D&D 5E Player's Handbook Official Errata

There's a new printing of the 5E Player's Handbook a'coming. It "corrects some typos while clarifying a few rules." But for those of us who already have a 5E Player's Handbook, there's a one-page PDF of official errata now available. It contains 51 items, covering classes, equipment, feats, spells, and more.

Download it right here! The errata has already been incorporated into the free Basic Rules.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

EDIT: Of course, I majorly dislike this new RAW, for the reasons I described a couple post back.

You're still doing 66 points of damage with Scorching Ray V (2d6+5 x6, assuming CHA 20). Is that really so bad? And then you can throw in a quickened Fire Bolt on top of that for another 21.5 points of damage: total DPR is 87.5 (against a low-AC foe), which outmatches even a GWM Polearm Master Barbarian's DPR. And you can do that at range, not to mention other tricks like Twinned/Heightened Hold Person/Monster and Heightened Polymorph[1]. (Wild Sorcs are better at this than Dragon Sorcs are, due to Bend Luck, but even Dragon Sorcs can do it pretty well.)

I don't love Sorcerers in 5E, I think they are boring due to the restricted spell list, but they are still viable even without Twinning Scorching Ray.

[1] The new errata makes it very clear that if you Polymorph the Tarrasque into a mouse and drown it in a fishbowl, it stays dead even after it turns back into a Tarrasque. "Suffocating (p. 183). If you run out ofbreath, you can’t regain hit points or bestabilized until you can breathe again." Just to be safe I'd do it in something larger than a fishbowl, but you get the idea.

 

[Delandel]

You're still doing 66 points of damage with Scorching Ray V (2d6+5 x6, assuming CHA 20). Is that really so bad? And then you can throw in a quickened Fire Bolt on top of that for another 21.5 points of damage: total DPR is 87.5 (against a low-AC foe), which outmatches even a GWM Polearm Master Barbarian's DPR. And you can do that at range, not to mention other tricks like Twinned/Heightened Hold Person/Monster and Heightened Polymorph[1]. (Wild Sorcs are better at this than Dragon Sorcs are, due to Bend Luck, but even Dragon Sorcs can do it pretty well.)

Where are you getting (2d6+5)*6 from? You only get 6 rays from casting it in a 6th level spell slot. Unless you could twin -- but you can't anymore.

Also, they nerfed Elemental Affinity, so you're only applying CHA to a single ray now.

I've already shown my math at high levels in a previous post -- which, by the way, I don't much care for in the first place, because the last Wizards survery already shows that hardly anyone will ever be actually playing levels 11+. But yeah, a GWM Polearm Master Barbarian is going to laugh at any attempts at a sorcerer to keep up in damage outside of a lucky Fireball.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

BTW, I also just noticed that the "new" interpretation of spell damage rolls makes Wild Sorcerer's Spell Bombardment feature pretty good instead of trash. Whenever you cast Magic Missile, you roll 1d4+1, but if you roll a 4 you get to reroll with a +4, so 1/16 of the time you will do 9 points of damage per missile whomever you hit: 63 points of damage with Magic Missile V, instead of the 17.5 of a regular Magic Missile V.

I still don't think Wild Sorcs are well-suited as blasters (they're mostly debuffers), but at least this explains why the 5E designers thought Spell Bombardment was an 18th level feature instead of irrelevant trash: it scales with number of effects.

 

[scottcoz]

deleted

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Where are you getting (2d6+5)*6 from?

Also, they nerfed Elemental Affinity, so you're only applying CHA to a single ray now.

I've already shown my math at high levels in a previous post -- which, by the way, I don't much care for in the first place, because the last Wizards survery already shows that hardly anyone will ever be actually playing levels 11+.

(2d6+5)*6: Scorching Ray gives you three rays at 2nd level, plus one ray per extra spell level, so Scorching Ray V will have six rays. Do I misremember? I'm AFB but I'm pretty sure about this.

You roll 2d6+5, and multiply that by the number of rays that hit. See details in post #173 of this thread. (http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...-Official-Errata/page18&p=6638271#post6638271)

 

[famousringo]

I don't think the Sorcerer has changed as much as some people think. The new wording for Elemental Affinity is the same as Empowered Evocation, but Crawford has been explicit in the past that each Magic Missile is intended to benefit from Empowered Evocation.

New wording: "Empowered Evocation (p. 117). The damage bonus applies to one damage roll of a spell, not multiple rolls". I don't know what that's supposed to mean, but check this out:

https://twitter.com/jeremyecrawford/status/557820938402947072








If we use Jeremy's twitter response as a guide to interpreting the errata (sigh), then Magic Missile and Scorching Ray only roll 2d6 once (+CHA/INT), and then you apply that to the target X number of times. It benefits "only one damage roll" so it's not (1d6+CHA)+(1d6+CHA), it's just 2d6+CHA times 3/5/7/whatever. So Magic Missile/Scorching Ray will have a very high variance.

