A bunch of feats come with +1 to an attribute now. That makes them seem much better, but it’ll have weird side effects – some feats will become worse choices as you gain levels and your primary attributes top out, at least until 20th level.

These feats are a mixed bag. Some are definitely improved from 5E, others aren’t much better, some don’t have any basis in 5E (like the Epic Boons, which are all awful)…and then there’s Lightly Armored, which seems like it’ll become obligatory for Wizards, and possibly some Sorcerers as well.

1. Ability Score Improvement – looks weaker in the face of other feats giving a +1 to various attributes. Not weak enough to go unselected, of course – this allows a character to maximize their primary attribute by 8th level rather than 12th. That’s why I don’t like it very much – it’s a straight-out attribute increase which is likely to be too tempting for many players to avoid in favor of something more distinctive and interesting.
2. Athlete
   1. Here’s another example of similar names causing confusion: you can have the Athlete feat without having the Athletics skill proficiency and vice-versa
   2. A character apparently can’t extensively train as an Athlete without already being physically fit. As far as I’m concerned, this makes this an inferior version of the Physical skills from Palladium RPGs – at least those can model, for example, Mob Psycho 100’s Shigeo joining the Body Improvement Club to start improving basically from 0.
3. Charger
   1. A feat for what was classically a basic maneuver is exactly what’s wrong with feats, and what has always been the problem with them. The cost is much too high for such a small improvement – experienced combatants who know how to use a wide range of weapons should know how to charge. Hell, junior high football players know how to charge, yet this ability is not only a feat but one that requires the character to be at least 4th level? This sort of thing is why I think that feats have encouraged bad design in D&D.
4. Crossbow Expert
   1. The requirement is “Proficiency with Any Martial Weapon”. Does this mean proficiency with at least one martial weapon, like Rogues have, or proficiency with any in the sense of all martial weapons, like Fighters have? Given some of the abilities I suspect the former, but it would be better if the wording was clearer.
   2. Ignore Loading – in other words, ignore one of the few things that makes crossbows distinct.  The real problem is with the lack of mechanical distinctions between weapons in D&D. At least this is enough of a mechanical improvement to reflect extraordinary ability
   3. Firing in Melee looks like it was tailored for ranged Rogues. Good for them, but I don’t feel great about feats that seem like they’re targeted at a single class.
   4. Dual wielding – isn’t this ability captured elsewhere, for all weapons? Or is that only for melee weapons?
5. Defensive Duelist – Parry is like Shield, except it takes a while to get to +5, it’s at-will, and it’s only good against 1 attack. A high-level Wizard can cast Shield at-will, so this should really get better over time – not just the AC bonus, but also how long it lasts.
6. Dual Wielder
   1. Enhanced Dual Wielding – I can’t tell how good this is supposed to be. Or rather, I can’t tell in what way this is supposed to be good. I don’t like the feat on that basis – I’d like to have an intuitive sense of exactly how a mechanical benefit is supposed to actually benefit my character, even if that requires providing an example.
7. Durable
   1. Speedy Recovery – There’s no limit to how many of your Hit Dice you can burn through this way – 1 per bonus action, and limited but the total you have. That means this is great for a Druid using wildshape, since they get he HD of the assigned form. Normally that doesn’t help – they can’t use those without a short rest, during which the wild shape expires – but this allows those HD to actually be useful between encounters. It’s also useful for someone using Shapechange, and appears to be useful for creatures who are under a Polymorph effect. I suspect this isn’t intended, but that’s a problem with shapechanging effects in 5E.
8. Elemental Adept – the damage benefit is worth almost nothing – about 1/(die size) points per die. For a basic Fireball (8d6 fire damage), that comes out to 1.3 damage total
9. Epic Boons – all of these suck. All of them. Some of them are insultingly bad.
   1. Epic Boon of Combat Prowess – once per combat you can turn a single melee miss into a hit, and that’s supposed to be a 20th level ability? One additional melee hit per combat hardly seems worthwhile – either you’re hitting most of the time and this makes very little difference proportionally, or you’re almost never hitting and a single additional hit is unlikely to do anything significant.
   2. Epic Boon of Dimension Travel – Once per combat or rest you can use a 2nd level spell. Meanwhile, a Wizard of a lower level gets Spell Mastery and can use 1 1st and 1 2nd level spell of choice at will. Weak.
   3. Epic Boon of Energy Resistance – resistance that’s changeable after a rest seems decent. It’s a bit better than Protection from Energy, which has a more limited set of resistance choices, lasts no more than 1 hour, and requires Concentration. On the other hand, Protection from Energy is a 3rd level spell, which means it’s available at 5th level. Is this enough better to be limited to 20th level? Uh, no.
