While Wizards of the Coast has stopped short of giving us an exact roadmap for the Unearthed Arcana it has been rolling out as proposed changes to 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dungeons & Dragons ahead of next year’s revised edition, it has been largely consistent so far. The seven playtests to date have dealt entirely with classes and subclasses, changing the former and introducing new versions of the latter. However, Playtest 8 is instead about building houses and changing cantrips, and is apparently a "bonus" playtest before we go back to the Player's Handbook. But in the video explaining what’s included in the latest Unearthed Arcana, the feedback to previous playtests was brought up, and I'm left with more questions than answers.
I'm largely sympathetic to the designers of Dungeons & Dragons. This is a huge game whose rules have served as the foundation for probably over a thousand others down the decades, and if you change one thing you end up impacting seven other things at the same time. I love 5e, and while the online, live-service platform that was first revealed as OneD&D last year is a bad idea, there are parts of 5e I think could be better, and we’ve been seeing glimpses of that in these tests. Case in point, Playtest 8 overhauls two pretty useless cantrips and makes both of them viable. But sympathetic or not, some changes have gone down poorly amongst the playerbase, and WotC's reaction to that is worrying.
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It's telling that, in a playtest where a brand new mechanic and an overhaul to a core pillar of the game, all of the comments on both YouTube and Reddit are instead about the short feedback section at the video's end. Mostly, the comment that rogues, rangers, paladins, clerics, and bards will be getting no more playtests received the most flak. We don't know for sure if that means the most recent version playtested was so great it has been locked in, or whether that told them an earlier version was the way to go. All we know is the other classes are subject to change, but those five are all sorted.
For rogues, paladins, and clerics, I think that's fine. You gotta stop some time and nothing much has happened with those to make me fear for their future. I'm a little surprised barbarians didn't make the list, since they seemed fine going into the playtests, and all the proposed changes have been fine (168💙澳洲幸运5开奖网:particularly♏ the latest wise viking subclass), and there's never been much fuss about them. They hit things, they’re fine. Druids have been the most controversial, so it's no surprise they're still in line for changes, and while fighters seem to be moving in the right direction, I wouldn't object to a final go around. But I'm not even sure what a ranger or bard is in the 2024 revision, and that's a concern.
In time, Wizards of the Coast will reveal the fully revised Player's Handbook, and at that point all will become clear. But even with druids, messy as the rollout has been, you can see the design choices. The designers want Wild Shape to cause less strain on DMs and keep the game movin🦩g faste🍌r, while trying to add different elemental approaches to subclasses. With monks, there has been an emphasis 🤪on Unarmed Strike. The revision is trying to connect monk and Unarmed Strike more than they ever have been, and while I'm not sure the approach is for me, there's a clear identity.
Ranger and bard both lack this sense of self. Some playtests have focused on giving bard a greater emphasis on being the party face, giving more options for roleplay and Performance-based success. Others have tried to make it more viable in combat, tightening its focus on damage and casting. Crucially, the universal spell list concept was floated and then dismissed (despite being hugely popular for bard), and I'm not sure where that leaves it. There are options around this, especially with Jack of All Trades ensuring bards are always of some use somewhere, but we haven't really playtested any of them.
As for ranger, it's a class I use a lot, and I like the current version, so I don't necessarily fear for the future of its viability. It's more that, like druid and monk, I don't think it's done yet. Much like bard, the most popular part of the ranger updates were the shared spell lists, which have already been scrapped. So either they're being brought back - why not just say that? - and bard and ranger can be locked in, or, after having hundreds of hours playtesting two classes reliant on a single feature, WotC is getting rid of that feature and throwing out all of the data that suggested it was a good idea. As I say, I'm sympathetic to the hard work the designers do, but I'm struggling to understand this one.
Without universal spell lists, I have no idea what the next iteration of either a bard or a ranger is supposed to look like. No one does. Wizards of the Coast, however, feels as though it has cracked it, and is moving on to other tests instead in true ‘just trust us’ fashion. Whatever version of bards and rangers have been locked in, I hope they're good ones.