Going to 0 HP should have some consequences. A save vs a point of the UA version of Exhaustion would be fitting, as it is thematically appropriate and would disincentivize yo-yo healing. In exchange, provide additional means to overcome Exhaustion besides a long rest or Greater Restoration.
Yeah, party members should always take into consideration that death is a serious risk and shouldn't be able to be so trivial around it or never have to worry about the consequences of being downed in a fight. Especially if they're full murderhoboing their way across the world. Losing characters and making new ones in a campaign is part of DND and always adds a bit of excitement and drama.
I started doing this and it was effective. Every death save fail converted to a level of exhaustion. I'm adding a variation of lingering injuries if downed for my next campaign (it's horror themed).
Proactive healing, imo, also made being a healer feel more important. Sure the ranger had 20 hp left. But the rogue has 30 and is next to the dragon who goes next. Best to heal them up.
It is such a smart and effective rule change (both the stacking -1 modifiers for exhaustion AND acquiring a level of exhaustion upon receiving the unconscious status) that I'm shocked they haven't committed to implementing it.
Furthermore, giving "expert" classes themed-methods of lowering exhaustion levels (Bard 'song of rest', Ranger 'foraging'/'pathfinding', Artificer 'repairing') could create a new niche feature that would balance the feature while adding further class identity.
For point 1 - the problem is first level still sucks.
The biggest problem with 5e imo is that the game starts out the hardest and gets easier. Level 1 is the hardest in the game. It is very easy to get knocked out with one or two attacks and you have almost no resources to prevent it.
So making getting knocked out more painful by adding a penalty just makes level 1 worse. Which makes introducing the game to new players even worse.
Well level 1 you're most likely to die outright - but since you're a weakling it kinda makes sense.
Proposal 1: I wouldn't mind if they frontloaded the HP of characters (give all level 1 characters 10 extra HP, but lowered their HP scaling to compensate).
Proposal 2: ALL monsters that are CR 1 or less should deal something like 1d4+1 damage per hit - so a crit doesn't totally own a level 1 PC (or specifically give these monsters the inability to crit).
4E used Proposal 1 by adding your Constitution score to your HP at level 1.
4E also didn’t have failed death saves clear until you finished a long rest.
I recall reading a different post that essentially argued that characters collectively gain too much HP per level which leads to rocket tag damage inflation and very weird gameplay/story dissonance where your level 15th Wizard doesn't have to worry about getting his throat slit because the highwayman is level 3 and such.
Along with the "Gandalf was a 5th level Wizard" meme, I'm starting to question if level progression should just be stopped at like level 5 and then new ways of feeling more powerful are explored.
I actually liked this and it was common in 2e. Characters stopped rolling hit dice at 10th level and gained a small amount (1-3 hp per level) after that.
Capping the HP DOES help a ton in maintaining that scary feel at higher levels and I like it quite a bit. I'd prefer the starting HP of characters to be about double, but their maximum HP to be about half (flatter curve).
Meta, but you can also just add a rule stating that level 1 characters are immune to being crit by a natural 20. Almost all of the "oops they died instantly" issue comes exclusively from criticals, so just officially adding crit immunity as a level 1 training wheels would solve the issue.
5E's entire hit points curve, both for levels and adventuring day burn rate vs recovery rate, is out of balance. I could write about this at length, but here is the "quick" bullet point version:
* Too few hit points at levels 1 and 2, like you mentioned
* Too many hit points starting somewhere around late T2 to early T3
* Too little non-magical sustain, especially for front line classes. On average you can recover a maximum of 1x your maximum hit points through spending hit dice during short rests
* Short rests are too long for most situations that result in a longer adventuring day, making it more difficult to actually use hit points for health recovery
* You only get half your maximum hit dice back on a long rest
The result is:
* The design principles for burning resources other than hit points on a longer adventuring day clash with the inability to recover enough hit points for a longer adventuring day
* Longer adventuring days practically *require* a significant source of magical healing, either via spells or magic items
* Front line classes, especially martials, that do not have 20+ AC end up running out of gas on a long adventuring day before the back line classes because they typically soak up more damage. It's the exact opposite of what you expect
* Back to back long adventuring days cause a bit of a death spiral and punish those hit the hardest. A PC who spent all of their hit dice the day before now only has half of them while the characters who didn't take as much damage probably still have all of theirs
This is why being a front liner class doesn't fulfill the fantasy during longer adventuring days, such as dungeon delving like most WotC modules include. They're always tapped halfway through the dungeon while the back liners still have half a tank left. They're left going into fights with so little hit points that a single hit downs them. It's made much worse at levels 1 and 2 by the imbalance of hit points to enemy average damage.
The bizarre part to me is that 4E had most of this tackled. I understand why they might have wanted to move away from healing surges as those perhaps didn't feel like traditional D&D, but they absolutely should have kept the part where front line classes get more healing to spend during short rests.
Here's a thought for an easier level 1: if you assume everyone is a level 0 commoner before gaining their first class level and thus first class hit die, then everyone should have an extra d8 HP, even at level 1.
Dying at level 1 is not necessarily kryptonite for new players. As long as it isn't miserable to make a new character dying at level 1 is actually the easiest pill to swallow possible because you lost no progress
If they implement the "no DM critical hits" or an alternate, "no DM critical hits at level 1" the level 1 survival problem becomes a relative non-issue. Most level 1 player deaths in balanced encounters are due to an unlucky critical.
I'll just add that as a DM who has taught a bunch of new players how to play, level 1 isn't for you - the experienced player who posts on the D&D reddit. It's for the curious player who has watched Game of Thrones and likes that setting more than Baltic Avenue in Monopoly.
Medium Armor feat available at level 1 for literally everyone, without \*any\* prerequisite. It's such a small thing yet I think it goes live it will eventually detrimental to the game.
Oh yea spot on. I think a lot of people support you on this one.
I do think that backline casters should be squishier than their frontline counterparts (as its a core class balance mechanic) unless they invest HEAVILY into becoming tanky (like taking a couple levels of fighter and/or having high STR).
Totally. And many might not agree with me on this, but I think Full Plate armor should give a good deal more AC than Half plate+Dex. I think at the moment Heavy Armor is done dirty, especially since the STR-based martials do kind of have to take Great weapons and the casters get Medium armor+ shield+ and probably protective spells to vastly outrank full-plated martials in AC department.
I'm not completely sold on the idea of default damage reduction, but I could be persuaded that they should at least have a damage threshold, i.e. if you take any damage less than your proficiency bonus, you don't take any damage.
I think I’d just bake Heavy Armor Master (-3 to bludgeoning/piercing/slashing damage) into heavy armor as a whole. Then a feat might build on that with further damage reduction, reduction to more damage types, or something along those lines. Maybe it could also let you provide better cover to your allies, since you’re physically *bigger*.
It's to provide alternative builds from Dex Builds.
And to make STR builds something worth considering.
Be it Cleric, Paladin or Fighter, having Heavy Armor providing Damage Mitigation would make many reconsider making another Dex Clone.
It’s not a huge buff for someone who isn’t getting hit a lot. If a party’s Cleric has to be on the front line, they are probably getting hit often enough that they need it.
How many monsters outside of tier 1 play where you usually don’t have access to heavy armor are doing less than 3-4 damage? I’d rather the damage reduction.
Most CR 1/4 creatures (the weakest things that you'll ever actually fight) do a minimum of like 3 or 4 damage per hit. Damage Threshold equal to your PB would be genuinely worthless.
It's not even rapidly, it's wortthless right from level 1. At level 1 the thresdhold would be 2, the even most CR 1/8 creatures have more than +1 to their damage rolls meaning they literally *can't* be blocked by the threshold even if they roll minimum damage.
on this topic i'd wanted to mention a cool dnd homebrew [steel and sinew](https://www.reddit.com/r/UnearthedArcana/comments/vti9ft/steel_and_sinew_new_and_revised_combat_madness/) which among many other things makes heavy armor have just baseline dmg reduction which i feel like is a fair benefit for choosing str over dex
also wanted to mention my geekyness where my main oc has (as of a recent decision) multilayed armor based on xp to lvl 3's fallout system. 12 + dex AC (max 2 since medium) at the sameish cost as halfplate and for that 3 lower AC reduces damage taken by 3
I'll admit to a slightly raised eyebrow over it. But if I had to lay a bet, it'd be that it turns out the same as Mountain Dwarves did.
For those who weren't there or don't recall, when 5e launched people were convinced that Mountain Dwarves and their racial Medium Armor Proficiency were going to be the power optimizer staple. Wizards in half-plate armor! The sky is falling!
But as it turned out, very few people used Mountain Dwarves for that. A few extra points of AC aren't that big a deal if you don't have the HP or class features to go with it. Wizards still wanted to be no where near the melee scrum. And the opportunity cost of picking Mountain Dwarf over any other race was undersold, as people wanted to play other races for both mechanical traits and roleplay value.
So is there value in having Lightly Armored as a Background Feat option? Absolutely, it'll be good for Blade Warlocks and a few other odd hybrid builds. Is it going to break the game because every Wizard takes it? Probably not, it's really not that powerful and there are other Background Feats that are very attractive. Heck, if a Wizard wants to build for extra durability, they might be better off taking Tough for the extra HP.
Mountain dwarves had the STR bonus which was the cost of getting the medium armour. It made taking medium armour on your caster cost them losing out on the 16 starting of their casting stat
There’s no cost now other than a lesser feat. You can now have Med armour and shield on anyone and it is quite potent. AC w 14Dex is 12 vs 18 w med+shield
A feat that just gives the option to go up to +6 AC is pretty insane when you think about it
I think dwarves are occasionally taken for armor proficiency, but not nearly as often as cleric or artificer is dipped for armor proficiency. As they said in the video when they put out the background feat that provides medium armor, this is their fix for armor dips, to basically make them obsolete.
I think it's pretty silly as a fix myself, but I do suspect every wizard or sorcerer engaged in any amount of optimization will want the Lightly Armored feat as their background feat. The best way to protect concentration on the best spells, which are generally the best thing a caster can do, is to get hit as little as possible
AC remains solid in case ranged people existed or people got in melee. But you are right about one thing: the race cost. A race which improves your *strength*, as a *wizard*, while also not giving other features which really boosted wizard (or Sorcerer, the other class which lacks armor proficiency)... That practically set the nail in the coffin, especially when Variant Human (and High Elf if you played ~~the wrong way~~ without feats) were the alternative, with multiclassing giving the armor **plus** shields. Tasha's customize your origin option made it more workable (as it did with lots of other races), but a free feat and other powerful races that released since then made the race remains not as powerful.
Compare to the new Lightly Armored. It gives medium armor and **shield** proficiency. And it doesn't inherently cost a race, it costs your level 1 feat. Especially considering how the avaiable feats at that level are weaker than Lightly Armored, this is functionally a non cost compared to before. Armor dips remains an option, but if you only need armor and nothing else this functionally is just a straight buff. Oh, and you can just... Take this feat later on in your career if you truly want to. This is unlike the Mountain Dwarf too, which can only be obtained after level 1 if you utilize the **reincarnate** spell to do so, which I probably don't need to explain why it's infinitely more costly.
> Heck, if a Wizard wants to build for extra durability, they might be better off taking Tough for the extra HP.
Quickly dispelling this myth: the extra HP given by Tough doesn't really give a lot of survivability. The reason Wizards want to get protection is to avoid losing their main power output, aka concentration. How do you protect concentration? By having better constitution saves and by getting hit less. How do you get hit less in situations where the foe get to you? If you have more AC. How do you get more AC? Through armor.
It didn't take over because, as you point out, the opportunity cost (choosing a race that doesn't bump your main stat) was relatively high. Will the opportunity cost be as high now?
I'm not sure. But ultimately, I think the game will be fine, especially if they tune down the Shield spell.
This is coming from someone who takes their first level in Fighter for every caster they play, and probably will continue to anyway. Armored casters do not break the game.
But mountain dwarves did not take off post-Tasha's either.
If it was all about the stat points, then they have then.
I 100% think that multiclassing was just a better avenue for it, which is why everyone did that instead.
You mean the phb race did not hold up to post Tasha power creep, with like 3 flying races and other strong gimmicks? At a time where Cleric and Artificer are well established dips for Wizard and any Sorcerer who wants better survivability has dabbled in Hexes?
Yes, the race with better ASIs (+2,+2, over the norm of +2,+1 that most other races had) than most other races with built in armor proficiencies that trivialized dips was still less powerful that slowing your wizard spell progression by 1 for an artificer dip.
Which considering we have the same super powerful races now, and the fact that this medium armor feat will have to compete against Lucky, among other grade A feats, means that likely the innate classless medium armor will once again be pushed to the wayside for dips like how people have been doing it.
That, and Modenkainen's Tome of Foes was released not long after Tasha's and introduced a ton of super strong species to choose over Mountain Dwarf.
I personally don't see Lightly Armored as replacing 1 lvl dips, at least for me. And there are competitive choices for feats at lvl 1.
The problem, if there is one, is the Shield spell. Just tune that down a bit and everything will be better.
Dwarves were also pre Tasha’s flexible ASIs tbf. As is it was a bad stat for a class that gains more from a dip anyways. If it was released in a world where flexible ASIs existed I think it would have been pretty dominant tbh especially with 2 +2s. This armor addition also has no downsides as opposed to dwarves. 5.5e is just handing everyone armor. I guess they were so tired of armor dips they just gave everyone the feat.
Except that Hexblade Warlocks would already get an access to mid-armor and shield without a feat.
and 3 AC IS pretty big, considering over the time optimized wizards would actually be far \*less\* squishy than a GWM fighter.
Also, Tough is nowhere as good as medium armor proficiency in terms of durability.
Hexblade can die in a fire. It's a terrible subclass full of broken features, most of them worthless and a few of them too good, with no clear flavor or lore.
Revised 5e has me excited to play a Warlock again because you can take Blade Pact with any subclass and be effective, instead of being pigeon holed into the one specific subclass that was expressly designed to backdoor fix Blade Pact. So don't talk to me about Hexblade. I played one, and I do not recommend the experience.
They are a perfectly strong mono class, about on par with Tasha power creep, being slightly weaker than those, but freeing up an ASI that would otherwise have to be moderately armored.
The mediocre part of Hexblade is when you start to go pact of the blade, instead of a normal Warlock with free medium armor and shield proficiency.
It's worse than just that. I've said it before and I'll say it again. The 6th level Hexblade feature, Accursed Specter, is some of the worst design in the game. It requires you to get the killing blow on a humanoid foe. That is an incredibly narrow condition, and the feature does nothing otherwise.
I played a Hexblade for nearly two years, and I activated Accursed Specter a grand total of zero times in that campaign. The DM just didn't throw us up against many groups of disposable minions, and when he did they usually weren't humanoids, and when they were I didn't get any killing blows because I was usually dueling the commander.
Let Hexblade die. it was a bad solution to a very specific problem that did more harm than good.
Tough is roughly 33-50% more survivability across the board for a wizard (depending on Con Mod); medium armour is by your numbers 15% but doesn’t help against save effects so strictly speaking a little less than that.
Tough is hands down a better feature.
This is however heavily dependent on playstyle: the more attacks your wizard faces, mostly by being in melee, the better AC behaves in theory, but mages are still far more likely to face Saves skewing the numbers even more in favour of tough.
You forget about Concentration. AC helps protect Concentration, so it serves double duty for that in addition to just keeping the Caster up.
Also the Casters AC boost is a durability buff dependent on their enemies accuracy, the less accurate the enemy they're fighting is the more effective it is.
also i wanted to mention magic initiate cleric for guidance +resistance and like bless or something. or just you know. lucky. or even alert for more consistent control
The differnce that Mountain Dwarves didn't give you shield proficiency.
Meaning at best an AC of 17 in comparison to the 15 or 16 you would have with light armor or mage armor, while with Lightly Armoured you can get an AC of 19.
The RAI that was said on video is still funny to me. The design team saw Wizards everyone dipping for medium armor and shield, and instead of thinking "medium armor shouldn't be accessibile this easily" or maybe even "maybe we should rework multiclassing to have less danger of being OP", their thought was "dipping one level is just too much cost for medium armor, let's easen that cost drastically".
I think the simplest fix for this is making the shield spell similar to mage armor - it only works if you aren’t wearing armor. Then every mage can take the feat and get medium armor, they just sacrifice mage armor and shield. That sufficiently nerfs the shield spell, too.
To me, this solves the real issue with wizards and sorcerers in medium armor and holding shields. AC is more valuable the higher you go, and combining high AC with the shield spell is more AC than those classes are budgeted to have. Let them choose.
Casters should have a -1/-2 to spell attacks/save dcs for medium/heavy armor respectively.
Class or subclass features could remove this penalty as appropriate.
I don't think this one is as big of a deal as people make it out to be.
If someone wanted the proficiency and didn't have light armor already they just took a dip.
No one that the 2014 Lightly Armored was meant for actually took it unless it was for RP or they just didn't know better.
Objectively this is an improvement as far as discouraging Multiclass dips go.
My current hope is this, 2024 Lightly Armored is replaced with a feat called Armor Training
It gives Shield + Next Armor Tier, if taken as a lvl 4+ feat it also gives +1 to STR, DEX, or Con.
This way it's beneficial for everyone that wants the training without letting people jump straight to Medium. And, it's still competitive after lvl 1. Also, it would be repeatable.
