4th & Dragon : Dungeons and Dragons...and stuff

I suppose there is a bit of power creep with Winter’s Shroud since gives a power from a feat, which is not normal, plus a resistance of negligible value in most games (I don’t know why they even bothered with resistance/vulnerability in 4e, really).

If you have a player that wants to be Winterkin and you feel it’s too good, just use a simple house rule to fix it. Allow the character to use either Winter’s Shroud OR Fey Step in an encounter, but not both. Channel Divinity feats work that way, as do Drow, and neither has ever struck me as overpowered.

All of the initial Bloodline feats (Vampiric Heritage, Deva Heritage, Vistani Heritage, Forgeborn Heritage, and Mantle of Misfortune), with the exception of Dusk Elf Stealth, grant either a new encounter or a new daily power plus some sort of additional minor bonus (usually some type of resistance or a conditional bump to a skill).  In many ways, they’re kind of like multi-class feats, which are also a bit more powerful than standard feats, because you can only take one of them. 

If anything, the confusion comes in from Mike Mearls’s article on tieflings which did have power swap feats; however, those were not bloodline feats (even though you can only take them once, if I remember correctly, because you’re required to give up infernal wrath).

In any case, I don’t think the granted encounter power is very powerful, so blowing a feat on it and restricting your future choices is a valid trade IMO.

I’ll point out that ,I railed against power creep when Vampiric Heritage and Mantle of Misofrtune came out as well.  In reviewing the Vistani articles I had bigger fish to fry (the whole three article split thing), but I did miss it when it came to Forgeborn Heritage.

In general, I’m opposed to feats which simply grant powers.  I much prefer ones that give you an either/or option (i.e. along the lines of Channel Divinity), ones which modify a power you already have (like Weapon Style feats) or ones which simply allow a simple power swap (like the aforementioned tiefling feats).  The more feats that simply grant powers, the more the power of each character creeps up.  I’m willing to tolerate the simple granting of powers for the Multiclass feats not because they restrict your future choices (which they do), but rather because it’s the most efficient way to give you a small taste of the other class’s role (the power granted is usually a feature power).  Bloodline feats simply restrict those future choices and only in regards to bloodline feats.  Nothing prevents a character from taking both a bloodline feat and a multiclass feat, granting them two more powers than they would normally have.  If the character is also a hybrid character, they might also take a Hybrid Talent option which grants a power.  What happens when we start coming up with more kinds of feats which can grant powers?  Fairly soon you’ll have to take one of each kind of power granting feat just to keep you power up.

Also, I’ll point out that the resistance is comparable to what PCs have available to them normally.  It’s the same as the tiefling’s fire resistance and on par (if not a bit better) with what you normally find on magic items (which are 5 at heroic tier, 10 paragon, and 15 epic).