Piercer Feat 5E Guide | Pros, Cons, Builds, and More

Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything wanted every feat to feel like an important part of the build. So, if you’re using a bow or a stabbing weapon, you might like the sound of Piercer. Your accuracy with a sharp weapon is talked about in small towns, and every blow you make was calculated flawlessly. Whether you’re hitting arrows or with a rapier, you always find your mark. Is this feat worthwhile? Check out our Piercer Feat 5E guide to find out!

Piercer Feat 5E Guide

The piercer feat allows you to increase either your Strength or Dexterity by +1. Once per turn, you’re allowed to reroll a damage dice on any attack that deals piercing damage. You must take the reroll. In addition, when you deal critical, piercing damage, you get to roll an additional damage dice.

Pros

This is a good amount of benefits! You only lose half of your Ability Score improvement, which is great for any feat. The damage reroll is nice; you’ll avoid a ton of ones, which is a death sentence for weapon users! You’ll want to reroll any dice that rolls below average (which is usually half of the damage dice’s maximum!).

The critical effect is fairly brutal too, adding another 3-5 damage (on average) to your critical hit! Yowch, you normally need to be a Barbarian to even attempt to do that!

Cons

So, rerolling a damage dice is neat, but you must take the reroll. It’s not like advantage; that second dice is your result. So, you can reroll a 1 into a 1, or a 3 into a 1… And then this feat will actively reduce your damage. You can act on statistics all you want; sometimes, statistics fail you!

The critical hit effect doesn’t even change that much. The other two feats on this list that work like this (Crusher and Slasher) have an actual effect on them. Damage is fine, but that’s a really low amount of damage to add to a critical hit!

Potential Builds

Any weapon build that focuses on piercing weapons benefit at least enough from this. Fighters tend to really like making many attacks, so you’ll benefit from the Piercer’s once per turn ability more often. 

A Barbarian (who uses a Piercing weapon, so like a Spearbarian?) might love this feat because of advantage making critical hits more common, and their critical hits being absolutely crazy. This turns Brutal Critical into 4 dice! 5d8 on a rapier, or on a spear!

So, this feat doesn’t specify that you must reroll a “weapon” damage dice, just piercing damage. That means a Rogue can reroll a 1 that they get on Sneak Attack to hope for more damage. Since you roll so many dice, you’re fairly likely to roll a 1 somewhere in your pile of d6s!

Conclusions

Piercer is fine. It’s a good amount of inconsistent damage, but damage nonetheless. If you like never really rolling ones on damage with your weapons, you’ve found a great feat!