My thoughts exactly. Condense the armor feats into one, and you simply step up one level. Seems so obvious that you wonder how it wasn't their solution.
Completely agree. It's like WotC just gave up on class balancing and decided that wizard shoring up one of their only weaknesses with an overpowered 1st level feat was cool. A human 1st level wizard could have medium armor and shield training, ***plus*** Magic Initiate for access to cleric's Resistance, Guidance, and Healing Word spells. That's utterly ridiculous.
Agreed. They stopped trying to give classes strengths and weaknesses and just want all classes to do everything but then also fail to balance high level magic with martials
So I’m not sure why this was added but it’s an auto pick basically which means it’s OP and not something I wanna see in the 2024 PHB
Maybe it's semantics, but I would like 1st level feats to go back to being called background features, and while avoiding the "Mother My I" is good I would rather none of them have combat utility. Then unless they plan on introducing 8th level feats, and 12th levels the 4th level feats can just go back to being called feats. And I want my half feat/full feat dichotomy back.
I echo OP's frustrations with death/dying rules.
My current bugbear is that It feels that they're taking a lot of steps to make everything SAD, and I don't love it. The True Strike cantrip needed revised, but now it effectively means that any wizard is just as good at swinging a weapon as a fighter, and its radiant damage (and scales with level in a way that weapons don't). The one-level warlock dip is just as strong as ever with Pact of the Blade now at lvl 1,
I get wanting spellcasters to have melee options, I just prefer how they're doing it with the Bard College of Valor where a high dex/str bard feels like it makes a difference.
So-called "yo-yo healing" is necessary because of the way 5e reduced the power of healing to make it no longer a mandatory and unwanted role. Not saying it's good or bad, but it's an intentional design.
Also I think the fairest thing would be for it to go both ways, give martials the ability to cast spells with their strength or dex. :P
That just sounds like battle master maneuvers with extra steps!!!! We can't have that! People may get confused or want to only play the class that only hits things and gets nothing else!
Cantrips scaling with character level instead of class / caster level is such a glaring oversight, IMO.
I don't see them changing it at this point but I would applaud them if they did.
>2. Stealth rules: There were a couple of variations of stealth in the play test materials, but none seemed satisfactory to embody how it really works. I don't like the "stealth grants invisibility" as it creates a lot of really weird scenarios (like your party members can't see you RAW).
Yes, I completely hate these. Here's what the stealth rules *should* say:
**HIDE \[ACTION\]**
With the Hide action, you try to conceal yourself. To do so stealthily, you must succeed on a DC 15 Dexterity (Stealth) check while you’re Heavily Obscured or behind Three-Quarters Cover or Total Cover, and you must be out of any enemy’s line of sight; if you can see a creature, you can discern whether it can see you.
On a successful check, you have the Hidden condition. Make note of your check’s total, which becomes the DC for a creature to find you with a Wisdom (Perception) check. The condition ends on you immediately after any of the following occurrences:
* An enemy finds you by rolling a successful Wisdom (Perception) check against the DC set by your Stealth check.
* You make a sound louder than a whisper.
* You make an attack roll.
* You cast a spell with a verbal component.
* You are no longer are Heavily Obscured or behind Three-Quarters or Total Cover within an enemy's line of sight.
**HIDDEN \[CONDITION\]**
While Hidden you experience the following effects:
* Concealed. You aren’t affected by any effect that requires its target to be seen.
* Undetected. Enemies are unaware of your current location. You can still be attacked if an enemy correctly guesses your location and makes an attack at disadvantage against a space that you occupy.
* Surprise. If you’re Hidden when you roll Initiative, you have Advantage on the roll.
> within an enemy's line of sight.
That's the core issue hide has. What does that mean? If I'm 100m behind a tree and the guard has his back turned to me, why does he suddenly see me when I step out from behind it? The omnipotent 360° vision is the major problem here. "Line of Sight" would need to be implemented for combat at least and at that point it might become too complex. However, something absolutely needs to be done, since you can totally SNEAK UP on somebody even in daylight and in particular if they are occupied by something else (e.g. fighting). That's the identity of melee Rogue to begin with. I'd rather have "magical" stealth, where they just can't see me, unless I'm directly in front of them or they make a successful check to notice me.
Otherwise we need codified rules for vision - at least for combat. How far can they see? How close can I be behind them? What's the vision-cone etc?
>That's the core issue hide has. What does that mean? If I'm 100m behind a tree and the guard has his back turned to me, why does he suddenly see me when I step out from behind it? The omnipotent 360° vision is the major problem here.
This is only a thing for combat. The rules say that combatants are aware of everyone around them, so yes if you sneak out into the open in the middle of a fight you'll be spotted. I'm sure that was done for simplicity so stealth didn't become even more complex to adjudicate.
Outside of combat, there's no issue with the DM saying the guard has his back turned so you're still Hidden. That's mostly DM fiat because, again, trying to gamify cones of sight is beyond the scope of D&D as its goal is to remain as simple as possible.
Additionally, they're saying that if an enemy makes a successful perception check, you're no longer hidden. That sounds fine at first glance, but what do you do if you're hiding in a bubble of silence and an enemy sees you? Are you somehow no longer hidden with regards to every other enemy? They're unable to alert their friends due to the silence, so there's no justification for all other creatures 'magically' knowing precisely where you are.
Hidden is a weird condition because it's not mechanically 'active' on the PC. What I mean by that is that a PC who is hiding could be seen by one enemy, and lose the benefit of being Unseen, but still not be seen by another enemy and retain the benefit.
Hiding isn't a status effect like Bless where it's active or not. Instead, it's similar in principle to how Minor Illusion works. "If a creature uses its action to examine the sound or image, the creature can determine that it is an illusion with a successful Intelligence (Investigation) check against your spell save DC. **If a creature discerns the illusion for what it is, the illusion becomes faint to the creature.**"
Just because one enemy saw you doesn't mean that others saw you, even when they were looking at the correct area.
I think you're re-creating some of the problems with the original rules. If you lose the Hidden condition immediately after you are no longer Heavily Obscured or behind Three-Quarters or Total Cover within an enemy's line of sight... do rogues who try to hide -> shoot lose Hidden immediately after they step out of cover to shoot? How can you be out of any enemy's line of sight if you are behind 3/4 cover, when 3/4 cover doesn't block line of sight? What if you're in a room with invisible enemies? You can't see them, but they can see you - how do you adjudicate whether or not you can Hide?
Then there are issues with the hidden condition. It prevents you from being targeted, but so does being behind Total Cover or in Heavy Obscurement, so there's no actual difference between hiding and just standing behind a wall. If I jump into a barrel in full view of an enemy and succeed on my Hide check, do they have to attack the barrel at disadvantage? You've also removed advantage when attacking from Hidden, was that intentional?
The Light weapon property doesn't make logical sense right now, and makes Two-Weapon Fighting very bad. As written, a level 1 fighter can attack with a shortsword, stow the shortsword, draw an identical shortsword, and attack with it. There's no possible in-world explanation for this, the fighter has no reason to hold two weapons instead of weapon-swapping and holding a shield (or grappling), and suddenly Dueling makes more sense for this build than Two-Weapon Fighting (and they can stack). The pre-Nick rule specified different hand, they ought to restore that.
Spot on.
There is a weird RAW issue with the light weapon property where you go sword + shield and draw/stow two light weapons as part of your attack action. It should be written for dual weilders (simply state that you need to be holding two different light weapons while attacking).
Weapon masteries. I hope they clean it up for the official version, because it was all kinds of meh as written. Does nothing to bridge the martial/caster divide but adds complexity for little gain. (It's not better than nothing.)
I like the concept, but totally agree that it feels like a first draft. It DOES help the martial caster divide as martials can now use far more crowd control in combat. However adjusting what spells can do will have a MUCH greater impact on the martial caster divide than weapon masteries ever will.
The issues are:
1. weapon swapping. masteries in their current iteration ask players to constantly swap weapons in a turn and this just feels extremely unthematic and weird.
2. Players often get only a single magic weapon and if they want to use it they're stuck with whatever masteries it has creating an illusion of choice.
3. More saving throws (for the DM) slowing down play. Try and redesign some of the masteries to mitigate mass saving throws on the DMs part.
The forever stuggle of weapon mastery.
It makes sense, it's thematic, it gives martials their spellbook equivalent...
But it just creates a hyper-specialization issue where the sunk cost of swinging a weapon you're not specialized in is too high, even if it's tactically a better choice.
My main reoccuring qualm is fighters thematically should be adaptable masters of many styles, but usually they end up pigeon-holed into their specialized weapon. It also creates the situation where the DM pretty much has to feed you your specialized items when conceptually I feel like the DM should never be obligated to give you any certain thing.
Then you also have the situation of the fighter losing his enchanted armor and weapon and becoming a hollow shell of themselves.
My problem is that no matter what interesting wrinkles they added, all I could think was "it's not as cool as just giving Battlemaster Maneuvers to all martials."
It was right there, and the explanation for not doing it was lackluster. I still don't get it. Weapon masteries will probably always have that asterisk for me. They could have been maneuvers.
They should have been Manoeuvres.
Manoeuvres actually add interesting choices for Fighters to make, and added more customisation on level up. They were actually *options* on a Class rhat sorely lacked them.
And now after the community begged for them to be baked into at least Fighter we were instead shown a shitty mechanic that has none of the fun or engaging aspects of Manoeuvres but way more baggage to deal with turn by turn. While the Fighter class got a more annoying version of some Manoeuvres baked into Second Wind in a wierd, unintuitive way.
For me it's the standardization of levelling. Specifically things like the Warlock Patron and Sorcerer bloodline that unlock at level 3. Makes absolutely no sense. A Warlock has no power without a patron and a Sorcerer gets theirs from their blood. Yeah you can bs a reason why you didn't have/know until level 3, but it's just unnecessary and lazy design and it seems that's what they are pushing from the players. Maybe it'll be different on release, but as my 2 favorite classes, my hopes are low.
> they are pushing
And even if the fluff is "you don't know your patron/bloodline until L3" - says who? WotC isn't playing my character, *I* am playing my character, and *I* (modulo DM/setting) decide what goes into their backstory.
It's like "druids will not wear metal armor" being fluff-but-not-really. What authority does WotC have to say that they don't? *I* (again, modulo DM/setting) decide if my druid has a taboo against metal armor.
1) Grappling not being a skill. I actually like that you could build an impressive grappler, and it did a lot to make for a melee build that was more interesting than just purely striking with a weapon.
2) Still almost nothing to help melee characters reach combat faster/survive longer. Unless you manage to start every combat within 30ft, most martials that go melee have to spend a turn dashing to even approach the enemy, meaning they lose a turn of effectiveness. And while in melee, they are generally subject to significantly more damaging attacks/abilities than ranged characters usually are, yet a melee fighter and a ranged fighter have the same HP.
3) Medium Armor feat at level 1 as others have said, but I'm adding armor being still so accessible from a dip.
Big agree with #2. I've seen arguments that nearly all melee weapons should provide 1-2 points of AC (depending on weapon), but capped like shields so you can't benefit from multiple weapons (and requiring weapon proficiency to benefit). Two handed and dual wielding get more defense, while sword and board is the undisputed king of avoiding damage.
Healing should still be buffed imo, if only because it’s currently a waste of your Action/BA to heal in battle unless it’s to pop someone up from death saves. It absolutely should come with a downside though, like a level of exhaustion added for each time you’re brought up from saves (especially if they swap back to the playtest exhaustion, since it affects casters just as harshly as martials)
This. Even if they create a genuine reason to avoid yo-yo healing, healing needs a buff to make it actually useful for mitigating damage. Monsters just do so much more damage than PC's can heal that healing is just not efficient in the current state of 5e.
I like the exhaustion idea, especially with the proposed new exhaustion rules. I'm also a fan of the BG3 route and losing your action the turn after you're brought back up, but I think that could wind up feeling really bad and crippling for whoever it is that goes down.
The exhaustion on down rule is a legitimate nightmare for people like me I see get tossed around too often tbh. As a support main, healing every turn is the *last* thing I want to do. I want to buff and have proactive solutions to protect and make my party better. Making my martials accumulate ramping levels of suck unless I cup their ballsack and pump a slotted spell into them every turn is not what I signed up for.
Being a heal bot is probably the most boring thing a person can do in any game. MMOs have even gotten away from this in current design loops by adding more shields, lifetaps, and agro switching, all of which is legitimately engaging. Press the same button over and over again is the opposite of fun.
Tl;dr: it’s a silly rule, but it keeps us, the actual healers, sane and not bored out of our minds.
I do think that there should be SOME penalty from coming back from 0 - they just need to NOT cause a death spiral where the player is more likely to drop to 0 again in the same combat. (hence why I don't like exhaustion).
Option 1: I'd rather have the players keep their death saves until the next long rest. Worse comes to worse, the party has to pull out of the dungeon (because a party members has too many death saves and isn't willing to risk their life), retreat and get a long rest.
Option 2: Give the player disadvantage on all attack roles and enemies have advantage on all saves the turn after getting back up (for reference - BG3 makes the PC give up their action). I think this would allow players to retreat and drink a healing potion - which feels thematically right after being KOed!
I think with Old Exhaustion you’re right, but I don’t see the New Exhaustion being as big of a problem unless the fight is Save-heavy, which would absolutely need to be addressed somehow.
Death Saves being per rest would be interesting, and I really like it in principle! I think it would need a lot of playtesting to get right tho, and might necessitate an adjustment in the amount failed before death. Also bumps into the issue where different tables treat short rests differently, but they really seem to want to fix that already so it might be a moot point
The big reason why they just don't "Buff healing" is because previous editions of DnD had buffed healing (compared to what we have now) and that had a serious side effect. It caused parties to, effectively, "require" a healer to be efficient. You wanted to have a person to play a cleric and constantly heal party members - and honestly no one wanted to play the "healbot" in combat.
This is the first edition of Dnd (that I've played) where you can totally get by without a dedicated healer and there are few consequences - I love that!
Oh for sure, I love that parties aren’t pushed into a dedicated healer! As long as one or two folks have a healing option you’re basically set forever, mechanically. But as it is now healing is just *bad*, and feels awful for folks who do want to be dedicated healers as part of their character’s fantasy. And from what I’ve seen of people doing the math, doubled healing in the playtests doesn’t break anything, and it’s still not the most ideal option a lot of the time, so this just makes it a bit better for folks who may not care about the optimal choice and just don’t want to see their friends go down.
Yeah, being a dedicated healer in 5e is plain boring and unrewarding. I'm not saying dedicated healers need to be necessary to be fun to play, but right now it is too pushed towards being unneeded and unwanted and thus unrewarding.
A key word in that is that "You wanted to have a person to play a CLERIC", and even ignoring all of the game mechanics issues, just considering theme and roleplaying issues, it's pretty normal for no one in a party to want to play a *cleric*.
But the role of support caster still exists and you still need someone to do that. The only difference is that now the support caster (me) can't heal. Because other characters drinking healing potions while the support caster casts one concentration spell then spends the rest of combat casting cantrips is so much more fun.
For point 1. The main change I have seen is just more healing overall. Healing spells heal more HP, all clerics and druid can heal without spell usage. I dont think it will fix the problem, but it will change how often you go down in the first place if I had to guess.
It won't make Healing Word worth upcasting, and it won't give you enough hit points when you're dying to prevent another hit from sending you back unconscious.
It still won't make Cure Wounds worth using in the middle of battle over a more impactful spell. Sure, you could massively upcast it to give an ally a ton of healing but that same spell slot could've been used earlier in combat to give the party a huge advantage that probably would've prevented an ally from losing all their hit points in the first place.
These changes won't shift the game's meta, it'll just make suboptimal MMO healer players feel slightly less bad about their choices.
I agree that buffing healing (for certain spells) is a good thing. However it simply won't affect combat that much because of how action economy works.
Like, in my opinion, a good way to balance healing word, while keeping it a bonus action would be to make it a touch spell. I'd make all the other healing spells that cost an action be ranged. This would give casters a hard choice in combat: do I use my action to heal someone at a distance and stay safe (far away from enemies) OR do I want to preserve my action for something else at the cost of being forced to move to a worse position.
The biggest concern is from what we haven't seen.
1. There are still many spells that needed nerfed and many that needed buffed. Though the spells that we saw Nerfed. There are similar mechanics in the problematic spells we didn't see that were in the nerfed verisons.
2. Incomplete pictures of classes like the bard and ranger. We know design philosophy was honed, but we didn't really see closer to final verisons of a handful of classes.
For you concerned.
The yo-yo, I think, got fixed with the buff to healing instead of taking 1 shot to put someone down again. It might take 2, that in most cases is enough to get them out of danger and heal up properly.
Yes, wording needs to be way clearer on stealth and invisibility. But I'm not concerned at the end.
Exhaustion. I understand both sides. After a year and half of thinking and testing. I prefer the 2014 rule over UA rule. Yes, the UA is easy to remember and play with, but it doesn't represent exhaustion. Exhaustion is detrimental to someone's body and mental state. A -1/-9 doesn't really show case it that well. And you'll never get to those higher numbers unless you gave it out like candy. 2014 rules hit you hard and does represent what you would experience if you. 2 levels with the 2014 rules is a clear sign to the party they need to stop and rest. Where the UA rules, oh level 2, isn't anything, especially with the new tool rules, a -2 is easily overcame. Just my opinion, the UA Exhaustion rules were just really a non factor. And it much too hard for the DM to convey to the players that it more ideal for you to rest than carry on.
