Just tried this out this weekend.  For the most part it worked very well and it definitely made life easier.  Some notes on potential improvements.  I'm sure that some of these have already been mentioned but I'll put it in anyway.

1) A way to name similar groups of creatures. In my case, I split 3 Frost Giants so they didn't go all in the same initiative.  So each was their own 'group'.  I didn't see any way of adding a name to these 'groups' so I had to just remember which was which.

2) When adding my players it didn't show their initial HP.

3) In our Frost Giant battle there were several guards fighting with the characters.  I split them into 2 groups, so the group naming issue again. Also, there were a few NPC's fighting for the characters (specifically the npc's from the attach on Bryn Shander in Storm King's Thunder).  A way of adding those would be good.

4) Adding a 'status' (actually multiple statuses)  to each player/npc/monster and how many turns remaining that that status will be in effect would be helpful.  Death Saving throw results would be good here too.

Excellent tool!  Looking forward to using it again!

The hit point tool is a great start to tracking HP's in the combat tracker. I would still like to see a way to modify hit points in the encounter builder that would translate to the combat tracker so you would not have to adjust the hit points after clicking run encounter.

Edit: I run a large campaign 8+ people. To make the encounters challenging I will typically max NPC hit points.

Most of my comments from the initial release remain valid, and I know from the streams that pretty much all of those features are on the roadmap.

Today, I just want to say THANK YOU for this awesome feature. I had been using the physical 5e Stat Trackers to hang on my DM screen and they worked OK, but were a TON of work to translate my monsters into a usable form (look, I'm a programmer. I don't write with my HANDS anymore...). Throwing all my custom and standard monsters into an encounter and then running it was a BREEZE compared to my manual way of doing things. I spent less time writing and more time engaging with the players. I ran a battle that was 35 enemies vs 6 players and 30 NPCs. No way I could have managed that without this feature, even though I did massively simplify damage and didn't use it for any but the most powerful monsters in the combat. But being able to just hit Next and move to the next one, calling out the "on deck" player, and having the monster stat blocks on the same page? *chef kiss* It was incredible.

So thank you, thank you, thank you for making this stuff awesome! Y'all are striking the perfect balance of letting me be digital where it works better and analog where I want (rolling dice). I can't wait to see where you are a few years from now, and hopefully that's a full VTT so I can get my group together more often!

I second the friendly NPC option.  I've been tinkering with encounters and it would be awesome to asses the difficulty more quickly when adding an npc/friendly that would participate in the fight.  

I love the tool, and I support the add encounters when we purchase an adventure from D&D Beyond

Hi,

It would be useful if the article's title would include the date of the last update (like with the Encounter Beta changes), so we don't have to click through the article every day to check if there was an update. (If the changelong sorting order would reflect the last update and not the creation, that would be also super useful in case there's an update to an earlier feature, like with the January changes for the Encounter Builder Beta.)

I'm sure we'll all miss Bob Ross Adam, but we cannot overdose on happy accidents... :)

for some reason i keep getting an error when attempting to save a new encounter. I also lost all my saved encounters. what am i doing wrong?

It just leapt from 0.1.4 to 0.1.7 and yet I can't tell any difference. What changed?

Really loving how this is shaping up, I could see myself completely shifting to using this going forward.

The one pretty major issue I've had with it (which, I will acknowledge, had a pretty big user error component...) is that if I accidentally go "back" in the browser while running an encounter, I'll lose everything I had entered apart from the saved encounter itself.  That mostly sucked because I was running an encounter with a bunch of characters I'd added with the "Manual Entry" option, so it wasn't just the initiative order that was gone.  (Think I did it when I was swiping between desktops, probably.)

Hoping eventually it will be possible to at least save the encounter again before you start running it?  I imagine there's some kind of more-integrated persistence solution in the works for tracking encounter state, but honestly I'd just find it very helpful to be able to set up an encounter (including with manual entries) and even enter initiative rolls for the enemies, and then save it and know that I'll be good to go when it's time to run it, without worrying whether the page has reloaded in the meantime or something.

