With the next Unearthed Arcana released, we get to see some revisions to classes and how they are going to be updated. With the Rogue, Ranger and Bard included in the new release, there are some interesting additions and, most notably, some missed opportunities for improvement. The most obvious of which is how they set up the rules for a certain number of encounter per day. So far, even in my home games, the most I can manage in a gaming day is three encounters, and that’s an outlier. Most days can only fit in one to two encounters at most.
That’s not to say that there isn’t a lot of good changes being made to the system. They are paying close attention to action economy, in particular, reactions and bonus actions. In the past, most duel wielders had to sacrifice their bonus action for that off hand attack when using a light weapon. Now it’s part of the property of the light weapon, meaning if you make an attack with a light weapon as an action, you can make an off hand weapon attack as part of the attack. This frees up rogues to dual wield and disengage on the same turn instead of pick one or the other.
Rangers have also seen some much needed additions including changing their use of hunters mark. With favored enemy, the ranger now gets hunters mark without it counting against their prepared spells, but more importantly, they don’t have to concentrate on it anymore making it much more useful.
At the end of the day, there is still a lot of material coming that may address the issues that plague 5e currently. The most notable of which is the amount of classes that can fight all day and still not lose any efficacy while spell casters at some point will run out of slots and become little more than cantrip wielding liabilities. The most obvious answer is a reduction in the amount of expected encounters during the day and balancing the classes with that in mind but its possible that Wizards have a better idea up their sleeve.
You can check out the new Unearthed Arcana release by visiting here.
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