I don't think anyone saw this coming!
This is a concept test. They want to see how people feel about the pet now, before they fine tune the balance.
I agree that it'd be best to hand off a healing draught to someone prior to combat so that you can save that action cost. However, you can only hand off one; you can't provide healing draughts to everybody in the party, at least not at the same time.
You'll have to rip the mechanical rhino from my mounted combatant gnome gunslinger's cold, dead hands.
I think you are misreading this, because I can't find wording to suggest that anywhere.But if you hand off a healing draught you can't use ANY off your other alchemist powers until it's used, because you can only have one item out.
Emphasis added.Healing Draught said:If not used, the vial and its contents disappear after 1 hour. While the vial exists, you can’t use this formula.
I'm beginning to wonder if our upcoming Big Book of Crunch is actually going to specifically update important mechanics for the various settings, considering how much of the UAs seem dedicated towards that end. Perhaps we'll get a lot of mechanical options, and then a chapter dedicated to each of the main settings (outside of FR which already has SCAG, and Planescape which will probably get its own Manual of the Planes-type book) to update them and their particular peculiarities for 5e, with references to all the updated crunch from the rest of the book. That way we could get all these new classes, racial options for warforged, thri-kreen, kender (I heard you all groan there), and the like, and a small bestiary with setting-specific creatures like draconians. With WotC wanting to take the route of multi-purpose books, it would be a good idea to combine the common requests for more player options and for setting-specific stuff to be updated to 5e....
It doesn't fly for *combat* pets. This is basically a Large familiar, which also don't scale. (And ranger pets DID scale... just not well.)Sorry, that doesn't fly. They already have feedback on non-scaling pets. There was so much backlash that they redid a PHB class, whihc they really really really were trying to avoid according to a lot of what they put out.
So NO, it doesn't get a free pass of "They intentionally went against two years of feedback and an admitted mistake 'just to see' if perhaps people changed their mind". That's insane.