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<blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 7846864" data-attributes="member: 18">This is a pretty important UA and right now is making me respect WotC's design skill a bit more, though when they cancel everything bold or clever I'll rescind that!The spell list additions are pretty straightforwardly necessary, and actually appalled me because I hadn't noticed some of these spells were missing, and it's ridiculous that they were. These universally improve both theme-ing and overall balance. The changes that allow slow, small-scale respec'ing or modifying available spells are extremely sensible. It's good for them to be optional but people talking about &quot;hard choices&quot; are overcooking things in a rather silly way. In practice, one of two things happens. Either the player is a min-maxer and carefully studies the options and picks a narrow range of optimal abilities (dull but effective and kind of necessary with no ability to fix it) or they aren't, and the pick what sounds good, and you can guarantee most players make some bum choices which don't result in much fun, merely frustration and limitation. These options improve both situations. Min-maxers can go outside their comfort zone knowing a choice at L1 won't screw them a L11, and normal players can try stuff out and get rid of bum abilities. The rest is less exciting and a couple of abilities are wonky, especially low level stuff (for dips) but the Ranger changes, especially the Beastmaster ones, are excellent. A BM Ranger might actually be decent with the new air/land beasts. I hope the vast majority of this appears in a Xanathar's style book unchanged and optional, and some of it might even make sense as a 5.5E, though I think there isn't enough to justify that, quite.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Ruin Explorer, post: 7846864, member: 18"] This is a pretty important UA and right now is making me respect WotC's design skill a bit more, though when they cancel everything bold or clever I'll rescind that! The spell list additions are pretty straightforwardly necessary, and actually appalled me because I hadn't noticed some of these spells were missing, and it's ridiculous that they were. These universally improve both theme-ing and overall balance. The changes that allow slow, small-scale respec'ing or modifying available spells are extremely sensible. It's good for them to be optional but people talking about "hard choices" are overcooking things in a rather silly way. In practice, one of two things happens. Either the player is a min-maxer and carefully studies the options and picks a narrow range of optimal abilities (dull but effective and kind of necessary with no ability to fix it) or they aren't, and the pick what sounds good, and you can guarantee most players make some bum choices which don't result in much fun, merely frustration and limitation. These options improve both situations. Min-maxers can go outside their comfort zone knowing a choice at L1 won't screw them a L11, and normal players can try stuff out and get rid of bum abilities. The rest is less exciting and a couple of abilities are wonky, especially low level stuff (for dips) but the Ranger changes, especially the Beastmaster ones, are excellent. A BM Ranger might actually be decent with the new air/land beasts. I hope the vast majority of this appears in a Xanathar's style book unchanged and optional, and some of it might even make sense as a 5.5E, though I think there isn't enough to justify that, quite. [/QUOTE]

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