This One Goes to . . . Ten [Merged four Oct 29 Playtest Package announcement threads]

Manbearcat said:

Dwarves now have advantage on poison saves rather than immunity. Good deal.

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This change makes me sad. I liked the immunity.

Screw rogues, their sneak attack has requirements like advantage. I am making a fighter, creating my own scheme, taking Deadly Attack at 1st level, and doing as much damage as a rogue without any requirements at all.

I'm having a hard time figuring out how they are doing the spell scaling. For example, Cone of Cold, a 5th level spell, does less damage than a Fireball, a 3rd level spell? Oh sure, it has a greater AoE, but still....it's a spell that's two levels higher. Methinks they need some tweaking there.

Walker N. Waistz said:

Screw rogues, their sneak attack has requirements like advantage. I am making a fighter, creating my own scheme, taking Deadly Attack at 1st level, and doing as much damage as a rogue without any requirements at all.

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If you make a Fighter, you wouldn't be creating your own Scheme, you'd be creating your own Fighting Style. Which all of them already give Deadly Strike as a Maneuver for free. So what you are talking about you already can do.

It's really pretty self explanatory: if all you want to do is the most damage in combat, you play a Fighter and get to use Deadly Strike. If what you want to do is a bit less damage in combat but gain an extra four skills on top of the four you already get... you choose Rogue.

Raunalyn said:

I'm having a hard time figuring out how they are doing the spell scaling. For example, Cone of Cold, a 5th level spell, does less damage than a Fireball, a 3rd level spell? Oh sure, it has a greater AoE, but still....it's a spell that's two levels higher. Methinks they need some tweaking there.

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If Cone of Cold had an extremely potent rider effect (immobillized, pushed and knocked prone in difficult terrain, slowed, restrained, etc) then the lower damage would be more than made up for. As is (without one), its a mess (an presumably an unQCed mess). Difficult terrain until the end of the encounter is insufficient. Target is Slowed and on difficult terrain? Ok. Probably enough action denial potential there to warrant a 5th level spell.

GX.Sigma said:

Wait... Sneak Attack says: "When you hit a creature...provided you have advantage against it or it is in the reach of a creature friendly to you."

So in other words, not a sneak attack. Every attack.

I thought the point of making it optional was to make it specifically a sneak attack, not an "extra damage every round" power that every rogue has to take to meet damage expectations. If that's all it is, just give them Deadly Strike by default.

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Isn't Sneak Attack just a worse version of the Fighters Deadly Strike? Why add a maneuver that's just worse?

(It's worse because it does the same damage, but has some conditions to when it can be applied)

Yes, sneak attack is worse than Deadly strike. However, the rogue gets Skill Mastery, which allows him to add his expertise dice to skill checks, and 4 extra skills.

So, if you want to rip it up in combat, play the class appropriately named "Fighter", and if you want to play the guy who rips it up in all sorts of noncombat situations, while, when circumstances are right also rips it up in combat, play the Rogue.

Manbearcat said:

If Cone of Cold had an extremely potent rider effect (immobillized, pushed and knocked prone in difficult terrain, slowed, restrained, etc) then the lower damage would be more than made up for. As is (without one), its a mess (an presumably an unQCed mess). Difficult terrain until the end of the encounter is insufficient. Target is Slowed and on difficult terrain? Ok. Probably enough action denial potential there to warrant a 5th level spell.

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Exactly. Then compare that to another 5th level spell on the cleric list, Flame Strike. 4d6 fire plus 4d6 radiant in an AoE? Sure, it's a smaller AoE, but nonetheless...

I'm genuinely baffled.

Monster to-hit still seems awful.

I think I'm mostly happy with the direction things are going. A few things...

-the human made it through another iteration without being nerfed into oblivion.

-I like the idea of Wizard traditions; I didn't think I'd like the return of encounter powers but actually reading the rules, they didn't bug me that much, especially since the Academic gets a different thing. I wish they'd change the name to the generic "Magic-User" though, so that it could be used as an umbrella for the "Wizard" tradition, the "Sorcery" tradition, the "Wu Jen" tradition, or the "Battlemage" tradition, or the "Necromancer" tradition. Wizard has cultural baggage. I'd like the class to be broad enough to cover archetypes that don't necessarily fall under what we think of as a "wizard"

-Glad they're going with Patron deity archetypes (Lightbringer, Trickster, etc.) rather than specific deities. That makes it easier to port the rules over to my campaign. Overall, I think the cleric is just clearer in this version, than the previous one.

-I think I'm glad at-will magic has been toned down a bit. It does make the 1st level feat for the Magic-User specialist (whatever it's called now, I'm working off memory) useless for the Wizard class.

-need to look over the spells more.

-like the two-weapon fighting rules, though I'm trying to figure out what they mean by "light" weapons. Those don't appear to be a property. Do they mean "finesse" weapons? EDIT: Okay I liked the two weapon fighting rules, until I noticed that you have disadvantage with each attack. And, you cannot gain advantage, so you can never negate that. Let us count the penalties: Disadvantage, one weapon must be light/finesse, which means no larger than d6 damage die, a main hand weapon that tops out at d8, and no attribute bonus to either weapon die. Contrast with the greatsword doing d12+Str. Heck, that stacks up badly damage wise versus longsword and shield. That's terrible, I'll pass.

-I think I'm okay with Expertise dice being a mechanic shared by the non-spell using classes.

-hate the skill list. You brought back "Use rope"; really? Not really happy about Spot, Listen & Search being broken up into 3 skills. It seems like it was done just so the Rogue with an 8 Wisdom can be good at finding traps.

-Not really really 5e related, but maybe think about divorcing perception from the skill list completely, in fact, divorce it from Wisdom. It's never been a good fit. It croggles my brain why the priest should be better at detecting an ambush than the battle hardened warrior. On top of it, the ability to hyperspecialize in perception skills drains the drama out of the game. It's time perception and detection got moved into their own mechanic. The skill list was never a good fit for them.

I'll probably think of others later.