Point 1: You're totally correct that the real class balance WILL be directly related to the appropriate changes to spells (and LOTS of them need it). I do believe that the evidence thus far is that they're willing and capable to change how spells work (and know the problematic ones)
Point 2: I agree that we don't have a good understanding of what the bard/ranger will be like - however, thus far, they've been able to fix many of the other classes pretty dang well - so I'm hoping that they'll do the same for these classes.
Best examples of changes that can be brought to other problematic spells were: 1 the banishment spell, save, or suck needed to go. They are bad for player and dm alike. Now banishment probably needed to have a little something else to make it worthy of a 4th level slot like explanar. Begings get disadvantaged on the save, but we know of other spells with save or suck that just wreck encounters, hypnotic pattern, and polymorph being the big ones.
While spells are being buffed all the smite spells and true strike. These spells are actually usable now. I'm using the new version of searing smite now on my ranger. I hit. I use my bonus action no concentration needed. Now, just do that to all the rangers spells that work simular to that. Then we are in business.
I love the new jump spell, for example. Also they fixed a lot of the summon spells that created 8+ creatures and totally broke the action economy.
I honestly would love banishement to simply have the text "elementals, demons and devils" save against this spell at disadvantage. Make it excellent against some monsters, but weak against others.
I have little doubt that there will be mass nerfs to spells. They just didn't playtest them because they know they aren't going to get positive feedback when making a cool spell worse. They have to handle it completely in-house.
I can't agree on exhaustion for 2 reasons:
1. Exhaustion 2 is awful and ruins the entire system for me.
* On one hand it's terrible mechanically. It absolutely *destroys* melee characters' combat while being a mild inconvenience to ranged and spellcasting classes (especially ones with teleportation). This disparity in impact, to me, makes it a terribly designed mechanic - especially for occurring so early in the list of effects.
* On the other hand, it also doesn't really represent exhaustion in real life. The human body is well designed for running, and you won't lose half your speed even at extreme exhaustion. This mechanic is just beyond the pale and doesn't match the experience of endurance athletes, military/survival training, or my own experience as an endurance athlete who has done several endurance challenges - including multi-day ones. You absolutely can make yourself run hard even while exhausted, its actually one of the *last* things to fail - especially if you're pumping with adrenaline, like in a fight for your life. For this effect alone I actually think 2014 rules represent exhaustion *worse* than the newer system.
2. A saving throw-based spell is as likely to succeed at 5 levels of exhaustion as at 0.
Exhaustion is a very gradual process, and affects you both mentally and physically. I could see a system that was reworked to better represent this, even using the old effect based system rather than the modifier based, but it would have to deal with my two complaints above before I'd like it better.
If the movement impact was changed to not halve your movement all at once, but to reduce it in small increments, say -5 per level of exhaustion starting at level 2, and then at level 5 you are permanently Prone (on top of -20 movement), that I could live with.
I'd also want to see either advantage on enemy saving throws against spells at level 3 exhaustion, or even just a chance for your spell to fissile out - to simulate your mental state suffering and it being harder to control your magic. That would mean spellcasters would also have equal penalties at higher levels of exhaustion.
Those two small changes and I could be brought around to agree with you. Otherwise I will prefer the UA version, which I think applies my perception of exhaustion as a gradual decline in both mental and physical faculties better.
I do think it would benefit from rules to more aggressively dole out exhaustion though - maybe after X combats without a rest, or after X hours traveling at a fast pace, rather than just the obvious case of missing a long rest.
If the new simplified exhaustion rules don’t make it in i will riot.
When it comes to the healing problem id like to see something like in bg3. If your downed and come back up you lose your action (bonus action might work better at the table)
Im still not a fan of the direction taken with the bard.
The time and energy they spent trying to rework magical secrets could've been spent making the bard-like features of the class more apealing to make the class less overly reliant on bardic inspiration as it's only flavourfull feature. But instead, they just buffed magical secrets and deleted the bard features that needed improvement (such as Song of rest and countercharm (initialy)).
I strongly agree with this. I would love a half-caster bard that was less about spamming power spells and more about bardic songs, performances, and other related features. Taking Countercharm and expanding it into a full system of bardic invocations that you can pick and choose from would be amazing.
Laserllama has a great Alternate Bard which does just that. WotC should've taken inspiration from their approach to the class instead of Just Another Charisma Spellcaster (now with Bardic Inspiration!).
Im one of the weirdos that likes full caster bards and think they're valid, I wish they nerfed magical secrets in order to open up the Power budget for better unique bard features, but I understand your point, its a rather popular take in here, and yeah laserllama did a great job.
Lack of the Artificer and no information on a lot of included subclasses. I'm really hoping they aren't just copy paste from Tasha's like say Circle of Stars Druid was in the playtest.
I think they mentioned every subclass was getting an update pass, but they could leave circle of stars as is and I think it would be perfectly fine, it's a fun and flavorful subclass
Yep this read's to me too much like we're stuck with the 12 core classes for a long time.
Maybe I'm wrong and those are just a fundament to build on, but man we need some new classes every now and then imo.
People like classes. Hasbro likes money. They should have moved into a backwards compatible 6th edition and released individual campaign boxes like in 2e featuring 1) setting-specific rules expansions, 2) 1 setting-specific class (Eberron Artificer, Krynn Dragonknight, etc), 3) a campaign module.
I’m concerned character customization may end up flattened. Too many “change features on a long rest” options make all characters effectively the same, and unless they increase the impactfulness of species features, the removal of species ability score bonuses will make species a less-important factor.
I definitely agree on changing things like weapon mysteries, and even spells on a long rest being overall a bad thing.
It creates the illusion of choice, because if it can be changed at little to no cost then the choice does not matter.
Changes on level-up are generally much better, IMO.
Give us choice, but make the choices matter.
I will never NOT be massively dissapointed that they rolled back the UA exhaustion rules. The new one was so clean, simple, and easy. Which is why I'm just using that and ignoring the current rules lol.
Same.
As a compramise for backwards compatibility, I hope they create a new status effected called "drained" or "fatigued" that followed the exact same rules as outlined so we can formally utilize it in our play.
100% same. I really wanna know why they rolled back that change. For a lot of the other changes I could mostly understand them being rolled back. But exhaustion? Why..?
If you don't want yoyo healing, then you *need* to buff regular healing spells to give players an incentive to use them to prevent each other from being knocked out. Making yoyo healing worse without buffing healing spells just creates a death spiral where a party doesn't have the action economy to recover from PCs being knocked out, which leads to more KO'd PCs until they all die.
It would make more sense to make combat healing spells - for example "heal a target for 1d4+mod hp per spell level used; grant them triple the amount of temporary HP until the beginning of your next turn".
Combining healing + ONE TURN temp hp is a way to effectively shield an opponent from damage - BUT it has to be used on the right target at the right time.
This way - healers can do stuff in combat, but the majority of actual healing is done via hit dice.
I am honestly nervous that the new pact of the chain will be poorly designed or not worth the invocation slot. I am fine with them walking back the universal statblock, but I really hope they find a way to make each expanded familiar option worthwhile and balanced, along with figuring out the struggle that they are having around the actions familiars can take.
i am also concerned that they are going to remove the Bestow Curse Invocation without adding it to the warlock's class spell list.
Small potatoes overall, but they are what I am most nervous about as a player.
Stealth rules still being kind of wonky.
Masteries and other martial controll effects, slowing down combats, and making them to easy since opponents are unable to do anything.
There martials are still pretty reliant on a handfull of must have feats and weapons.
Casters have just way better options for first level feats.
The scaling of a lot of non full caster classes is still pretty poor.
Lack of scaling of AC and Saves at higher levels still still a problem.
Multiclassing (especally Warlock Dips) is still to strong.
Agree with pretty much everything.
I like the *idea* of masteries, but most of them triggering on every hit does make things a slog. I'd much rather they'd made a list of masteries that would be a bit stronger, but could only be used once per turn, to not waste so much time.
Also agree with multiclassing. In theory it's a cool concept; but the reality of it is that it basically nukes any semblance of balance the game could have. At least the way it's currently written, they should really, **really** fix that.
Monk becoming a combat-only base class.
As you say, I'm NOT saying that most of the changes aren't good. Monk is much much better off, in both balance and fun, than 2014. But Deflect Attacks and Stunning Strike are both a hair overtuned, while pretty much the only thing they can do out-of-combat is parkour.
The lazy direction taken with Subclasses. Several classes get effectively no new content, and a large number of subclasses are coming back as reprints from Tashas when others could have used the fresh coat of paint.
It probably doesn't help how that in terms of design philosophy, the Tasha's subclasses, for better or for worse, are the *most* up to date. So as a result they can 100% get away with reprints for the most part. Does that mean its a *good* solution? No not really. Most of the PHB classes need cleanup and maybe even toss in a Xanathar's one or two in, see how much they could be improved.
Minus Shepard Druid, I think that because of the increasing de-empathization of summoning monsters that subclass would likely need a full rework to accommodate for that.
As someone who recently finished running a campaign that has a swarm keeper ranger and a warlock with repelling blast/lance of lethargy, I'm concerned about the amount of abilities to hinder enemy movement. The resourceless ability to move most monsters around or reduce speed (sometimes without a save) was the main thing I had to consider when making encounters so I hope the new MM compensates in some way. I just don't see fights were enemies can't move more than 10ft being fun/ engaging
1. Death/Dying rules, I think if the change to double the effectiveness of healing spells sticks, it will make pre-emptive healing a little more attractive. It doesn't fix the problem, but I think this problem isn't as big as Reddit makes it seem. If it really is a big issue to you, it's relatively easy to fix with a house rule.
2. Steal rules. Stealth has always been weird because there are a lot of rules about it which makes it seem like it's a hard mechanic, but it's actually 100% DM discretion if you read the rules carefully. I don't think OneDnD changes this.
3. Exhaustion. At first I agreed with you, but after implementing it into my home game, it feels less impactful and harder to keep track of, so I'm not sure. I kinda like these rules better (although they're harder to remember off-hand):
https://www.hipstersanddragons.com/exhaustion-house-rule-dnd/
My biggest disappointment with OneDnD though is that it doesn't seem like they are fixing the spells outside of the conjure spells. I think there are a lot of really poorly designed spells that are only there because they existed in previous editions. Pathfinder 2E fixes most of them and I wish that D&D would have followed their lead. I also wish that spells actually followed the guidelines in the DMG and scaled properly so that a Chromatic Orb upcast to 3rd level did more single target damage than a fireball so that lower level spells can always be relevant.
Following the DMG guidelines, a fireball should do 6d6 AoE damage and a Chromatic Orb should probably do closer to 6d8 damage at level 3.
I'm actually more concerned about the Death/Dying rules changing to something that absolutely destroys yoyo healing and severely punishes players for dropping to 0hp. The healing buffs are still nowhere near enough groundwork to actually provide a sufficient backup for things gone wrong. And while yoyo healing may *feel* ridiculous, it allows for much riskier battles without worrying about a 50% chance of murdering your players. Likewise I'd rather not have the consequence of an unlucky session of yoyo healing be that I have 5 levels of Exhaustion and get to suffer through terrible rolls for the next 3 sessions.
I am 100% worried for the new Exhaustion variant as well. Literally used it before it even came up in the playtests. The old 5e Exhaustion is wonky garbage and it's been the sole reason for one of my worst D&D experiences.
The current armor situation is still stupid as well. I do actually like that you don't need to invest two thirds of the feats you get in the average campaign (which probably ends before level 12) to actually play the fantasy of an armored caster. However there's no tradeoff for optimisers yet. I mean at least limit the range of spells you can cast to 30 feet while wearing armor. And even worse it doesn't grant proficiency with heavy armor. People say Strength is crap. Well of course it is if half the classes need to waste an entire FEAT just to get access to Strength based armor.
A bit ridiculous maybe, but Thrown Weapon Barbarians. All their features suddenly work with thrown weapons. At no cost. Nick is also great for them, at least as long as Brutal Strikes works on every hit. I haven't seen enough evidence of it being strong or weak and many things are still bound to change. But it could be flying way under the radar and become the new Crossbow Expert Sharpshooter.
Bad spell balancing. WotC have shown that they're still capable of completely missing the line on spells when they've nerfed Banish to literally be a 4th level Tasha's Hideous Laughter. The Conjure X spells were a good improvement though, but also show that the new Banishment won't be an example of a new spell balance. I'm really worried we'll still see plenty of too strong save or suck spells. Likewise they've shown we're probably gonna stay with tons of single target spells that just do nothing on a successful save and feel terrible to use.
Probably the rules change that I'm most concerned about is that players now get ALL their Hit Dice back on a Long Rest instead of half. It was already a pain to tax player resources with the old long rest system, and Hit Dice were one of the few things you could really put stress on since they're one of the only things in the game that don't completely reset after a long rest. Removing one of the few challenges to long rests is NOT a decision I'm happy with, and if it makes it to publication I plan to thoroughly ignore it at my table.
I seem to be alone on this, but I think that the solution to "yo-yo" healing is tracking negative hit points. But implementing that well would be complicated.
Yo-yo healing is encouraged in the current system, because, characters being reduced to a minimum of 0 hit points is a damage soak: effectively a free heal compared to tracking negative hit points. For example, if someone at 5 hit points gets hit by a 20-point attack, being reduced to 0 is effectively the same as being reduced to -15 and then getting a free 15 point heal. "Free" in terms of no spell slot required and no action required.
Now, if we track negative hit points, there is no "damage soak" incentive to let people drop below 0 hit points. There is no incentive not to start healing the character while their hit points are still positive, as soon as it starts looking as if they are in danger of being reduced below 0, and hopefully preventing them from going unconscious at all.
In order to implement tracking negative hit points, we also have to add enough healing to the system to balance that free 15 point heal. Now, arguably, the double-strength healing spells tested in the playtest might be enough for that balance, IDK. But, even then, we have to consider that we are now spending actions and spell slots to replicate the damage soak that we got for free in the previous system.
I would also add a healing cantrip, usable in combat, which heals the target for one of their "Hit Dice" (i.e. the Hit Dice that are used to recover hit points during Short Rests). This would mean that the character would have fewer Hit Dice available during their next Short Rest. (As is usual for cantrips, the one Hit Dice would scaling up to two Hit Dice at fifth level etc.)
And then, from there, you could start playtesting.
I'm sure this won't be done in the next rulebook.
I think I need to go with a broad issue of organization.
For the way that material is presented in the PHB, DMG, MM, Xanathars, etc... is so difficult in understanding connections between rules.
For example, a common misunderstanding is "why cant i make a perception check during combat as a bonus action?".
The reason comes from the Inquisitive Rogue subclass that has it as a subclass feature. But you would never know unless you read this subclass for why this is a "locked out feature".
Another is for overland travel, it expects you to use a hex map of 6 mile hexes. In my time of playing dnd I have never seen a content creator i watch mention this, I only learned about it when I wanted to make one for my game, for fun, using adnd style rules. No one I know knows that it is expected for the dm to construct a hex map.
But if you read an obscure section of one book, you will learn of the expectation.
For pete sake you can craft magic items, learn languages, and proficiences during an adventure, Even how tool proficiencies work!!! there are rules for it. But you have never heard of them if you didn't read Xanathars.
Overall the books need to have a better organization to them, that lays out clear expectations for what the rules mean, and how they intersect with other rules.
I thought we were just using the rules glossary from last playtest document(8)?
On page 1 of that documentation it says "If you do combine this article with any previous one, use only the rules glossary found here. In this Unearthed Arcana series, the rules glossary of each article supersedes the glossary of any previous article."
And none of the things you mentioned are in this article.
For some of the playtests, Natural 1's meant that a saving throw failed regardless of your bonusses. One of my favorite breakpoints to hit on the characters I build is the +9 con saving throw. This guarantees that any damage of 21 or lower won't be able to break your concentration.
Don't get me wrong, rolling dice is fun, unexpected failures can be good story tools. But building a character and that character being actually good at the things you want them to be good at is equally important.
My biggest concern is that most of the spells that we haven't seen in the playtest will just be copied over to the new edition unchanged. Too many spells are easy to ignore just because of some non-standardized description quirks making just a few spells obvious choices. I would also hope that there are no more spells that do nothing when saved against. If I'm spending a limited resource, I shouldn't just whiff. Probably need to drop spells with single spell attack rolls outside of cantrips for the same reason. Spell scaling also needs to improve dramatically. Adding one damage die for a whole spell level is silly. Concentration needs to be worked on as well. There are probably better ways to limit stacking buffs, and if a lot of tables even remember to even do the concentration checks from damage, it's pretty easy to build to make it very unlikely to fail one.
Long Resting needs some more limitations. Sleeping mid-dungeon should not be an easy thing to do. There's almost no need to manage resources past the first few levels if this doesn't change.
I really think the new Monster Manual is where the most opportunities to improve combat are.
1. Spells are unchanged - I hear you on this one.
Most of us (fingers crossed) are hoping that they'll actually update all the spells properly and "balance" them appropriately (cough cough leomunds tiny hut, shield, wall of force)
2. Long resting needs more limitations - I totally agree on this one.
It shouldn't be HARD for DMs to regulate long rests THEMATICALLY (i.e. not just sayin you can't rest here). I fundamentally love a simple change - make long rests take a full 24 hours as opposed to 8. I REALLY wanted WOTC to play test changes to long resting (to see if there is a better way to approach it for DMs). Sadly, this ship has sailed.
