Saeviomagy
Adventurer
I personally think that requiring people to select class features that will haunt them for the rest of their career at 1st level when they don't actually know anything about their class is a poor mechanic. Hence why most classes don't have specialization at 1st level. And yes, I think the 5e cleric is bad for doing it.Something I think 5e is missing is tradeoffs. 5e sticks with addition of abilities and never really takes away anything so specialist wizards are just wizards with an aptitude for a specific school, a player doesn't have to decide at 1st level if they will be a generalist with full access to spells or a specialist who has more spells but an inability to cast spells from certain schools.
The only thing that 5e misses in this respect is the existence of a generalist wizard (and a pantheist cleric). Apparently the designers think it's fine to make new warrior sub classes that just boost combat numbers and have a generic name, but think that having a minimal flavor wizard subclass that boosts spells known and spell slots would be awful. Once you add that, you're giving up spells known and spell slots in order to get perks relating to your chosen school. The only thing you're 'missing' is the ability to not take spells which aren't a thematic match, and the mini game of finding a splatbook that has a version of fireball that isn't an evocation.
Except it does. Effectively every race has -1 to all stats, compared with a basic human. Which is kind of academic in 5e, because stats pretty much don't matter.Races are similar, before 4e, races had a penalty to stats while having a bonus for others; in general 5e doesn't do this (except for the poor little kobold).
"I miss not using things. I wish I could not use things now".2e priests were similar to specialist wizards once gods had specialist priests. Choose to be a cleric or choose to be a specialist and have different access to spells which could include limited access to healing spells. I can kind of understand why D&D has evolved to have everything be additive instead of tradeoff but I do feel like it loses some of what I loved about the earlier editions (don't get me wrong, I love 5e, but there were definitely things from earlier editions that I miss from time to time).
As others have said, there's nothing stopping you from refusing to heal with your cleric (or cast necromantic spells with your illusionist etc), and doing so is far less crippling than it would have been in 2e.