Chaosmancer
Legend
I'll agree that they dragged their feet. But continuing to work on a projected fewer and fewer people want isn't a good business decision. "Obligation" isn't a good reason to release a product.
Same number of people, maybe even more. Smaller percentage of people. That is an important distinction.
If they started work on a trilogy and the reception to the first release was cool, they shouldn't be obligated to finish.
Especially as it will literally be coming at the expense of content that the current audience DOES want. There's a finite amount of hours in the day, and they can only log so many hours of work.
As a fan of Patrick Rothfuss, I must reject your assertion that a trilogy started is not obligated to be finished. In fact, the number of times I’ve been disappointed by a series suddenly without an end drives me to reject that line of thinking almost fully.
This is also why I would not declare “this is a trilogy” when I released book one, if I wasn’t sure I would go on to finish the rest of the trilogy. You say you are going to do something, you do it.
Really, this is why WotC was so secretive in the late 3e/ 4e era. Because when they changed their plans people got upset. So, the "mistake" they made was keeping the fans in the loop.
And, personally, I'd rather have the company reactive and responsive to changes and shifting feedback than maintaining a plan years after it was devised.
You know, I agree I would rather a company keep us in the loop and be reactive.
However, if that means we can’t trust what they say they will deliver because the audience might change, then they have gone from reactive to wishy-washy.
I mean, they just announced Ravnica and Eberron a little while ago. But they could easily cancel those projects to make more time for the next FR book that the larger percentage of the audience wants. After all, they have only so many man-hours to put towards products and we might get a flood of hardcore FR fans fleeing from PF2 who really don’t care about these products WoTC just said they would do.
I don’t find that to be acceptable behavior. For myself or for a company.
I could say very similar things about the PHB sorcerer given how unpopular wild magic is. Should they redo the sorcerer as well? There's a bunch of fixes they could do (bloodlines giving spells, rephrasing metamagic).
Or… they could just release more options, which largely fixes the problem.
Releasing a new subclass does not fix the problems with the sorcerer, and it especially does not fix the issues with the Wild Magic or Draconic Sorcerers.
I don’t want to get off track talking about how badly I feel sorcerers need a fix. This is a thread about Rangers. Sorcerers have been high on my list of fixes for a long time though, and I’ve looked into many solutions. I’ve also mostly given up hope that WoTC understands what I see as wrong with the Sorcerer, since they keep doing the exact same thing every time they release a new subclass for it.
Regardless, the beast master isn't "half" the ranger. It's half the options, but maybe a quarter of the class features. Less if you include spells.
So redoing the entire ranger to fix the beast master is unnecessary.
Half the ranger options, you can be a Hunter or you can be a Beastmaster.
Sure, all Rangers might get a bunch other abilities, but you don’t get to choose those. You don’t get to choose whether or not you get Land’s Stride, you will get it. It isn’t a Ranger “option” it is part of the Ranger design.
And I listed some problems with the core ranger as well.
What they *should* do is just offer a variant pet using ranger subclass. This skirts all the problems with releasing a variant ranger, as people are used to additive options. Drop an "animal lord" that fills the same niche but has slightly different flavour and variant powers. Which lets people play that kind of character, but doesn't confuse people with contradictory options or forces players to revise their character.
Heck, they could even have two. Have a "warg" option that is more utility and lets the ranger see through the eyes of its pet, which is more of a hardy familiar. And a combat pet option, with the beast being all about kicking butt.
Your hamburgers are awful.
There is nothing wrong with our hamburgers good sir, but if you are adamant we can provide you with some beef burgers, and make any changes you would like.
And we are supposed to accept this as a legitimate offer to our complaint. We won’t fix the thing with the problem, we will give you something that is what it should have been the first time.
If the response to a poor quality product is for them to release it again and make even more money… what's the incentive to get it right the first time?
Well, it seems there is no reason to even care about your quality. If you give bad quality you either argue “where do you stop fixing things” or “we can just make something else that is similar instead”