Feats in Baldur’s Gate 3 can give a lot of flavor and even power to a character. You can choose a feat at levels four, eight and twelve. It is a difficult choice since you’d need to forgo gaining stat improvements over the effects of a given feat, and you might be already juggling with a lot of rules from the get go.
But a lot of feats can be more than worth it, especially when you consider that the maximum you can have on any stat is twenty. This gives room to one or two feats for every character, yet with so many options to choose from its better to be informed about the best of the bunch.
10 Shield Master
Most players like to take the offensive approach when dealing with combat, but shields can have ample room in your party. The designated tank can certainly use one, and casters like Clerics can still cast their spells while holding a shield, giving them something to do with an unoccupied hand.
The Shield Master feat’s main use is against area damage from spells. Usually, you’d need to do a saving throw to take half damage, but with this feat and a trusty shield, you completely negate the damage if you succeed the throw (and half it if you fail), making dreadful spells like fireball a minor inconvenience.
9 Elemental Adept
Elemental Adept, much like its name implies, is for players looking to focus on a specific damage type. It’s not recommended if you’re looking for a wide range of damage types, but for classes like the Storm Sorcerer, hyper-focusing improves your damage completely.
This feat makes it so enemies that have resistance to your chosen element still take normal damage, meaning you don’t need to ever switch things up. And on top of that, you can’t roll one on attack rolls used to cast your element, giving a much-needed consistency on a system so reliant on luck.
8 Mage Slayer
Spell casters are a danger on any battlefield, disabling your every strategy with their disrupting magics. With the Mage Slayer feat, you can now disable them.
While the feat only works from melee range, once you’re close to them, it's game over.
Whenever they try to make a spell, you can make an attack as a reaction. If the spell is towards you and with a save throw, you have an advantage on that throw.
And of course, all of your melee attacks give the opponent a disadvantage in concentration. No matter what they’re trying to cast, once you close the gap you’ll be making free hits constantly.
7 Sentinel
Control of the battlefield is everything in Baldur’s Gate 3, hence why spell casters are so important in any team composition. However, there are things martial classes can do to better control the field, and one of them is the Sentinel feat.
A great feat for tanks, a Sentinel next to an ally can make opportunity attacks against enemies trying to hit said ally. While this makes them great at staying with your more fragile party members, a Sentinel can also help catch the more slippery opponents, thanks to his ability to reduce their movement speed to zero.
An enemy that can’t move is easy pickings for the rest of the encounter.
6 Mobile
Melee characters generally have a hard time dealing with distances. Most ranged opponents will be perched up high, while you have to figure out how to swing your sword at them.
Mobile is a great feat for getting rid of some disadvantages in many encounters, not to mention gaining unexpected advantages over others.
First off, when dashing you’re unaffected by difficult terrain. This means that if a caster is throwing fire from across a pond, you can quickly get to them without issue.
This is particularly good for rogues since they can dash as a minor action. And once you make a melee attack, if you move that turn you won’t provoke opportunity attacks.
5 Dungeon Delver
Whether exploring a crypt or a cave, traps are bound to be present. They can be a pain to deal with, especially if your rogue is not present in your party.
Any character with the Dungeon Delver feat can make short work of any trap and even have a better chance of finding secrets in the world. The feat gives you an advantage on passive checks for detecting traps and hidden objects, so those sneaky darts will have a hard time hitting you.
This is invaluable to explore every nook and cranny in the game, and if you end up missing any trap, you’ll take half the damage from it.
4 Polearm Master
Polearms are one of the most effective weapons in Baldur’s Gate 3, giving you a much-needed safety range compared to other weapons. If you are already gravitating towards this type of weapon, consider the Polearm Master feat, since it improves your effectiveness greatly.
The main ability of the feat is letting you make opportunity attacks across your whole range, being able to create all sorts of choke points with a single character. Moreover, you can also make a secondary attack with the butt of your weapon as a bonus action, turning you into a whirlwind of death.
If you have two characters with this feat you can completely block enemies from going anywhere.
3 Great Weapon Master
Heavy weapons already do a lot of damage in Baldur’s Gate 3, so improving upon them can only be for the best. But with Great Weapon Master, you don’t just improve them, you transform them into a multi-hitting powerhouse.
The feat gives you two passives; one lets you do an additional attack whenever you kill an enemy or score a critical hit. The other is a toggleable passive, giving you a minus five to attack rolls but a plus ten to damage.
That alone is powerful enough, but combine it with buffs like bless and the negative aspect of the feat is non-existent.
2 Alert
Ambushes in Baldur’s Gate 3 are plenty, and if you don’t carefully check every corner you’re going to be surprised more often than not. The Alert feat makes it, so you don’t have to worry too much about ambushes, since you won’t lose your turn since you can’t be surprised.
The additional power of the feat is as powerful as it is straightforward: You gain a plus five to initiative rolls. Going first in any combat scenario is always important, but for classes like the Gloom Stalker Ranger, it is of vital importance.
You can use your turn advantage for better positioning or even for pushing enemies straight out of combat.
1 Lucky
The dice are not always in your favor, even with the Karmic Dice option enabled. Some important rolls are going to fail, and you’re going to have to deal with the consequences.
You can always go back to a previous save, but during boss fights it would mean doing the whole encounter again.
With the Lucky feat, you can reroll up to two failed rolls per day. Since you can choose which ones, you can take the hit from a goblin but reroll the one from an ogre. In higher difficulties, having this feat at the very least with your main character is a must.