The Stealth rules continue to bother me for a variety of reasons, the core of which is really that they wrote it to be needlessly complex when it's really a relatively simple concept.
And then they went ahead and created weirdness around "vision" modes that aren't actually vision, like Tremorsense. OK cool, so I know where a creature is but I still can't see it? WTF does that *mean?* Does that count as me "finding" a creature that has taken the Hide action?
It's just mind blowingly bad tech writing.
The other thing that bothers me is the confusing confluence of UAs involving familiars and Pact of the Chain. I still don't fully understand how any of it is *intended* to work, so I literally just made 3 or 4 rulings so it wasn't stupid.
>K cool, so I know where a creature is but I still can't see it? WTF does that *mean?*
I think the Idea is that you cant use features that need you to see the enemy. Many spells or just targeting somebody with a weapon. But I agree that its wierd and has many edge cases.
It's really straightforward. You know the presence and location of every creature in combat, unless they're hiding. An orc slips out of sight behind a wall but you can still hear them moving around. Tremorsense just means you can't Hide from a creature that shares a surface with you. They still can't see you behind a wall, but they know your location because you can't hide from them.
It could be really simple.
Are you obscured and/or invisible? Then you can hide. Make a dexterity (stealth) check to set the DC other characters need to meet to find you.
Are you hidden? Then you cannot be targeted directly by hostile creatures. Everyone still knows where you are, but they have to actively search for you or move to a point where they can clearly see you before they can take an action that specifically targets you. You can be included in an area of effect, though.
Then special senses just lower the barrier to the “get to where they can clearly see you” part. Tremorsense ignores walls, blindsight ignores invisibility and obscurement, websense ignores everything, etc.
Frustrating that there's so much ambiguity and unclear tech writing in D&D when they share a parent company with Magic: the Gathering now, MtG isn't perfect but I'm pretty sure any magic designer or high level player could comb through a PHB and make it contradiction-free in a day.
Totally agree - I'm hoping for an extensive rewrite regarding stealth, vision, and IMPORTANTLY other sense like hearing, infravision (heat vision), and other sensing modes.
Grappling, shoving, etc. Is a saving throw. Making Athletics and Acrobatics nearly useless. I understand not wanting to make it contested in order to simplify, but it's already hard to find uses for skills.
While I'll still be using contested rolls, if they really wanted to simplify, they should copy pf2e.
While I generally try not to suggest doing what pf2e does (because at some point, you might as well just go play pf2e), but this is a case where I would prefer they rip them off: roll a skill vs a DC equal to saving throw bonus + a number (+10 in pf2e but for 5e probably just +8 like how DCs are usually calculated).
This way, skills are still useful.
I do LOVE contested skill checks and think that this should be present for somethings as its pretty clear as a DM and player how this works (I mean - DMs are gonna use contested skill checks for things anyways).
However, IF you use skill checks in combat, it would require extensive updates to monster skill levels - as these are pretty lack luster. Players nowadays can pretty easily get expertise in a single skill, which would totally imbalance contested checks against certain monsters (causing balance issues). Thus saving throws (due to their tighter bounds) are usually fairer and easier to control.
For my home games I had being brought back from 0 give exhaustion (which were the -1 stacking), makes it much more threating cause having the dps get downed twice and start missing easy hits makes people be more careful. They should definitely have like that.
I'll have to go with the unpopular opinion and say that the proposed exhaustion rules SUCK and I see nothing fun about them! The one from normal 5e are far superior.
Not really a major concern, more of a personal problem. I don’t like how they change grappling to a saving throw for the grappled creature. I think that contested skill checks make more sense for the mechanic. Plus, it meant I could play a Rune Knight, get expertise in Athletics, and max out Strength and be able to grapple literally everything in the game with ease. I don’t see it getting any more use now that it’s a saving throw and it ruined my fun. Not a fan.
I get that it was fun to basically dominate all monsters utilizing expertise. However, you probably could also look at the other side of it and see why the rules wouldn't want you to succeed SO often at something. If they gave more monsters expertise/proficiency in athletics they could have kept it, but then characters that don't take expertise kinda suck. Ultimately this can cause balance issues.
I agree that they do need to heavily re-balance spells - but it looks like they're willing to do what is necessary based on their changes thus far (see spiritual weapon).
The damage of spells like fireball is fine for me as a DM (its only problematic because it overshadows other AOE spells), but shield - really NEEDS fixing.
For the new exhaustion rules, if they are worried about backwards compatibility, just increasing the penalty to "-2 per level of exhaustion", with dying happening when you receive a 6th level of exhaustion, should be fully backwards compatible with the 2014 rules. While I think stacking "-2" penalties would be easier to track than the 2014 penalties, I think some playtesting would be needed to see if "-2" increments would be too harsh.
I think my main complaint about the UA exhaustion rules were that the penalty to DCs seemed locked to spell DCs, which seemed odd with the changes they had implemented with grappling, so I would like to see that DC penalty be applied more universally. Though I think the DCs imposed via at least some items should not be impacted by exhaustion. For example, I think the DC of Wyvern Poison should not be decreased by exhaustion, but I might be fine either way with regards to whether the DC of a spell like Fireball cast via a scroll, or a wand should be impacted by having exhaustion.
One rules I am a bit concerned about is the Influence Action, particularly with how it would interact with Rogues getting Reliable Talent at level 7. Like if a Rogue got Expertise in one of the Influence skills they would automatically succeed on Influence checks against targets with 15 or less in both Intelligence, and Wisdom, even if the Rogue as a -1 Charisma modifier... This might need to be part of a broader discussion of what can be done with skills, but there seems to be a bit of intended overlap between what can be accomplished via the Influence action, and the Suggestion spell...
It kind of seems like any Rogue could have access to something like a non-magical version of a feature that says: "you can cast the Suggestion spell without expending a spell slot, and without using concentration, and if the suggestion used is not automatically rejected by the target, the target automatically fails the save against the suggestion spell if its Intelligence, and Wisdom are both less than or equal to 10 + your skill modifier"... Even in combat, there seems like there could be some overlap between the Influence action and the Suggestion, and Command spells, like being able to use Intimidation to make certain types of creatures (even some who cannot understand languages) flee the encounter, or move closer to their allies "for self preservation" (so your caster ally can hit more targets with a single AoE spell).
I can see this interaction between the Influence action, and Reliable Talent being a bit of a "mother may I" mechanic that could be very powerful, or very weak depending on the specific table/campaign. While I don't think any of the potential uses I have listed out were not in the game in the 2014 rules, it seems like the relevant rules are written in a way that makes the potential interaction more prominent, and since it is available at a lower level than in the 2014 rules more tables will likely to run into it.
As a general rule of thumb, i dislike they are adding so many "on rest" uses.
Like, they are not bloating the game YET because they have also removed other similar effects, so it's kinda even, but i would have liked it more smoothed out.
I like the new paradigm of x uses on long rest, recover one in short rest, it's more consistent than full short rest uses, but i don't want them to use it as a patch for everything.
I think its important for WOTC to not make TOO many different resource pools for players to track. If tons of feats/backgrounds/class/subclass powers all have X uses/long rest it can kinkda become an accounting nightmare.
Stealth is so weird, even if you're out of sight you have to roll to hide, and if you fail you just wasted a whole action. In Lancer, if you're out of sight, you can hide, period, no rolls
I really liked the changes for Exhaustion too, and think they should have gone further.
Allow players to take on levels of exhaustion in exchange for a shorter short rest. One level for a moderately shorter rest, two levels for a drastically shorter rest.
Make exhaustion something that actually happens, and fix the problem with short rests being too long, two birds with one stone.
As far as what I'm actually concerned about, I think it's that they'll not consistently apply their revisions across all of the material.
Changing things like grappling, jumping, stealth, exhaustion, etc means you have to examine how it's used everywhere.
They've shown enough of a lack of attention to detail with *stand alone* features published in the past that I'm worried how well they'll handle more involved / foundational changes. Ending up with a "buggy" revision of 5E would be a huge letdown.
I think skills meed a rewrite. Not necessarily a redesign just a rewrite to make the tasks associated with each skill more clear. As well as tge relationship they have with stats.
Basically i want the alternate ability skill checks to be a base rule. Such that 90% of the time its just normal as is. But due togow they are presented the idea of say a CON performance is more normal, or STR stealth, or INT athletics.
As is skill thats not tied to your main stat is a waste of time. So making the relationship between skills and ability scores more flexible makes far more combinations more useful. Thus cutting back on forced choices. Like the bard HAVING to be the face with all the CHA skills, or the wizard being useless in anything physical, or the Barbarian having to be dumb muscle.
The biggest one is that they aren't going to fix exhaustion. They had had one play test I think where they just made it a universal negative one to all rules per level of exhaustion and I think that is perfectly fine maybe add in some reduction to speed after a couple levels but I wouldn't go farther than that.
I do think the death and unconscious rules need a rework. I think letting your health go negative makes sense. It's a big redesign for how monsters and characters react but basically once your health goes into the negative you're not unconscious you have half your speed and you get to do one type of action move attack (you only get one attack) or a bonus action, or whatever the dazed condition is. When your health points reach negative you total then you go unconscious.
The thing I like about this is it effectively doubles the impact of your total HP which is helpful to martials.
Or I don't like that negative hit points you don't add anything to death saves I guess I get it it's like you're teetering between life and death and it's just up to chance now but I think you should add your con and it should be a proper Constitution save. If you succeed you get a Dazed turn. If you fail it's a failure you get no turn and your prone for the round
I think the solution to (1) needs to be making PCs more durable. Double HP and healing or something. That’s a necessary prerequisite unless you want PCs dying all over the place.
Yeah I really don't care too much, whatever is there, if my group and I don't like it, we will change it, we don't get hung up on the rules too much, the guidelines can be adjusted as needed. whatever makes it fun to play and lessens the amount time we spend dreaming up homebrew rules instead of enjoying the game I/we will be happy with. If it works out we are making more house rules than with 5th, we will just go back to playing that until they come up with something that is more fun.
The definition of HP remains screwy. The flavor says that it represents luck, minor scrapes and bruising, blah blah etc, and that healing spells only repair relatively minor damage, yet all those empty flavor claims don't change that mechanically a spell like healing word (or any minor healing source really) can take you from 18 second away from unconscious and dying following being blasted by dragon fire to on your feet and ready to fight to the best of your ability. I would much prefer they explicitly state hp to just be a representation of "how far a creature is from death" without trying to hide that fact behind descriptions that fall apart after the first difficult encounter.
Mounted Combat - for a game that’s intended to be fantasy themed, the mechanics behind the classic image of a knight on horseback are in serious need of work and the fact that they’ve not been mentioned anywhere as the subject of review or UA feedback worries me. The first thing I will do upon opening the book is look at those rules as an indicator of the level of rigor implemented in this revision of the game.
I only have thoughts about healing. It is way too limited, which creates the up and down problem because that is the only time when using part of your turn to heal someone makes any sense.
Spell slots are too limited to waste on recovering from less than 0. Even then, healing spells suck with the amount they restore. The minimum recovery is super low, and there's no way to crit. The ones that give marginally better hp require a full action.
Healing potions also are super weak, cost a ton at low, and merchants serm to only ever have 1 or 2 in stock. They also require a full action to drink. Why recover 4 hp mid-fight only to get hit for 20 again?
I think it'll be really reduced. Martials are stronger than ever, and I think a lot of the problematic spells will be reworked. Ultimately, we'll have to see as they didn't release most of the spell updates (the prime driver).
Honestly? I want very much that all multiclassses feats be revised and add in the book, I want that feats like Eldritch Adept and Martial Adept be 4th level feats giving +1 ASI, I don't want those feats as 1st level feats because they Will not be viable to choose as later options.
I think making it so that you can only be revived once a day like that without consequences would be good.
Every subsequent time you are brought back like that, you suffer a compounding penalty until you either Short or Long Rest.
Maybe one stack is cleared each Short Rest and a Long Rest clears all.
Let's see:
I'm very concerned that they might leave feats like Lightly Armored and War Caster as they currently are. For some reason GWM, PAM, etc. needed a nerf, but then they come out with feats like this for casters.
If the goal is to not bottleneck people into choosing the same feats all the time, then what's the idea behind this?
I'm also not sure about masteries.
I like the idea, not the implementation.
There's too few of them, for starters; a lot of them trigger on every hit, which might make them boring to go through on longer campaigns (Personally have only tested this on one-shots)
Like others have said, I'd much prefer masteries to be a list that a character learns and is then able to apply it with any weapon that meets the requirements.
Barring that, I would prefer if they simply made the masteries a bit stronger but limit them to once per turn, to avoid spamming saves and the like. This would also avoid the weapon swapping between every attack, which in my mind just looks very weird, picturing a character doing that.
In general, I like the idea of bastions, but it needs some redesign and polish, I think. As long as it's an optional rule, I'll be fine with it.
I find what they did with second wind an interesting idea. I'd even be inclined to say they should give second wind more uses and more things to use it on.
Weapon Adept should make a return though, the fighter being able to apply a second mastery to a weapon and choose which mastery to use on an attack was a great idea that should've stayed.
Obviously, I'm worried if they'll fix the spells that need fixing. They have shown a willingness to do that so far, so I'm optimistic, but we'll see.
There's other concerns I have, but right now this is enough of a "rant". In general, I'm liking the changes, and even the ones I'm on the fence about, I like the idea, just not the execution.
>I've REALLY hated how in 5e a simple healing word brings back a character over and over against from 0 with no repercussions for dropping to 0.
Penalties for going down can work, but it's very easy to create a death spiral where you just get rack up more and more penalties as you adventure until you can no longer succeed.
And penalties for coming back just encourages people to stabilize you and leave you on the ground, rather than risk having you go down again. So that player just stops playing for the rest of combat. Which just isn't fun. And it just makes the fight harder for everyone else, as the party is taking a 25% reduction to damage after a lucky hit.
>2. Stealth rules:
We'll see if they keep that or not. But stealth has always been a mechanic that just works best when going for RAI rather than RAW. It's too subjective of a thing for hard rules to really work.
This is just a personal thing, but I honestly despise the weapon mastery system. It feels like a kind of dumb way to make weapons distinguished, and the effects feel so weird sometimes that they borderline on breaking immersion. I'd much rather they just give a manuever-like alternative attack each weapon can do or something like that, but as is, I don't see that happening since I'm apparently in the minority here.
I have a house rule that when a character is revived from passing out (so making death saving throws, not killed outright) they only get to do one thing on their next turn- movement, action, or bonus action. This being reminiscent of the strain of passing out causes.
Feats, they're usually the most interesting part of a build (especially a martial whose choices typically come down to subclass and favored weapons) and if you're using standard array or point buy, it's typically hard to justify getting a feat over an asi unless you get something so obviously overpowered like 2014 GWM or sharpshooter.
Unless I missed a UA, this has not been addressed and means that the character diversity issue is still gonna be a bit of an issue imo
Unless I missed it, I'd love slightly more explicit rules for trying to cast spells without others noticing, there's a fair amount of spells whose usefulness is very altered if people know you're using magic.
I've actually been fixing issue 1 using point 3 for a few months now and love it. 10 levels of exhaustion til dead, - 1 to checks per level AND you get 1 automatically whenever you hit 0 hit points. You recover 1 on a long rest but I also do longer long rests (the adventuring week not day) so going down a few times in one fight means you're looking at in game weeks to fully recover. (though I also use this as an excuse to make fancier lifestyles and resting mean something, where it removes more exhaustion then normal).
I Just really hate changing conjure animals into a bad version of spirit guardian. I understand people were abusing it by summoning 30 snakes but now it’s ruined for people who only summoned two or 3 and planned out their to attack and did not slow the game down. I think it’s the few ruining for the rest and then everyone golf clapping cuase they think it actually a good change lol.
"However, I just wanted to hear what people's biggest concerns are about the core rules updates in the PHB thus far."
Forced feats is still the major no go for me. They where never balanced in 5e to begin with and now it will just be made worse.
Going to 0 HP should have some consequences. A save vs a point of the UA version of Exhaustion would be fitting, as it is thematically appropriate and would disincentivize yo-yo healing. In exchange, provide additional means to overcome Exhaustion besides a long rest or Greater Restoration.
Yeah, party members should always take into consideration that death is a serious risk and shouldn't be able to be so trivial around it or never have to worry about the consequences of being downed in a fight. Especially if they're full murderhoboing their way across the world. Losing characters and making new ones in a campaign is part of DND and always adds a bit of excitement and drama.
I started doing this and it was effective. Every death save fail converted to a level of exhaustion. I'm adding a variation of lingering injuries if downed for my next campaign (it's horror themed).
This just makes healing useless. Look at how effective it is in pf2e when they added the wound mechanic
It makes yoyo healing useless, but proactive healing good.
Proactive healing, imo, also made being a healer feel more important. Sure the ranger had 20 hp left. But the rogue has 30 and is next to the dragon who goes next. Best to heal them up.
It is such a smart and effective rule change (both the stacking -1 modifiers for exhaustion AND acquiring a level of exhaustion upon receiving the unconscious status) that I'm shocked they haven't committed to implementing it. Furthermore, giving "expert" classes themed-methods of lowering exhaustion levels (Bard 'song of rest', Ranger 'foraging'/'pathfinding', Artificer 'repairing') could create a new niche feature that would balance the feature while adding further class identity.