   4. Epic Boon of Fortitude – +40 HP maximum is just Tough taken at 20th level. Adding con modifier to HP recovery once per round is pretty minor as well. For a 20th level ability this is garbage.
   5. Epic Boon of Irresistible Offense – ignoring all Resistance seems worthwhile. Coming online at 20th level means it’s too late to build anything around.
   6. Epic Boon of Luck – Once per encounter or rest, add 1d10 to a d20 roll. That seems pretty weak for a 20th level ability
   7. Epic Boon of the Night Spirit – Invisible in darkness while not moving. Isn’t there a Warlock invocation that does this at much lower than 20th level? Isn’t this basically just a Stealth roll?
   8. Epic Boon of Peerless Aim – like Epic Boon of Combat Prowess but for ranged attacks? They have to separate something this weak into melee vs ranged versions?
   9. Epic Boon of Recovery – Once per long rest recovery of 1/2 your HP max as a bonus action, and succeed on every death save except a 1. That’s…OK. It still seems pretty mild for 20th level, but unlike some other epic boons it doesn’t feel insulting
   10. Epic Boon of Skill Proficiency – proficiency in all skills. I guess this at least creates the image of omnicompetence, but skills are weak in 5E so this is weak as well. Especially for 20th level
   11. Epic Boon of Speed – +30 feet to speed at 20th level? Come on
   12. Epic Boon of Undetectability – this is much weaker than an old Nondetection spell.
   13. Epic Boon of the Unfettered – a bonus action disengage is a 2nd level Rogue ability. Letting it also end the restrained and grappled conditions is, again, not much at 20th level.
10. Fighting Styles are just feats exclusive to Warriors now, huh? So a 1-level dip into a Warrior class means characters can keep picking them up with whatever feats they get? They’re even 1st-level feats, so characters can pick up one with their initial Background feat. They aren’t super-powerful, but they might be just good enough to make this worth something…
11. Grappler – ???
12. Great Weapon Master
    1. A bonus action attack on a critical is no great prize – that’s infrequent enough you’ll ideally have lined up something to do with your bonus action the other 85%+ of the time. Being able to get it when you drop an enemy is better, but it’s still mostly an ability for slightly increasing the rate at which you clear out weak enemies. Since you can’t get this feat until 4th level, you’re probably 1 level away from getting Extra Attack, which will make this extra attack feel proportionally less valuable.
    2. Extra damage equal to proficiency bonus is decent, even if it’s only once per turn
    3. The attribute increase has an interesting side effet of not only directly making the feat better, but also making your attacks more likely to hit and therefore more likely to trigger the feat’s other benefits.
13. Heavily Armored
    1. We won’t know until we see the whole ruleset, but I believe this will be one of the very few ways to pick up Heavy Armor Training if you don’t start with it at 1st level – some Cleric domains had it previously, but multiclassing in general didn’t let you get it. That said, I don’t see much benefit in waiting after 1st level to pickup Heavy Armor Training – if you didn’t start with it you’re either spending 3 levels depending on a Dexterity bonus that’ll be going to waste, or you’ll spend 3 levels at a noticeably sub-par AC. I’m sure someone can come up with an edge case where this is a good idea, but I’m not seeing it.
14. Heavy Armor Master – Reducing bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage by your proficiency bonus seems pretty decent at low levels, but I feel like per-attack damage is likely to increase faster than your proficiency bonus, so this probably becomes less useful over time. Ultimately, this seems kind of weak for PCs – it would probably be much more useful for people dealing with a lot of mundane combat situations.
15. Inspiring Leader – A maximum of 14 temporary HP for 6 characters once per rest doesn’t feel that valuable. I’m sure there’ll be some analysis that shows it’s actually pretty decent, but it just doesn’t feel like it’s worth all that much. Maybe at 4th level it’s better when it’s being compared to characters with 2 2nd-level spells per long rest?
16. Keen Mind
    1. Giving proficiency seems much less useful than giving Expertise. And this isn’t repeatable, so it’s your one chance to pick up Expertise without multiclassing. Just give Expertise along with proficiency if you don’t have it already.
    2. Can take the Study Action as a bonus action – I suspect the utility of this feature will be very campaign-dependent. Overall, this seems like a good feat for characterization, but a poor choice for optimization, and that’s the sort of ugly choice I think feats have been forcing on players since 3rd edition.
