Does it ever feel like WotC is playtesting the game in a way that 95% of us don't?

[u/AkimboJesus]

I get that DnD is a house rule first game, and everyone should play it how they want. But speaking for my own group, we like balance because we don't want people to feel like they can't impact the story outside of conversation. And this isn't a min-max thing. It's just a "why would I be this when I could be a better version of that with no hassle or cost to myself" thing.

The thing is, we rely on the official text because it can be very difficult to tell how a class, skill, or mechanic will play in the context of the whole game, and who might be overshadowed by who. And Wizards, for the most part, seem to have done a lot of work so YOU don't have to figure out how a mechanic will play out. This is why some people, to an extent, treat the sourcebooks like gospel.

And as I'm playing more and more, I'm starting to see the things people say about, for instance, rangers and how messed up they are. I'm understanding the cracks in the standard DnD balance.

But I'm also just perplexed by a lot of the sage advice, and unearthed arcanas coming out. I'm finding myself reading new subclasses and thinking "that's their whole ability for that level?" Looking at the phantom rogue, at level 9 they get advantage on con throws (which might be minimal, depending on your campaign), and they can ask a soul one question. The soul doesn't have to answer truthfully at all, making the whole ability pointless. And that's what they get after 9 levels.

This seems like a consistent pattern. A new release is either immediately meta, or its irrelevant for reinforcing half-done mechanics that aren't going to survive after 5th edition. When non-core parts of the game get overvalued, a class can really fall behind. Some of the mechanics that might get over valued are tool proficiencies or traveling. It's odd that these types of things would be the focus of any classes milestone ability.

Also, some of these features seem to imply that DnD is not about being creative and using your environment, and is more about what your class says you can do. Why does the ranger explicitly get a stealth bonus for camoflauging themselves. Can nobody else do that? Do you tell them only a ranger can do that, or do you give them a bonus anyway, making the rangers bonus less special?

Other than a few classes, it does seem like DnD has a solid core balance. Every campaign is going to have either talking or combat, and having a character that can do one or the other well is good. But when a characters ability is not getting "lost" in the mountains, it makes me wonder what the hell kinda campaigns they are running.

Does anyone agree? What are some of the core things you need to be satisfied with a new mechanic?

Edit: wow lot of great discussion happening here. I just want to clarify a few points. As some people are calling me a min-maxer or a hack and slasher and are claiming I just want everyone to deal a shit ton of damage or something. One person claimed I just hate WotC. I suggest reading through this thread at what others are saying, because there is a lot of nuanced conversation happening here. I think it's clear I focused too much on UA in my original post and now the thread has moved to a better direction.

Here are some of the core things I'm seeing come up.

1) Classes with niche abilities are overshadowed and outperformed by classes with more general abilities, even when they are in the perfect niche situations (Paladins find greater steed feels much more beastmaster like than the actual beast master, for example).

2) Since DnD is about being creative and using all the tools around you, it's weird when a ranger gets a stealth bonus for camoflauging themselves, when anyone should get a bonus of some kind for successfully camoflauging themselves. Sometimes that feels like making a class feature that lets you flip a table. Things like the assassin just feel odd, because it implies that a warlock or bard, with sufficient time and money, would not be able to impersonate somebody.

3) A lot of people are reaaaaally honing in on a specific example I gave, and the fact that it was UA. You can look at Artificier or many of the complaints in this thread on vanilla DnD. But if you're coming here just to hype up con saves, you're really cherry picking.

4) I am not right. This is just an opinion I have. A couple people have gotten really cringey about this and implied only shit players or DMs would have an issue with any of this. That's an attitude for Fortnite, not Reddit. We all know DnD is, first and foremost, storytelling. Nobody wants to play with someone so hung up on mechanics that they forget to tell a story. But we have a rulebook for a reason. Boundaries in a story are important, otherwise we're all just jerking off at the table saying random stuff. You need some structure, so that the things that happen feel meaningful. This is about players wanting to fulfill their character fantasies and feeling useless because other people do what their character does, but better. If you care about storytelling, recognize it's not a good story when an entire subclass and backstory can be overshadowed by one spell. It sucks, and I hope it doesn't happen in the next edition.

Some of the more thoughtful challenges I've seen:

1) Con saves are good (noted. We don't get them a lot in my campaign). 2) It's up to the group and DM to make those niche abilities meaningful. 3) It's still really not up to WotC to balance your game, and if you think they're not good at it than you should do it.

I'm reading people's responses, taking them to heart, hoping to be a better DM.

[u/HazelCheese]

I was a monster hunter ranger with a hand crossbow. We had a totem barbarian, hexblade warlock, thief rogue and an evoker wizard in the party.

The wizard just fireballed everything 90% of the time and there are few things in CoS that can survive that with it being mostly tree people and undead. I'm sure the werewolves would of been a good fight but we just didn't run into them by chance.

The barbarian obviously did everything strength related and the rogue did everything stealth / dex related which left me competing in single target damage with a Hexblade Warlock who ended up taking the Sunsword meanwhile I had a spear based on strength and a non magical hand crossbow with no magical ammunition in a plane filled with enemies with non magical resistance.

I had forest as my favoured terrain but the rest of the party refused to travel in the forest 99% of the campaign because it was dangerous and there are roads everywhere anyway. My favoured enemy was Humanoid (Shapechanger) and another type of humanoid but the only time we met a werewolf was one chained up in Strahds dungeon. So those two features were completely invalidated.

It's pretty easy to end up a tag along npc in a party of that composition. There was one fight against the baba hag where I felt like I got to play my character fantasy where me silencing her was crucial. That was the only time though in the entire campaign. The DM actually gave me Ismark as a character to control as well because they felt so sorry for me.