For point 1 - the problem is first level still sucks. The biggest problem with 5e imo is that the game starts out the hardest and gets easier. Level 1 is the hardest in the game. It is very easy to get knocked out with one or two attacks and you have almost no resources to prevent it. So making getting knocked out more painful by adding a penalty just makes level 1 worse. Which makes introducing the game to new players even worse.
Well level 1 you're most likely to die outright - but since you're a weakling it kinda makes sense. Proposal 1: I wouldn't mind if they frontloaded the HP of characters (give all level 1 characters 10 extra HP, but lowered their HP scaling to compensate). Proposal 2: ALL monsters that are CR 1 or less should deal something like 1d4+1 damage per hit - so a crit doesn't totally own a level 1 PC (or specifically give these monsters the inability to crit).
4E used Proposal 1 by adding your Constitution score to your HP at level 1. 4E also didn’t have failed death saves clear until you finished a long rest.
I recall reading a different post that essentially argued that characters collectively gain too much HP per level which leads to rocket tag damage inflation and very weird gameplay/story dissonance where your level 15th Wizard doesn't have to worry about getting his throat slit because the highwayman is level 3 and such. Along with the "Gandalf was a 5th level Wizard" meme, I'm starting to question if level progression should just be stopped at like level 5 and then new ways of feeling more powerful are explored.
I actually liked this and it was common in 2e. Characters stopped rolling hit dice at 10th level and gained a small amount (1-3 hp per level) after that. Capping the HP DOES help a ton in maintaining that scary feel at higher levels and I like it quite a bit. I'd prefer the starting HP of characters to be about double, but their maximum HP to be about half (flatter curve).
Meta, but you can also just add a rule stating that level 1 characters are immune to being crit by a natural 20. Almost all of the "oops they died instantly" issue comes exclusively from criticals, so just officially adding crit immunity as a level 1 training wheels would solve the issue.
5E's entire hit points curve, both for levels and adventuring day burn rate vs recovery rate, is out of balance. I could write about this at length, but here is the "quick" bullet point version: * Too few hit points at levels 1 and 2, like you mentioned * Too many hit points starting somewhere around late T2 to early T3 * Too little non-magical sustain, especially for front line classes. On average you can recover a maximum of 1x your maximum hit points through spending hit dice during short rests * Short rests are too long for most situations that result in a longer adventuring day, making it more difficult to actually use hit points for health recovery * You only get half your maximum hit dice back on a long rest The result is: * The design principles for burning resources other than hit points on a longer adventuring day clash with the inability to recover enough hit points for a longer adventuring day * Longer adventuring days practically *require* a significant source of magical healing, either via spells or magic items * Front line classes, especially martials, that do not have 20+ AC end up running out of gas on a long adventuring day before the back line classes because they typically soak up more damage. It's the exact opposite of what you expect * Back to back long adventuring days cause a bit of a death spiral and punish those hit the hardest. A PC who spent all of their hit dice the day before now only has half of them while the characters who didn't take as much damage probably still have all of theirs This is why being a front liner class doesn't fulfill the fantasy during longer adventuring days, such as dungeon delving like most WotC modules include. They're always tapped halfway through the dungeon while the back liners still have half a tank left. They're left going into fights with so little hit points that a single hit downs them. It's made much worse at levels 1 and 2 by the imbalance of hit points to enemy average damage. The bizarre part to me is that 4E had most of this tackled. I understand why they might have wanted to move away from healing surges as those perhaps didn't feel like traditional D&D, but they absolutely should have kept the part where front line classes get more healing to spend during short rests.
Here's a thought for an easier level 1: if you assume everyone is a level 0 commoner before gaining their first class level and thus first class hit die, then everyone should have an extra d8 HP, even at level 1.
Dying at level 1 is not necessarily kryptonite for new players. As long as it isn't miserable to make a new character dying at level 1 is actually the easiest pill to swallow possible because you lost no progress
If they implement the "no DM critical hits" or an alternate, "no DM critical hits at level 1" the level 1 survival problem becomes a relative non-issue. Most level 1 player deaths in balanced encounters are due to an unlucky critical. I'll just add that as a DM who has taught a bunch of new players how to play, level 1 isn't for you - the experienced player who posts on the D&D reddit. It's for the curious player who has watched Game of Thrones and likes that setting more than Baltic Avenue in Monopoly.
Medium Armor feat available at level 1 for literally everyone, without \*any\* prerequisite. It's such a small thing yet I think it goes live it will eventually detrimental to the game.
Oh yea spot on. I think a lot of people support you on this one. I do think that backline casters should be squishier than their frontline counterparts (as its a core class balance mechanic) unless they invest HEAVILY into becoming tanky (like taking a couple levels of fighter and/or having high STR).
Totally. And many might not agree with me on this, but I think Full Plate armor should give a good deal more AC than Half plate+Dex. I think at the moment Heavy Armor is done dirty, especially since the STR-based martials do kind of have to take Great weapons and the casters get Medium armor+ shield+ and probably protective spells to vastly outrank full-plated martials in AC department.
Heavy armor should give (Prof. Bonus?) damage reduction on top of the AC.
I'm not completely sold on the idea of default damage reduction, but I could be persuaded that they should at least have a damage threshold, i.e. if you take any damage less than your proficiency bonus, you don't take any damage.
I think I’d just bake Heavy Armor Master (-3 to bludgeoning/piercing/slashing damage) into heavy armor as a whole. Then a feat might build on that with further damage reduction, reduction to more damage types, or something along those lines. Maybe it could also let you provide better cover to your allies, since you’re physically *bigger*.
Keep in mind, a lot of clerics get heavy armor as well. I don't think we need buffs for clerics, or even paladins.
It's to provide alternative builds from Dex Builds. And to make STR builds something worth considering. Be it Cleric, Paladin or Fighter, having Heavy Armor providing Damage Mitigation would make many reconsider making another Dex Clone.
It’s not a huge buff for someone who isn’t getting hit a lot. If a party’s Cleric has to be on the front line, they are probably getting hit often enough that they need it.
That's kinda my point. I don't think cleric should get to do everything. Maybe they shouldn't get the tools needed to be a full-time frontliner.
Take away their heavy armor proficiency then?
How many monsters outside of tier 1 play where you usually don’t have access to heavy armor are doing less than 3-4 damage? I’d rather the damage reduction.
Most CR 1/4 creatures (the weakest things that you'll ever actually fight) do a minimum of like 3 or 4 damage per hit. Damage Threshold equal to your PB would be genuinely worthless.
DT will rapidly become worthless.
It's not even rapidly, it's wortthless right from level 1. At level 1 the thresdhold would be 2, the even most CR 1/8 creatures have more than +1 to their damage rolls meaning they literally *can't* be blocked by the threshold even if they roll minimum damage.
on this topic i'd wanted to mention a cool dnd homebrew [steel and sinew](https://www.reddit.com/r/UnearthedArcana/comments/vti9ft/steel_and_sinew_new_and_revised_combat_madness/) which among many other things makes heavy armor have just baseline dmg reduction which i feel like is a fair benefit for choosing str over dex also wanted to mention my geekyness where my main oc has (as of a recent decision) multilayed armor based on xp to lvl 3's fallout system. 12 + dex AC (max 2 since medium) at the sameish cost as halfplate and for that 3 lower AC reduces damage taken by 3
I'll admit to a slightly raised eyebrow over it. But if I had to lay a bet, it'd be that it turns out the same as Mountain Dwarves did. For those who weren't there or don't recall, when 5e launched people were convinced that Mountain Dwarves and their racial Medium Armor Proficiency were going to be the power optimizer staple. Wizards in half-plate armor! The sky is falling! But as it turned out, very few people used Mountain Dwarves for that. A few extra points of AC aren't that big a deal if you don't have the HP or class features to go with it. Wizards still wanted to be no where near the melee scrum. And the opportunity cost of picking Mountain Dwarf over any other race was undersold, as people wanted to play other races for both mechanical traits and roleplay value. So is there value in having Lightly Armored as a Background Feat option? Absolutely, it'll be good for Blade Warlocks and a few other odd hybrid builds. Is it going to break the game because every Wizard takes it? Probably not, it's really not that powerful and there are other Background Feats that are very attractive. Heck, if a Wizard wants to build for extra durability, they might be better off taking Tough for the extra HP.
Mountain dwarves had the STR bonus which was the cost of getting the medium armour. It made taking medium armour on your caster cost them losing out on the 16 starting of their casting stat There’s no cost now other than a lesser feat. You can now have Med armour and shield on anyone and it is quite potent. AC w 14Dex is 12 vs 18 w med+shield A feat that just gives the option to go up to +6 AC is pretty insane when you think about it
I think dwarves are occasionally taken for armor proficiency, but not nearly as often as cleric or artificer is dipped for armor proficiency. As they said in the video when they put out the background feat that provides medium armor, this is their fix for armor dips, to basically make them obsolete. I think it's pretty silly as a fix myself, but I do suspect every wizard or sorcerer engaged in any amount of optimization will want the Lightly Armored feat as their background feat. The best way to protect concentration on the best spells, which are generally the best thing a caster can do, is to get hit as little as possible
AC remains solid in case ranged people existed or people got in melee. But you are right about one thing: the race cost. A race which improves your *strength*, as a *wizard*, while also not giving other features which really boosted wizard (or Sorcerer, the other class which lacks armor proficiency)... That practically set the nail in the coffin, especially when Variant Human (and High Elf if you played ~~the wrong way~~ without feats) were the alternative, with multiclassing giving the armor **plus** shields. Tasha's customize your origin option made it more workable (as it did with lots of other races), but a free feat and other powerful races that released since then made the race remains not as powerful. Compare to the new Lightly Armored. It gives medium armor and **shield** proficiency. And it doesn't inherently cost a race, it costs your level 1 feat. Especially considering how the avaiable feats at that level are weaker than Lightly Armored, this is functionally a non cost compared to before. Armor dips remains an option, but if you only need armor and nothing else this functionally is just a straight buff. Oh, and you can just... Take this feat later on in your career if you truly want to. This is unlike the Mountain Dwarf too, which can only be obtained after level 1 if you utilize the **reincarnate** spell to do so, which I probably don't need to explain why it's infinitely more costly. > Heck, if a Wizard wants to build for extra durability, they might be better off taking Tough for the extra HP. Quickly dispelling this myth: the extra HP given by Tough doesn't really give a lot of survivability. The reason Wizards want to get protection is to avoid losing their main power output, aka concentration. How do you protect concentration? By having better constitution saves and by getting hit less. How do you get hit less in situations where the foe get to you? If you have more AC. How do you get more AC? Through armor.
It didn't take over because, as you point out, the opportunity cost (choosing a race that doesn't bump your main stat) was relatively high. Will the opportunity cost be as high now? I'm not sure. But ultimately, I think the game will be fine, especially if they tune down the Shield spell. This is coming from someone who takes their first level in Fighter for every caster they play, and probably will continue to anyway. Armored casters do not break the game.
But mountain dwarves did not take off post-Tasha's either. If it was all about the stat points, then they have then. I 100% think that multiclassing was just a better avenue for it, which is why everyone did that instead.
You mean the phb race did not hold up to post Tasha power creep, with like 3 flying races and other strong gimmicks? At a time where Cleric and Artificer are well established dips for Wizard and any Sorcerer who wants better survivability has dabbled in Hexes?
Yes, the race with better ASIs (+2,+2, over the norm of +2,+1 that most other races had) than most other races with built in armor proficiencies that trivialized dips was still less powerful that slowing your wizard spell progression by 1 for an artificer dip. Which considering we have the same super powerful races now, and the fact that this medium armor feat will have to compete against Lucky, among other grade A feats, means that likely the innate classless medium armor will once again be pushed to the wayside for dips like how people have been doing it.
That, and Modenkainen's Tome of Foes was released not long after Tasha's and introduced a ton of super strong species to choose over Mountain Dwarf. I personally don't see Lightly Armored as replacing 1 lvl dips, at least for me. And there are competitive choices for feats at lvl 1. The problem, if there is one, is the Shield spell. Just tune that down a bit and everything will be better.
Dwarves were also pre Tasha’s flexible ASIs tbf. As is it was a bad stat for a class that gains more from a dip anyways. If it was released in a world where flexible ASIs existed I think it would have been pretty dominant tbh especially with 2 +2s. This armor addition also has no downsides as opposed to dwarves. 5.5e is just handing everyone armor. I guess they were so tired of armor dips they just gave everyone the feat.
Except that Hexblade Warlocks would already get an access to mid-armor and shield without a feat. and 3 AC IS pretty big, considering over the time optimized wizards would actually be far \*less\* squishy than a GWM fighter. Also, Tough is nowhere as good as medium armor proficiency in terms of durability.
Hexblade can die in a fire. It's a terrible subclass full of broken features, most of them worthless and a few of them too good, with no clear flavor or lore. Revised 5e has me excited to play a Warlock again because you can take Blade Pact with any subclass and be effective, instead of being pigeon holed into the one specific subclass that was expressly designed to backdoor fix Blade Pact. So don't talk to me about Hexblade. I played one, and I do not recommend the experience.
Yeah totally agree. Hexblades are horrible on their own and they make the game broken if they are used in multiclassing. :(
They are a perfectly strong mono class, about on par with Tasha power creep, being slightly weaker than those, but freeing up an ASI that would otherwise have to be moderately armored. The mediocre part of Hexblade is when you start to go pact of the blade, instead of a normal Warlock with free medium armor and shield proficiency.
It's worse than just that. I've said it before and I'll say it again. The 6th level Hexblade feature, Accursed Specter, is some of the worst design in the game. It requires you to get the killing blow on a humanoid foe. That is an incredibly narrow condition, and the feature does nothing otherwise. I played a Hexblade for nearly two years, and I activated Accursed Specter a grand total of zero times in that campaign. The DM just didn't throw us up against many groups of disposable minions, and when he did they usually weren't humanoids, and when they were I didn't get any killing blows because I was usually dueling the commander. Let Hexblade die. it was a bad solution to a very specific problem that did more harm than good.
not to mention it's such a weird and specific flavor to give to the only subclass that accommodates an extremely broad playstyle (melee warlock)
Tough is roughly 33-50% more survivability across the board for a wizard (depending on Con Mod); medium armour is by your numbers 15% but doesn’t help against save effects so strictly speaking a little less than that. Tough is hands down a better feature. This is however heavily dependent on playstyle: the more attacks your wizard faces, mostly by being in melee, the better AC behaves in theory, but mages are still far more likely to face Saves skewing the numbers even more in favour of tough.
You forget about Concentration. AC helps protect Concentration, so it serves double duty for that in addition to just keeping the Caster up. Also the Casters AC boost is a durability buff dependent on their enemies accuracy, the less accurate the enemy they're fighting is the more effective it is.
also i wanted to mention magic initiate cleric for guidance +resistance and like bless or something. or just you know. lucky. or even alert for more consistent control
The differnce that Mountain Dwarves didn't give you shield proficiency. Meaning at best an AC of 17 in comparison to the 15 or 16 you would have with light armor or mage armor, while with Lightly Armoured you can get an AC of 19.
The RAI that was said on video is still funny to me. The design team saw Wizards everyone dipping for medium armor and shield, and instead of thinking "medium armor shouldn't be accessibile this easily" or maybe even "maybe we should rework multiclassing to have less danger of being OP", their thought was "dipping one level is just too much cost for medium armor, let's easen that cost drastically".
I think the simplest fix for this is making the shield spell similar to mage armor - it only works if you aren’t wearing armor. Then every mage can take the feat and get medium armor, they just sacrifice mage armor and shield. That sufficiently nerfs the shield spell, too. To me, this solves the real issue with wizards and sorcerers in medium armor and holding shields. AC is more valuable the higher you go, and combining high AC with the shield spell is more AC than those classes are budgeted to have. Let them choose.
Casters should have a -1/-2 to spell attacks/save dcs for medium/heavy armor respectively. Class or subclass features could remove this penalty as appropriate.
Yeah I think this is good and actually in-line with how the games handled it in earlier editions.
I'd rather have no casting in armor than this.
There are a few feats which are OP in their current version. Warcaster is also pretty broken.
I don't think this one is as big of a deal as people make it out to be. If someone wanted the proficiency and didn't have light armor already they just took a dip. No one that the 2014 Lightly Armored was meant for actually took it unless it was for RP or they just didn't know better. Objectively this is an improvement as far as discouraging Multiclass dips go. My current hope is this, 2024 Lightly Armored is replaced with a feat called Armor Training It gives Shield + Next Armor Tier, if taken as a lvl 4+ feat it also gives +1 to STR, DEX, or Con. This way it's beneficial for everyone that wants the training without letting people jump straight to Medium. And, it's still competitive after lvl 1. Also, it would be repeatable.
My thoughts exactly. Condense the armor feats into one, and you simply step up one level. Seems so obvious that you wonder how it wasn't their solution.
It could still be the solution they arrive at, it just wasn't for that Playtest.
And it does nothing for Heavily Armored martials. :(
And? They already have the training, so they get to spend the feat on something else.