17. Lightly Armored – This is one of the best 1st-level feats in 5.5 – arguably, one of the best feats overall in 5.5, at least if you belong to one of the classes that would benefit from it (Sorcerer for bloodlines that don’t give a natural AC at level 1, but mostly Wizards).
    1. So this is a 1st level feat that gives light armor, medium armor, and shield proficiencies. I have a hard time seeing how a Wizard or Sorcerer picks any other feat than this one at 1st level, since it lets you have a better AC than you’re going to get from class abilities and lets you de-prioritize Dexterity.
    2. Here’s the scenario: at level 1 you take this and spend 50 GP on Scale Armor (AC 14 + Dex bonus, max 2) and 10 GP on a shield (+2 AC); your starting attributes would be something like a 17 for spellcasting attribute, 14 for Con, 14 for Dex. This gets you an AC of 18. Compare that to Mage Armor:
       1. At 1st level Mage Armor is 13 + full Dex bonus, which maxes out at 16. So it starts out 2 points lower
       2. Mundane armor can scale with level – with a bit more gold you can move up to Half Plate for another point of AC. You can also get magic armor and shields, and while you’re probably the last in line in the party for these items you should eventually be able to get something. Meanwhile, Mage Armor doesn’t naturally scale with your level and can’t even be made to scale by using higher-level spell slots
       3. …and speaking of spell slots, Mage Armor requires you to use one at 1st level when you only have 2 for the day (well, 3 for the Wizard using Arcane Restoration via a short rest). The mundane armor is better in combat and leaves you with more magic in the tank.
       4. Also, while Mage Armor only requires an Action to get started (vs 5 minutes to don a suit of Medium armor), you can don a shield with a single action, and that’s a +2 to AC right there – most of the benefit of Mage Armor without using a spell slot. And your mundane armor can’t be dispelled
       5. Also also! Walking around in a big suit of armor removes one of the most obvious indications that you’re the sort of person who casts Fireball and therefore needs to be taken down ASAP
    3. BTW, other competitors for best 1st-level Feat:
       1. Lucky
       2. Magic Initiate (Shillelagh for any mental attribute!)
       3. Musician (It’s free Inspiration!)
18. Mage Slayer
19. Medium Armor Master – increasing the maximum dexterity bonus usable with medium armor is strictly worse than the Defense Fighting Style, since it works with any armor. Adding the 1-point attribute increase is the only thing that makes this competitive, and even then it seems iffy.
20. Mounted Combatant – I wonder how many campaigns are structured in a way that leads to enough mounted combat for this feat to be meaningful? 
21. Observant
22. Polearm Master
    1. Bonus action attack + reaction attack is already quite good. Adding a Strength increase probably makes this too good
23. Resilient – gaining a saving throw proficiency only seems good because everyone should be proficient in every save. The attribute on this is a bit of a trap – if you’re taking this to make a saving throw better, it’s probably tied to an attribute that isn’t very high, and the boost probably won’t make you significantly more competent. The saving throw bonus should probably just be moved to the Ability Score Improvement feat
24. Ritual Caster
    1. Tying the casting attribute to the attribute you increased makes sense – it makes the feat feel like a single thing, the result of hard work and training
    2. The ability to mix-and-match lists for which rituals you choose is nice, but…they’re 1st level. This feat is only available starting at 4th level. Choosing 1st level rituals at a point when full spellcasters are well into 2nd-level spells isn’t that bad, but there’s no upgrade path – whether you take this feat later in your career or early and just live with it, this becomes much less valuable over time. Like, I hope those 1st-level rituals are pretty awesome.
       1. That you can cast these spells with spell slots you have makes this feat more valuable to spellcasters – it’s about allowing casters to diversify their spell list, not about giving mundane characters broader options.
    3. Once per long rest, can cast a prepared ritual without the ritual casting time and without using a spell slot. This is great – if you have a high-level ritual you’d like to cast, this is a free spell slot of up to that level once per long rest. I don’t know what the highest-level ritual spell is – maybe Forbiddance at 6th level? Divination at 4th is probably better, since it’s 1 action as a non-ritual vs 10 minutes as a ritual, is useful in a wide variety of circumstances, and the material components aren’t too expensive. And then this feat is a free 4th-level spell per long rest. At lower levels, a Cleric could use Gentle Repose as a single action – meaning it’s useful in combat – to keep someone eligible for Revivify for up to 10 days, which means even if someone does die in combat and you can’t get to them or don’t have the spell slots, you can still bring them back via a 5th level Cleric rather than a 9th-level one.
