Weapon Mastery scored really high and is confirmed to be in 5.5. All the options scored high too, EXCEPT Flex.
Barbarian was 77% and most features scored 80+. Berserker was a clear winner, going from 29% in 2014 to 84% in the playtest.
Fighter was 75%, most features again scored 80+. People want Weapon Expert/Adept to be buffed, and they have committed to that.
Champion was another winner, going from 54% to 74%. (Interesting note - they confirmed that they see Champion as not only the best "beginner Fighter," but one of the best beginner subclasses in the entire game period.)
Sorcerer went from 60% to 72%, which they see as more to do. Mixed response to the sorcerer unique spells, lots of enthusiasm for metamagic with two exceptions (see below.)
Most metamagic scored extremely high *e.g. Careful Spell got 89%. The two exceptions were Seeking Spell at 74%, good but not great. The other of course was Twinned Spell at 60%, which they will take another look at.
UA 7 is going back to class spell lists 🙄 I suppose this means though that Bard won't be the omnicaster we're seeing in 6 anymore.
Draconic Sorcerer got 73%. This was driven by the dragon wings being tied to the concentration spell, everything else scored high. Now that classes are going back to nonstandardized progressions, they'll revert the wings to being always on and higher level.
Warlock is going back to Pact Magic 🙄 but they're still committed to addressing the limited slots and short-rest dependency in some other, balanced way that we won't see until UA 7.
Warlock is going back to being based on one stat only 🙄they didn't confirm which stat that would be.
Hex will be getting buffed.
Wizard got 70%. Their conclusion here is quite odd, they seem to think people are upset that wizard doesn't have far and away the best spell list in the game due to the Arcane List being open to everyone thing. Apparently their feedback is showing that people want every list in the game to be notably worse than the Wizard list, so that's where they're headed.
Evoker scored very well (number not given, likely 80+.)
Going back to Warlock, their modularity and invocations are seen as the core part of their identity, and they're going to lean more into that.
Well, the folks who want One to just be 2014 again with incremental updates seem to have won. Guess I'll be waiting another decade for more substantial swings.
With that said I'm looking forward to seeing the next Druid. I'm also hopeful that reverting to class spell lists means bards can be both healers and illusionists again.
Flex would be fine if versatile weapons had two masteries. One for each grip.
Barbarians are in a better place, but could improve more.
Fighters need more since everyone can use weapon masteries. Just being better at weapon masteries isn’t enough. They need something unique.
Champon is still missing some umf to make it more than a beginner subclass or a dip subclass. I thought combining some Brute fighter features with it would make it better. S you weren’t just crit fishing.
Sorcerer will be fine once they return it to 5e level progression. Long as they don’t take it back to 5e 15 spells known.
I don’t know how you improve seeking spell and twin spell is clearly too good to go back to the 5e version with all the nova nerfs they have done.
They shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water when it comes to the spell list. Having an Arcane, Divine, and Primal list is awesome. Everyone gets their own list and some people get to also choose from the Master lists. So a Bard would only have Bard list but maybe magical secrets let’s it choose Arcane, Divine or Primal. A wizard would have Wizard and arcane would have sorcerer and arcane. This way they can easily add spell later for other classes the Artificer, wile still limiting who gets access. Sorry Warlock you only get the Warlock list.
Yeah Dragon Sorc will be fine.
I hope they go with the Pact magic + 1/3 Spellcasting model. I think that’s the best middle ground.
While I didn’t like half caster warlock I did like the stat choice. I hope they make that half caster into its own future class. Spellsword anyone?!
Hex should hav been left alone from 5e, but the nova nerf stick hit it too hard. Glad they will try to adjust this.
I think it was more of the “what makes my Wizard special?” To be fair at the time of the play test everyone else could change their spells every morning.
Everyone likes to blow things up, excluding your friends makes it easier.
Warlock invocations are fun. Some of the trap options should be removed or buffed.
The moment they said backwards compatibility there was no hope some of those changes were sticking. They were testing the waters for 6E with some of that. 5ER will be a bunch of errata fixes all at once. Well some subclasses are getting fixed.
