If your Combat Keystones make up the bones of your combat style, your Combat Feats are the muscles. They give you active abilities (both martial and magical) to use in combat and passive bonuses that apply to your attack rolls, damage rolls, or saving throws. At higher Tiers, they upgrade your abilities, making them more powerful, versatile, or both.
Choose your combat feats deliberately and with care — it might feel like you’ve got a lot of them, but you can spend them fast if you’re not careful.
First, make sure to pick enough Proficiency Feats to let your character do what you want them to do.
Then, grab some active abilities — whether martial abilities, Spells, or Techniques. Don’t take more than five or six Exceptional abilities, though, at least to start out; any more than that and you’re likely to run into decision paralysis in combat, where there are just too many choices and you can’t pick between them.
In general, you don’t want more than one ability to deal with each of these situations:
Having more than one big single-target damage ability, for instance, can lead to either indecision on which one to use, or to one of them being used more than any other, and the feeling of “wasting” the combat feat(s) used to pick up those “unnecessary” abilities. It’s not necessarily a bad idea, but you should be mindful of the tradeoffs you’re making if you choose to do it.
On a similar note, be careful when purchasing more than two or three Reaction abilities unless they’re incredibly specialized or you’re also taking abilities (such as Guarded Strike or Poised Strike) that let you use one or more of them as Free Actions — you only get one Reaction each round, so having a lot of options to use it on can lead to decision paralysis or second-guessing yourself.
Please note that you don’t need to have abilities that do all of the things on the list above! These are just the major categories that abilities tend to fall into, and you don’t need to be good at all of them — and, in fact, trying to be good at all of them might lead you to spread yourself too thin. Pick a role for your character to pursue and stick to it, only picking up new abilities to fill in gaps that you and your party are having trouble dealing with.
Combat Feat pages