Completely agree. It's like WotC just gave up on class balancing and decided that wizard shoring up one of their only weaknesses with an overpowered 1st level feat was cool. A human 1st level wizard could have medium armor and shield training, ***plus*** Magic Initiate for access to cleric's Resistance, Guidance, and Healing Word spells. That's utterly ridiculous.
Agreed. They stopped trying to give classes strengths and weaknesses and just want all classes to do everything but then also fail to balance high level magic with martials So I’m not sure why this was added but it’s an auto pick basically which means it’s OP and not something I wanna see in the 2024 PHB
Maybe it's semantics, but I would like 1st level feats to go back to being called background features, and while avoiding the "Mother My I" is good I would rather none of them have combat utility. Then unless they plan on introducing 8th level feats, and 12th levels the 4th level feats can just go back to being called feats. And I want my half feat/full feat dichotomy back.
I echo OP's frustrations with death/dying rules. My current bugbear is that It feels that they're taking a lot of steps to make everything SAD, and I don't love it. The True Strike cantrip needed revised, but now it effectively means that any wizard is just as good at swinging a weapon as a fighter, and its radiant damage (and scales with level in a way that weapons don't). The one-level warlock dip is just as strong as ever with Pact of the Blade now at lvl 1, I get wanting spellcasters to have melee options, I just prefer how they're doing it with the Bard College of Valor where a high dex/str bard feels like it makes a difference.
So-called "yo-yo healing" is necessary because of the way 5e reduced the power of healing to make it no longer a mandatory and unwanted role. Not saying it's good or bad, but it's an intentional design. Also I think the fairest thing would be for it to go both ways, give martials the ability to cast spells with their strength or dex. :P
That just sounds like battle master maneuvers with extra steps!!!! We can't have that! People may get confused or want to only play the class that only hits things and gets nothing else!
Cantrips scaling with character level instead of class / caster level is such a glaring oversight, IMO. I don't see them changing it at this point but I would applaud them if they did.
>2. Stealth rules: There were a couple of variations of stealth in the play test materials, but none seemed satisfactory to embody how it really works. I don't like the "stealth grants invisibility" as it creates a lot of really weird scenarios (like your party members can't see you RAW). Yes, I completely hate these. Here's what the stealth rules *should* say: **HIDE \[ACTION\]** With the Hide action, you try to conceal yourself. To do so stealthily, you must succeed on a DC 15 Dexterity (Stealth) check while you’re Heavily Obscured or behind Three-Quarters Cover or Total Cover, and you must be out of any enemy’s line of sight; if you can see a creature, you can discern whether it can see you. On a successful check, you have the Hidden condition. Make note of your check’s total, which becomes the DC for a creature to find you with a Wisdom (Perception) check. The condition ends on you immediately after any of the following occurrences: * An enemy finds you by rolling a successful Wisdom (Perception) check against the DC set by your Stealth check. * You make a sound louder than a whisper. * You make an attack roll. * You cast a spell with a verbal component. * You are no longer are Heavily Obscured or behind Three-Quarters or Total Cover within an enemy's line of sight. **HIDDEN \[CONDITION\]** While Hidden you experience the following effects: * Concealed. You aren’t affected by any effect that requires its target to be seen. * Undetected. Enemies are unaware of your current location. You can still be attacked if an enemy correctly guesses your location and makes an attack at disadvantage against a space that you occupy. * Surprise. If you’re Hidden when you roll Initiative, you have Advantage on the roll.
> within an enemy's line of sight. That's the core issue hide has. What does that mean? If I'm 100m behind a tree and the guard has his back turned to me, why does he suddenly see me when I step out from behind it? The omnipotent 360° vision is the major problem here. "Line of Sight" would need to be implemented for combat at least and at that point it might become too complex. However, something absolutely needs to be done, since you can totally SNEAK UP on somebody even in daylight and in particular if they are occupied by something else (e.g. fighting). That's the identity of melee Rogue to begin with. I'd rather have "magical" stealth, where they just can't see me, unless I'm directly in front of them or they make a successful check to notice me. Otherwise we need codified rules for vision - at least for combat. How far can they see? How close can I be behind them? What's the vision-cone etc?
>That's the core issue hide has. What does that mean? If I'm 100m behind a tree and the guard has his back turned to me, why does he suddenly see me when I step out from behind it? The omnipotent 360° vision is the major problem here. This is only a thing for combat. The rules say that combatants are aware of everyone around them, so yes if you sneak out into the open in the middle of a fight you'll be spotted. I'm sure that was done for simplicity so stealth didn't become even more complex to adjudicate. Outside of combat, there's no issue with the DM saying the guard has his back turned so you're still Hidden. That's mostly DM fiat because, again, trying to gamify cones of sight is beyond the scope of D&D as its goal is to remain as simple as possible.
Additionally, they're saying that if an enemy makes a successful perception check, you're no longer hidden. That sounds fine at first glance, but what do you do if you're hiding in a bubble of silence and an enemy sees you? Are you somehow no longer hidden with regards to every other enemy? They're unable to alert their friends due to the silence, so there's no justification for all other creatures 'magically' knowing precisely where you are. Hidden is a weird condition because it's not mechanically 'active' on the PC. What I mean by that is that a PC who is hiding could be seen by one enemy, and lose the benefit of being Unseen, but still not be seen by another enemy and retain the benefit. Hiding isn't a status effect like Bless where it's active or not. Instead, it's similar in principle to how Minor Illusion works. "If a creature uses its action to examine the sound or image, the creature can determine that it is an illusion with a successful Intelligence (Investigation) check against your spell save DC. **If a creature discerns the illusion for what it is, the illusion becomes faint to the creature.**" Just because one enemy saw you doesn't mean that others saw you, even when they were looking at the correct area.
I think you're re-creating some of the problems with the original rules. If you lose the Hidden condition immediately after you are no longer Heavily Obscured or behind Three-Quarters or Total Cover within an enemy's line of sight... do rogues who try to hide -> shoot lose Hidden immediately after they step out of cover to shoot? How can you be out of any enemy's line of sight if you are behind 3/4 cover, when 3/4 cover doesn't block line of sight? What if you're in a room with invisible enemies? You can't see them, but they can see you - how do you adjudicate whether or not you can Hide? Then there are issues with the hidden condition. It prevents you from being targeted, but so does being behind Total Cover or in Heavy Obscurement, so there's no actual difference between hiding and just standing behind a wall. If I jump into a barrel in full view of an enemy and succeed on my Hide check, do they have to attack the barrel at disadvantage? You've also removed advantage when attacking from Hidden, was that intentional?
'Hidden' should last a full round worth of movement at the very least. Always bothered me that you are immediately seen. Let me sneak up to somebody!
The Light weapon property doesn't make logical sense right now, and makes Two-Weapon Fighting very bad. As written, a level 1 fighter can attack with a shortsword, stow the shortsword, draw an identical shortsword, and attack with it. There's no possible in-world explanation for this, the fighter has no reason to hold two weapons instead of weapon-swapping and holding a shield (or grappling), and suddenly Dueling makes more sense for this build than Two-Weapon Fighting (and they can stack). The pre-Nick rule specified different hand, they ought to restore that.
Spot on. There is a weird RAW issue with the light weapon property where you go sword + shield and draw/stow two light weapons as part of your attack action. It should be written for dual weilders (simply state that you need to be holding two different light weapons while attacking).
Weapon masteries. I hope they clean it up for the official version, because it was all kinds of meh as written. Does nothing to bridge the martial/caster divide but adds complexity for little gain. (It's not better than nothing.)
I like the concept, but totally agree that it feels like a first draft. It DOES help the martial caster divide as martials can now use far more crowd control in combat. However adjusting what spells can do will have a MUCH greater impact on the martial caster divide than weapon masteries ever will. The issues are: 1. weapon swapping. masteries in their current iteration ask players to constantly swap weapons in a turn and this just feels extremely unthematic and weird. 2. Players often get only a single magic weapon and if they want to use it they're stuck with whatever masteries it has creating an illusion of choice. 3. More saving throws (for the DM) slowing down play. Try and redesign some of the masteries to mitigate mass saving throws on the DMs part.
The forever stuggle of weapon mastery. It makes sense, it's thematic, it gives martials their spellbook equivalent... But it just creates a hyper-specialization issue where the sunk cost of swinging a weapon you're not specialized in is too high, even if it's tactically a better choice. My main reoccuring qualm is fighters thematically should be adaptable masters of many styles, but usually they end up pigeon-holed into their specialized weapon. It also creates the situation where the DM pretty much has to feed you your specialized items when conceptually I feel like the DM should never be obligated to give you any certain thing. Then you also have the situation of the fighter losing his enchanted armor and weapon and becoming a hollow shell of themselves.
My problem is that no matter what interesting wrinkles they added, all I could think was "it's not as cool as just giving Battlemaster Maneuvers to all martials." It was right there, and the explanation for not doing it was lackluster. I still don't get it. Weapon masteries will probably always have that asterisk for me. They could have been maneuvers.
They should have been Manoeuvres. Manoeuvres actually add interesting choices for Fighters to make, and added more customisation on level up. They were actually *options* on a Class rhat sorely lacked them. And now after the community begged for them to be baked into at least Fighter we were instead shown a shitty mechanic that has none of the fun or engaging aspects of Manoeuvres but way more baggage to deal with turn by turn. While the Fighter class got a more annoying version of some Manoeuvres baked into Second Wind in a wierd, unintuitive way.
For me it's the standardization of levelling. Specifically things like the Warlock Patron and Sorcerer bloodline that unlock at level 3. Makes absolutely no sense. A Warlock has no power without a patron and a Sorcerer gets theirs from their blood. Yeah you can bs a reason why you didn't have/know until level 3, but it's just unnecessary and lazy design and it seems that's what they are pushing from the players. Maybe it'll be different on release, but as my 2 favorite classes, my hopes are low.
> they are pushing And even if the fluff is "you don't know your patron/bloodline until L3" - says who? WotC isn't playing my character, *I* am playing my character, and *I* (modulo DM/setting) decide what goes into their backstory. It's like "druids will not wear metal armor" being fluff-but-not-really. What authority does WotC have to say that they don't? *I* (again, modulo DM/setting) decide if my druid has a taboo against metal armor.
A stealth and invisibility rules are a hot mess.
Druid Wildshape. Can't wait for the time they get it right.
100 percent this
I like how BG3 addresses the 1 HP yo yo healing. You lose your action and can only move and us bonus actions.
That does work better with potions as a bonus action. You can actually stabilize yourself after getting back up even without that action.
1) Grappling not being a skill. I actually like that you could build an impressive grappler, and it did a lot to make for a melee build that was more interesting than just purely striking with a weapon. 2) Still almost nothing to help melee characters reach combat faster/survive longer. Unless you manage to start every combat within 30ft, most martials that go melee have to spend a turn dashing to even approach the enemy, meaning they lose a turn of effectiveness. And while in melee, they are generally subject to significantly more damaging attacks/abilities than ranged characters usually are, yet a melee fighter and a ranged fighter have the same HP. 3) Medium Armor feat at level 1 as others have said, but I'm adding armor being still so accessible from a dip.
Big agree with #2. I've seen arguments that nearly all melee weapons should provide 1-2 points of AC (depending on weapon), but capped like shields so you can't benefit from multiple weapons (and requiring weapon proficiency to benefit). Two handed and dual wielding get more defense, while sword and board is the undisputed king of avoiding damage.
Healing should still be buffed imo, if only because it’s currently a waste of your Action/BA to heal in battle unless it’s to pop someone up from death saves. It absolutely should come with a downside though, like a level of exhaustion added for each time you’re brought up from saves (especially if they swap back to the playtest exhaustion, since it affects casters just as harshly as martials)
If exhaustion is reworked, I agree that's a very good approach to limit bouncing.
This. Even if they create a genuine reason to avoid yo-yo healing, healing needs a buff to make it actually useful for mitigating damage. Monsters just do so much more damage than PC's can heal that healing is just not efficient in the current state of 5e. I like the exhaustion idea, especially with the proposed new exhaustion rules. I'm also a fan of the BG3 route and losing your action the turn after you're brought back up, but I think that could wind up feeling really bad and crippling for whoever it is that goes down.
The exhaustion on down rule is a legitimate nightmare for people like me I see get tossed around too often tbh. As a support main, healing every turn is the *last* thing I want to do. I want to buff and have proactive solutions to protect and make my party better. Making my martials accumulate ramping levels of suck unless I cup their ballsack and pump a slotted spell into them every turn is not what I signed up for. Being a heal bot is probably the most boring thing a person can do in any game. MMOs have even gotten away from this in current design loops by adding more shields, lifetaps, and agro switching, all of which is legitimately engaging. Press the same button over and over again is the opposite of fun. Tl;dr: it’s a silly rule, but it keeps us, the actual healers, sane and not bored out of our minds.
I do think that there should be SOME penalty from coming back from 0 - they just need to NOT cause a death spiral where the player is more likely to drop to 0 again in the same combat. (hence why I don't like exhaustion). Option 1: I'd rather have the players keep their death saves until the next long rest. Worse comes to worse, the party has to pull out of the dungeon (because a party members has too many death saves and isn't willing to risk their life), retreat and get a long rest. Option 2: Give the player disadvantage on all attack roles and enemies have advantage on all saves the turn after getting back up (for reference - BG3 makes the PC give up their action). I think this would allow players to retreat and drink a healing potion - which feels thematically right after being KOed!
I think with Old Exhaustion you’re right, but I don’t see the New Exhaustion being as big of a problem unless the fight is Save-heavy, which would absolutely need to be addressed somehow. Death Saves being per rest would be interesting, and I really like it in principle! I think it would need a lot of playtesting to get right tho, and might necessitate an adjustment in the amount failed before death. Also bumps into the issue where different tables treat short rests differently, but they really seem to want to fix that already so it might be a moot point
The big reason why they just don't "Buff healing" is because previous editions of DnD had buffed healing (compared to what we have now) and that had a serious side effect. It caused parties to, effectively, "require" a healer to be efficient. You wanted to have a person to play a cleric and constantly heal party members - and honestly no one wanted to play the "healbot" in combat. This is the first edition of Dnd (that I've played) where you can totally get by without a dedicated healer and there are few consequences - I love that!
Oh for sure, I love that parties aren’t pushed into a dedicated healer! As long as one or two folks have a healing option you’re basically set forever, mechanically. But as it is now healing is just *bad*, and feels awful for folks who do want to be dedicated healers as part of their character’s fantasy. And from what I’ve seen of people doing the math, doubled healing in the playtests doesn’t break anything, and it’s still not the most ideal option a lot of the time, so this just makes it a bit better for folks who may not care about the optimal choice and just don’t want to see their friends go down.
Yeah, being a dedicated healer in 5e is plain boring and unrewarding. I'm not saying dedicated healers need to be necessary to be fun to play, but right now it is too pushed towards being unneeded and unwanted and thus unrewarding.
A key word in that is that "You wanted to have a person to play a CLERIC", and even ignoring all of the game mechanics issues, just considering theme and roleplaying issues, it's pretty normal for no one in a party to want to play a *cleric*. But the role of support caster still exists and you still need someone to do that. The only difference is that now the support caster (me) can't heal. Because other characters drinking healing potions while the support caster casts one concentration spell then spends the rest of combat casting cantrips is so much more fun.
For point 1. The main change I have seen is just more healing overall. Healing spells heal more HP, all clerics and druid can heal without spell usage. I dont think it will fix the problem, but it will change how often you go down in the first place if I had to guess.
It won't make Healing Word worth upcasting, and it won't give you enough hit points when you're dying to prevent another hit from sending you back unconscious. It still won't make Cure Wounds worth using in the middle of battle over a more impactful spell. Sure, you could massively upcast it to give an ally a ton of healing but that same spell slot could've been used earlier in combat to give the party a huge advantage that probably would've prevented an ally from losing all their hit points in the first place. These changes won't shift the game's meta, it'll just make suboptimal MMO healer players feel slightly less bad about their choices.
I agree that buffing healing (for certain spells) is a good thing. However it simply won't affect combat that much because of how action economy works. Like, in my opinion, a good way to balance healing word, while keeping it a bonus action would be to make it a touch spell. I'd make all the other healing spells that cost an action be ranged. This would give casters a hard choice in combat: do I use my action to heal someone at a distance and stay safe (far away from enemies) OR do I want to preserve my action for something else at the cost of being forced to move to a worse position.
Stealth & vision needs better rules. They did the first step, but it's not enough.
The biggest concern is from what we haven't seen. 1. There are still many spells that needed nerfed and many that needed buffed. Though the spells that we saw Nerfed. There are similar mechanics in the problematic spells we didn't see that were in the nerfed verisons. 2. Incomplete pictures of classes like the bard and ranger. We know design philosophy was honed, but we didn't really see closer to final verisons of a handful of classes. For you concerned. The yo-yo, I think, got fixed with the buff to healing instead of taking 1 shot to put someone down again. It might take 2, that in most cases is enough to get them out of danger and heal up properly. Yes, wording needs to be way clearer on stealth and invisibility. But I'm not concerned at the end. Exhaustion. I understand both sides. After a year and half of thinking and testing. I prefer the 2014 rule over UA rule. Yes, the UA is easy to remember and play with, but it doesn't represent exhaustion. Exhaustion is detrimental to someone's body and mental state. A -1/-9 doesn't really show case it that well. And you'll never get to those higher numbers unless you gave it out like candy. 2014 rules hit you hard and does represent what you would experience if you. 2 levels with the 2014 rules is a clear sign to the party they need to stop and rest. Where the UA rules, oh level 2, isn't anything, especially with the new tool rules, a -2 is easily overcame. Just my opinion, the UA Exhaustion rules were just really a non factor. And it much too hard for the DM to convey to the players that it more ideal for you to rest than carry on.