Genuinely, what is the issue people have with 2014 warlock? I have not been following recent events, and I personally like PHB warlock. The lack of abundant spell slots makes me think about resource management much more than a normal caster and it feels like a distinct class with it's own identity. I do agree that warlocks should be able to use any mental stat for spellcasting, but people seem to have other issues with them. I feel as though I am missing something here.
The thing with 5e's Warlock is that if you don't get short rests, the Warlock has significantly fewer casts per day and inevitably ends up Eldritch Blast spamming.
But if you do get short rests, then the Warlock gets several times more higher-level casts up to 5th-level than every other caster in the game. with mystic arcanums giving them effectively equivalent casting ability above 5th-level until very late levels.
In short, the Warlock is heavily imbalanced, and people were upset because they played at tables that let them exploit Warlocks' pact slots recharging on short rests.
Some people were just upset about the casting power. As a half cast at level 5 I don’t have the 3rd level spells I once had. And no matter how I tried to use mystic Arcanums to make up for this loss in spell power it was noticeable. Especially since the game cares more about nova damage. Hitting as hard as you can as fast as you can is far better than slow and steady damage. Having more slots let you do more out of combat magic, but at will invocations already had that covered.
The Invocation system is also underutilized, and the individual Pact Boons are wildly lopsided; the 2014 PAct of the Blade is a total waste of time. In all seriousness, the entire class is boiled down to "shoot lasers at your enemies, and when not fighting wait for the next fight to start because you have no utility whatsoever and can't get it, either."
I have a 7th level Pact of the Blade Hexlock and I can say confidently that the Pact of the Blade is the opposite of a waste of time. This is true even with only 1-2 short rests a day.
ETA: I also really liked the UA spell lists. I'm surprised they've been received negatively enough to make the design team decide to ditch them.
The Invocation system is also underutilized, and the individual Pact Boons are wildly lopsided; the 2014 PAct of the Blade is a total waste of time. In all seriousness, the entire class is boiled down to "shoot lasers at your enemies, and when not fighting wait for the next fight to start because you have no utility whatsoever and can't get it, either."
I have a 7th level Pact of the Blade Hexlock and I can say confidently that the Pact of the Blade is the opposite of a waste of time. This is true even with only 1-2 short rests a day.
ETA: I also really liked the UA spell lists. I'm surprised they've been received negatively enough to make the design team decide to ditch them.
I assume they mean for anyone who isn't a hexblade. The hexblade needs the pact of the blade, obviously.
I played a hexblade from level 5 to level 17, and it's tremendously effective. But it's also true that you are only going to use your magic for two things: Armor of agathys and Shadow of moil. Anything else is wasting a spell slot. At medium / high levels, with mystic arcanum you can do something else. And if your game there uses a lot of short rests, the 3rd and 4th spell slot can also be invested in something else. But Generally what you are going to do is Armor of agathys + shadow of moil. That feels really very uncaster.
When I tried the bladelock of the Playtest 5 the feeling is totally different. I really felt like a gish, using spells and sword to fight. But anyway, if people like pact magic, there is nothing more to say.
Regarding the spell lists, the issue was they were substantially pointless, albeit slightly helpful to Sorcerers and Warlocks, and nerfed the innate spellcasting versatility of Bards into the ground. Both new Bard spell list options cut out a lot of popular picks, either outright in the first iteration or by making some of them mutually exclusive in the second. Plus giving them the full lists undercut them having their own distinct casting identity. The lists would likewise have been a headache to fit Artificers into, for similar reasons.
Regarding the spell lists, the issue was they were substantially pointless, albeit slightly helpful to Sorcerers and Warlocks, and nerfed the innate spellcasting versatility of Bards into the ground. Both new Bard spell list options cut out a lot of popular picks, either outright in the first iteration or by making some of them mutually exclusive in the second. Plus giving them the full lists undercut them having their own distinct casting identity. The lists would likewise have been a headache to fit Artificers into, for similar reasons.
