was this fast? like I know I just found out but it looks like this was out less then 2 months? how can even the most hard core 'gets to play every week' gamer make it through more then a small handful of levels in 2 months?
In aggregate, they'll get plenty of information. the most important thing is how these options feel, frankly. They are entirely capable of balancing the mechanics in house, but sometimes the community falsely decides something is broken with such a resounding consensus that they end up changing it in spite of it being completely fine by the numbers.
The Four Elements Monk is a great example. They overvalued ki points in relation to spell slots, valued getting to choose from a list rather than getting set spells highly enough to cost shadow spells and 4elements spells differently, and while all of that made perfect sense on paper, the 4elements just sucks to play for a large swath of players, so it will almost certainly get some sort of change.
I'm hoping they recycle the wu jen psionic disciplines from the mystic for the four elements monk, tbh. Steal it's name, too, and make the lore around the class less orientalist, while we're at it.
/tangent
As for the survey, I was mildly surprised at how negative my detailed feedback was.
I had a box for written feedback for the rogue, so it's only some respondents experiencing that issue.
I gave almost entirely negative feedback on the Bard. Leaning more heavily into spellcasting rather than bardic inspiration, reducing choices, "normalizing" everything in general, all leading to a Bard that just might as well be a variant Rogue at this point. And I say that as someone who vehemently opposing consolidating the classes. This is a bad version of the Bard. The Lore College is even worse than the base class. After level 3, it has nothing that relates remotely to knowledge. Swap the extra skills for a choice of social skills, and rename it something related to being the guy satirizing the king, or dressing down the villain until he relents, etc, with flavor pulled from Irish and Scandinavian bardic archetypes, and give it a ribbon "you can gain entrance to courts and noble households in exchange for performance and bringing news from the road, and the common folk are usually eager to share gossip with you and listen to your stories and hear new songs." I'd love it, then.
As it is, it's eating a very good Bardic archetype while doing nothing to actually fulfill that archetype.
The Ranger was mostly positive, with only a couple sore spots. Nature's Veil would be good if it didn't cost a spell slot, but is absolutely a waste of said slot as is. Either buff the effect, preferably by letting the ranger share the effect with at least one ally, or drop the spell slot cost. Foe Slayer is still terrible at that level. No one is excited to get that at level 18. I'd barely be excited about it at level 11.
Hunter is just...boring. This impulse designers have to listen to optimizer and rework the game to drop the options the optimizers ignore is bad for games. I told them it reads like they spend too much time listening to people who yell online.
Rogue is fine, though I challenged the change to Sneak Attack. if the point is to limit the rogue to 1 use per round, just
do that. Directly. let the rogue who misses on their turn use SA if they get a reaction attack.
The Thief is excellent. I want to play a Thief with the Athlete feat and maybe Charger immediately. Charger makes a great
Fleche fencer, and with the rest of the build makes such a fast and aggressive swashbuckling rogue that I don't know if I even need the Swashbuckler anymore.
I took a break to write this post, and I'm going to move on to feats. There are just so damn many.