I‘m really excited about this new combat tracker. In classic D&D Beyond form, y’all have obviously paid a lot of attention to the usability of this tool (which is unfortunately not common in tabletop RPG tools), but I have some big issues with the core layout of this feature. The list of combatants on the left is so small, and unnecessarily so. I understand why your main navigation works the way it does, but in this context, it just seems to get in the way of making room for the initiative list. This is a dungeon master tool to help with the hardest part of running a D&D game, so I feel like it should be treated a little differently than the rest of the site.

Anyway, keep up all the great work!

Quote from HarperLieblich >>

I‘m really excited about this new combat tracker. In classic D&D Beyond form, y’all have obviously paid a lot of attention to the usability of this tool (which is unfortunately not common in tabletop RPG tools), but I have some big issues with the core layout of this feature. The list of combatants on the left is so small, and unnecessarily so. I understand why your main navigation works the way it does, but in this context, it just seems to get in the way of making room for the initiative list. This is a dungeon master tool to help with the hardest part of running a D&D game, so I feel like it should be treated a little differently than the rest of the site.

Anyway, keep up all the great work!

 If you click on the monsters on that "unnecessarily small" list on the left, you'll see that the space on the right was reserved for the monster descriptions and stat blocks, which is also a very useful and important thing for DMs so they don't have to switch betweens tabs or sheets of paper. :)

Can we please get the friendly NPC support?  It would be nice to calculate the difficulty of an encounter when you add friendly NPCs.  Currently, you have to do it off the tracker which proves to be less than useful.

Is there going to be a way to inset images of custom maps so our players can better understand the terrain and enemy locations?

Quote from Edem >>

Quote from HarperLieblich >>

I‘m really excited about this new combat tracker. In classic D&D Beyond form, y’all have obviously paid a lot of attention to the usability of this tool (which is unfortunately not common in tabletop RPG tools), but I have some big issues with the core layout of this feature. The list of combatants on the left is so small, and unnecessarily so. I understand why your main navigation works the way it does, but in this context, it just seems to get in the way of making room for the initiative list. This is a dungeon master tool to help with the hardest part of running a D&D game, so I feel like it should be treated a little differently than the rest of the site.

Anyway, keep up all the great work!

 If you click on the monsters on that "unnecessarily small" list on the left, you'll see that the space on the right was reserved for the monster descriptions and stat blocks, which is also a very useful and important thing for DMs so they don't have to switch betweens tabs or sheets of paper. :)

I'm referring to the height of the list. Apologies if that wasn't obvious.

Take a look at it on a larger screen, The list stays the same size (read vertical height) regardless of how much room it has. I also contend that the 3 layers of navigation plus the encounter title take up nearly a third of the viewport height. In this context, I think the navigation should be minimized, so the DM has as much room (read vertical height) for the initiative list as possible.

In a combat with more than 6 combatants, you're likely to have the current character turn highlighted, but then have to scroll to the character on whom you want to apply damage/healing. That's "unnecessary" when there's more room (read vertical height) on the screen that's being taken up by other stuff.

Seriously come on. This is so cool. I will use it in my next game (Friday night) and then come back to leave more detailed feedback. I'm so happy to have this!

Loving it so far, and second a lot of the prior requests.  I have a minor one, but it would be great if for all non-character combatants we could click into their name field and modify that, or alternately just be able to assign a name as a separate field?  

Something that just hit me last session: I can't resize the length of the tool when there are a lot of characters in an encounter.  Something simple that may make a big difference

The most important thing you should enable next is to auto save the current state of a combat.  Nothing fancy or overly complicated.  Simple and easy is important. I should be able to close the window and come back into the combat the next week with it being right where it was when I last left. Just like in google docs.  If I want to restart it, a simple restart campaign with an "are you sure?" prompt that can also be disabled is enough, hell make it really cool and allow us to click the undo button to un-reset it, then I would say not to have an "are you sure?" prompt if we could just click undo. 