Glad* to hear you're totally 100% behind making it utterly impossible to create new base classes in the future of D&D. Or at least base classes with any access to Spellcasting whatsoever. Man, I really wish the artificer wasn't a shitty footnote with no support forthcoming for the remainder of the game's lifetime, but we had that chance and it was thoroughly scuppered.
With the generic spell lists destroyed, we've officially lost the last mechanism allowing new classes to be created in the future of the game. Everybody who wanted an arcane spellblade gets to get ****ed. Everybody who wanted...well, anything that isn't served in the core game gets to get ****ed.
Right, because they clearly didn’t do just that with the Artificer already. The TCoE spell list included XGtE spells in it, so there’s no reason to expect they can’t simply create additional spell lists as needed for any hypothetical future classes. Might not cover every single future spell, but it’ll cover a good 95% of the spells in the game, and as a bonus doesn’t gut one of the defining features of a core class in service to hypothetical future classes.
Lists + class spells are the key. With all spells as class, we have spells added both new and to class availability. It is a pain when having all the manuals to look if a specific spell is available to your class. With all spells into generic lists, we lose granularity.
Instead that, if the spell is not specific, as most are, simply put into the (i.e.) Arcane list, and any arcane user knows that can use it.
Interesting you mention artificers. Who don't get access to any spells printed in books not named PHB, Rising from the Last War, or Tasha's Cauldron because those new books can't assume you have access to the artificer. Who will, by the by, never again receive a new subclass because they'd have to reprint the entire base class and its previous subclasses in whichever book they offered a new subclass in for the same "we can't assume..." reason. The artificer is frozen in time, left forlorn and abandoned by Wizards because its non-core status means they CANNOT support it in new books without going through significant expense every time. Artificer players have gotten all they will ever get, and they have to eat the fact that their delightful new class ultimately failed and died.
Sure, Wizards could add a "the [X] class can be found in [Y] book" tag to every last product they make, but how often can they do that before it gets absurd? Before the "you can find [X] in [Y]" list is longer than the list of actual new content itself?
It's not future-proof, at all. They MIGHT be able to get away with it one more time, since they're eliminating the artificer entirely from the 2024 series of books so whichever thing they dream up next can take the artificer's previous place as the Novel but Ultimately Abandoned Stepchild, but they won't be able to do anything more after that.
So yeah. Don't cite artificers to me. Played one for two years, played them during the UA cycle, was one of the most prolific posters on the Artificer sub-board when the class was young. I know artificers. And I know their pitiable fate. The same fate "The Community" has imposed on all possible future base class additions, now.
Except there’s classes whose core lists don’t break down along those nice clean lines, ie Bards and Artificers. Plus that also restricts future classes to almost entirely having to fit within one of three generic molds rather than having a list curated to their intended role. It’s “simpler”, but not only does it not actually apply itself well to two existing classes, but it would be handicapping future designs.
Given that they've created exactly 1 new class in ten years, I would say that future-proofing the spell lists is overrated. They could use a keyword system, and spellcasters get lists that match their keywords, but that's a ton of work.
Interesting you mention artificers. Who don't get access to any spells printed in books not named PHB, Rising from the Last War, or Tasha's Cauldron because those new books can't assume you have access to the artificer. Who will, by the by, never again receive a new subclass because they'd have to reprint the entire base class and its previous subclasses in whichever book they offered a new subclass in for the same "we can't assume..." reason. The artificer is frozen in time, left forlorn and abandoned by Wizards because its non-core status means they CANNOT support it in new books without going through significant expense every time. Artificer players have gotten all they will ever get, and they have to eat the fact that their delightful new class ultimately failed and died.
Sure, Wizards could add a "the [X] class can be found in [Y] book" tag to every last product they make, but how often can they do that before it gets absurd? Before the "you can find [X] in [Y]" list is longer than the list of actual new content itself?
It's not future-proof, at all. They MIGHT be able to get away with it one more time, since they're eliminating the artificer entirely from the 2024 series of books so whichever thing they dream up next can take the artificer's previous place as the Novel but Ultimately Abandoned Stepchild, but they won't be able to do anything more after that.
