Analysing the Epic Boon Feats From Heroes of Faerun for D&D 2024

Brand new epic boon feats for high level characters, but how good are they?

Heroes of Faerun epic boon feats

Heroes of Faerun gives us 13 brand new epic boon feats to play with. All of these are completely new feats. There are no refreshes or revamps of old 2014 feats in sight here.

Below you can find my analysis and ratings for each of these feats:

Boon of bloodshed – 3/5

Requirements: Level 19+

Good for: Martials and especially those that make plenty of attacks.

Ability score improvement: One of your choice

Ability: Advantage on your next attack when an enemy drops to 0HP and extra damage equal to your proficiency bonus one per turn on attacks.

Tactics: The damage here is a decent buff, but you have to be bloodied to benefit from it. The advantage means that fighting lots of weaker enemies will benefit your attacks. And you can benefit from this multiple times in a turn. If you have multiple attacks, you may be able to chain killing enemies into instances of multiple advantage, though I’d expect this to be uncommon.

Boon of bountiful health – 3/5

Requirements: Level 19+

Good for: Anyone able to get a regular supply of temporary hit points and those with larger hit dice. Path of the world tree barbarians and circle of the moon druids make good examples, but this could include those with allies that provide temporary hit points (like a banneret fighter or glamour bard).

Ability score improvement: One of your choice

Ability: Gain an extra 5 temporary hit points whenever you gain temporary hit points. Use the maximum dice roll when using hit dice to regain HP.

Tactics: If you’ve got an easy supply of temporary hit points, then this is decent. It also means your short rests will help your hit point dice go further allowing you to recover more between encounters. A rare few abilities and spells can use your hit point dice outside of short rests. The one that comes to mind is Simbul’s synostodweomer which will let you use hit dice mid-combat for healing.

Boon of communication – 3/5

Requirements: Level 19+

Good for: Charismatic characters like bards, paladins, warlocks and sorcerers. Especially those proficient in face skills.

Ability score improvement: Intelligence, wisdom or charisma

Ability: You don’t have disadvantage on influence checks against hostile creatures, can understand any language and gain telepathy.

Tactics: Talk down hostile creatures more easily and use telepathy to secretly communicate with allies, or basically anyone. There’s no restriction on who can feel the effects of this so long as they are in range, you can speak secretly to enemies and NPCs too.

Boon of desperate resilience – 4/5

Requirements: Level 19+

Good for: Tanks like barbarians, paladins and fighters.

Ability score improvement: Strength or constitution

Ability: While bloodied, you have resistance to all damage types other than force.

Tactics: I think this is better than the boon of energy resistance, even if it only kicks in once you’re half way to 0HP. That’s just a lot of resistances to really make you more resilient. If you want the benefits for longer, you could become bloodied and then use something that adds a significant number of temporary hit points to you (like a druid’s wildshape for example). At this point, you have the resistances, but also the hit points to survive.

Boon of exquisite radiance – 3/5

Requirements: Level 19+

Good for: Spellcasters with radiant AoE spells. This is mainly clerics, but at this level, druids, sorcerers and wizards have access to sunburst.

Ability score improvement: One of your choice

Ability: Deal maximum damage with radiant damage once per long rest and creatures you kill can’t be raised as undead.

Tactics: Preventing undeath isn’t a big deal mechanically. One maximum damage radiant blast can be. Be careful about wasting this though. Your best option is an AoE spell as this will only work for a single damage roll and that will multiply the extra damage you deal by the number of targets you hit. So your best options here aren’t divine smites (even upcast to level 5). You’re better off using it on something like flame strike (10d6) or sunburst (12d6). Although flame strike is half fire and half radiant damage, all the damage die will be affected by this based on how the feat reads.

It’s a bit limited in who this will benefit and the best tactics behind it, but that can be one very explosive sunburst!

Boon of fluid forms – 4/5

Requirements: Level 19+

Good for: Anyone

Ability score improvement: Intelligence, wisdom or charisma

Ability: You can essentially polymorph into a creature with up to a CR10 that’s a beast, humanoid or monstrosity, gaining its hit points as temporary hit points.

Tactics: This is kind of halfway between the polymorph and the shapechange spells. It’s more potent than even a moon druid’s wild shape (which is limited to CR 6 beasts but no monstrosities or humanoids). It’s a strong option and gives you transformations like a hydra or spy master. If nothing else, this is a great big load of temporary hit points to protect you with. At its best, it means you can adapt with new damage dealing capabilities and utility for outside of combat too.

RAW, this boon does allow transforming into some obscure, named creatures including Karas Chembryl and Auril (First Form). These are obscure options found outside of the monster manuals (Adventures in Faerun and Rime of the Frost maiden to be specific). I’m not sure I’d allow obscure, named individuals for this transformation at my table as characters will have almost certainly never heard of such obscure creatures, but the mechanics do allow scope to use these. If your DM is willing to let you use these creatures and you have access to these books, then these are really powerful options with legendary actions and would easily elevate this feat to a 5. However, speak to your DM first to see if they’re happy for you to use these options.

