You have just described every monster ability ever in relation to first encountering it. Would you think a slightly oversized barnyard chicken turning you to stone is counterintuitive? I sure would, unless I already knew all about a cockatrice.
Obviously weird monsters aren't familiar humanoids who have just gained a massively powerful new ability, so that's not what's being discussed.
Part of the game is discovery through play, even if that discovery is sometimes painful. A new edition is very much a new game and carrying too many assumptions with you from another version might not always be to your advantage.
Sure, but this is bad design, even accounting for that.
Back when 3E came out, we returned to D&D after a long hiatus. My buddy (our resident Leeroy Jenkins) was playing a fighter. We were fighting some humanoids at a castle wall and he drinks a potion of spider climb, runs up and down the wall to engage the boss in the courtyard - a fire giant. His fighter was tent spiked into the ground on round 1. " When did fire giants get multiple attacks!!!"
Lesson (painfully) learned.
That's the precise opposite of this. The natural assumption, having played 3E, would be that high-level fighter-like monster WOULD have multiple attacks.
Here, the natural assumption is that ganging up on a PC might gain Hobbies
some minor advantage. Not that it would MORE THAN DOUBLE their average damage, or take it to the point that they are virtually certain to down most PCs in a single hit!
I think a good approach would be to play as if you were in that situation instead of so much from the metagame angle-in other words ROLEPLAY during a roleplaying game. It might just help you survive until you learn more about the (meta) game world.
This is just condescending nonsense. The Hobbie ability is virtually pure metagame. The answer to it is metagaming (tight focus fire, particularly - not something real people use in medieval-style combat, typically - it's extremely dangerous, because IRL, you have to concentrate less on defence to attack someone who isn't threatening you when there are other threats to you - I'd have no problem if this required the other Hobbie to be un-threatened, btw).
EDIT - In fact I might well use that as the fix - Require the Hobgoblin to have another Hobgoblin adjacent to the target and for that Hobgoblin to have no enemies adjacent to him other than the target. I'd still re-name it from the vague-as-heck "Martial Advantage".
You are wrong:
sneak attack in the last playtest was +1d6 at first level. Too little in my opinion. It may now be a bonus action to sneak attack once per turn that deals an extra +2d6 damage for all we know.
Sneak attack used to be +2d6 damage in a former playtest which felt right. So I am crossing my fingers for +2d6 sneak attack early on (maybe from level 2). Makes the rogue scary.
What am I wrong about? You've failed to specify.