So yeah. Don't cite artificers to me. Played one for two years, played them during the UA cycle, was one of the most prolific posters on the Artificer sub-board when the class was young. I know artificers. And I know their pitiable fate. The same fate "The Community" has imposed on all possible future base class additions, now.
Yurei, look at the spell list; there is literally a note for spells printed in XGtE. They are included, and so it’s entirely reasonable to expect that if they make another caster class in the future, they can include those same notes.
Given that they've created exactly 1 new class in ten years, I would say that future-proofing the spell lists is overrated. They could use a keyword system, and spellcasters get lists that match their keywords, but that's a ton of work.
Yes!
They created one whole entire new base class in ten years becausde the 2014 ecosystem is so hostile to new classes that they couldn't pull it off more than once!
Usually when a subclass in UA isn't satisfying enough it just gets dropped and we never hear about it again. If instead the system were better suited to accept new classes then we might see them show up much more often (i.e. it encounters fewer complications, or need for reprinting in new books).
Far less work is a measure of effectiveness for a business. As much as I’d love for them to take the time to pour their hearts and souls into getting everything just so before publishing, I’m enough of a realist to understand that such an approach simply isn’t viable for something being produced on this scale until we hit a post scarcity utopia.
Sure. Except most subclasses are lame and boring and don't have any impact whatsoever on the playstyle or hero fantasy of the base class they apply to. They've tried to solve the Spellblade thing, what...half a dozen times now? And every time they've failed utterly, because "Martial class with a meaningless and insignificant pinch of magic" and "magic class with a meaningless and insignificant pinch of martial prowess" both fail the Spellblade Criteria of "is a magic class AND a martial class that is actually pretty good at both."
1) I'm really, really hoping their solution isn't just "more pact slots per short rest." Not only is that dreadfully unimaginative, it has power implications too. Say you make it PB pact slots per SR, at level 9 that's four 5th-level slots per short rest, i.e. roughly twelve 5th-level slots per day when other full casters are working with 1-2 at most. Sure they'll have no low level slots, but with that many nukes it hardly matters.
2) Whatever they land on, I want it to be multiclass friendly. Warlocks having this weird separate magic progression makes me wonder why they bothered with giving them spell slots at all when they could have just based everything on invocations. This is a big part of why people only dip Warlock before progressing something else; more than a dip is just setting those levels on fire, and the pact slots don't scale.
The reality is that there just isn't a terribly large appetite for new classes (there are lots of ideas with low demand, but not much with a broad base of interest), and of the big ones I can think of, none of them would be enhanced by the generic spell lists. The biggest ones I've noticed a demand for are
A better arcane gish. This is hard to do, but not because of spell lists.
Something like the 4e warlord. Doesn't involve spell lists, because not a spellcaster.
Psionic characters. Not relevant to spell lists because the people who object to existing implementations wouldn't want to use the spell lists anyway.
Therein lies the problem with the concept of a spell blade in a game that needs some kind of balance. If you have a power budget of 100 points for each class design, but any major feature of a class is effectively worthless if it's under 50 points of power, you'll never have the 50/50 mix of melee and spells because then both would be too weak. So, you need to choose: mostly magic with a sprinkle of melee or mostly melee with a sprinkle of magic. Could you just say 'eh, this class actually gets 160 power points so they can be pretty good at both'? Sure, but then other players would be justified in asking why that one class gets to contribute more and more often per session on average than other classes do.
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The moment they said backwards compatibility there was no hope some of those changes were sticking. They were testing the waters for 6E with some of that. 5ER will be a bunch of errata fixes all at once. Well some subclasses are getting fixed.
Some people were just upset about the casting power. As a half cast at level 5 I don’t have the 3rd level spells I once had. And no matter how I tried to use mystic Arcanums to make up for this loss in spell power it was noticeable. Especially since the game cares more about nova damage. Hitting as hard as you can as fast as you can is far better than slow and steady damage. Having more slots let you do more out of combat magic, but at will invocations already had that covered.