Boon of fortune’s favour – 4/5

Requirements: Level 19+

Good for: Anyone

Ability score improvement: One of your choice

Ability: Each round you can reroll a failed saving throw.

Tactics: This is just plenty of extra resilience against nasty effects like AoE damage spells and conditions.

Boon of poison mastery – 3/5

Requirements: Level 19+

Good for: Spellcasters with poison spells.

Ability score improvement: One of your choice

Ability: Immunity to poison damage and the poisoned condition and deal maximum damage from poison damage once per turn.

Tactics: Poison is the most resisted damage type (but also the most used), but often deals more damage, and certainly will here. Poison damage is difficult to make happen with weapons unless you grab a magic weapon or pay for poison. That makes spellcasters a more reliable source of poison damage for this. If you’ve got plenty of poison spells, then this could be a decent option. Poison AoE spells will be the most potent as this will magnify the extra damage across multiple targets. The likes of cloudkill and dragon’s breath are 2 of your few AoE poison options.

Boon of revelry – 1/5

Requirements: Level 19+

Good for: No one. Otto’s irresistible dance isn’t a great spell and this isn’t worth taking.

Ability score improvement: Intelligence, wisdom or charisma

Ability: You know a slightly enhanced version of Otto’s irresistible dance and can cast it once for free.

Tactics: Otto’s irresistible dance is a bad level 6 spell made only slightly better by this boon. You’ll do far better with something like hypnotic pattern. You can at least cast this for free which makes it not completely worthless, but this is basically worse than a level 3 spell, disguised as a level 6 spell, that’s been made a little better.

Boon of terror – 2/5

Requirements: Level 19+

Good for: Characters with a high charisma.

Ability score improvement: Charisma

Ability: Immunity to frightened, can cause terror in an already frightened creature with your reaction causing them to run from you. Gain proficiency and expertise in intimidation.

Tactics: Immunity to the frightened condition is decent. How often you can strike terror in enemies will depend on how much you or the party are causing the frightened condition. The fear spell is an easy way to make this happen, but you will need to contrive it to make this work. This means a single turn wasted for an enemy per rest, and that’s if it works. It’s not a huge amount, especially when it targets a creature that’s already been debuffed with the frightened condition.

Boon of the bright sun – 5/5

Requirements: Level 19+

Good for: Anyone.

Ability score improvement: Constitution, wisdom or charisma

Ability: Create a 30ft emanation of bright light that grants 10 temporary hit points at the beginning of each of your turns.

Tactics: There is no limit to how much and how long this can be active. This means that all your nearby allies can just have a constant supply of 10 temporary hit points. This gives quite a considerable amount of extra resilience the party can accumulate over the course of a combat. Just activate it every combat (or even better, ahead of every combat). You may also find it useful against magical darkness and light sensitive creatures like vampires.

Boon of the furious storm – 3/5

Requirements: Level 19+; spellcasting or pact magic feature

Good for: Spellcasters with plenty of lightning and thunder spells.

Ability score improvement: Intelligence, wisdom or charisma

Ability: Resistance to lightning or thunder damage which becomes immunity when bloodied. Creatures have disadvantage on saving throws against your spells that cause lightning and thunder damage.

Tactics: Spells like dragon’s breath, chain lightning, cacophonic shield, shatter, thunderclap and thunderwave are all options here. This is really only any good for spellcasters with plenty of lightning and thunder spells. Sadly, lightning and thunder damage isn’t hugely common.

Boon of the soul drinker – 4/5

Requirements: Level 19+

Good for: Anyone, but especially tanks and frontline martials that likely need more healing.

Ability score improvement: One of your choice

Ability: Resistance to cold and necrotic damage and heal 50HP when an enemy is reduced to 0HP once per rest.

Tactics: The resistances are decent, the healing is substantial and dropping to 0HP isn’t rare. The healing only requires a reaction making it easily accessible too.

Are the epic boon feats in Heroes of Faerun any good?

Yes, mostly they’re pretty good and offer unique options for characters while fitting the right kinds of power levels. As with a lot of the feats in Heroes of Faerun, they also manage to fill some decent niches in the game such as the boon of the furious storm being a good option for characters with plenty of lightning and thunder spells or the boon of fluid forms for those that want to shapeshift.

Sadly, one boon does fall short. The boon of revelry is quite a poor option and not worth taking. It does at least win points for being unique and amusing.

Other than that though, these are a decent bunch of epic boon feats for your characters.

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What did you think of the epic boon feats in Heroes of Faerun? Let me know in the comments below.

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