Mostly positive feelings, because I love 5e archetypes and I am glad they have chosen to gradually add more, but not nearly as fast as 3e prestige classes.
However now that we're half way through the classes, I also feel like a lot of the archetypes are too simple with mostly inflexible abilities.
I believe that it would be better to have more diversity in complexity, not just low-complexity archetypes but also some that are more customizable.
For example take the Arcane Archer. It's flexible at build, because you choose the Arcane Shot abilities, but only mildly flexible at play because you have very few of those to choose from.
I am not saying it's wrong, but just noticing how they are always a LOT behind in complexity and flexibility spellcasters. I think it'd be nice to get a couple of non-spellcasters subclasses that could cater to players who love highly complex characters.
It's ok to have low-complexity choices. It's just that there is still a huge divide between casters and others. At the same time in fact there is still basically no low-complexity subclass for any casters.
Or am I alone with this?
I completely agree, but especially because of the schism created by 4th edition, this is never going to change. Aside from 4th, D&D has always had cripplingly few options for non-casters, with almost everything the character in question can do stemming from the basic class features (like early rogues being on trap/lock duty) or cobbled together as 3.x builds that just let the player spam their desired action (trip/attack/disarm/whatever).
Even casters themselves don’t really receive that much, a different spell list maybe, or a change in some proficiencies or minor new ability. Which really leads me to my main point; the sacred cow of Vancian casting is what dooms D&D to a lack of complex options. Every casting class spends a huge amount of time detailing the minor differences in how they approach mostly the same system, and said system is simultaneously so reliable and versatile that there’s no room for anything else really. This shadow falls over non-casters as well, since if they have anything similar (like powers/exploits/etc) they are just accused of being casters as well, since the Vancian system is simply so synonymous with magic at this point.
Likewise, non-casters have a huge amount of emotional baggage from the playerbase, which continues to hamper their design to this day. If I recall correctly, the original playtest material had the superiority die in a lot greater prominence, and I don’t think it was just the fighter that got it. This is a huge shame to me, because die pools seem like a great way to bridge the gap between folks who want realism and those who want more compelling (and fantastical) options for non-casters. However, this was not to be, in no small part due to a clamoring for the ‘simple’ options of classes like the champion, and because subclasses are designed to be subservient to the main class, that meant fighters would mostly be simple by default, with Champion just being ‘simplest’. That realism I mentioned earlier is the main factor of why fighters/non casters will never advance seriously, in my opinion. This is because designers not only have to create a fun and balanced system, but they have to also marry it to a fluctuating ideal of pseudo-realism, a standard that magic, by its nature, doesn’t have to meet. If you think I’m joking, go look at the fighter UA article thread, where from pages 11 to about 30 or so are completely dominated by discussions of the Knight’s mark alone.
Lastly, the subclass system itself is designed to not ‘rock the boat’ in regards to the main chassis. This is why many people (myself included) have said there will never be an acceptable subclass of fighter that emulates the warlord, because there’s no way to separate it from the damage-dealing chassis of the base fighter. Every subclass basically has 3-4 areas of varying budgetary power spread across 20 levels give or take, and that’s just not enough to give an identity more prominent than that of the base class. In other words, it’s (in my opinion) functionally impossible for Wizards to actually have subclasses that effect the complexity of the base class one way or the other.