I have a 7th level Pact of the Blade Hexlock and I can say confidently that the Pact of the Blade is the opposite of a waste of time. This is true even with only 1-2 short rests a day.
ETA: I also really liked the UA spell lists. I'm surprised they've been received negatively enough to make the design team decide to ditch them.
I assume they mean for anyone who isn't a hexblade. The hexblade needs the pact of the blade, obviously.
I played a hexblade from level 5 to level 17, and it's tremendously effective. But it's also true that you are only going to use your magic for two things: Armor of agathys and Shadow of moil. Anything else is wasting a spell slot. At medium / high levels, with mystic arcanum you can do something else. And if your game there uses a lot of short rests, the 3rd and 4th spell slot can also be invested in something else. But Generally what you are going to do is Armor of agathys + shadow of moil. That feels really very uncaster.
When I tried the bladelock of the Playtest 5 the feeling is totally different. I really felt like a gish, using spells and sword to fight. But anyway, if people like pact magic, there is nothing more to say.
Regarding the spell lists, the issue was they were substantially pointless, albeit slightly helpful to Sorcerers and Warlocks, and nerfed the innate spellcasting versatility of Bards into the ground. Both new Bard spell list options cut out a lot of popular picks, either outright in the first iteration or by making some of them mutually exclusive in the second. Plus giving them the full lists undercut them having their own distinct casting identity. The lists would likewise have been a headache to fit Artificers into, for similar reasons.
Glad* to hear you're totally 100% behind making it utterly impossible to create new base classes in the future of D&D. Or at least base classes with any access to Spellcasting whatsoever. Man, I really wish the artificer wasn't a shitty footnote with no support forthcoming for the remainder of the game's lifetime, but we had that chance and it was thoroughly scuppered.
With the generic spell lists destroyed, we've officially lost the last mechanism allowing new classes to be created in the future of the game. Everybody who wanted an arcane spellblade gets to get ****ed. Everybody who wanted...well, anything that isn't served in the core game gets to get ****ed.
Thanks for that, "The Community."
Please do not contact or message me.
Right, because they clearly didn’t do just that with the Artificer already. The TCoE spell list included XGtE spells in it, so there’s no reason to expect they can’t simply create additional spell lists as needed for any hypothetical future classes. Might not cover every single future spell, but it’ll cover a good 95% of the spells in the game, and as a bonus doesn’t gut one of the defining features of a core class in service to hypothetical future classes.
Lists + class spells are the key. With all spells as class, we have spells added both new and to class availability. It is a pain when having all the manuals to look if a specific spell is available to your class. With all spells into generic lists, we lose granularity.
Instead that, if the spell is not specific, as most are, simply put into the (i.e.) Arcane list, and any arcane user knows that can use it.
Interesting you mention artificers. Who don't get access to any spells printed in books not named PHB, Rising from the Last War, or Tasha's Cauldron because those new books can't assume you have access to the artificer. Who will, by the by, never again receive a new subclass because they'd have to reprint the entire base class and its previous subclasses in whichever book they offered a new subclass in for the same "we can't assume..." reason. The artificer is frozen in time, left forlorn and abandoned by Wizards because its non-core status means they CANNOT support it in new books without going through significant expense every time. Artificer players have gotten all they will ever get, and they have to eat the fact that their delightful new class ultimately failed and died.
Sure, Wizards could add a "the [X] class can be found in [Y] book" tag to every last product they make, but how often can they do that before it gets absurd? Before the "you can find [X] in [Y]" list is longer than the list of actual new content itself?
It's not future-proof, at all. They MIGHT be able to get away with it one more time, since they're eliminating the artificer entirely from the 2024 series of books so whichever thing they dream up next can take the artificer's previous place as the Novel but Ultimately Abandoned Stepchild, but they won't be able to do anything more after that.
So yeah. Don't cite artificers to me. Played one for two years, played them during the UA cycle, was one of the most prolific posters on the Artificer sub-board when the class was young. I know artificers. And I know their pitiable fate. The same fate "The Community" has imposed on all possible future base class additions, now.
