I am beginning to really FREAKING hate the plethora of little PROF times per day features. They all need to be tracked separately instead of a common currency like Superiority Dice, and so many little bonuses that "use now or not" bogs things down and leads to choice paralysis.
This is a bad design direction in my opinion. Having, reasonably powerful feature PROF times per day works well. Having half a dozen minor ones is clutter.
Agreed. It's a cool mechanic when there is one prof. per day feature that you track for your subclass. Tracking them for a race and a feat as well would be needlessly fiddly. It might not be a big problem in practice since they're all opt in, but its definitely inelegant.
[...] WotC needs to create a power source that can be used for non-spell things that everyone has. Even something like PF2E focus points, etc, would work well.
It always seemed obvious to me that that power source should be hit dice. Perhaps not named hit dice and acquired at the rate that hit dice currently are, but it would make sense that the mechanic which all PCs use, at baseline, to regain HP while taking a breather could be a resource they draw from when exerting themselves in some special way.
I'd assume that if the backgrounds become tied to feats, a significant section of the playerbase will feel compelled to optimise and certain background/class combos become "mandatory."
Certainly.
It's a weird move, considering what they did to ASI.
Also agreed. I like it that backgrounds are mostly irrelevant to optimization and am not a fan of this development. It seems slightly weird that they are taking distinguishing mechanics out of race while also putting distinguishing mechanics into background. Maybe they wanna move some of the weight of optimization decisions from race to background. Perhaps going all the way with that would make sense? Doing it halfway feels pretty weaksauce to me, though.
[...] God I absolutely loathe never ending, unceasing negativity about absolutely everything that WotC does. It's just so irritating.
I don't care for this UA. But in the spirit of not being unceasingly negative, here are a couple things I do like:
Glitchling's Vestigial Wings and Scion of Elemental Air's Wind's Glide--this is kind of like a platforming game power, which is neat. It's vastly more interesting than full flight, since it helps with
some combat and exploration challenges rather than
most combat and exploration challenges.
Cartomancer's Hidden Ace--as a 5th level spellcaster, you can cast a 3rd level spell as a bonus action AT NO SPELL SLOT COST. Fun, and not overpowered because it costs an ASI selection. The Card Focus d4*prof is obnoxious and needless, though. And learning prestidigitation at level 4 is clunky.
the House of Cards spell--it's weird af, but building a SUPER flimsy structure is something that nothing else in the game does. It's battlefield control with no concentration requirement, moving creatures vertically, blocking terrain and line of sight, giving you a 30 foot step pyramid with ramps which is usable for 24 HOURS. Is it loadbearing? Could I use it to march a platoon of soldiers over a wall? Can I deal falling damage to everybody on the pyramid if I destroy it myself?
the Summon Warrior Spirit spell--we absolutely did not need another 3rd level summon template to go with
three already in Tasha's. Be that as it may, this one strikes me as much more fun and intuitively relatable than all the others. Its a barbarian, fighter, and monk doing (more or less) the things those classes do. Cool.
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