Interested in the "issue" with way of the shadows/ way of the element being an "artifact of two designers" with different expectations. It explains so much!
I found the answer to multiclassing interesting. It explains the lack of front loading at levels 1-3 (which is good).
"Never a big fan of grappling in D&D as a core concept to be honest." YES! Truer words have rarely been spoken...
...disagree about the warlock class design; for me, that makes it interesting (mix and match).
I missed the monk thing. What did he actually say?
The MC answer explains much of what I dislike about 5e class design. IMO, back loaded class design is strictly inferior to front loaded design. The core competencies of the class should all come online by level 4 at the very, very, latest. The rest should be "Mastery" concepts, improvements on the core stuff, etc.
I really hope Mike didn't work directly on the grappling rules, if that's the case. They still don't work great, and if he worked on it, I'm perfectly willing to blame the fact that a person who doesn't like the concept worked on realizing it in this edition.
Agree on warlocks. I'm glad he won't be able to change that short of a new edition. Also, some of his comments make me really, really, hope that if a 6e comes around, the playtest and feedback system remains in place, because I do not want him to have his way on a lot of this.
Shouldn't the obvious solution then be to get rid of the redundant nature cleric rather than killing the druid and stealing their stuff?
And yet the druids in Diablo and WoW are also essentially "full casters" with summons and nature spells. So it seems that the pop-culture idea of the druid still acknowledges them as powerful casters and not just shapeshifters with a smattering of spells.
Well, no, because there is absolutely nothing wrong with having both in the game. A Nature Cleric is just a cleric of a nature god, and is still very much a cleric. The Druid is it's own thing, and would be even if you replace Wild Shape with nature rituals, full talking to plants and animals, and upgraded nature themed summoning.
But it doens't need to have as much casting as it has to do the Druid things.
Same with the druid as a "nature caster." Clerics of the nature domain handle that perfectly well. Let the Druid shine!
How so? The nature cleric gets a handful of druid spells, and that is it. That's not a nature caster, that is
just a priest of a nature-themed god. If there were a Nature school of magic, a Nature Wizard might do Nature Caster ok, but in 5e right now the only class that actually has all the Nature Caster spells is the Druid. If you try to expand the Nature Cleric to actually cover the concept, that domain will have far more spells than other domains, and it will still have a bunch of Cleric baggage that doesn't fit the concept. And their team mates will be confused when it doesn't have Mass Cure Wounds because they filled their prepared spells with actual nature spells.
Or make it a "full caster" in the same way as the Warlock (with a different way to progress).
I agree with the idea of warlock style casting for druids. Again, though, I'd take some of the cleric spells away from it, and put in more druid specific spells, and make a lot of them ritual spells. Possibly also give the Druid some rituals that aren't even spell options at all, in the fform of class features. The Druid should be very magical, and should be able to all out focus on shapeshifter if the player wants.
Iit should also be able to summon like crazy, command the land (whether it's through spells or not is irrelevant), heal, especially heal conditions and boost natural healing, speak with animals, plants, and even stones and such, without needing spells. The Druid should just speak their"language" as if itt were a normal language, andd should be the only class that can do so.
Leave the existing spells for that sort of thing as they are, with whatever limitations they have, but the Druid should be able to just walk up to a squirell and ask it for directions, and have a chat with the tree the squirrel is on, and ask the hawk to forgo eating the squirrel for right now and scout for her, please, just like the bard can do with people.
And none of that needs to involve full casting, but it certainly is easier to design using at least a warlock casting basis. It needs to have some significant level of casting.
Because the Druid also definitely needs to be able to call lighting, conjure stuff, etc, and there are already spells for so much of it that there is just no reason to not use spells to give those abilities to the druid.
I agree that the fighter is less interesting than 4e.
The 5e Fighter is less interesting than what's in the bottom of my dirty clothes basket right now. The 5e Fighter may be less interesting than the dnd Fighter has ever been, depending on how you look at the 3.5 "this is a class made up of feats" Fighter. The 5e fighter is the least interesting, engaging, worthwhile part of 5e. Any character type the Fighter wants to try to be can just as easily be made elsewhere, and it will have actually interesting abilities.
I'd rather have a 3.5 Paladin at my table than a 5e Fighter.