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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 7690333" data-attributes="member: 7006">The thing to remember about these offerings is that they are Playtests.  Which means oftentimes WotC will have deliberately over-powered, under-powered, differently-powered, or just plain weird-powered things precisely so that we will comment on them come Survey Time.The best way to get us to playtest these things and then give WotC our opinions is to deliberately provoke us.  When they released the playtest packet way back when that all of a sudden added alignment restrictions to the Monk... people freaked.  Which is exactly what WotC WANTED, because they needed to know whether players actually wanted alignment restrictions in the game.  The comments overwhelming said 'No', so they got exactly the info they were looking for.  But had they not ever added them to the Monk for that one playtest packet, they might never have known how we felt about them, because people do not tend to comment on things that aren't there.So for these UA options... they gave the Scout a lot of frontloaded abilities, plus more skill proficiencies that puts them up and over the Ranger and Rogue.  That WILL get mentioned by people come Survey Time.  I'm pretty sure their response will be "No way!"  Which means this Playtest article did its job.  They gained information about what they can and cannot give to classes as options that they otherwise might not have known people's feelings on.By the same token... this article will also tell them whether these "Battlemaster Variants" are found to be favorable to people.  I jokingly said to Banana that these sub-classes could have been made as Prestige Classes, and I think that's quite possibly true.  They could have been.  But because they already just asked us our opinions on the concept of the Prestige Class in an earlier UA... now they're asking us whether Battlemaster sub-sub-classes are something we'd be interested in.  And they're going to find out!  A bunch of people will respond during Survey Time that they like the idea of Battlemaster sub-sub-classes... and other people will respond that they'd prefer all of these options just be rolled into the Battlemaster proper and widening the BM's scope.  All information they wouldn't otherwise know until they actually gave us these articles to force us to think about and test.Throw in other things for us to comment on (like the over-abundance of bonus action options for the Bard college) and you have an article full of things to provoke discussion and help them narrow their designs.  Exactly what playtesting is supposed to do.</blockquote>

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