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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 6970682" data-attributes="member: 7006">I reiterated my stance that the Battlemaster is what the Fighter should be.   The Maneuvers system and superiority dice should be the baseline for the Fighter class (and really, many of the other melee classes) the same way that Spellcasting and spell slots ares the baseline for all the magic classes.  And to throw that system by the wayside is just stupid.If you add these four archetypes to the four Fighter archetypes we already have (Champion, Battlemaster, Eldritch Knight, Banneret) and you ask someone "What's the underlying base mechanical assumption that gives all Fighter their iconic identity regardless of subclass?" what is our answer currently?Action Surge and Second Wind.That's it.All Barbarians have Rage; all Bards have Spellcasting and Bardic Inspiration; all Clerics have Spellcasting and Channel Divinity; all Druids have Spellcasting and Wildshape; all Monks have Ki; all Paladins have Spellcasting, Smite,  and Channel Divinity; all Rangers have a lot of junk; all Rogues have Sneak Attack; all Sorcerers have Spellcasting and Metamagic; all Warlocks have Invocations, Patrons and Pacts; all Wizards have Spellcasting, Spellbooks, and non-prepared Ritual casting).For Fighters though, they get a second action in a round and some self-healing.  That's all.  Every other meaningful mechanical feature for the Fighter currently is completely different for each and every single Martial Archetype.  There is nothing the Fighter as a class has which I think is a really cool thing it gets to hang its hat on.  Every single cool thing comes out of each individual subclass, and these four new ones are no different.  Which I think sucks.  Because it give the Fighter as a class no real identity.Now I'm sure some people are happy with that, because they thinks Fighters should have no individual identity.  Personally though, I think that just makes the Fighter class almost superfluous.So I made it quite clear in my survey that I much preferred the archetypes they had made previously for the Cavalier, Scout, and Monster Hunter that used the Maneuver and superiority die system of the Battlemaster as the mechanical baseline of all new Fighter archetypes.  And in each case, they received a set selection of some already-in-existence Manuevers, but then also got additional new Maneuvers and features that they and only they got based upon the fluff and story of the archetype.  And that what mechanical underpinnings they used for the Knight and Samurai especially could and should have easily been encapsulated within the superiority die system.After all... the Knight and Samurai got some cool features.  And what were the mechanics under them?  "Use this feature 3 times and you get them back following a Long Rest".  And thus I ask why you couldn't instead incorporate that feature as a Maneuver that is activated by a superiority die why?  Because if you did... not only would the Knight and Samurai get those kinds of abilities, they'd also get to do all the cool extra damage and "special combat maneuvers" that all Battlemasters (should be 'all Fighters') get to do.And then finally... I also said that doing an end-around on the DMs who don't want to use Feats by making subclasses that have ostensibly unique features but are actually just giving them Feats automatically is really kinda cheesy.  Fighters already get extra slots as part of their class make-up to select additional ASIs/Feats, under the assumption that all these combat-related Feats are potential Fighter class abilities.  So a Fighter can easily get the Sentinel or Sharpshooter feat if the DM allows for it, thereby getting those mechanics.But if a DM has decided not to use Feats... it's because they don't want to deal with having those types of mechanics in their game.  So to then re-introduce them to the game anyway by just handing them out to Fighter subclasses automatically does not put them in a very good light in my eyes.  I feel it's like WotC just thumbing their eye at their DMs who choose to not use Feats.So yeah... I wasn't overwhelmed by the Fighter UA.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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