SOURCE: Xanathar’s Guide to Everything

Rating the Benefits of Second Chance

Benefit #1 – 

+1 to Dex, Con or Cha, to a max of 20 

Half an ASI is a common feat bonus, especially for the Xanathar racial feats. 

This one is better than most, offering a spread of three good stat choices and making it much easier for a character to find a good use for a spare floating point. 

Benefit #2 – 

As a reaction, when a creature you can see hits you with an attack, you can make them reroll

The ability comes back on a short or long rest, or whenever the character rolls for Initiative at the start of combat

An on-demand reroll is a potent defensive tool, especially for characters that already pack some sort of natural defense

What makes this ability stand out though is the fact that it comes back when the character rolls for initiative, meaning it will be available in every single combat the party finds themselves in, and enables its use that much more freely. 

Mechanics and Requirements

Understanding How It Functions

Half an ASI

Many feats give a character half an ASI in one or more stats, reducing the cost of taking it by half and letting you even up odd ability scores and smooth out strange stat distribution. 

Second Chance has one of the best we’ve seen, offering a choice of three stats; Dexterity, Constitution, and Charisma. Not only is this a great spread of stats, one or more of the three being useful for literally every single class in the game, but it’s also one more option than the two most feats give you. 

A strong start to the feat. 

Rerolling enemy attacks

The unique, major benefit of the Second Chance feat is the ability to force an enemy to reroll successful attack rolls that have hit you, as a reaction. 

The ability has a single use, but comes back more often than comparable abilities might; specifically, it comes back on short or long rests as standard, but also comes back whenever the character rolls for initiative. 

This is huge. It means a character with the Second Chance feat can use it in every single combat encounter, safe in the knowledge that, no matter how many more times they stumble into combat situations, the ability will always come back. 

But how useful is this ability?

Pretty damn so, as it turns out. Possibly the best part of Second Chance is the fact that it’s reactive on an enemy landing an attack. That means no wasting the use, and no having to burn your reaction for the turn on a potential what-if. You only spend this if and when an enemy lands a successful strike against you. 

Second, when the ability is used, it forces the enemy to reroll the attack. This sounds strange to point out, but as written, because the attack is rerolled, if you had defensive buffs or the enemy has debuffs that make their attacks less effective, those still count against the rerolled attack. 

All of this together makes Second Chance a surprisingly potent defensive ability, especially against characters that are already hard to hit. 

But the converse is also true. Playing a squishy little Bard with light armor and 14 Dex, with a magnificently pathetic AC of 14. Second Chance is not for you. Enemies are gonna hit you more often than not, so spending a feat, and a reaction every encounter, to turn a hit into another probable hit just isn’t worth it. You’re better off spending your power budget on things that are actually gonna make you harder to kill.

Key Stats

Second Chance offers half an ASI in Dex, Con, or Cha, all of which are incredibly good stats to boost for many builds. 

Possibly the most important “stat” for the Second Chance feat though, is AC. The higher your AC, the lower the chances of being hit, both by the initial attack and by the second, rerolled attack forced by this feat. 

Ideal Characters for Second Chance

Top Classes

Fighter – Halfling make surprisingly effective Dex-based Fighters, able to stack up AC and other defensive abilities while dealing solid damage with a rapier and the Dueling fighting style. 

Leaning into this ability can take you in two directions. One becomes even tougher by taking a defensive subclass. Eldritch Knight is the gold standard here, adding spell support to an already tough chassis. 

Alternatively, go full damage with Rune Knight or Echo Knight, and use this ability to stay standing when enemies realize that the 3ft tall, 50lb halfling is the one killing everybody. 

Artificer – Combining High Int, proficiency in armors up to heavy plus shields, self-built magic items, and defensive, utility spellcasting for a tanky spellcaster that can be built to fulfil almost any combat role and fit into any party composition. 

Of the four subclasses, the Armorer straps on a suit of magitek armor and becomes fantasy Iron Man, (or a slightly less tough, lightning bolt blasting ninja, which might actually be even cooler.)

But we’d love to make a Battle Smith, standing in the backline with a magical crossbow. This build is a uniquely tanky ranged attacker, supporting the party with firepower from spells and bolts, while sending in their robotic companion to do the fighting for them.  

Cleric – The standard Cleric class benefits are already tough, with many subclasses turning it into a literal brick wall of armor and HP that can anchor the heart of a party and comfortably wade into the middle of an encounter.

Twilight and Peace Clerics are standouts here. Mostly because both subclasses are considered low-key broken, pulsing out strong AOE effects that make the party that much more effective. If your GM isn’t into balancing encounters entirely around your ability to break party balance, though, you could go Forge Cleric, which has AC buffs and damage spells galore, plus genuinely enjoyable thematic elements. 

Race or Subrace Choices

The Second Chance feat is only available to Halflings. 

