Paul Farquhar
Legend
Meh. Using your Channel Divinity, for 1 minute.1d6+level temp HP every round without concentration? To the entire party? That is so good.
Artillerist can do it for 1 hour for free.
Meh. Using your Channel Divinity, for 1 minute.1d6+level temp HP every round without concentration? To the entire party? That is so good.
Meh. Using your Channel Divinity, for 1 minute.
Artillerist can do it for 1 hour for free.
Snip
No draw backs. Now I know people can disagree on this, and people like different things, but one of the things I liked about the Wild Magic Surge was that things could go horribly wrong. You can cast grease or fireball centered on yourself, you can turn into a potted plant, you can get older or younger, everybody within 30' could gain vulnerability to damage.
The Wild Magic barbarian has none of that. Everything is good, and not just good, but good for you and your friends. You can't control what magic will happen, but you can control who is effected by it. If it is protective lights, it protects you and your friends. If you grow a bunch of plants around you, they only hinder your enemies. I mean, sure, magic can do that kind of stuff, but if it is really random, why does it always recognize who is friendly and who isn't? Why doesn't it randomly effect everyone? Or randomly give the bad guys a bonus?
Now I understand this is supposed to be a benefit, so the majority should be beneficial, but you can throw a few curve balls in there to make things interesting. I mean, if you always won at gambling, it wouldn't be fun anymore. Sure you would still do it to make some money, but now it is just a chore.
I think in part because of the Wild sorcerer. Most people avoid the subclass like the plague because of that potential to fireball and kill your team. So people would see the Wild Magic Barbarian as just a detriment to their team and not pick it.
So I got my book today, and did my usual quick skim....delving into a few things that interested me. My general quick and dirty thoughts:
1) Player Options: Most of these are "fine"...honestly its mostly fluff to my eyes. The ranger changes are at least interesting. The Monk ones....why does WOTC hate the monk so much, like that healing ability is a ridiculously weak use of ki.
2) Artificier: Compared to the UA, looks like they tightened up a few abilities and move some things into infusions. They also took out the weird extra attack with magic items thing. Don't have much more to say until I dig in.
3) My first read of the Fighter subclass "Rune Knight" gave me a bit of an eyebrow raise. It looks really cool, but man some of things abilities seem pretty darn strong. Its probably one of the favorite ones I looked over.
5) Feats: All of the feats look solid enough. WOTC is clearly embracing the idea of "multiclassing through feats"...not as a requirement, but as another avenue to allow characters to "dip their toe in the water". That said...I WANT MORE FEATS!!! This is actually a common complaint about my table, that the players miss the plethora of 3.5 feats and really want to see feats in more places.
6) The Group Patron section is just all fluff to me....and fluff I wasn't really looking for. Its a cool idea that many dms already use, its a good idea, but doesn't need such a large amount of space dedicated to it.
7) Spells: My favorite thing in the book are the new summon spells. I really really like the new format. Effectively you summon a specific type of creature...but you get a few choices. Example, you summon an elemental and choose which type. You summon a fiend, and choose between a devil, demon, or yugoloth. Then it provides you a statblock. Your choice means you access certain parts of the stat block and not others. For example, the devil gets one type of attack, the demon gets another. Further, the level you summon the spell is a major factor in the statblock, so you can easily scale the summons up with level...instead of having to just summons hordes of things.
It feels like a good balance, provides players the statblock (no MM needed), gives them a solid base with some customization, and with some good spell level scaling. I like it.
The other spells seems all well and good, my only beef..... clerics have been shafted in the spell department in Xanathars and now Tasha's. Everyone else to enjoy a plethora of new spells, clerics get 2.
9) The sidekick rules remind me of the old npc classes. They are decently useful if the DM wants to throw in another character without overshadowing anyone.
10) There is a section called Parleying with Monsters I actually really like. Its short and simple, but it offers good ideas on how to diplomacy with monsters but not make it "pass or fail". Effectively it provides things the monster might be interested in, that if the party provides, the monster would be more cooperative.
11) I like the Environmental Hazards section a lot. It provides a lot of options to have whole landscapes altered by forces, such as a haunting or infestation. Then it provides random results as the party explores to help sell the weirdness of the new landscape...its solid.
12) Puzzles: Now personally I am not a puzzle guy, but some players are my table are, so having some new ones to use on them is handy. They also come with some pretty handouts in the back that you can copy to help make the puzzles pop. That said, the first puzzle in the book noted as "Easy".... damn that one was not Easy for me!!!
So all in all what did I think?
1) New subclasses will get some use.
2) New magic spells and magic items will see a lot of use. Probably the meatiest section
3) New feats are solid for certain classes. I know my players will be disappointed there were not more of them.
4) I will make solid use of the Environmental Hazards...and an occasional use of the puzzles....assuming I can prevent my players from looking at that section!
5) About 1/5 of the book is just stuff that I think is fluffy or uninteresting....overall a bit better than Xanathar's for me.
I don't understand why the multiclass spellcasting feats all say, "You can also cast these spells using spell slots you have of the appropriate level," when none of the original multiclass spellcasting feats have errata to say that. Just a bit odd.
The language of the PHB errata implies that the intent is for it to work the same way as these new feats. It's just not quite as clear as the new phrasing. Maybe they'll rephrase it the next PHB printing, or maybe it takes too much space on the page.
Here's the current PHB errata.
"Magic Initiate (p. 168). The second paragraph has been changed to “In addition, choose one 1st-level spell to learn from that same list. Using this feat, you can cast the spell once at its lowest level, and you must finish a long rest before you can cast it in this way again.”
"Spell to learn", "using this feat", and "in this way" are the relevant phrases that make it work the same as the Tasha's feats.
Jeremy Crawford has also clarified in the past that it works that way.
I have been pleasantly surprised at how fun the cleric class is to play. The class, (mostly), has great action economy, and is extremely magical.Non-arcane casters have been shafted most of this edition, IMO. I think druids and clerics have generally poor spell lists regardless of the books your DM lets you use. In general I've been dissatisfied with clerics and druids in this edition
It was never a penalty. There just wasn't a bonus, which is perfectly fine in 5e. It's easy street anyway.Now they dont have to be penalised with sub-optimal stats anymore when they want to play those concepts.
Huzzah!