not sure what you are referring to, but if they did it is probably deserved. I think overall it is a bump up in power level
I think (for the most part) that the result is a
little bit of power-creep, but only because they (AFAICT and hopefully) took a bunch of lackluster features that are unpopular (usually because they aren't, or at least are seen as, not very good) and gave them a bump-polish.
Which, IMO, is awesome because I'd love to look at a list of features and have to actually
think about what I want to take, instead of discounting like half of them because they look like crap. And I'm not even remotely a power gamer! Just some stuff can be so lame compared to other things, it's hard to take it seriously enough to bother considering.
It's particularly bad when a feature works really well for your character concept, but mechanically is utterly uninspiring. Or worse, will never actually come up (or rarely) during the course of a game. Why pick it, when you can pick one of those "always on" type features?
Some stuff
needed a bump. And a bump is a lot more fun than bringing everything down. It evens out if you bump monsters too, which it looks like they're doing.
