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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Falling Icicle" data-source="post: 6038523" data-attributes="member: 17077">I've only been looking over the new packet for a little while, but I've already noticed several things that really bother me. Here's just a few of them:Sneak Attack is flat-out inferior to Deadly Strike. It does the same damage but has conditions when deadly strike can be used on any attack. Rogues are just weak fighters now.0th level spells aren't at-will anymore! I think this is the single biggest blunder of the new playtest packet. Now, you can only get at-will spells from your tradition or cleric domain. And some of the tradition spells don't even make sense. Illustionists, for example, get shocking grasp at-will if they prepare it, which leaves me scratching my head. Why can't they just let all cantrips and orisons be at-will, and let your tradition/domain give you a couple extra? Yeah, you get an encounter spell, but you only ever get one and you don't even get to choose it.On the same note, the magic user specialty only lets you use a cantrip once per day instead of giving two at-will cantrips. They took one of the coolest feats in Next and totally ruined it. All my aspirations of playing a rogue with mage hand and magic missile, shattered. Why did they do this? You can't tell me having a couple at-will cantrips was overpowered!Spells no longer add the caster's primary ability score to damage. This infuriates me. Now there is really nothing to distinguish a burning hands cast by one wizard from another (other than save DC). Weapons add Str or Dex, spells should add Int, Wis or Cha. This is just such a common sense thing I don't get why they abandoned it. They even left a flat numerical bonus in some of the spells, like magic missile and radiant lance (now renamed to lance of faith). Why not just let casters add their primary ability modifier and  magic implement bonus?The damage of spells overall is just pitiful, especially considering the reduced number of spells per day. Even 5th level spells like cone of cold do less damage than fighters using deadly strike, and the fighter can do that all day long. Yes, I know that many of these spells hit multiple creatures, but doing mediocre damage to several creatures is not very satisfying. And once you've spent your few daily spells, wizards are then left using puny at-will spells for far less damage than fighters and rogues are doing for the rest of the day. Whatever happened to wizards as the glass cannons? Now they're all glass, no cannon.They still seem to be using hp thresholds, though I only noticed them in Command and Polymorph (and in an odd way, Sleep). It's notably absent from Charm Person and Hold Person/Monster. Hopefully this means the hp threshold mechanic is on the way out.Lance of Faith is just plain inferior to magic missile now. So much for the lazer cleric. And on a separate note, what happened to all the necromancy spells?And as if the imbalance between fighters and other classes wasn't already big enough, they went and gave them a second attack starting at 6th level. Not even a reduced iterative attack like in 3e with -5 to hit and preventing you from moving more than 5 ft that turn, but a complete bonus attack and you can even move inbetween both attacks. Wow. So now your poor rogue is stuck trying to get advantage for sneak attack when the fighter is chopping everything up with two attacks and deadly strike. The poor wizard is throwing sleep spells to hopefully put to sleep 3d8 hp worth of monsters and praying they don't have more hp than that while the fighter is doing more damage than 3d8 and he's putting the monster to "sleep" forever, as in eternal rest, six feet under. Welcome everyone to the new era of linear wizards, quadratic fighters!All that said, I do like the word of power mechanic for clerics. This is a great alternative to the crappy word of healing spell and makes playing a cleric healer much more enjoyable. I also liked the way they're doing deities and domains for clerics now. By providing generic archetypes, people can assign them to whatever god(s) or belief systems they want to use in their campaign. We also get 4 skills from our background now instead of 3, so it's not all bad!</blockquote>

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