Anyway, the only Sorcerer "nerf" I see in this errata is therefore the Twinning thing, which was controversial anyway. Evokers are actually hurt much more because Overchannel has been clarified to not work at all on cantrips.

I gave XP for this clarification of the clarification, but then I saw that these tweets were made back in January. Now I'm not quite convinced whether the Twitter ruling which explicitly states +stat damage applies to each bolt is correct, or the new errata that seems to imply +stat damage only applies once to a single bolt is correct. I'm not quite clear as to whether your clarification of the clarification has actually made the rules clear.

You can keep the XP for a valiant effort at trying to untangle the knot. This is why I drink.

 

[Eric V]

Yet things like Contagion were given a free pass.

Makes you wonder how much thought and discussion really went into this errata.

The same amount that went into the last Unearthed Arcana!

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I gave XP for this clarification of the clarification, but then I saw that these tweets were made back in January. Now I'm not quite convinced whether the Twitter ruling which explicitly states +stat damage applies to each bolt is correct, or the new errata that seems to imply +stat damage only applies once to a single bolt is correct. I'm not quite clear as to whether your clarification of the clarification has actually made the rules clear.

You can keep the XP for a valiant effort at trying to untangle the knot. This is why I drink.

I agree that the errata is unclear and need to be errata'ed. :-/ It would be better if they had also errata'ed this passage:

If a spell or other effect deals damage to more than one target at the same time, roll the damage once for all of them. For example, when a wizard casts fireball or a cleric casts flame strike, the spell’s damage is rolled once for all creatures caught in the blast.

According to Crawford's interpretation, it seems that this passage should say "If a spell or other effect deals damage to more than one target at the same time, or to the same target more than once, roll the damage once..." But even though the passage doesn't actually say that, you need to interpret it this way for the rules to be coherent. Here's the scenario:

I'm a Gold Dragon Sorc. I cast Scorching Ray V, directing five bolts at an Oni and one bolt at a zombie. If I roll 2d6+5 damage separately for each bolt for the Oni and get ( 14 + 12 + 13 + 12 + 10 ) = 61, how much damage does the zombie take? Obviously not 61 since there was only one bolt that hit him. But the zombie was hit at the same time as the Oni. So does he take 10 points or 14 or something in between? The only way to resolve this is to go with Crawford's tweet from January and say, "Oh, the 5E designers intended to minimize the number of damage rolls. Roll 2d6+5 only once. If I get a 14, the Oni takes 70 points of damage and the zombie takes 14."

I hope that attempted clarification of the clarification of the clarification helped.

 

[DaveDash]

That was one way to play them. Or you could play a multiclassed fighter/cleric, which, thanks to 1st/2nd edition's utterly broken multiclassed rules, put you at most a whopping 1 level behind the single classed chump fighter, and with much better saves.

Beat on the bad guys during the fight and heal up afterwards. You got hold person at 3rd level (and odds are 3 of them thanks to bonus spells), which was effectively a save or die. Same with heat metal (which had no save).

Yeah and now you can still multi-class your way out of this by going Warlock2/Sorc X - because I think Agonizing Blast still got a free pass - so you can still do decent damage using quickened + EB. But when we see Sorcerers who want to keep up with other classes damage wise having to MC to do it, we know something is broken in the rules.

 

[Mistwell]

No, what you're doing is now cherry picking which words you want to focus on to suit your idea of what the sentence means.

I am reading it the way I think most people would read it. I didn't cherry pick anything. That a spell might be able to target an object on very rare occasion doesn't change the primary meaning of the sentence, any more than being able to do subdual damage with a weapon on rare occasion changes the primary intent to do damage. You're playing a game of pretending the idea behind the ability was differentiate between target creatures and objects, when we both know damn well from a plain reading of the sentence it isn't focused on that concept at all but is concerned with quantity. You're free to play that game with your DM but don't pretend I am changing something when I am just giving my opinion on what I think the reasonable-person plain interpretation of it looks like.

There is no "clear emphasis," you either apply your logic to the complete sentence or you do not.

Life isn't as black and white and you're trying to make it, including reading sentences. If there is more than one way to read something, it's OK to pick the most obvious and reasonable interpretation given the circumstances. It's not about pedantry.

"When you cast a spell that targets only one creature and doesn't have a range of self..."

If you say that "only one creature" means spells that CAN do otherwise are ineligible, then Fire Bolt is ineligible too, because it too can target something beyond one creature (objects). But you're just ignoring that because it doesn't suit your interpretation.

Because it's nonsense, and I suspect you know it as well. You know what they mean by that, just as you'd know if they said "weapons that do damage" that would include the subset of weapons than can do subdual damage on the rare happenstance that a PC might want to do that instead with it. But hey, if you want to live in that sort of rules lawyering over-reading of sentences and you have fun with that, go right ahead. But I am telling you my opinion, and I don't "have" to read it differently because you want it that way.