Feats

Again, before I get into the detailed rundown of individual feat ratings, I want to provide the short list.

Heroic

Every Avenger should have a real Melee Basic Attack. Chasers want artillery to shift away before firing, Martyrs want to be given attacks by Warlords/Eagle Shamans, etc. So either take Melee Training , or Power of Skill . Obviously, Power of Skill is seriously prefered there, unless you can talk your DM into undoing the nerf.

Most Avengers will take a Weapon proficiency with a superior weapon. The rest should probably take Avenging Resolution (D382). This is an Either-Or thing for the most part, Avenging Resolution doesn't do much to a Fullblade, but makes a Falchion almost to a Fullblade. And if you're stuck with a dagger, it's nearly a non-choice. If you have a racial Weapon Training feat, you'll usually take that as a combined Proficiency+Focus (or in the case of Valenar Elves, just a better Focus).

If you can talk your DM into giving Versatile Expertise for free (it's a math patch), then that should about cover it. Otherwise you take the relevant Expertise feat for your weapon from Essentials, or Devoted Priest if you wield a Heavy Blade or non-spear Axe.

If you can fit it in, Divine Rage is amazing at getting you your oath on the round you need it. Otherwise, there's a skill power for Intimidate that has the same effect.

After the Reckless nerf, Acolyte Power(Battle Fury) is your replacement. Reckless, the encounter stance, Fighter MC Required.

If you worship Moradin and want to take some implement powers, then grab Symbol of the Sonnlinor .

Paragon

Painful Oath is effectively another striker class feature in feat form. If you can get a third one from a PP, you'll have some darn tasty DPR.

Censure's Grip can be useful for generating OAs for Pursuit Avengers with a consistent means of gaining Combat Advantage. Attack an enemy who relies on ranged attacks and let the fun begin.

Epic

Every Avenger should have some way of increasing their crit range. If you don't have a paragon path that gives it to you, you take Hand of Divine Guidance (D382).

Controllers pick up Fist of Heaven (DP) as soon as they can. Everyone else picks up Divine Mastery (DP) as soon as they can.

If you took Battle Fury , then you take Slashing Storm (MP2).

Highly optimized avengers need to get Vengeful Declaration (D382). And then everyone should finishing out the feat packages there're interested in.

Feat Packages

Some feats work better with other feats than you would expect. Here we're going to talk about packages of feats that interact well.

Gouge Charger

By itsself, the gouge is actually a downgrade after heroic. But it opens up a lot of feat support that all stacks.

Now you never miss on a charge (11 base, +1 charge, +2 CA, +2 vs REF, meaning ~95% hit rate after oath), and you hit pretty hard. Of course, you've spent ALL your feats. (And need to pick up Unarmored Agility and Painful Oath , and are missing out on Improved Defenses and other nice feats). If you add a slide extender in there, Polearm Momentum is a nice addition to this, to also prone the poor target.

Stay put while I hit you!

Censure's Grip prevents your OoE target from being able to shift after you hit them while having Combat Advantage against them. There are a fair number of ways to guarentee combat advantage. Combining the two forces makes it so that you'll get an OA against your OoE target any time he/she moves.

Leading by Oath

In progress. The assumption here is that you're a member of a highly optimized party with a zealous flare for focus-firing. So your oath target will die every turn, so you're re-oathing someone every turn. So look for things that boost that. You may also want to find/buy a low-level Reaper's Axe gauntlet axe.

The Light, It Burns Us!

Punishing Radiance causes any target who you crit with a Radiant Attack to gain vulerable 10 Radiant. Additionally, any enemy within 5 squares of the crit victim also gains vulnerable 10 Radiant. Pervasive Light makes it so that any enemy who is vulnerable to Radiant damage also has an equal vulnerability to any non-radiant Divine attack. The vulnerability lasts until the end of the Avenger's next turn.

This feat package is effectively utilized by any build with an expanded crit range, but becomes dramatically more valuable when used in conjunction with builds which are able to utilize multiple Divine attacks in a turn. Examples: Builds using Power of Skill feat to turn their Melee Basic attacks into Overwhelming Strikes, and using Rending weapons, Ardent Champion / Ardent Fury , or Two-Weapon Opening . Alternately, you can increase the value by including Fury's Advance and Vengeful Parry in your final Encounter power list.

Mini Nova Radiant

This is basically the combination of the above two packages.

This package creates insanity every single time you crit. Here's what happens when you crit your OoE with a Radiant Attack:

The Big Picture:

DPR Feats

There are, rather obviously, a LOT of feats that add DPR. Some work better than others. In the table below, I'm going to attempt to sort the obvious feats by effectiveness... now, to do so means making a lot of assumptions. If your character does not fit these assumptions, then different feats will have different values. I'm just trying to cover the bland case.

The feats are evaluated in terms of a Avenger, with Oath, using a melee Avenger At-Will power. For feats that increase your damage on hit, I'm assuming a 50% hit chance before rerolls (and thus a 75% chance to hit overall). For feats that increase damage on crit, I'm generally going to assume an 19+ crit range in Epic, but 20+ in Heroic and Paragon. For purposes of things that increase your chance to hit, I'm assuming 20 point hits in heroic, 26.7 in Paragon, and 50 in Epic.

The spreadsheet I'm using to show my assumptions/analysis is here, on google docs. Please feel free to review that, and point out how I'm insane. Again, I'll note I'm deliberately simplifying things to help make it possible to compare incomparable feats.

As a general rule, if a feat isn't rated, it's because I didn't think it was interesting at all. Feel free to ask me to rate it on the discussion page, or in the original thread, but most of them I'd rate as Purple . Ones that are red or purple are included because I believe they might look better than they are.