Still reading it, focussing on the Druid, because that’s what I have played the most.
Druidic now also makes sure you always have Speak with Animals prepared.
Great, that’s a change “nobody?” can get mad at. I call it the “druid tax”, and have it prepared on all my druids.
Speak with Animals always prepared seems like such low hanging fruit I am surprised it wasn’t added earlier. A great easy addition that won’t change overall combat power but is quintessential druid
The base druid is slightly buffed, but no flavor has changed. A small nerf on wildshape but that’s utility anyway for a base druid.
I have not looked at subclasses yet.
Edit: I refuse to use reddit for dnd, it’s hard!
Circle of the moon: There is Temp HP, I’ll let someone else do the calculations.
Circle of the land: Circle Spells now lets you pick a different land type each day.
I might actually play it, it’s a nice way for beginners to explore different spells. And you can fireball!
Being able to change the spell lists each day really lends itself well to Circle of the Land as the nature wizard role. It gives it tons of flexibility and some great non-primal spells like fireball and misty step.
This is my outlook on prestidigitation, thaumaturgy, and druidcraft. To me they smack more of narrative abilities rather than functional ones and I both give them to my players for free and ask for them for free in games I play in.
I always try to take those cantrips as well. I can see not giving them as default but it’s great to have them added in like that.
The bard seems overpowerd, choose any spell list on first level?
I’m all in for a primal bard.
It really makes the bard the most flexible of all classes. You can make an entire party of bards with totally different roles.
I am ready for the adventuring party / band campaign now
Gonna jot my thoughts down, feel free to point out anything I might be missing!
Oh, wow, some actually good capstones! Though some are still a bit disappointing…
I shouldn’t be surprised they reverted the restriction on preparing spells based on the exact levels of your spell slots, but I thought that was a pretty reasonable nerf to spellcasters. I liked that change much more than the three spell lists thing.
Whew, they un-fucked Druids. I think this version of Wild Shape is quite reasonable. I’d probably allow learning a few more different forms tbh but this seems pretty fair.
Hmm. Am I missing anything, or does the Elemental Monk still not look very good? The 3rd level feature is a lot of text and good flavor to really not do anything that impactful, and the 6th level feature is basically a worse fireball. Happy to see they’re aware it’s bad, but I’m still not feeling it.
Nooo Quivering Palm nerf?? I loved that ability, it was so cool.
Giving Weapon Masteries to Paladin and Ranger was necessary IMO. They fundamentally play like martials. Though I do think pure martials should still be better at it.
Well, Paladin Smite spells finally work how everyone has been suggesting they should since 2014. I think it’s a good change.
Hunter Ranger looks pretty nice now. While I still kinda miss the old multiattack feature (I just thought it was cool), this seems reasonable, and way better than the last UA version.
Steady Aim is back!! Probably because I told how important it was to me in the survey.
Oh wow, I really like Cunning Strike. That’s a cool way to give them options in combat. I still kinda think they should have Extra Attack though.
This is a huge playtest, so there might be something in here I hate that ruins it all, but I actually feel really good about this one. A lot of the changes I really didn’t like were fixed or reverted, and there’s a bunch of new stuff I really do like. My outlook on 1D&D (or 5.5 or whatever we’re calling it) has substantially improved today.
I hated the previous spell preparation system. I’m glad they went back to this version
What did you hate about it, may I ask? I thought it was a reasonable nerf to flexibility without too huge of an impact.
It’s much more book keeping to begin with. It has much more work in most tracking and teaching. If we are going that route we might has well go full vancian and prepare spells slots.
Also in general the spells I want don’t match with spell progression for prepared casters. I usually want more 1st level spells especially at higher levels. Also there are a few spell levels like 4th that have worse selections. I would prefer either more 3rd and 5th level spells. Especially for druids which have 1 or 2 good options
I dunno, I’ve seen a decent amount of players basically match their spells known levels with their spell slots already just because they feel like it makes sense; it’s not really more bookkeeping because you’re already keeping track of exactly how many spell slots you have anyway.
It certainly does force you to make choices that you might not want to otherwise, but spellcasters are problematically overflexible at the moment, so reining them in a bit like this felt pretty fair to me.
I just feel like it’s easier to just say you get 10 spells prepared of any level instead of 3 first level, 3 2nd level, 2 3rd level and 2 4th level
I said something stupid, deleted
I skimmed the whole thing this morning but didn’t dig too deep or to any math - that being said - I was pleased with just about everything I noticed. Looking forward to trying out a pet ranger again someday. Maybe I’ll recreate my beastmaster/scout, seems like it will be more effective - and fun - in general!
Heightened Metabolism is a great feature. It lets the monk get an extra short rest per day. This is great for the groups who never short rest as well as those that do. 1 minute is easy to slip in at any point outside of combat
Give warlocks this and bring back short rest warlocks!
I liked the short rest warlock. I also track time in our dungeon crawls using 10 minute dungeons turns.
I never realized until this point that the Circle of the Moon had really nothing to do with the moon. I am glad they added the moonbeam as well as the moon flavour
Moonbeam is a great match for wildshape, I love it.
On balance: The switch to a calculated temp HP makes balancing much easier, but I have no idea where this moon druid is compared to the old one.
The old circle of the moon had too much HP. I am sure people will be mad but will be better for balance overall
I was mad at the previous UA, it was a nerf with nothing in return, and an extreme focus on wildshape.
Balancing Moon is fine.
Moving reliable talent earlier is a great improvement. It will actually get much more use at this point
The College of Dance seems awesome. It is the monk bard hybrid that I didn’t know I wanted. The 6th level features are amazing and would be great for the entire team. Really mitigate damage by going first and protecting your allied from those fireballs
Invoke Duplicity just got good. The replacing of yourself with the duplicate with teleportation for the initial use is amazing. Moving it to bonus action makes it actually usable while casting spells. This subclass just got way better
I think it still needs a sentence or two added to address mechanically how enemies can realise it’s an illusion etc. Most illusion spells say something about being seen through if there is physical contact. Maybe it needs an AC and it’s revealed as a duplicate if hit?
That isn’t a bad idea. I always use the old touch ac for this. Which is 10 + dex
I really like the rogue changes. Being able to add status effects by lowering sneak attack damage is exactly what I asked for in the feedback!
Ideally fighters would get similar with bringing back DNDNext superiority dice, but you can’t have everything.
Thief rogue is back to being good again.
I like the ability for multiple classes to impose status effects from this play test. The rogues feel like a bunch of neat tricks and I like being able to just use it with sneak attack. No extra type of attack and no extra dice pool. It’s a wonderful feature
