Update video about the upcoming revision for 2024 Some highlights:
- Fully backwards compatible with 2014+ D&D books
- Can have a 2014 character next to a 2024 character at the same table/game
- Most of the classes/changes theyre keeping have high approval ratings
- Fey warlock has something like 89% approval rate
- All major class changes/revisions have been/will be in UA before release
- There will still be minor changes (spells, other class changes, etc.) outside of that which won’t be
- Probably will be previews next year
- The three new books will the largest version the game has ever had (close to 1000 pages combined)
- treasure is different (and will be noted in the MM)
- There will be more common magic items
- “there should be more ways to engage with high level play, and we can address that” - not sure what this will mean, but noteworthy statement
- world tree barbarian is in, brawler is out
- 9 of the 12 classes are moving forward, with just the druid, monk, and barbarian needing revisions
As someone who hasn’t been tracking these UA updates at all, how are the new classes? Are they way more balanced and more fun than the base classes? What makes them better?
Some classes are substantially better, others have been cleaned up. For example, the fighter has an entirely new set of tools, from Second Wind now being +1d10 to any skill check, to indomitable being a pseudo legendary resistance; Barbarians gain new bonuses from their rage, including advantage on stealth; rogues get to flavour their sneak attack with extra effects at the cost of their damage output; Warlocks have bigger expanded spell lists which are automatically added to your known spells, and a few extra invocations; and so on. Additionally, most of the optional features, invocations and maneuvers from Tasha have been included, too.
There have been a few nerfs as well: +10/-5 feats being removed/reworked will drastically shake up the meta for martial classes. Unfortunately, we have no word on the main problem the game has faced since its inception - spells, which apparently are not going to be playtested. I wonder what the designers have in mind; the same designers who tried to give infinite Wish to three different spellcasting classes as a capstone, and an ungodly broken metamatic to Wizards. Yeah, not holding my breath for that.
They also decided to leave the rest system unchanged, while also putting some band-aids on certain short rest-reliant classes (Warlock and Monk) instead of fixing the rest system as a whole. So if you play a Warlock, you can recover half your spell points in 10 minutes, but if you’re a fighter stuck with a DM that doesn’t use short rests on a regular basis, you are still going to suck.
It’s basically just a Tasha’s cauldron of more things, but the options presented are no longer “optional” and are baked into the base rules, which is good because having your class/subclass fixed in an optional ruleset that your table may not accept was not great.
Appreciate the summary!
Thank goodness. Those feats made certain martial classes crazy good at the early levels with variant human.
Baking in the Tasha’s changes should help rangers hopefully.
And ya, calling a lot of the optional features in Tasha’s optional when they were supposed to be straight up fixes for existing issues isn’t great. It’ll be annoying having to get used to a bunch of new rules but the changes do sound exciting now lol.
But too bad about the spells. The fact that wizards can replace a bunch of other classes at later levels has always been kind of an issue, or easily solve an encounter unless as a DM you were aware of the effect the most powerful spells have (like Forcecage or Wall of Force), has probably ruined many a campaign story.