Playtest 5 Survey Results

 

Jeremy Crawford and Todd Kenreck have a new video discussing the survey results for Playtest 5 - note that this is 5, rather than the more recent 6, so there's no talk about the Monk or revisions to the Experts and Priests (also, those class groups don't seem to be much of a thing anymore.)

The video is almost half an hour long, so here are the highlights as I saw them:

Weapon Mastery is extremely popular, and is officially in for the 2024 core rulebooks. I can't say I'm surprised - while some options have had some legitimate critiques (I think Flex is both boring and also more or less gets rid of the versatile trait on those weapons - though it does deliver on being the simplest option) the overall idea of weapon mastery is popular and good and it's here to stay.

One thing I'm less excited about is that class spell lists are coming back - they're doing away with the Arcane, Primal, and Divine spell lists we've seen in the past several playtests. While this does allow them to tailor certain spells around certain classes and vice versa, the worry I have is that this is a step back from the "future-proofing" that the early playtests were doing. By creating universal class groups and spell lists, it became far easier to implement a new class like the Artificer and simply say "anything in any sourcebook that is for Experts, and any spell that is Arcane, is usable by you.") Now, by making all these things class-specific, I fear that the logistics of adding new classes to the game will be far more cumbersome, and we'll be less likely to see other new things like the Artificer.

Notably, this change will have huge implications for the most recent version of the Bard, who in playtest 6 eventually got access to all three spell lists at once, making them the most versatile spellcaster in the game. We'll have to see if Magical Secrets will be as generous in the next version.

In terms of class-specifics, we got light touches and mentions:

Barbarians: the Berserker got "most improved" in terms of satisfaction ratings, which isn't a surprise, as the new Berserker gets to do what it's meant to without the profound penalty of getting exhaustion (if we don't get the new exhaustion mechanic, I hope we'll get something akin to Van Richten's "Stress," which is a less punishing scaling condition that I think holds a lot of mechanical space.)

Fighters: The focus here was more on their use of weapon mastery. Personally, I was most excited by the new version of Indomitable, which seems like it will actually work sometimes now.

Sorcerers: Crawford acknowledged that some of the sorcerer-specific spells were not terribly popular. And I also had mixed feelings about them - while things like the Wizard's spell-manipulation stuff was very deeply tied into the class, many of the Sorcerer ones felt like they were either too similar to existing spells, or did things the sorcerer wouldn't likely want to spend spell slots on. Also, they're going to do another pass on Twinned Spell, which is probably for the best.

Warlocks: Pact Magic is coming back, and I believe Mystic Arcanum is again going to be a core class feature, rather than an invocation. Also, all Warlocks are going to use Charisma (as cool as the idea of Intelligence or Wisdom Warlocks was, I actually think this is probably the right call). Supposedly there are new ideas of how to let Warlocks cast more spells without giving them standard (and half-) spellcasting, but details are thin, though I'd expect to see them in Playtest 7, which is theoretically soon.

Wizards: I don't think they said a ton here. Evokers are still going to evoke, etc.

    So, again, I think my take on all of this is that I worry that the D&D team is playing too conservatively. While 5E is beloved, and I know they don't want to alienate anyone with sweeping changes, if you're too cautious and conservative, you start to run into the question of "hey, why would I even want these books if they're just giving me stuff that already exists?"

Granted, there are a ton of smaller tweaks here and there that I'm sure will add up, and I think that most of the ways in which things are being changed are probably good.

Indeed, while I wasn't a fan of the decision to revert subclass feature levels to their old progression, there was one winner in the Draconic Sorcerer, who once again gets their permanent wings thanks to the fact that that feature comes much later than it would with the standardized 3-6-10-14 progression. I still feel for Bards and Rogues, though in the latter case, at least they have Cunning Strikes (which I expect will get high approval ratings).

One theme Crawford mentioned was how a lot of classes were rated lower than the average on all their features, which he felt was probably a case of low-balling before going into the details. But I think one problem is the structure of these surveys - if a class is missing a thing that I think it needs, I might rate it low even if the things it does have are all fine.

Anyway, I'm assuming that playtest 7 will give us revisions of the remaining classes, which should mean the Barbarian, Fighter, Monk, Sorcerer, Warlock, and Wizard. (Possibly missing the Monk, as they're a cycle behind).

I'm curious to see what other elements of the game they want to publicly test. I'd love to see if they have some Monsters from the new Monster Manual to show off, and a new encounter-building system would be great.

I think some guidance on how to build dungeon environments and social encounters would also be great - structuring an adventure that isn't purely about hacking and slashing through fiends, but maybe "how do I seed hints of how to get to this dungeon without just telling the party" and "what kind of things might I put in my environments that players can make use of - in or out of combat."

In ten days, it'll be the one year anniversary of the first of these UAs. That means we're likely over halfway through the process, so I'd only expect 3-4 more of these. Naturally, classes and subclasses are core mechanics to the game, so I can understand why they've been the focus. But I'll be curious to see what else, if anything, they want tested.