D&D (2024) Jeremy Crawford Gives an Overview of the New Unearthed Arcana

The upcoming Unearthed Arcana playtest packet for One D&D gets a preview from WotC's Jeremy Crawford. This is apparently the largest of these playtest packets so far, and the biggest Unearthed Arcana they have ever done, at 50 pages long.

It contains 5 classes, new spells, new feats, a revised rules glossary, and the new weapon mastery system.

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[Veltharis ap Rylix]

I’d be shocked if it is. Hopefully the blade pact just gives you EB as a melee spell attack while wielding your pact weapon, and you use your weapon reach and other properties like light, finesse, any mastery properties, etc.

That obviates any need for the extra attack invocation, and lets existing EB invocations work for blade pact.

Let Hexblade make you tougher and gain an extra curse and all that jazz. Keep the “attack with Cha” stuff, because no patron should ever require a specific pact to be effective.

Not saying that Hexblade should be merged into Pact of Blade entirely, just that there's an imbalance in the Patron-Pact dynamic there that should probably be smoothed out a bit.

For anyone wanting to make a Pact of Blades Warlock at present, the benefits for choosing the Hexblade patron heavily outweigh those for basically any other patron. Better armor/shield options, attack with CHA, a bunch of bonus smite and defensive spells, eventually gets a 50% miss chance on attacks from their hexed target by burning reactions, etc.

I definitely think Hexblade still has a place as a subclass, but it shouldn't be so heavily weighted toward benefitting a Pact of Blades character over any other pact, and a Pact of Blades character shouldn't feel like any Patron other than Hexblade is a less effective option. Let Pact of Blades carry most of the weight for "weapon/melee-focused warlock" and refocus Hexblade to be primarily about the "hexes and curses" angle.

 

[I'm A Banana]

So, martial cantrips. Martial cantrips are a good idea!

 

[DEFCON 1]

WotC doesn't hate Monks. They hate Psions and Warlords. Get it right.

 

[mamba]

The classes of this famously monikered Class-based system are not part of the system.

they are not part of the rules, just like monsters are not

 

[mamba]

I think they are pretty committed to templates for wildshape

I hope so, it is a better approach, just needs more templates or separate features to add to the existing ones

 

[OldSchoolGamerGirl]

Not saying that Hexblade should be merged into Pact of Blade entirely, just that there's an imbalance in the Patron-Pact dynamic there that should probably be smoothed out a bit.

If they let you choose your attack stat as default the hexblade would not be as 'needed'' it's the cha attack I see it mostly garbed for.

 

[OldSchoolGamerGirl]

So, martial cantrips. Martial cantrips are a good idea!

Yes please and thank you

especially non combat ones.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Take heart, it means that while doing the internal playtest they didnt think it stood up to the other martial options so they are trying to make it even better before releasing it into the wild.

Actually, all it means is that they didn't get a consensus that it was ready for public playtest. There's no "why" as of yet, and certainly no indication that anyone thought it wasn't as strong as other options.

 

[Kannik]

I think that's likely it. I think that they released the Druid to see what people thought of the general direction (Fixed statblocks) and weren't ready for the pushback on the execution, which they weren't all that worried about. (It's not the final Druid! Don't panic!)

This reminds me of when we present our preliminary designs (as architects) to our clients. They can get quite animated/agitated from an aspect of the proposal, even though it's very much in the early stages and intended to view some possible directions, not necessarily the details.

(We've now chosen to never show anything more than sketches or a sketchy 3D view of our concepts to the clients, as we found that more realistic 3D renderings seem to lead people to believe that the design is more 'set.' Keeping the drawing rough, even if it is still 3D modeled, helps keep things fluid such that even if they totally don't like the direction things remain calm. More difficult to do this in text and for a larger audience, though...)

 

[Micah Sweet]

but that is what a few of us have been saying. It’s not player side backwards compatibility it’s adventure and DM side.

It sounds like they are saying that outright

About time. General claims of backwards compatibility always seemed dubious.