Is this Combat Perception feat balanced?

Question

This feat is intended to help with action economy when players are trying to keep an eye on a tunnel or hallway for additional enemies, while maintaining active participation in the fight. My general understanding is that making Perception checks takes an action. Inspiration for this feat was taken from the official Observant feat, but to flavor it much more in line with the experience combat veteran would have.

Strategist

Extensive battlefield experience has attuned your senses to filter out the chaos of war and distill the tactically relevant details.

• Increase your Wisdom or Intelligence score by 1, to a maximum of 20.
• While in combat, you may make active Wisdom (Perception) checks as a bonus action.
• Making a Perception check in this way is never subject to disadvantage.

Answer 1

Since the two feats are so similar I will compare Strategist to Observant. See this answer for a full breakdown on how perception works in combat.

Observant already does most of what this feat intends to do

Observant will perform better in finding hidden enemies most of the time, at a lower action economy cost. If your passive perception is high enough, you can notice hidden enemies for free without expending any actions, and the +5 bonus will ensure that it will be high enough more often. The +5 bonus also cancels out disadvantage (-5) to passive perception. Furthermore, Observant also works on Investigation checks and has an additional useful benefit.

Strategist is better than Observant when you are taking the Search action, but only if the required roll is a Perception check, not when it is an Investigation checks and only if you don't need your bonus action for something else.

Overall I think Strategist is slightly weaker and less useful than Observant

I would therefore propose to slightly buff Strategist like so:

• Make it also work on Investigation checks

and either

• Allow one free Perception or investigation check per turn

or

• Perception or Investigation checks made this way have advantage

Answer 2

Highly situational, but flawed

The first consideration is, not everyone says it takes a full action to do a perception check while in combat. So if you are the DM, and this is how you play the game, it's okay. If you are not the DM, then find out how they handle perception checks in combat to see if it even makes a difference. There are better feats for gaining a +1 to Wisdom.

Breakdown

Adding a +1 to a stat is very common. The abilities that are the riders vary greatly; from flavorful to granting spells. This seems to be a middle ground.

The biggest problem is this line:

Making a Perception check in this way is never subject to disadvantage.

That means you, or your target, can be lightly obscured, in dim light, or any number of situations that would normally impose disadvantage, and they are all nullified. Which means at worst a normal roll, but leaves room for even having advantage.

Instead

Just keep the Observant feat, and make a house rule about Passive Perception. It's there for a reason.

Something like:

During combat, a player can use their Bonus Action to make a Passive Perception sweep of area they can see.