Combos, Tactics, and Synergies

Complementary Feats

Lucky – Instead of complementary, read better. Lucky is, and has always been, one of the strongest feats in 5e, and there’s a real case for taking it instead of this one. There’s a full breakdown on why below:

Heavily Armored – If you’re building a tank, especially at low levels, the flat damage reduction from this feat is one of the strongest defensive benefits there is. 

Defensive Duelist – Halflings tend to build Dex, and characters running Second Chance are generally gonna wanna be up close and personal, with a shield in one hand and a sword in the other. Defensive Duelist adds your proficiency bonus to AC against one attack, at the cost of a reaction. It’s nowhere near as strong as Second Chance, but it can be used every single turn, so makes a great backup feat. 

Spells that Synergize

Shield of Faith – +2 to AC for up to 10 minutes is a significant buff to overall toughness and works even better with this feat

Blur – All attacks against you have Disadvantage. That’s nice, especially when you can force successes to roll again. With Disadvantage. Again. 

Shield – Taken alongside Second Chance, the Shield spell is another reaction that slams +5 AC onto the character’s armor class value, until the start of their next turn, making it especially useful against groups of enemies, or when Second Chance has already been used. 

Strategies for Maximizing Second Chance Effectiveness

Stack AC

There’s no point in forcing an enemy to reroll if they’re just going to hit you again, which is why the Second Chance feat is far more effective on characters that are already hard to hit. 

Considering Second Chance only works against attack rolls, the only defensive vector that matters is AC. A character looking to maximize the potential of the Second Chance feat should be pushing their AC as high as possible. 

• Start by wearing the best armor your character class can – Medium or Heavy armor is best, especially paired with a shield. Light armor only starts to scale heavily as characters level and max their Dexterity to 20. 
• Find static bonuses to AC – These are far more rare in 5e than in previous editions, but examples still exist, for example; the Defense Fighting Style, the Forge Cleric’s bonus, etc. 
• Buffing spells – Spells like Shield of Faith can push AC higher than possible with non-magical means.
• Debuff your enemies – An enemy that can’t hit you deals no damage. Conditions like poisoned or prone confer disadvantage, and stunned enemies can’t hit you at all. 

Use it early

Or save it for crits. 

These are the two strategies to best make use of Second Chance. Either save it for the biggest hits coming your way or use it as soon as you can to maximize your own toughness and make it through the early turns of an encounter with the minimum risk. 

Take Lucky instead?

As we mentioned in the feats section of this guide, there’s a serious argument that a character wanting Second Chance should just take the Lucky feat instead. 

Firstly, the effects are very similar. Second Chance lets a character force a reroll on an attack that’s just hit them. Lucky can do the same. Except Lucky does it better. Here’s why:

• Potentially more uses: Second Chance is single use, and comes back on short or long rests, or when rolling for Initiative. Haven’t used it yet? No rests today? A low number of large encounters so no rolling for initiative? I hope you enjoy one use of Second Chance.
  
  Lucky instead has three luck dice, given at the start of the day. You can’t get them back, but you always gain the full three. 
• Second Chance can only be used on enemy attack rolls. Luck dice can also be spent on saving throws, attack rolls, and skill checks. Playing a backline character who isn’t often targeted? No combat that day, because the party’s haggling at the market or negotiating with powerful nobles? Second Chance does nothing. Lucky is still incredibly useful. 
• Second Chance is a flat reroll. What happens if they reroll that hit into a crit? What happens if they have a good chance of hitting you anyway?
  
  Lucky instead is an additional dice, and it can also be stacked on top of Advantage and Disadvantage. I’m sure the enemy, and by extension the GM, loves rolling three dice for attack rolls and choosing the lowest, right?
• Second Chance is used when an attack hits you, so is purely reactive against confirmed hits. Lucky is used before an enemy rolls instead, so you don’t know if the enemy would have hit you. This makes Lucky more of an at-will disadvantage button.
  
  At first glance, this gives Second Chance a point positive, here. The problem is, that Second Chance requires your reaction, which means it eats any other possible reactions a character might want to take, and the list of defensive reactions is surprisingly long. 

Sure, they’re different, and Second Chance gives a character half an ASI, but honestly, if we had to make the choice between both of these feats, we’d lean toward Lucky almost every time. 

That said, if you can find the space to fit both of these feats into a build, that has the potential to be incredibly strong.

Final Thoughts on Second Chance

This feat is weird

Looking at what it does, Second Chance seems useful. And it is, but it’s useful in staccato bursts, and because of the numbers involved, only really efficient on characters that have already heavily invested in defense. 

That’s the takeaway. Decided to make a Halfling tank, taking the front lines despite coming up to everyone else’s knees? Good on you. Second Chance is a great way of doing that. Every other character and build should probably look elsewhere.