Second 5th Edition Survey! Plus Results of the First Survey: The Ranger Gets Some Attention!

A new survey is up on the official D&D website. It looks like its covering the classes not in the last survey and the recent Eberron material. WotC also reports on what was learned from the last survey. "For our second survey, we’re focused on the final six classes in the game and the Eberron material that we rolled out in last month’s Unearthed Arcana. If you haven’t looked at that article and want to provide feedback, read it over and come back to the survey later. Even if you don’t have a chance to use the Eberron material in your game, your reactions to it are helpful. You can also skip over the Eberron questions if you don’t want to give feedback on that material."

Here's the overall feedback from the first survey:

"So, what did we learn from our last survey? Let’s take a look at some trends:

To start with, there are a lot of you. We had more people respond to this survey than any of our playtest surveys. A lot of people are into D&D these days!

There are a lot of new players and DMs out there. Welcome to D&D!

You are playing the game in droves. Only about 10 percent of you have read the books without yet playing.

Your campaigns are just getting started. Most of you are playing at 6th level and below.

You love the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons, and we’re overjoyed to be able to write that. The overall assessment was incredibly positive, surpassing our results from the playtest by a significant margin."
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The ranger, in particular, is getting some focus:

"To start with, a majority of players and Dungeon Masters are happy with the ranger overall. The game as a whole is grading well, so we don’t want to make a huge, sudden change to that class. But taking a deeper dive into the ranger, we can see that favored enemy and the beast master archetype received the lowest ratings. Our next step is to take a closer look at why that is.

We’ll start with an internal assessment mixed with feedback from our closed circle of testers. From there, we’ll work up some options and present them to you, most likely in the Unearthed Arcana column. That process allows us to determine if the track we’re on answers your concerns with the class.

The critical step is making sure that any changes we make genuinely improve the class. Remember, plenty of people are happy with the ranger, so any changes need to cover a number of options:

People who like the ranger as it is can simply keep playing their current characters.

People who don’t like the ranger should feel as though the new options allow them to play the ranger they want to create.

The new options are exactly that—new choices for ranger players to select from, as opposed to a rewrite of the Player’s Handbook.

DMs should always feel that they can take or leave the new options, just like any other material in the game beyond the Basic Rules."
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Hop on over here to take the new survey!

 

[dd.stevenson]

Yeah, the current beastmaster runs afoul of verisimilitude seekers and power gamers alike. It does the bare minimum of checking the "pet class" box. It doesn't even look exciting on paper, to me.

The ONLY thing I like about it right now is that the class restrictions are very easy to case rule or houserule.

 

[Fralex]

I opted not to leave a final comment at the end because they'll be inundated with thousands of them, and I don't need to add to that pile.

Well I left a comment using 499 out of 500 words, so I think we cancel each other out.

 

[Minigiant]

I think people talk about it in terms of balance but Wizards is smart enough to listen in terms of perception. The Beastmaster is balanced, but it 'feels' weak, mostly because your bad-ass animal buddy is, in terms of in-game fiction, kind of slow on the uptake. It works out so that about 1/4 or 1/3 of your power is invested in the beast, when players were expecting about 1/2. I hope they find a way to switch more power into the beast, maybe by forgoing spells.

I believe this is the source of the issue. The 5th ed ranger is like 25% nature skills, 25% warrior, 25% magic spells and 25% subclass. With only 25% nature skill; favored enemy/environment is gonna be weak. With only 25% subclass; you don't have a lot of PC power to "fuel' your beast pet. Some fans prefer a 40-50% subclass with the "base ranger" being a magicless light warrior with some skill bonuses.

The Hunter gets few gripes as the subclass is all combat and if you dump all your magic into combat spells, you get 25% nature skills, 75% warrior. If you go more environment spells you get 30-40% nature skills, 60-70% warrior.

But the Beastmaster's pet is 25% of the class as it is a ranger's subclass. And if you dump ALL your spells into it, the most it can reach is 50%. You can't dump your warrior or skills into the beast. So most are only 30%. A 30% beast requires a lot of sacrifices. WOTC chose to sacrifice action economy and defenses. Many dislike that decision as well.

Hopefully the team has a plan to combat the constraints they put themselves in.
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My survey comments were just 3 simple sentences.

 

[TrippyHippy]

The issues with Rangers seemed to have passed me by somewhat, largely because not many people I know have chosen to play one (maybe that’s the issue!). I do think one or two of the Races are a bit unbalanced (Half Eves too good; Dragonborn, I think could do with a boost actually).

I run one Adventurer’s League game each week for new players (mainly youngsters, although not exclusively, and there is a mix of both genders in there), and play in another one on a bye-weekly basis, for more experienced gamers, alternating with a Traveller campaign I am also running. I too, get a genuine sense of enthusiasm for the game, with the freewheeling aspect of the rules suiting my style of GMing a lot. I would like to see more electronic pdf support, and possibly more 3rd party campaigns, but otherwise the game is doing really well in my neck of the woods.

 

[Li Shenron]

The new options are exactly that—new choices for ranger players to select from, as opposed to a rewrite of the Player’s Handbook.

I really really hope they stick with this principle.

I don't want a "living edition" in the sense of invalidating previous material, because I don't game with people who keep buying books all through the edition, and neither do I, we just want to buy a game once. If they pull out updated PHBs every now and then, I soon won't be able to play when different players will show up with different years' books.

As much as it's not a very nice design principle, I'd rather have "fixes by feats" than revising existing material.

 

[Falling Icicle]

I really wish the designers stopped defaulting to wizard each time they are adapting a caster. Wizardness is quite contagious, and only produces watered down versions of once quite good classes.

Yeah, their first instinct seems to be to cram everything arcane under the wizard. This reminds me of back during the play test when they said they were going to make the sorcerer and warlock subclasses of the wizard. I'm sure glad they abandoned that horrible idea, because the sorcerer and warlock classes ended up being awesome. Hopefully, they'll see reason again and stop trying to force the artificer into the wizard class where it doesn't belong.

 

[Uchawi]

I agree. Unique classes for the win. The fighter is another example of what not to do with subclasses.

 

[CapnZapp]

Those are true, but not immutable truths. In the context of a poll, it's worth mentioning that if "do not play this subclass" is not an answer you're just willing to accept, you can say that you don't like it on the poll. Given their reaction to the beastmaster ranger, it sounds like they'd be willing to entertain the idea that they might want to take another look at the subclass.

Oh, I wasn't trying to say you shouldn't voice your opinion on the poll.

I just took the opportunity to highlight a few things about the Wild Mage I suspect plenty of people aren't fully aware of

 

[CapnZapp]

...or I'm betting Concentration would have come up, which I feel greatly affects the Ranger and Paladin.

Well, the Paladin is a very strong class, so it's probably a good thing Concentration sets at least some limits.

(That doesn't mean I don't see the issue. Just that you might want to solve it for Rangers and Paladins separately. Just loosening the general Concentration rules is almost certainly a bad idea)

 

[CapnZapp]

Glad they're looking at the Ranger and Beastmaster archetype. It's unnecessarily weak.

I would say it's not so much that the class is weak, but that it isn't as fun in actual play as it could be.