25. Sentinel
    1. The benefits of this depend on your use of an Opportunity Attack – a melee attack that uses your reaction. That means this feat isn’t good for characters who think they’re likely to have other frequent uses for their reactions.
    2. This is pretty clearly meant to be a 4E-style marking feature: someone can’t just move away because of conventional opportunity attacks, can’t Disengage because of this, and can’t attack someone else because of this and a successful opportunity attack drops the target’s Speed to 0. Note that the expanded ability to make Opportunity Attacks is limited to enemies within 5 feet, which means this doesn’t particularly benefit reach weapons.
    3. This is…probably pretty decent as a feat. It gives you a capability you don’t have as a Fighting character but very much might want – as long as you weren’t doing anything better with your reactions.
26. Sharpshooter
    1. Ignore anything less than full cover. Ignore disadvantage when shooting while in melee. Ignore disadvantage from shooting at long range. I’m not really sure I’d say all these are about being a “sharpshooter” as such, but they’re all relevant to being good at ranged attacks and they’re all pretty good.
27. Shield Master
    1. Shield bash now doesn’t take your bonus action (even though it can only be used once per turn – I don’t know if that’s one attempt or one success), doesn’t do damage, and either pushes back or knocks down only if the opponent fails a Strength save. This apparently doesn’t have an enemy size restriction
    2. Turn half damage on Dex save to no damage on dex save by using your reaction.
    3. The shield bash feels broadly useful for a melee fighter, while the interpose shield ability seems awfully circumstantial. In terms of effect, well – it turns Fireball expected damage (assuming a 50% chance to save) from 21 to 14 points of damage. It’s the sort of ability that’s more useful if you’re very good at making Dexterity saves, which oddly makes it a better ability for a Ranger than a Fighter or Paladin…except if you’ve focused on Dexterity, the shield bash (whose save DC is based on Strength) is likely to suffer. I’d say this seems to be on the weak side. It’s still clearly better than the prior, 5E version.
28. Skulker
    1. Blindsight 10’ is pretty good, at least if you’re melee-focused
    2. Advantage on Dex (Stealth) checks made as part of the Hide action is more useful if the Hide action doesn’t require a full action, which benefits Rogues. That combined with no loss of hidden on a missed attack roll favors characters who really just want to hit on a single attack – again, Rogues. This is probably pretty good for them, but of very limited use for other characters.
29. Speedster
    1. +10 feet when not wearing heavy armor. 5E doesn’t feature a lot of fleeing from battle for either PCs or NPCs, so this is really only going to be meaningful for characters who want to maneuver around on the battlefield. This combined with the ability to ignore difficult terrain but only when using Dash cements this as only useful for characters who are going to really focus on trying to get around quickly – Rogues and Monks, basically.
    2. This is pretty circumstantial – it requires there to be a substantial number of battles that take place in locations large enough to maneuver around, and with some amount of difficult terrain.
30. Spell Sniper
    1. The ability score increase associated with this pretty clearly indicates the designers don’t think there are supposed to ever be spellcasters based on physical attributes.
    2. Other features are basically Sharpshooter but for spells. This will mostly be used for characters whose spell damage is more dependent on cantrips than on higher-level spells (i.e. Warlocks). For them it seems pretty good, and it probably retains decent utility for Sorcerers and Wizards. It would probably be a mistake for anyone else to take this.
31. War Caster
    1. Advantage on Constitution saves to maintain concentration
    2. Instead of an opportunity attack for moving out of your reach, can cast a single-target spell with a normal 1 Action casting time at the creature. This means you have to be up close and personal with enemies as well as the sort of target they’d want to move away from – either because you’re too threatening or too hard to hit compared to other targets. This wouldn’t apply to most casters – this mostly seems like something to be used by martial casters like Paladins, Rangers, and Eldritch Knight Fighters. This works well with the ability to perform Somatic components even when your hands are holding weapons and/or a shield. Frankly even a Paladin shouldn’t bother, since they can just try to get a conventional hit in and use that to smite if they’re going to be casting leveled spells.
    3. I’m not sure if this would be better to use cantrips (in which case you want an Eldritch Knight) or leveled spells. Honestly, it might be funny to hit people with something like a Charm Person when they try to get out of your reach…At any rate, cantrips get you free damage scaling., which is generally better performance than you’ll get out of a weapon attack.
32. Weapon Training
    1. Gaining proficiency with all martial weapons is much better than the old version, which only gave you proficiency with 4 of them. It still seems fairly weak – what’s a character going to do with a martial weapon proficiency if they don’t get it from their class? It doesn’t seem like they’d be a let to get much benefit form it.