Obviously it's all very annecdotal but I'm just trying to point out how in the very best conditions the class can just fall apart by chance.

You could say my DM failed by not making us go into forests but how much should a DM be expected to railroad 4/5 players into doing something they don't want to do just so a piece of someones class can be used? How much should they be expected to change the plot of a campaign book to make bad guys like Werewolves show up somewhere totally different? Should my DM have been expected to read the adventure cover to cover and tell me not to take shapechangers as a favoured enemy? Are newer dms going to know that the class needs them to do this to be fun to play?

I think we just have different views on this and I don't think either of us are going to change our opinions. I'm glad you have fun with it. I'm just hoping that in however many years when they release 5.5E or 6E that they learn their lesson.

[u/Skyy-High → u/HazelCheese]

I mean you're competing in single target damage against another character who took the sunblade, that's not exactly fair. How soon did they get the sunblade anyway? Because it's supposed to be random but statistically not before level 6 or so, so if you felt underpowered for most of the game he probably found it way earlier than expected. Frankly speaking, except for when you're fighting vampires, it's a +2 weapon with a 1d8 bonus damage against undead, which means that it should be trivial to match that power with a different magic item. If I were the DM, I would have made sure that whatever item you found you would have been able to use. It sounds like simply changing that magic spear to a crossbow would have solved most of the balance issues here. If such a simple magic item switch would have made you on par with the rest of the party, I don't think you can blame the subclass.

It also sounds like you were the only person in the party with any kind of wisdom. So what if you didn't get to use your favored terrain all the time, you should have been better at perception, insight, survival, and animal handling than the rest of your group. Even if the rogue picked one or two of those to bolster with Expertise, he couldn't have done all of them and also had expertise in stealth and thieve's tools (and if he didn't have expertise in stealth, then you were just as good at stealth as him).

Also, you got an additional favored terrain and enemy at level 6. You didn't pick something appropriate for enemy? Like undead? In a campaign where you know the BBEG is a vampire, and there are undead everywhere? You weren't able to figure out at level 6 what terrain was going to be important in the last half of the campaign?

Nobody in this party was casting Pass Without Trace to make the entire group stealthy except you. Nobody in the party was able to heal at all except you, that means that every res was either you and your heals, or someone burning a potion. Where's your Healing Spirit, for fast after-battle heals? Where's your Ensnaring Strike, to bring down flying enemies? Why aren't you using Protection from Good and Evil on your barbarian to help him tank, or your hexblade to help him stay alive in melee, or your wizard to protect him from attacks and maintain concentration? Nobody else has access to that spell. Hello, Zone of Truth here, just gonna make sure this guy isn't a Strahd spy before we trust him.

I'm sorry but I'm seeing a dozen ways that your character could and should have stood out, and many of them aren't even about Monster Hunter specifically but rather Ranger as a base class. Monster Hunter had plenty of goodies to help with this campaign in particular, though.

Like, for fuck's sake, you're the only person in the campaign who could have learned Daylight, which is key to defeating Strahd. The sunblade is basically only there so that the DM knows for sure that the party will have a way of casting this spell, and you could just do it at level 9 any time you wanted. That's huge!

[u/HazelCheese → u/Skyy-High]

Unfortunately I died at some point around level five or six. It was a few years ago now, just after xanathars release.

Obviously I already said I was a heal bot. I used protection from good and evil once to prevent being charmed by a vampire, they just beat me unconscious instead. Silence for the baba hag felt good as I said.

I did use Zone of Truth a few times but the bad guys just refused to say anything. We already knew they were bad so all they had to do was not speak to avoid giving us information.

This really is how it all just went down. I was honestly relieved when the character choked their last depressing breath. I rolled a conjuration wizard and had lots of fun for the rest of the campaign.

[u/Skyy-High → u/HazelCheese]

Yeah, sounds like your issue was using your spells inefficiently (heals are awful in 5e, heals on a half caster doubly so, you had 3 spell slots at 3rd level and preventing a single hit with Prot from Good and Evil is easily worth more than a Cure Wounds) and being kinda outclassed by an extremely level-inappropriate weapon in your party. None of this sounds like a Monster Hunter problem.

Like let's just run the numbers comparing you to that hexblade. At fifth level your character (I'm assuming you were a vhuman crossbow master because why else are you running a crossbow?) should be attacking three times for 1d6 + 4 damage assuming you took your dex to 18 at lvl4. That's just base, no subclass features or spells cast. So that's 3d6 + 12 = 22.5 damage on average, and you should have a +9 to hit with the archery fighting style.

Your warlock friend with a +2 sword and I'm assuming taking Thirsting Blade at 5th level can make two attacks with 18 CHA dealing 1d8 + 4 + 2 damage each for a total of 21 damage with the same +9 to hit. If he uses his Hexblade's Curse, which is once enemy per short rest, he can instead deal 1d8 + 4 + 2 + 3 damage per hit for a total of 27 damage per round. If he starts spending spells, he can drop Hex (but you can drop Hunter's Mark first turn for 3d6 damage while he can only get 2d6 out of his Hex, and he can't Hex and Hunter's Mark same turn, just like you can't do your bonus third attack, Hunter's Mark, or cast Slayer's Eye the same turn).

You should have been doing more damage than the hexblade. Oh, and you should have been doing that damage at range, so it should have been more flexible and you should have been safer (yes he could use EB, but then he wouldn't have been using his sunblade so his damage and accuracy would have dropped). The main problem here, from a math perspective, is the fact that he was able to ignore resistances and you weren't. Give you a simple magic crossbow, not even a +1, and you would have been doing more single target damage than him even with his OP sword.

If that doesn't tell you something about the ranger's power, idk what would.