No Hope for Scout and Monster Hunter Fighter and artificer wizard

[MechaTarrasque]

At https://www.sageadvice.eu/2018/02/2...d-monster-hunter-will-not-return-for-fighter/, Jeremy Crawford was asked if the scout and monster hunter fighter and artificer wizard had any hope of becoming official classes. Jeremy's answer was:

"When a subclass moves from Unearthed Arcana to an official product, every version of the subclass that appeared in UA is obsolete." and "The fighter scout became the rogue scout."

 

[Mouseferatu]

With apologies to those who liked the fighter scout, I'm good with this.

I didn't care for any of the "we use superiority dice and are basically a more focused/more limited battlemaster" subclasses. I'd prefer the either avoid superiority dice completely when building new subclasses, or at lease use them in entirely different ways.

 

[Unwise]

[MENTION=1288]Mouseferatu[/MENTION], why though? Isn't there an elegance to reusing the same basic rules and just changing as little as possible to get the desired effect? The spell-casting section of most caster classes is almost identical, it would seem confusing and inefficient to rewrite it per class. I'm not necessarily disagreeing, just curious. It may of course just be personal preference. I found the Scout's combat orientated uses of superiority to be the blandest options imaginable, but then again if you are only getting a couple I guess that makes sense.

For me the scout was pretty much what I wanted in a Ranger. Basically a fighter who gave up some flexibility and little bit of combat power in order to have good outdoor skills. My only real problem with it was that it gave up too little combat power for the extra skills etc. Limiting people's options is not really a balancing feature if the person only had access to a small subset of of those features to start with e.g. BM maneuver.

The Rogue Scout works well for the hidden elven sniper style ranger, but is not to my taste for the bountyhunter, highwayman, Aragorn or military forward scout style guys.

 

[Kobold Avenger]

I didn't care for any of the "we use superiority dice and are basically a more focused/more limited battlemaster" subclasses. I'd prefer the either avoid superiority dice completely when building new subclasses, or at lease use them in entirely different ways.

They backed themselves into a corner when they made Superiority Dice to be the sole special thing about the Battlemaster. All fighters should have got Superiority Dice, and then they bothered making the Battlemaster the master of using Superority Dice.

 

[Olive]

How much does official matter?

 

[Mistwell]

Why no hope for artificer though?

 

[Hawk Diesel]

Why no hope for artificer though?

I think no hope of the Artificer as a Wizard subclass. Everything I've seen suggests that they are working on it, but as a stand alone class.

 

[Sunseeker]

[MENTION=1288]Mouseferatu[/MENTION], why though? Isn't there an elegance to reusing the same basic rules and just changing as little as possible to get the desired effect?

No, not really.

D&D has always been pretty clear that while you can build a light-fighter, scouting and scouting themes have almost always been the domain of the Ranger or the Rogue.

A Bounty Hunter doesn't need a class. It can be literally any sort of class, even Wizards can be Bounty Hunters, that's sort of why it was such a wide-spread profession because it was so "every-man". A Highwayman is probably better built as a Rogue/Fighter MC, and if you're about to say "Well I don't use the MC rules!" well then sorry bud, there's gonna be some concepts you miss out on, and D&D need not create a stock class to cover every MC concept under the sun. Aragorn has ALWAYS been a Ranger, you may not like that but he is literally the basis for the class, and a Forward Scout is probably better off built closer to a sniper anyway.

The fact of the matter is, concepts like the Scout were pretty heavily covered by the rules to begin with, you could build a very solid one with just the base PHB classes. We don't need a new class for only minor feature adjustments.

 

[Azzy]

[MENTION=1288]Mouseferatu[/MENTION], why though? Isn't there an elegance to reusing the same basic rules and just changing as little as possible to get the desired effect?

The thing, though, is that if you're going to have another subclass that uses Superiority Dice, it needs to have enough unique Maneuvers to make it feel distinct from the Battle Master.

 

[Mouseferatu]

[MENTION=1288]Mouseferatu[/MENTION], why though? Isn't there an elegance to reusing the same basic rules and just changing as little as possible to get the desired effect?

That assumes that they got the desired effect.

As [MENTION=6563]Azzy[/MENTION] said, the classes that did this didn't feel distinct. Nor did their powers feel interesting or sufficient enough. (All IMO, obviously.) They didn't feel like their own thing; they felt like a poorer, more limited battlemaster.

If a class can be designed around superiority dice that actually feels and plays like it's a totally different thing than the battlemaster, and feels sufficiently like it accomplishes whatever its concept is supposed to accomplish, and feels interesting in its own right, sure, I'm fine with that. But I've yet to see it, or even a hint of it, being done successfully.