D&D 5E The new races in the free PDF for elemental evils kinda seem off in places

[BRKNdevil]

Quick question. Do the Aarakocra seem overpowered with its 50ft fly speed off the bat? I looked over the Deep Gnome and It seemed fine, considering the Advantage on all the mental stat saves from magic are the same for all gnomes. The Goliaths seem liked they got screwed with powerful build just allowing you to carry double the normal weight. Finally, the Genasi seemed to go all over the scale of being slightly above average to middle to below average

 

[jgsugden]

They're all fine in my book.

Flight is handy, but it isn't the be-all-end-all. It is dangerous (what happens if you're incapacitated while flying? Splat is what happens.) and the benefits of it are limited in a lot of dungeon settings. The flight rules are a bit light right now, but common sense flight movement rulings are going to put further limits on the character's ability to do things in the air. I expect aarakocra to be effective while alive, but to have a higher mortality rate amongst PCs due to falling damage when they get nailed out of the sky.

 

[bganon]

Fly speed is pretty much the only thing Aarakocra get - and they can only use it with light armor, they have a small penalty to land speed, and the talons are garbage. At least their ability score increases are in useful stats. Without flight I don't see why anybody would play one -- how satisfying would it be to play a bird-man that can't fly?

Stone's endurance and +2 Str/+1 Con already make Goliaths extremely good Barbarians or Fighters - having powerful build grant a weapon die increase or something would just make other races seem useless in comparison.

The Genasi seem pretty hard to evaluate to me. There's a lot of situationally-dependent stuff there, with Fire maybe being the most broadly useful. Air seems weakest at first, but Levitate can be used offensively and at early levels can easily be a save-or-lose.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

The Genasi seem pretty mediocre. Fire seems about the best, but it still feels like a weak tiefling. Con as the saving throw determinant makes it iffy, as that is going to be many classes tertiary score. Burning Hands loses steam relatively quickly, while Hellish Rebuke is nice in that as a reaction, you don't have to give much up to use it.

 

[True_Blue]

I was underwhelmed by the races, but then again, I felt the same about the Eberron races also.

The only genasi I would really want to play is the fire genasi. Its definitely way better than the others. The water genasi is all right. The air and earth genasi I think just plain aren't good. I don't necessarily need every race to be exactly balanced, which can't happen anyways, but the air and earth genasi's are considerably worse than almost all of the other races. I know some people will pick them anyways for fun, but I feel like they should have slightly better abilities.

When looking over the genasi and even the shifters, I sometimes have a hard time believe multiple people actually looked at those options and said "yeah, they seem comparable". There are *clearly" better choices, and not even by a slight amount, but some have cool or useful abilities, and some literally have almost nothing or very situational abilities. The only thing I can think of is that they are ok having some options be so bad because there are also good options? I don't know, it doesn't make sense to me. Its just weird no one read over the genasi and said.. "hey, maybe we should give the air genasi a resistance, or the earth genasi a cool ability". I dunno, its weird to me.

 

[neobolts]

Quick question. Do the Aarakocra seem overpowered with its 50ft fly speed off the bat? I looked over the Deep Gnome and It seemed fine, considering the Advantage on all the mental stat saves from magic are the same for all gnomes. The Goliaths seem liked they got screwed with powerful build just allowing you to carry double the normal weight. Finally, the Genasi seemed to go all over the scale of being slightly above average to middle to below average

The arakocra weren't built with the assumed balance considerations, and the opening paragraph of their entry warns DMs to give extra consideration before allowing them. Some of the genasi are not very exciting.