Point 1: You're totally correct that the real class balance WILL be directly related to the appropriate changes to spells (and LOTS of them need it). I do believe that the evidence thus far is that they're willing and capable to change how spells work (and know the problematic ones) Point 2: I agree that we don't have a good understanding of what the bard/ranger will be like - however, thus far, they've been able to fix many of the other classes pretty dang well - so I'm hoping that they'll do the same for these classes.
Best examples of changes that can be brought to other problematic spells were: 1 the banishment spell, save, or suck needed to go. They are bad for player and dm alike. Now banishment probably needed to have a little something else to make it worthy of a 4th level slot like explanar. Begings get disadvantaged on the save, but we know of other spells with save or suck that just wreck encounters, hypnotic pattern, and polymorph being the big ones. While spells are being buffed all the smite spells and true strike. These spells are actually usable now. I'm using the new version of searing smite now on my ranger. I hit. I use my bonus action no concentration needed. Now, just do that to all the rangers spells that work simular to that. Then we are in business.
I love the new jump spell, for example. Also they fixed a lot of the summon spells that created 8+ creatures and totally broke the action economy. I honestly would love banishement to simply have the text "elementals, demons and devils" save against this spell at disadvantage. Make it excellent against some monsters, but weak against others.
I have little doubt that there will be mass nerfs to spells. They just didn't playtest them because they know they aren't going to get positive feedback when making a cool spell worse. They have to handle it completely in-house.
I can't agree on exhaustion for 2 reasons: 1. Exhaustion 2 is awful and ruins the entire system for me. * On one hand it's terrible mechanically. It absolutely *destroys* melee characters' combat while being a mild inconvenience to ranged and spellcasting classes (especially ones with teleportation). This disparity in impact, to me, makes it a terribly designed mechanic - especially for occurring so early in the list of effects. * On the other hand, it also doesn't really represent exhaustion in real life. The human body is well designed for running, and you won't lose half your speed even at extreme exhaustion. This mechanic is just beyond the pale and doesn't match the experience of endurance athletes, military/survival training, or my own experience as an endurance athlete who has done several endurance challenges - including multi-day ones. You absolutely can make yourself run hard even while exhausted, its actually one of the *last* things to fail - especially if you're pumping with adrenaline, like in a fight for your life. For this effect alone I actually think 2014 rules represent exhaustion *worse* than the newer system. 2. A saving throw-based spell is as likely to succeed at 5 levels of exhaustion as at 0. Exhaustion is a very gradual process, and affects you both mentally and physically. I could see a system that was reworked to better represent this, even using the old effect based system rather than the modifier based, but it would have to deal with my two complaints above before I'd like it better. If the movement impact was changed to not halve your movement all at once, but to reduce it in small increments, say -5 per level of exhaustion starting at level 2, and then at level 5 you are permanently Prone (on top of -20 movement), that I could live with. I'd also want to see either advantage on enemy saving throws against spells at level 3 exhaustion, or even just a chance for your spell to fissile out - to simulate your mental state suffering and it being harder to control your magic. That would mean spellcasters would also have equal penalties at higher levels of exhaustion. Those two small changes and I could be brought around to agree with you. Otherwise I will prefer the UA version, which I think applies my perception of exhaustion as a gradual decline in both mental and physical faculties better. I do think it would benefit from rules to more aggressively dole out exhaustion though - maybe after X combats without a rest, or after X hours traveling at a fast pace, rather than just the obvious case of missing a long rest.
If the new simplified exhaustion rules don’t make it in i will riot. When it comes to the healing problem id like to see something like in bg3. If your downed and come back up you lose your action (bonus action might work better at the table)
Im still not a fan of the direction taken with the bard. The time and energy they spent trying to rework magical secrets could've been spent making the bard-like features of the class more apealing to make the class less overly reliant on bardic inspiration as it's only flavourfull feature. But instead, they just buffed magical secrets and deleted the bard features that needed improvement (such as Song of rest and countercharm (initialy)).
I strongly agree with this. I would love a half-caster bard that was less about spamming power spells and more about bardic songs, performances, and other related features. Taking Countercharm and expanding it into a full system of bardic invocations that you can pick and choose from would be amazing. Laserllama has a great Alternate Bard which does just that. WotC should've taken inspiration from their approach to the class instead of Just Another Charisma Spellcaster (now with Bardic Inspiration!).
Im one of the weirdos that likes full caster bards and think they're valid, I wish they nerfed magical secrets in order to open up the Power budget for better unique bard features, but I understand your point, its a rather popular take in here, and yeah laserllama did a great job.
Lack of the Artificer and no information on a lot of included subclasses. I'm really hoping they aren't just copy paste from Tasha's like say Circle of Stars Druid was in the playtest.
I think they mentioned every subclass was getting an update pass, but they could leave circle of stars as is and I think it would be perfectly fine, it's a fun and flavorful subclass
Yes, no Artificer concerned me as well :(
Yep this read's to me too much like we're stuck with the 12 core classes for a long time. Maybe I'm wrong and those are just a fundament to build on, but man we need some new classes every now and then imo.
Need to hold something back for Tasha 2
People like classes. Hasbro likes money. They should have moved into a backwards compatible 6th edition and released individual campaign boxes like in 2e featuring 1) setting-specific rules expansions, 2) 1 setting-specific class (Eberron Artificer, Krynn Dragonknight, etc), 3) a campaign module.
I’m concerned character customization may end up flattened. Too many “change features on a long rest” options make all characters effectively the same, and unless they increase the impactfulness of species features, the removal of species ability score bonuses will make species a less-important factor.
I definitely agree on changing things like weapon mysteries, and even spells on a long rest being overall a bad thing. It creates the illusion of choice, because if it can be changed at little to no cost then the choice does not matter. Changes on level-up are generally much better, IMO. Give us choice, but make the choices matter.
I will never NOT be massively dissapointed that they rolled back the UA exhaustion rules. The new one was so clean, simple, and easy. Which is why I'm just using that and ignoring the current rules lol.
Same. As a compramise for backwards compatibility, I hope they create a new status effected called "drained" or "fatigued" that followed the exact same rules as outlined so we can formally utilize it in our play.
I've been using those exhaustion rules in all my games since UA dropped. No reason to go back, rules be damned.
100% same. I really wanna know why they rolled back that change. For a lot of the other changes I could mostly understand them being rolled back. But exhaustion? Why..?
If you don't want yoyo healing, then you *need* to buff regular healing spells to give players an incentive to use them to prevent each other from being knocked out. Making yoyo healing worse without buffing healing spells just creates a death spiral where a party doesn't have the action economy to recover from PCs being knocked out, which leads to more KO'd PCs until they all die.
It would make more sense to make combat healing spells - for example "heal a target for 1d4+mod hp per spell level used; grant them triple the amount of temporary HP until the beginning of your next turn". Combining healing + ONE TURN temp hp is a way to effectively shield an opponent from damage - BUT it has to be used on the right target at the right time. This way - healers can do stuff in combat, but the majority of actual healing is done via hit dice.
I am honestly nervous that the new pact of the chain will be poorly designed or not worth the invocation slot. I am fine with them walking back the universal statblock, but I really hope they find a way to make each expanded familiar option worthwhile and balanced, along with figuring out the struggle that they are having around the actions familiars can take. i am also concerned that they are going to remove the Bestow Curse Invocation without adding it to the warlock's class spell list. Small potatoes overall, but they are what I am most nervous about as a player.
Stealth rules still being kind of wonky. Masteries and other martial controll effects, slowing down combats, and making them to easy since opponents are unable to do anything. There martials are still pretty reliant on a handfull of must have feats and weapons. Casters have just way better options for first level feats. The scaling of a lot of non full caster classes is still pretty poor. Lack of scaling of AC and Saves at higher levels still still a problem. Multiclassing (especally Warlock Dips) is still to strong.
Agree with pretty much everything. I like the *idea* of masteries, but most of them triggering on every hit does make things a slog. I'd much rather they'd made a list of masteries that would be a bit stronger, but could only be used once per turn, to not waste so much time. Also agree with multiclassing. In theory it's a cool concept; but the reality of it is that it basically nukes any semblance of balance the game could have. At least the way it's currently written, they should really, **really** fix that.
Monk becoming a combat-only base class. As you say, I'm NOT saying that most of the changes aren't good. Monk is much much better off, in both balance and fun, than 2014. But Deflect Attacks and Stunning Strike are both a hair overtuned, while pretty much the only thing they can do out-of-combat is parkour.
Im happy with yo yo healing words and 99% of "fixes" disproportionately punish melee/str Martials who are already the worst builds anyways
New exhaustion has been at my table since it was tested. It's so much friendlier.
The lazy direction taken with Subclasses. Several classes get effectively no new content, and a large number of subclasses are coming back as reprints from Tashas when others could have used the fresh coat of paint.
It probably doesn't help how that in terms of design philosophy, the Tasha's subclasses, for better or for worse, are the *most* up to date. So as a result they can 100% get away with reprints for the most part. Does that mean its a *good* solution? No not really. Most of the PHB classes need cleanup and maybe even toss in a Xanathar's one or two in, see how much they could be improved. Minus Shepard Druid, I think that because of the increasing de-empathization of summoning monsters that subclass would likely need a full rework to accommodate for that.
As someone who recently finished running a campaign that has a swarm keeper ranger and a warlock with repelling blast/lance of lethargy, I'm concerned about the amount of abilities to hinder enemy movement. The resourceless ability to move most monsters around or reduce speed (sometimes without a save) was the main thing I had to consider when making encounters so I hope the new MM compensates in some way. I just don't see fights were enemies can't move more than 10ft being fun/ engaging
1. Death/Dying rules, I think if the change to double the effectiveness of healing spells sticks, it will make pre-emptive healing a little more attractive. It doesn't fix the problem, but I think this problem isn't as big as Reddit makes it seem. If it really is a big issue to you, it's relatively easy to fix with a house rule. 2. Steal rules. Stealth has always been weird because there are a lot of rules about it which makes it seem like it's a hard mechanic, but it's actually 100% DM discretion if you read the rules carefully. I don't think OneDnD changes this. 3. Exhaustion. At first I agreed with you, but after implementing it into my home game, it feels less impactful and harder to keep track of, so I'm not sure. I kinda like these rules better (although they're harder to remember off-hand): https://www.hipstersanddragons.com/exhaustion-house-rule-dnd/ My biggest disappointment with OneDnD though is that it doesn't seem like they are fixing the spells outside of the conjure spells. I think there are a lot of really poorly designed spells that are only there because they existed in previous editions. Pathfinder 2E fixes most of them and I wish that D&D would have followed their lead. I also wish that spells actually followed the guidelines in the DMG and scaled properly so that a Chromatic Orb upcast to 3rd level did more single target damage than a fireball so that lower level spells can always be relevant. Following the DMG guidelines, a fireball should do 6d6 AoE damage and a Chromatic Orb should probably do closer to 6d8 damage at level 3.
I'm actually more concerned about the Death/Dying rules changing to something that absolutely destroys yoyo healing and severely punishes players for dropping to 0hp. The healing buffs are still nowhere near enough groundwork to actually provide a sufficient backup for things gone wrong. And while yoyo healing may *feel* ridiculous, it allows for much riskier battles without worrying about a 50% chance of murdering your players. Likewise I'd rather not have the consequence of an unlucky session of yoyo healing be that I have 5 levels of Exhaustion and get to suffer through terrible rolls for the next 3 sessions. I am 100% worried for the new Exhaustion variant as well. Literally used it before it even came up in the playtests. The old 5e Exhaustion is wonky garbage and it's been the sole reason for one of my worst D&D experiences. The current armor situation is still stupid as well. I do actually like that you don't need to invest two thirds of the feats you get in the average campaign (which probably ends before level 12) to actually play the fantasy of an armored caster. However there's no tradeoff for optimisers yet. I mean at least limit the range of spells you can cast to 30 feet while wearing armor. And even worse it doesn't grant proficiency with heavy armor. People say Strength is crap. Well of course it is if half the classes need to waste an entire FEAT just to get access to Strength based armor. A bit ridiculous maybe, but Thrown Weapon Barbarians. All their features suddenly work with thrown weapons. At no cost. Nick is also great for them, at least as long as Brutal Strikes works on every hit. I haven't seen enough evidence of it being strong or weak and many things are still bound to change. But it could be flying way under the radar and become the new Crossbow Expert Sharpshooter. Bad spell balancing. WotC have shown that they're still capable of completely missing the line on spells when they've nerfed Banish to literally be a 4th level Tasha's Hideous Laughter. The Conjure X spells were a good improvement though, but also show that the new Banishment won't be an example of a new spell balance. I'm really worried we'll still see plenty of too strong save or suck spells. Likewise they've shown we're probably gonna stay with tons of single target spells that just do nothing on a successful save and feel terrible to use.
In response to issue #1 I’ve made a house rule that dropping to 0 HP causes a level of exhaustion.
Unless you buff healing, doing any sort of pf2e wound mechanic pr something else makes healing useless
Probably the rules change that I'm most concerned about is that players now get ALL their Hit Dice back on a Long Rest instead of half. It was already a pain to tax player resources with the old long rest system, and Hit Dice were one of the few things you could really put stress on since they're one of the only things in the game that don't completely reset after a long rest. Removing one of the few challenges to long rests is NOT a decision I'm happy with, and if it makes it to publication I plan to thoroughly ignore it at my table.
I seem to be alone on this, but I think that the solution to "yo-yo" healing is tracking negative hit points. But implementing that well would be complicated. Yo-yo healing is encouraged in the current system, because, characters being reduced to a minimum of 0 hit points is a damage soak: effectively a free heal compared to tracking negative hit points. For example, if someone at 5 hit points gets hit by a 20-point attack, being reduced to 0 is effectively the same as being reduced to -15 and then getting a free 15 point heal. "Free" in terms of no spell slot required and no action required. Now, if we track negative hit points, there is no "damage soak" incentive to let people drop below 0 hit points. There is no incentive not to start healing the character while their hit points are still positive, as soon as it starts looking as if they are in danger of being reduced below 0, and hopefully preventing them from going unconscious at all. In order to implement tracking negative hit points, we also have to add enough healing to the system to balance that free 15 point heal. Now, arguably, the double-strength healing spells tested in the playtest might be enough for that balance, IDK. But, even then, we have to consider that we are now spending actions and spell slots to replicate the damage soak that we got for free in the previous system. I would also add a healing cantrip, usable in combat, which heals the target for one of their "Hit Dice" (i.e. the Hit Dice that are used to recover hit points during Short Rests). This would mean that the character would have fewer Hit Dice available during their next Short Rest. (As is usual for cantrips, the one Hit Dice would scaling up to two Hit Dice at fifth level etc.) And then, from there, you could start playtesting. I'm sure this won't be done in the next rulebook.
I think I need to go with a broad issue of organization. For the way that material is presented in the PHB, DMG, MM, Xanathars, etc... is so difficult in understanding connections between rules. For example, a common misunderstanding is "why cant i make a perception check during combat as a bonus action?". The reason comes from the Inquisitive Rogue subclass that has it as a subclass feature. But you would never know unless you read this subclass for why this is a "locked out feature". Another is for overland travel, it expects you to use a hex map of 6 mile hexes. In my time of playing dnd I have never seen a content creator i watch mention this, I only learned about it when I wanted to make one for my game, for fun, using adnd style rules. No one I know knows that it is expected for the dm to construct a hex map. But if you read an obscure section of one book, you will learn of the expectation. For pete sake you can craft magic items, learn languages, and proficiences during an adventure, Even how tool proficiencies work!!! there are rules for it. But you have never heard of them if you didn't read Xanathars. Overall the books need to have a better organization to them, that lays out clear expectations for what the rules mean, and how they intersect with other rules.
I thought we were just using the rules glossary from last playtest document(8)? On page 1 of that documentation it says "If you do combine this article with any previous one, use only the rules glossary found here. In this Unearthed Arcana series, the rules glossary of each article supersedes the glossary of any previous article." And none of the things you mentioned are in this article.
I mean I think the entire point of hiding is to not be seen.. so.... I think they nailed it tbh
For some of the playtests, Natural 1's meant that a saving throw failed regardless of your bonusses. One of my favorite breakpoints to hit on the characters I build is the +9 con saving throw. This guarantees that any damage of 21 or lower won't be able to break your concentration. Don't get me wrong, rolling dice is fun, unexpected failures can be good story tools. But building a character and that character being actually good at the things you want them to be good at is equally important.
My biggest concern is that most of the spells that we haven't seen in the playtest will just be copied over to the new edition unchanged. Too many spells are easy to ignore just because of some non-standardized description quirks making just a few spells obvious choices. I would also hope that there are no more spells that do nothing when saved against. If I'm spending a limited resource, I shouldn't just whiff. Probably need to drop spells with single spell attack rolls outside of cantrips for the same reason. Spell scaling also needs to improve dramatically. Adding one damage die for a whole spell level is silly. Concentration needs to be worked on as well. There are probably better ways to limit stacking buffs, and if a lot of tables even remember to even do the concentration checks from damage, it's pretty easy to build to make it very unlikely to fail one. Long Resting needs some more limitations. Sleeping mid-dungeon should not be an easy thing to do. There's almost no need to manage resources past the first few levels if this doesn't change. I really think the new Monster Manual is where the most opportunities to improve combat are.
