I was hoping for something better myself. If I were to institute a sleeping in armor rule (and I haven't yet because it just hasn't been an issue in any of the games I run), I'd put a Con check in there first. Pass the check, and you're fine. Fail, and then you've got the consequences.
Better yet, you could just make it something simple like: if you're proficient in the armor you're sleeping in, you're fine. If you're not, then you don't gain the benefits of a long rest.
I doubt this would change much of anything really, the first one is still a hit against the more strength-prone heavy armor users, and the latter fix I can't see the point of because in all my years of playing D&D, I can't remember a single time when a player wore armor they weren't proficient in.
Indeed. Many of them just don't seem at all interesting. Others are quite cool conceptually but don't live up to their potential.
I blame pointlessly conservative design for this, honestly. There are so many subclasses that do barely anything to modify how the main class plays, and that to me is the biggest area of interest. From what people have reported I already know I'll have to revise the Arcane Archer or make my own, because it just doesn't fundamentally feel like an arcane imbued ranged damage dealer, and that's largely in part because of the small number of magical arrows they get to use.
As time goes on, I'm becoming more disillusioned with the playtest process. I feel like often times our feedback just doesn't make a difference. The monstrous races in Volo's, for instance: they are virtually unchanged from their draft form. Despite all the talk about the slower release schedule meaning better quality, I'm really not seeing that. It's like they can't even be bothered sometimes. I'm all for "rulings not rules", but I feel like lately they've been using it as a bit of a cop-out. "We'll just chuck these half-baked ideas out there and let the DMs polish them up properly."
Again I find myself agreeing. Very little appears to have changed on most of the options we've seen previously, and the Arcane Archer was even put through two playtests and still people (and myself among them) have big problems with it.
At the end of the day I might pick it up severely discounted, or maybe luck into it as a gift or something, but there are a lot of aspects that have dimmed my initial enthusiasm for the product. Reprinting spells and classes wholesale is incredibly lame no matter if you purchased prior products or not, filler junk like common items eat up space for no reason (yeah everyone gushes about the billowing cape, I'm sitting here wondering how many rules could have fit in that section), and the painfully egregious 17 pages of
names have left me very sour on this release. At this point I'm honestly just waiting for a 3rd party supplement to pick up the slack and give me some actual rules or classes worth using because it doesn't seem like Wizards wants to do so anytime soon.