Unlike other, comparable tabletop role-playing games, the second edition of Pathfinder is replete with feats that let you customize your character down to the minutia. And while some of these are specific to ancestry and class, general feats are open to everyone as long as you have the required level and skill.
Some of these feats, like Crystal Healing, are more for flavor than anything else. Others, though, are useful for almost any character in any situation. Choose carefully, adventurer. These feats may be the difference between life and death.
10 Armored Stealth
We've all been there. You've successfully snuck past the sleeping dragon, through a pile of gold to the legendary sword, when the Fighter's armor starts banging around like a commercial kitchen's worth of pots and pans. The dragon's eye snaps open. There's fire everywhere. Time to roll up a new character.
Armored Stealth won't eliminate this scenario, but it will make it a lot less likely to happen. It does require you to be trained in stealth, but that's more than worth it to reduce your penalty. It's also useful for stealthy characters who want to armor up, since it'll reduce your penalty by three at legendary level. Sneaking around in Hellknight Plate? Why not?
9 Toughness
Whether you're a Barbarian looking to squeeze out a few extra hit points or a Wizard sick of getting constantly battered around, Toughness will get the job done. It's not exactly a sexy feat. It won't give you the ability to jump off walls or confuse people with your arcane knowledge. But that extra hit point per level may be the difference between life and death.
Toughness also decreases the difficulty of recovery saves by one, which is incredible for a flat roll that determines whether your character lives or not. There may be other options, but increasing your probability of survival is always a solid choice.
8 Adopted Ancestry
Choosing ancestry in the second edition of Pathfinder is almost as important as choosing your class. It determines a lot about your character, gives you different ability bonuses, and in many cases gives you special abilities like darkvision. Unfortunately, it also locks you into a specific set of racial feats, when another might be more attractive to you.
Adopted Ancestry solves this somewhat by letting you dip into another class's racial feats. Your choices are limited to first-level, but there's still an incredible variety of extremely solid feats. It also gives you some really interesting roleplaying options. An Elf with an affinity for Goblin culture? Now there's someone that'll turn heads.
7 Prescient Planner
There's an old military saying that no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Obviously, whoever authored the phrase didn't play Pathfinder, and didn't know about Prescient Planner. The feat won't make your plans always work brilliantly, but it will make sure you always have a piece of adventuring gear with you — even if you didn't spend the time to buy it.
Is there a locked door and no Rogue for miles? Maybe you packed a portable battering ram. Being chased by a horde of Kobolds? You've just realized that you bought a set of caltrops just for the occasion. The next feat on the chain, Prescient Consumable, makes your ability to plan backward even more acute, by giving you access to any common consumable.
6 Pickpocket
You can be a master-level thief with a catsuit and a grappling hook, but without Pickpocket, it hardly matters. Rules as written, anyone who tries to steal a tightly guarded object takes a negative-five penalty to thievery checks, and this applies to more than just something in someone's pocket. At higher levels, the penalty is kind of inconvenient, but at low levels, it's prohibitive.
Pickpocket solves your stealth problems in two ways. Firstly, it eliminates the nasty penalty you get for stealing secrets from under people's noses. Secondly, it gives you access to some other incredible stealth feats, like Legendary Thief, which lets you steal things in plain sight.
5 Continual Recovery
Pathfinder's healing rules can be rather restrictive. On one hand, if you're trained in medicine you can heal your party members a full 2d8 damage if you take ten minutes to treat their wounds. On the other hand, doing so means that they'll be immune to that kind of healing for an hour.
Taking Continual Recovery reduces this restriction, narrowing the time of immunity from an hour to ten minutes. Essentially, it increases your healing capacity by six without uttering a word of divine magic. The feat is essential for parties who don't have a Cleric, or who want to conserve spells for vital moments.
4 Bon Mot
Pathfinder players have a vast array of techniques at their disposal to conquer their enemies. Sure, you can blast someone with fireballs, but you can also trip them, knock them over, or feint to their right to get behind their guard. If you're trained in diplomacy, you can also insult them so badly that they take a minus-two penalty to perception and will saves for an entire minute.
You might have been slinging hot fire at your enemies before taking Bon Mot, but this feat means they'll actually burn. On a critical, the penalty is even worse, but it's the one-minute duration that makes Bon Mot incredible. Sometimes the tongue is mightier than the sword.
3 Kip Up
Getting knocked down in Pathfinder is a problem. Getting back up again is an even bigger one, especially if you're surrounded by enemies who all still have their reactions. In that situation, if you try to stand, you'll just get knocked down again in a less-fun reenactment of 1997's dance-rock hit Tubthumping.
Kip Up lets you bypass all of that, by giving you the ability to pop up off the ground without triggering reactions. It requires a master-level skill in acrobatics, but it essentially means you don't have to worry about being knocked prone. So, go ahead and knock back that whisky drink. They're never going to keep you down.
2 Assurance
As good as your character may be, their fortune depends on a die roll. Sometimes the dice just aren't with you. If you want to take the chance out of your roleplaying experience, especially during critical moments, Assurance is the feat for you. Instead of rolling dice for a skill of your choice, Assurance just lets you assume you will roll a ten, and lets you add your modifier from there.
It's difficult to overstate how useful this is. In a game where experts routinely fail at their chosen skill, Assurance gives you consistency. You might not succeed fantastically, but for some checks, you don't need to. With the ability to apply it to any of your chosen skills, this feat is as reliable as you'll be after taking it.
1 Untrained Improvisation
If you're anything like most other Pathfinder players, you hate to fail. Failing because you're untrained in a skill is even worse. That negative-two modifier sticks out like a sore thumb, and if you're trying to craft something without training, it might even give you one.
Fortunately, Untrained Improvisation turns your lack of skill into an asset. Rather than a negative modifier, the feat gives you one equal to half your level. At seventh level, the bonus increases to one per level, making you good at pretty much anything you feel like doing. It won't give you access to feat prerequisites, but that won't matter so much when your Fighter surprises everyone by sitting down to study occult lore.