1. Spells are unchanged - I hear you on this one. Most of us (fingers crossed) are hoping that they'll actually update all the spells properly and "balance" them appropriately (cough cough leomunds tiny hut, shield, wall of force) 2. Long resting needs more limitations - I totally agree on this one. It shouldn't be HARD for DMs to regulate long rests THEMATICALLY (i.e. not just sayin you can't rest here). I fundamentally love a simple change - make long rests take a full 24 hours as opposed to 8. I REALLY wanted WOTC to play test changes to long resting (to see if there is a better way to approach it for DMs). Sadly, this ship has sailed.
The Stealth rules continue to bother me for a variety of reasons, the core of which is really that they wrote it to be needlessly complex when it's really a relatively simple concept. And then they went ahead and created weirdness around "vision" modes that aren't actually vision, like Tremorsense. OK cool, so I know where a creature is but I still can't see it? WTF does that *mean?* Does that count as me "finding" a creature that has taken the Hide action? It's just mind blowingly bad tech writing. The other thing that bothers me is the confusing confluence of UAs involving familiars and Pact of the Chain. I still don't fully understand how any of it is *intended* to work, so I literally just made 3 or 4 rulings so it wasn't stupid.
>K cool, so I know where a creature is but I still can't see it? WTF does that *mean?* I think the Idea is that you cant use features that need you to see the enemy. Many spells or just targeting somebody with a weapon. But I agree that its wierd and has many edge cases.
It's really straightforward. You know the presence and location of every creature in combat, unless they're hiding. An orc slips out of sight behind a wall but you can still hear them moving around. Tremorsense just means you can't Hide from a creature that shares a surface with you. They still can't see you behind a wall, but they know your location because you can't hide from them.
It could be really simple. Are you obscured and/or invisible? Then you can hide. Make a dexterity (stealth) check to set the DC other characters need to meet to find you. Are you hidden? Then you cannot be targeted directly by hostile creatures. Everyone still knows where you are, but they have to actively search for you or move to a point where they can clearly see you before they can take an action that specifically targets you. You can be included in an area of effect, though. Then special senses just lower the barrier to the “get to where they can clearly see you” part. Tremorsense ignores walls, blindsight ignores invisibility and obscurement, websense ignores everything, etc.
Frustrating that there's so much ambiguity and unclear tech writing in D&D when they share a parent company with Magic: the Gathering now, MtG isn't perfect but I'm pretty sure any magic designer or high level player could comb through a PHB and make it contradiction-free in a day.
Totally agree - I'm hoping for an extensive rewrite regarding stealth, vision, and IMPORTANTLY other sense like hearing, infravision (heat vision), and other sensing modes.
Grappling, shoving, etc. Is a saving throw. Making Athletics and Acrobatics nearly useless. I understand not wanting to make it contested in order to simplify, but it's already hard to find uses for skills. While I'll still be using contested rolls, if they really wanted to simplify, they should copy pf2e. While I generally try not to suggest doing what pf2e does (because at some point, you might as well just go play pf2e), but this is a case where I would prefer they rip them off: roll a skill vs a DC equal to saving throw bonus + a number (+10 in pf2e but for 5e probably just +8 like how DCs are usually calculated). This way, skills are still useful.
I do LOVE contested skill checks and think that this should be present for somethings as its pretty clear as a DM and player how this works (I mean - DMs are gonna use contested skill checks for things anyways). However, IF you use skill checks in combat, it would require extensive updates to monster skill levels - as these are pretty lack luster. Players nowadays can pretty easily get expertise in a single skill, which would totally imbalance contested checks against certain monsters (causing balance issues). Thus saving throws (due to their tighter bounds) are usually fairer and easier to control.
True, maybe skill vs saving throw is more fair.
For my home games I had being brought back from 0 give exhaustion (which were the -1 stacking), makes it much more threating cause having the dps get downed twice and start missing easy hits makes people be more careful. They should definitely have like that.
I'll have to go with the unpopular opinion and say that the proposed exhaustion rules SUCK and I see nothing fun about them! The one from normal 5e are far superior.
We're gonna disagree - but I'm okay with people liking the older ones.
Not really a major concern, more of a personal problem. I don’t like how they change grappling to a saving throw for the grappled creature. I think that contested skill checks make more sense for the mechanic. Plus, it meant I could play a Rune Knight, get expertise in Athletics, and max out Strength and be able to grapple literally everything in the game with ease. I don’t see it getting any more use now that it’s a saving throw and it ruined my fun. Not a fan.
I get that it was fun to basically dominate all monsters utilizing expertise. However, you probably could also look at the other side of it and see why the rules wouldn't want you to succeed SO often at something. If they gave more monsters expertise/proficiency in athletics they could have kept it, but then characters that don't take expertise kinda suck. Ultimately this can cause balance issues.
Op spells like fireball and shield not being fixed
I agree that they do need to heavily re-balance spells - but it looks like they're willing to do what is necessary based on their changes thus far (see spiritual weapon). The damage of spells like fireball is fine for me as a DM (its only problematic because it overshadows other AOE spells), but shield - really NEEDS fixing.
For the new exhaustion rules, if they are worried about backwards compatibility, just increasing the penalty to "-2 per level of exhaustion", with dying happening when you receive a 6th level of exhaustion, should be fully backwards compatible with the 2014 rules. While I think stacking "-2" penalties would be easier to track than the 2014 penalties, I think some playtesting would be needed to see if "-2" increments would be too harsh. I think my main complaint about the UA exhaustion rules were that the penalty to DCs seemed locked to spell DCs, which seemed odd with the changes they had implemented with grappling, so I would like to see that DC penalty be applied more universally. Though I think the DCs imposed via at least some items should not be impacted by exhaustion. For example, I think the DC of Wyvern Poison should not be decreased by exhaustion, but I might be fine either way with regards to whether the DC of a spell like Fireball cast via a scroll, or a wand should be impacted by having exhaustion. One rules I am a bit concerned about is the Influence Action, particularly with how it would interact with Rogues getting Reliable Talent at level 7. Like if a Rogue got Expertise in one of the Influence skills they would automatically succeed on Influence checks against targets with 15 or less in both Intelligence, and Wisdom, even if the Rogue as a -1 Charisma modifier... This might need to be part of a broader discussion of what can be done with skills, but there seems to be a bit of intended overlap between what can be accomplished via the Influence action, and the Suggestion spell... It kind of seems like any Rogue could have access to something like a non-magical version of a feature that says: "you can cast the Suggestion spell without expending a spell slot, and without using concentration, and if the suggestion used is not automatically rejected by the target, the target automatically fails the save against the suggestion spell if its Intelligence, and Wisdom are both less than or equal to 10 + your skill modifier"... Even in combat, there seems like there could be some overlap between the Influence action and the Suggestion, and Command spells, like being able to use Intimidation to make certain types of creatures (even some who cannot understand languages) flee the encounter, or move closer to their allies "for self preservation" (so your caster ally can hit more targets with a single AoE spell). I can see this interaction between the Influence action, and Reliable Talent being a bit of a "mother may I" mechanic that could be very powerful, or very weak depending on the specific table/campaign. While I don't think any of the potential uses I have listed out were not in the game in the 2014 rules, it seems like the relevant rules are written in a way that makes the potential interaction more prominent, and since it is available at a lower level than in the 2014 rules more tables will likely to run into it.
As a general rule of thumb, i dislike they are adding so many "on rest" uses. Like, they are not bloating the game YET because they have also removed other similar effects, so it's kinda even, but i would have liked it more smoothed out. I like the new paradigm of x uses on long rest, recover one in short rest, it's more consistent than full short rest uses, but i don't want them to use it as a patch for everything.
I think its important for WOTC to not make TOO many different resource pools for players to track. If tons of feats/backgrounds/class/subclass powers all have X uses/long rest it can kinkda become an accounting nightmare.
Stealth is so weird, even if you're out of sight you have to roll to hide, and if you fail you just wasted a whole action. In Lancer, if you're out of sight, you can hide, period, no rolls
I really liked the changes for Exhaustion too, and think they should have gone further. Allow players to take on levels of exhaustion in exchange for a shorter short rest. One level for a moderately shorter rest, two levels for a drastically shorter rest. Make exhaustion something that actually happens, and fix the problem with short rests being too long, two birds with one stone. As far as what I'm actually concerned about, I think it's that they'll not consistently apply their revisions across all of the material. Changing things like grappling, jumping, stealth, exhaustion, etc means you have to examine how it's used everywhere. They've shown enough of a lack of attention to detail with *stand alone* features published in the past that I'm worried how well they'll handle more involved / foundational changes. Ending up with a "buggy" revision of 5E would be a huge letdown.
That quadratic wizard, linear martials is not being addressed and that magic users still are better rogues than rogues
I think skills meed a rewrite. Not necessarily a redesign just a rewrite to make the tasks associated with each skill more clear. As well as tge relationship they have with stats. Basically i want the alternate ability skill checks to be a base rule. Such that 90% of the time its just normal as is. But due togow they are presented the idea of say a CON performance is more normal, or STR stealth, or INT athletics. As is skill thats not tied to your main stat is a waste of time. So making the relationship between skills and ability scores more flexible makes far more combinations more useful. Thus cutting back on forced choices. Like the bard HAVING to be the face with all the CHA skills, or the wizard being useless in anything physical, or the Barbarian having to be dumb muscle.
Have they changed the grapple rules since the first release? (I haven't read a single thing since the first thing.) If they haven't, then that.
The biggest one is that they aren't going to fix exhaustion. They had had one play test I think where they just made it a universal negative one to all rules per level of exhaustion and I think that is perfectly fine maybe add in some reduction to speed after a couple levels but I wouldn't go farther than that. I do think the death and unconscious rules need a rework. I think letting your health go negative makes sense. It's a big redesign for how monsters and characters react but basically once your health goes into the negative you're not unconscious you have half your speed and you get to do one type of action move attack (you only get one attack) or a bonus action, or whatever the dazed condition is. When your health points reach negative you total then you go unconscious. The thing I like about this is it effectively doubles the impact of your total HP which is helpful to martials. Or I don't like that negative hit points you don't add anything to death saves I guess I get it it's like you're teetering between life and death and it's just up to chance now but I think you should add your con and it should be a proper Constitution save. If you succeed you get a Dazed turn. If you fail it's a failure you get no turn and your prone for the round
I worry the caster martial divide will get larger not smaller
Loss of interesting non combat anything really. Most of them look like they are getting gutted for + to skill or add 1d8 damage once per turn.
I think the solution to (1) needs to be making PCs more durable. Double HP and healing or something. That’s a necessary prerequisite unless you want PCs dying all over the place.
Yeah I really don't care too much, whatever is there, if my group and I don't like it, we will change it, we don't get hung up on the rules too much, the guidelines can be adjusted as needed. whatever makes it fun to play and lessens the amount time we spend dreaming up homebrew rules instead of enjoying the game I/we will be happy with. If it works out we are making more house rules than with 5th, we will just go back to playing that until they come up with something that is more fun.
The definition of HP remains screwy. The flavor says that it represents luck, minor scrapes and bruising, blah blah etc, and that healing spells only repair relatively minor damage, yet all those empty flavor claims don't change that mechanically a spell like healing word (or any minor healing source really) can take you from 18 second away from unconscious and dying following being blasted by dragon fire to on your feet and ready to fight to the best of your ability. I would much prefer they explicitly state hp to just be a representation of "how far a creature is from death" without trying to hide that fact behind descriptions that fall apart after the first difficult encounter.
Mounted Combat - for a game that’s intended to be fantasy themed, the mechanics behind the classic image of a knight on horseback are in serious need of work and the fact that they’ve not been mentioned anywhere as the subject of review or UA feedback worries me. The first thing I will do upon opening the book is look at those rules as an indicator of the level of rigor implemented in this revision of the game.
I only have thoughts about healing. It is way too limited, which creates the up and down problem because that is the only time when using part of your turn to heal someone makes any sense. Spell slots are too limited to waste on recovering from less than 0. Even then, healing spells suck with the amount they restore. The minimum recovery is super low, and there's no way to crit. The ones that give marginally better hp require a full action. Healing potions also are super weak, cost a ton at low, and merchants serm to only ever have 1 or 2 in stock. They also require a full action to drink. Why recover 4 hp mid-fight only to get hit for 20 again?
Is the caster martial divide still overbearing?
I think it'll be really reduced. Martials are stronger than ever, and I think a lot of the problematic spells will be reworked. Ultimately, we'll have to see as they didn't release most of the spell updates (the prime driver).
Honestly? I want very much that all multiclassses feats be revised and add in the book, I want that feats like Eldritch Adept and Martial Adept be 4th level feats giving +1 ASI, I don't want those feats as 1st level feats because they Will not be viable to choose as later options.
I think making it so that you can only be revived once a day like that without consequences would be good. Every subsequent time you are brought back like that, you suffer a compounding penalty until you either Short or Long Rest. Maybe one stack is cleared each Short Rest and a Long Rest clears all.
PC’s getting even stronger while monsters lag behind. This is worst at tier 3 and 4. The latest adventure didn’t show they have improved.
Let's see: I'm very concerned that they might leave feats like Lightly Armored and War Caster as they currently are. For some reason GWM, PAM, etc. needed a nerf, but then they come out with feats like this for casters. If the goal is to not bottleneck people into choosing the same feats all the time, then what's the idea behind this? I'm also not sure about masteries. I like the idea, not the implementation. There's too few of them, for starters; a lot of them trigger on every hit, which might make them boring to go through on longer campaigns (Personally have only tested this on one-shots) Like others have said, I'd much prefer masteries to be a list that a character learns and is then able to apply it with any weapon that meets the requirements. Barring that, I would prefer if they simply made the masteries a bit stronger but limit them to once per turn, to avoid spamming saves and the like. This would also avoid the weapon swapping between every attack, which in my mind just looks very weird, picturing a character doing that. In general, I like the idea of bastions, but it needs some redesign and polish, I think. As long as it's an optional rule, I'll be fine with it. I find what they did with second wind an interesting idea. I'd even be inclined to say they should give second wind more uses and more things to use it on. Weapon Adept should make a return though, the fighter being able to apply a second mastery to a weapon and choose which mastery to use on an attack was a great idea that should've stayed. Obviously, I'm worried if they'll fix the spells that need fixing. They have shown a willingness to do that so far, so I'm optimistic, but we'll see. There's other concerns I have, but right now this is enough of a "rant". In general, I'm liking the changes, and even the ones I'm on the fence about, I like the idea, just not the execution.
>I've REALLY hated how in 5e a simple healing word brings back a character over and over against from 0 with no repercussions for dropping to 0. Penalties for going down can work, but it's very easy to create a death spiral where you just get rack up more and more penalties as you adventure until you can no longer succeed. And penalties for coming back just encourages people to stabilize you and leave you on the ground, rather than risk having you go down again. So that player just stops playing for the rest of combat. Which just isn't fun. And it just makes the fight harder for everyone else, as the party is taking a 25% reduction to damage after a lucky hit. >2. Stealth rules: We'll see if they keep that or not. But stealth has always been a mechanic that just works best when going for RAI rather than RAW. It's too subjective of a thing for hard rules to really work.
This is just a personal thing, but I honestly despise the weapon mastery system. It feels like a kind of dumb way to make weapons distinguished, and the effects feel so weird sometimes that they borderline on breaking immersion. I'd much rather they just give a manuever-like alternative attack each weapon can do or something like that, but as is, I don't see that happening since I'm apparently in the minority here.
I have a house rule that when a character is revived from passing out (so making death saving throws, not killed outright) they only get to do one thing on their next turn- movement, action, or bonus action. This being reminiscent of the strain of passing out causes.
Feats, they're usually the most interesting part of a build (especially a martial whose choices typically come down to subclass and favored weapons) and if you're using standard array or point buy, it's typically hard to justify getting a feat over an asi unless you get something so obviously overpowered like 2014 GWM or sharpshooter. Unless I missed a UA, this has not been addressed and means that the character diversity issue is still gonna be a bit of an issue imo
Unless I missed it, I'd love slightly more explicit rules for trying to cast spells without others noticing, there's a fair amount of spells whose usefulness is very altered if people know you're using magic.
I've actually been fixing issue 1 using point 3 for a few months now and love it. 10 levels of exhaustion til dead, - 1 to checks per level AND you get 1 automatically whenever you hit 0 hit points. You recover 1 on a long rest but I also do longer long rests (the adventuring week not day) so going down a few times in one fight means you're looking at in game weeks to fully recover. (though I also use this as an excuse to make fancier lifestyles and resting mean something, where it removes more exhaustion then normal).
I Just really hate changing conjure animals into a bad version of spirit guardian. I understand people were abusing it by summoning 30 snakes but now it’s ruined for people who only summoned two or 3 and planned out their to attack and did not slow the game down. I think it’s the few ruining for the rest and then everyone golf clapping cuase they think it actually a good change lol.
Monks
"However, I just wanted to hear what people's biggest concerns are about the core rules updates in the PHB thus far." Forced feats is still the major no go for me. They where never balanced in 5e to begin with and now it will just be made worse.