No Pathfinder character build is complete without its feats, just like no Pathfinder book is complete without adding some feats of its own.
The feats within Path of the Wilds are, unsurprisingly, geared towards nature-based abilities. Natural-attack characters will enjoy feats like Ferocious Assault, which reduces the penalties you take when fighting with manufactured and natural weapons together, or Greater Eldritch Claws which allow your natural attacks to ignore some forms of magical concealment like blur. On top of more typical natural tactics, Path of the Wilds also presents handful of options for elemental-focused characters. Elemental Strike is one of the most prominent, which allows you to exchange the bonus damage from Arcane Strike for acid, electricity, cold, or fire damage, which is great when you need to hit a specific weakness or stop regeneration.
Adding new features is great and all, but Path of the Wilds also breathes new life into older options. Several feats aim to improve those often-overlooked class features for the nature-based classes. We’re talking stuff like track, wild empathy, or a ranger’s companion bond to his allies. Ideally, these new feats will let a player really specialize into mastery of the wilds and enable builds you couldn’t accomplish before.
I’ll leave you with a few examples of these new feats that improve existing class features. Keep an eye out on the Kickstarter page or here on the website for even more updates in the near future!
Mystic Empathy
Your bond with wildlife surpasses understanding and becomes supernatural authority.
Prerequisite: Knowledge (nature) 5 ranks, Wild Empathy class feature
Benefit: You no longer take a penalty to your Wild Empathy checks to influence magical beasts with Intelligence scores of 1 or 2. If you spend an additional minute to interact with an animal or magical beast while using wild empathy, you can attempt to direct the creature with mystical compulsion. This acts as a suggestion spell, except it does not have the language-dependent descriptor. You must give relatively simple suggestions or commands to the creature, such as “help us track something” or “lead us to water”, unless you can communicate with it directly (such as being under the effect of speak with animals). You use your ranks in Knowledge (nature) as your caster level for this effect, and the save DC is equal to 10 + 1/2 your character’s level + your Charisma modifier. A magical beast gains a +4 bonus to its save against this feat’s effect. Once you attempt to compel a creature in this manner (whether it makes the save or not), it cannot be compelled again for 24 hours.
Normal: You can use wild empathy to influence a magical beast with an Intelligence score of 1 or 2, but you take a –4 penalty on the check.
Skilled Tracker
You can track down impossible prey.
Prerequisite: Survival 7 ranks, Track class feature
Benefit: You can track creatures that leave no tracks at all, such as flying creatures and those under the effects of pass without trace, though you take a -5 penalty to your Survival checks to do so.
Normal: You cannot track a creature that leaves no trail.
Spotter’s Call
You strike a marking hit on your quarry that shows your allies how to take it down.
Prerequisite: BAB +9, Wis 13; Animal Companion or Hunter’s Bond (hunting companions) class feature
Benefit: As a standard action, you can make a single attack with a weapon your are wielding against a foe you can see. If the attack hits, you grant your companions additional damage against that target. If you have an animal companion, your companion deals an additional +1d6 damage with its natural attacks against that target and ignores any concealment effects on the target less than total concealment. If you have a hunter’s bond with your hunting companions, you grant this bonus to all allies within 30 feet that saw your attack for 1 round, instead, and it applies to both their natural attacks and weapon attacks. The damage granted by spotter’s call is the same type as the weapon or natural attack used by your companion and is not multiplied on a critical hit. The effects of this feat do not stack.
Special: You can use the effects of this feat in conjunction with the attack granted from the Vital Strike, Improved Vital Strike, and Greater Vital Strike feats.