Please do not contact or message me.
Except there’s classes whose core lists don’t break down along those nice clean lines, ie Bards and Artificers. Plus that also restricts future classes to almost entirely having to fit within one of three generic molds rather than having a list curated to their intended role. It’s “simpler”, but not only does it not actually apply itself well to two existing classes, but it would be handicapping future designs.
Given that they've created exactly 1 new class in ten years, I would say that future-proofing the spell lists is overrated. They could use a keyword system, and spellcasters get lists that match their keywords, but that's a ton of work.
Yurei, look at the spell list; there is literally a note for spells printed in XGtE. They are included, and so it’s entirely reasonable to expect that if they make another caster class in the future, they can include those same notes.
Yes!
They created one whole entire new base class in ten years becausde the 2014 ecosystem is so hostile to new classes that they couldn't pull it off more than once!
Please do not contact or message me.
Or they just feel it’s more effective to create subclasses rather than build from the ground up all the time.
I think it's less that it'd be more effective and more that it'd be far less work to implement a subclass than a new class.
Brief History of Artificers in 5e:
Artificers started as a Wizard subclass in a 2015 UA for Eberron they were initially slated as a subclass for the Wizard. I wasn't following it at the time but I believe the general sense was that it wasn't satisfying enough. Then they went through subsequent UAs as various possible classes. 2017 as a 1/3 caster, 2019 as a half caster, then again with additional subclasses before being released in Eberron. Overall it took 4-5 years for that process to happen.
Usually when a subclass in UA isn't satisfying enough it just gets dropped and we never hear about it again.
If instead the system were better suited to accept new classes then we might see them show up much more often (i.e. it encounters fewer complications, or need for reprinting in new books).
Far less work is a measure of effectiveness for a business. As much as I’d love for them to take the time to pour their hearts and souls into getting everything just so before publishing, I’m enough of a realist to understand that such an approach simply isn’t viable for something being produced on this scale until we hit a post scarcity utopia.
Sure. Except most subclasses are lame and boring and don't have any impact whatsoever on the playstyle or hero fantasy of the base class they apply to. They've tried to solve the Spellblade thing, what...half a dozen times now? And every time they've failed utterly, because "Martial class with a meaningless and insignificant pinch of magic" and "magic class with a meaningless and insignificant pinch of martial prowess" both fail the Spellblade Criteria of "is a magic class AND a martial class that is actually pretty good at both."
Please do not contact or message me.
1) I'm really, really hoping their solution isn't just "more pact slots per short rest." Not only is that dreadfully unimaginative, it has power implications too. Say you make it PB pact slots per SR, at level 9 that's four 5th-level slots per short rest, i.e. roughly twelve 5th-level slots per day when other full casters are working with 1-2 at most. Sure they'll have no low level slots, but with that many nukes it hardly matters.
2) Whatever they land on, I want it to be multiclass friendly. Warlocks having this weird separate magic progression makes me wonder why they bothered with giving them spell slots at all when they could have just based everything on invocations. This is a big part of why people only dip Warlock before progressing something else; more than a dip is just setting those levels on fire, and the pact slots don't scale.
The reality is that there just isn't a terribly large appetite for new classes (there are lots of ideas with low demand, but not much with a broad base of interest), and of the big ones I can think of, none of them would be enhanced by the generic spell lists. The biggest ones I've noticed a demand for are
From what they've done with Channel Divinity/etc, I suspect 'more initial slots, recover 1 per SR'.
Therein lies the problem with the concept of a spell blade in a game that needs some kind of balance. If you have a power budget of 100 points for each class design, but any major feature of a class is effectively worthless if it's under 50 points of power, you'll never have the 50/50 mix of melee and spells because then both would be too weak. So, you need to choose: mostly magic with a sprinkle of melee or mostly melee with a sprinkle of magic. Could you just say 'eh, this class actually gets 160 power points so they can be pretty good at both'? Sure, but then other players would be justified in asking why that one class gets to contribute more and more often per session on average than other classes do.