I only have experience from the DM side and am not as up on Maneuvers as I would like to be.
First campaign, they played a marshal, druid, rogue, wizard, and ranger.
I think the standout was the marshal. The ability to let someone else attack, especially the rogue for sneak attack, was cool.
I think the druid showed us their versatility. The player had the druid be defense with healing and did well. Spells that hindered enemies. At some point, after nearly losing friends, the player had the druid go offensive and that worked as well.
The ranger character made it impossible to use Supplies, or at least try to diminish them, because they were in plains, with a few blasted bad land areas, and could gather three during Journey Activities and double that if they did it all day. Maybe even more? We still tracked them, and there were times I wanted to use supplies more, but the ranger could always get more.
I can't say the rogue or wizard were standout but it was our first campaign with Level Up.
In the current campaign, they are playing two fighters, a bard, a wizard, and a sorcerer.
The bard is definitely impressive with Battle Hymns. I had to check and recheck at the things they can do. It also took us a bit to understand the game mechanics of them. Quite nice, though.
One player with a fighter is obsessed with getting their AC as high as possible. While a few points are on me, they got to a base 30 AC and with activated maneuvers or feats can get to 35 AC. This one attacks up to three times with Stunning Assault moving after stunning an enemy and once stunned three bad guys that were just close enough to do that. I think their DC is 20 and with my bad rolls, the bad guys are usually stunned. It's making me question why constructs aren't immune to stun.
The other fighter has good armor and a two handed weapon and can dish out some punishment. We probably cheated on several maneuvers. One of the things I do like about 5e/LU is how a lot of low level things are viable at high levels. When we found a maneuver that seemed to be no good after Extra Attacks were earned, we modified it to still work. It does mean that this fighter is the attacker and can do five attacks without haste and good damage.
I think the wizard and sorcerer are good classes. I like the rare spells. As with the rogue and wizard from the other campaign, I can't think of anything that makes them stand out. They throw spells well. The sorcerer specialized in fire but took a feat to change damage type to deal with the plane stuff on planes with fire resistant/immune creatures.
To expand on that, from what I have seen, wizard, rogue, and sorcerer do well in their roles. I haven't seen them do anything that made me say wow. I don't know if that's LU, the players, or just how the characters have organically grown. It's more when I think over the campaign, the other classes are the ones I remember.
LU was a compromise for the group. I prefer PF, two like 5E, the other three are open. LU gave us deeper options (gaining more proficiencies at higher levels, and expertise dice make them feel like they are good at skills, learned more, and improved) and we have felt it is better. I also appreciate all of the supplements that have come up. I feel like they have put out as much as 5E has in a third of the time.
As for myself, I need to learn maneuvers better, incorporate Maladies more, and use exploration challenges. I modified Fatigue and Strife, removed Doom (at least in the 'casual' way I found it to be there), and like the extra conditions. My only issue is like 5E, LU still has a lot of GM fiat and I prefer rules/guidelines to handle things knowing I can tweak as I want.
I also want a sourcebook based on BG3 because I liked how it did magic items much better. I use FR and it has always had a lot of magic. The idea of them only finding a dozen magic items across a campaign in FR means they have touch choices. We are tweaking those rules as well.
Again, we have loved LU and it will be the fantasy system we play the most, I'm sure. We are currently using Foundry in the winter but are local and play in person spring to fall.
Everytime we encounter a creature with a poison attack, I use the poisoner's kit to harvest poison from it (usually autosucceed since I have d10 expertise and Resident Expert from Human which means I roll a 10 at the d20 mininum). Then I use Analysis to determine the recipe for the poison in 10 minutes, then Unstable Poison to brew one dose for free (but can't have more than one). Then use the poison on three pieces of ammunition as per the rules. I use the "real" poison only in emergencies, but with PB uses of Blackblade from subclass I rarely run out.