If someone wants to track the same combat in multiple-separate campaigns, then you could create a clone button for the encounter and let us save it as a separate encounter under a new name with a default of "copy of [encounter name]".  But honestly, we could also just create the same encounter under another name from scratch if you added the save current state behavior I just described. 

Quote from gauchomate >>

The most important thing you should enable next is to auto save the current state of a combat.  Nothing fancy or overly complicated.  Simple and easy is important. I should be able to close the window and come back into the combat the next week with it being right where it was when I last left. Just like in google docs.  If I want to restart it, a simple restart campaign with an "are you sure?" prompt that can also be disabled is enough, hell make it really cool and allow us to click the undo button to un-reset it, then I would say not to have an "are you sure?" prompt if we could just click undo. 

If someone wants to track the same combat in multiple-separate campaigns, then you could create a clone button for the encounter and let us save it as a separate encounter under a new name with a default of "copy of [encounter name]".  But honestly, we could also just create the same encounter under another name from scratch if you added the save current state behavior I just described. 

 Auto save is on the list, but it will come towards the end. As a user this must be frustrating, but as a developer I understand the decision - all the changes up until then would most likely affect the data structure to be stored, which means the save functionality would need to be constantly updated / changed / refactored, slowing down the progress considerably.

Just bear with it for now.

Quote from gauchomate >>

The most important thing you should enable next is to auto save the current state of a combat.  Nothing fancy or overly complicated.  Simple and easy is important. I should be able to close the window and come back into the combat the next week with it being right where it was when I last left. Just like in google docs.  If I want to restart it, a simple restart campaign with an "are you sure?" prompt that can also be disabled is enough, hell make it really cool and allow us to click the undo button to un-reset it, then I would say not to have an "are you sure?" prompt if we could just click undo. 

If someone wants to track the same combat in multiple-separate campaigns, then you could create a clone button for the encounter and let us save it as a separate encounter under a new name with a default of "copy of [encounter name]".  But honestly, we could also just create the same encounter under another name from scratch if you added the save current state behavior I just described. 

I don't know if this is what you are referring to - but I have had issues with my browser refreshing the page or the occational mis-press of the backspace key, which also reloads the page. It's very frustrating for combat to basically stop because the encounter progress was lost. Luckily, my players are very understanding. 

Quote from Edem >>

Quote from gauchomate >>

The most important thing you should enable next is to auto save the current state of a combat.  Nothing fancy or overly complicated.  Simple and easy is important. I should be able to close the window and come back into the combat the next week with it being right where it was when I last left. Just like in google docs.  If I want to restart it, a simple restart campaign with an "are you sure?" prompt that can also be disabled is enough, hell make it really cool and allow us to click the undo button to un-reset it, then I would say not to have an "are you sure?" prompt if we could just click undo. 

If someone wants to track the same combat in multiple-separate campaigns, then you could create a clone button for the encounter and let us save it as a separate encounter under a new name with a default of "copy of [encounter name]".  But honestly, we could also just create the same encounter under another name from scratch if you added the save current state behavior I just described. 

 Auto save is on the list, but it will come towards the end. As a user this must be frustrating, but as a developer I understand the decision - all the changes up until then would most likely affect the data structure to be stored, which means the save functionality would need to be constantly updated / changed / refactored, slowing down the progress considerably.

Just bear with it for now.

An alternative, or a simpler idea would be a prompt before leaving the page - a simple "are you sure you want to leave this page?" would help a lot of us. A DM could just leave the webpage open, relying on the page to remain in its state for a longer time - and technical hiccups like random page reloads would be avoided. Also, that prompt would probably be quick to implement.

Devs, I love what you guys have made! I'm rooting for this, and asides from my experience with random page refreshing, I am so happy with what you have made thus far. Keep it up!