Ok, we're in the home stretch here. The massive 50-page Unearthed Arcana that dropped yesterday brought five whole classes and the new weapon mastery system. But there are also a handful of other things to cover.
First, let's look at Feats.
This UA brings a few revised or new Epic Boons, the feats one can take at 20th level or beyond if your campaign is going into super overtime. There is also one standard, 4th-level+ feat.
Epic Boon of Dimensional Travel.
This feat is for Experts and Mages. It increases your choice of Dexterity, Intelligence, Wisdom, or Charisma by1. (Max 30)
Immediately after you take the Attack or Magic action, you can teleport up to 30 feet to an unoccupied space you can see.
This is relatively simple. It essentially causes most in-combat turns to give you a free, no-action-required Misty Step. I think if you wanted to push this a little further, letting you choose to do this before or after your action could be cool. This will give you excellent mobility, and free teleportation could be very powerful. But is it flashy enough? I honestly don't even know what expectations to set for level 20. I think this is good, and I think it will be appealing. Actually, it's obviously good. The question is whether this will wow your fellow players at the table.
Epic Boon of Energy Resistance.
This feat is for Experts and Mages. It increases your choice of Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, or Charisma by 1. (Max 30)
You gain resistance to two different damage types from between Acid, Cold, Fire, Lightning, Necrotic, Poison, Psychic, Radiant, or Thunder. When you finish a long rest, you can meditate to change those choices.
Additionally, when you take damage of a type to which you have Resistance, you can use your Reaction to force another creature you can see within 60 feet of you that isn't behind Total Cover to make a Dex save (DC determined by the ability increased with this feat) or take 2d12 + your constitution modifier damage of the type that triggered it.
So, I think the adaptability of the damage types is very nice, presuming your DM does enough foreshadowing to let you predict what kind of damage you're likely to face. ("Oh, we're going to the Caustic Labyrinth of Agathys? I might take Cold and Acid resistance.") The energy redirection is fun, though I think this has to be treated as the cherry on top rather than the main feature, given how often creatures (especially high-level ones) that deal certain types of damage are often resistance and immune to them. That's maybe focusing too much on, say, Dragons, so maybe I'm overestimating how much that will be impacted (and of course, you don't need to redirect it to the creature that damaged you in the first place - splash a little of that red dragon's fire breath onto their archmage ally).
Epic Boon of Irresistible Offense.
This feat is for Experts and Warriors. It increases your Strength or Dexterity by 1 (max 30).
The bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage you deal always ignores resistance.
Furthermore, when you roll a 20 on the d20 for an attack roll, you deal extra damage equal to the ability score increased by this feat. You can use this benefit only once per turn.
So, we don't really have enough information to see how powerful this will be. Are +1 or other magical weapons going to still be doing B/P/S damage, or are they going to, as we've seen in some newer stat blocks, be dealing Force damage instead? In the current Monster Manual, very few things have resistance to nonmagical weapon damage, and by level 20 I sure hope your character has a magic weapon. So I really don't know whether this anti-resistance thing will be amazing or worthless.
Now, let's look at the crit bonus. When I first read this I didn't see that you had to roll a natural 20, and thought it was just once a turn, which would be utterly bonkers powerful. But this also means that you can't benefit from other ways to increase your chance to crit, such as the Champion's Superior Critical or using "Hold Monster" to get an automatic crit. Still, when this goes off, 5% of the time, you're going to likely be dealing 23 or more extra damage on your crits. Technically that amounts to an increase of 1.15 damage per attack (it's a little lower due to the once-per-turn rider) but this will feel epic when you get off that one shot with your +2 pistol that's dealing 2d10+7+23, or 41 damage on average.
Epic Boon of Recovery.
This feat can be used by all class groups. It increases your Constitution by 1 (max 30)
When you would be reduced to 0 hit points, you can drop to 1 hit point instead and regain HP equal to half your Hit Point Maximum. Once you gain this benefit, you can't do so again until you finish a long rest.
When you take damage while you have 0 hit points, you can make a death saving throw instead of suffering a death saving throw failure.
Now this, I think, might be the most epic of the ones here. Effectively, your HP has just expanded by 50%. On top of that, by this level, a DM is well within their rights to have monsters go for the killing blow and attack you when you're down (and getting you down will be harder given the first part.) But now, even if they're slashing the crap out of your unconscious body, you're still more likely to survive than not. If you are attached to a character and want to make it very, very hard for your DM to kill the character you're probably very invested in at this point, this is the epic boon for you.
Epic Boon of Speed.
This feat is available to Experts and Warriors. It increases your Dexterity score by 1 (max 30).
As a bonus action, you can Disengage. When you do so, you end the Grappled and Restrained conditions on you. Additionally, your speed increases by 30 feet.
This does what it advertises, but on top of that, it also gives you a Freedom of Movement-like effect. This can be huge. Did you just get swallowed by the Tarrasque? You're level 20 - that's not outside the realm of possibility. With this boon, you can just bonus-action disengage to slip easily from the Tarrasque's mouth and back onto the battlefield, and then run far, far away. I think this is one of those boons that gives you a powerful ability that you'll really be grateful for in high-level play.
Epic Boon of the Night Spirit.
This feat is available to Experts and Mages. It increases your Dexterity, Intelligence, Wisdom, or Charisma by 1 (max 30).
When entirely in dim light or darkness, you can become invisible as an action. This condition ends after you take an action, bonus action, or reaction. While entirely within dim light or darkness, you have resistance to all damage except force, psychic, or radiant.
This was a case where I read the first part and thought that was the main bit, but I think the second is the real benefit. Invisibility on-demand is nothing to sneeze at, but so many tough monsters at high level have blindsight or truesight that I think its utility will be a little underwhelming. However, depending on your campaign, you might very frequently get the benefit of the damage resistances, which covers a ton of damage.
As a note, though, the current design for a lot of demon lords and other scary monsters does see their weapon attacks dealing Force damage, which this does not protect against. We'll have to see how things look in the new Monster Manual.
The final feat is Weapon Master, which we covered in the Weapons post when we started this UA, so I'll direct you there to check it out.
The work on Epic Boons is cool, but it only matters at all if taking a campaign to level 20 becomes something that works better in D&D. I think we could use more high-level published adventures. Currently, I believe that the only one that even hits tier 4 is Dungeon of the Mad Mage. The new DMG could also use some guidance on how to build adventures for parties that have the full suite of "Scry and Fry" spells at their disposal, which is where traditional dungeoneering kind of falls apart.
This concludes my overview of the largest playtest document we've gotten for this whole test. It's been a lot. I think rather than doing a conclusion post to summarize my thoughts, I'll just do a brief summary here and address things in regular posts moving forward.
Generally, I think that the Weapon Mastery system looks good and simple enough to implement, though it inarguably adds complexity to a game that is fairly complex. I don't think martial classes have fallen behind spellcasters in 5th Edition the way that they might have in earlier editions. Still, this is primarily a buff to the Warriors in particular, who might be more in need of a boost like this. We didn't see the Monk, which I assume means that it's in for some heavy revision, and perhaps if any Warrior needed something to jazz them up, it's them.
The Sorcerer and Wizard are both, I think, looking pretty good here. The use of spells-as-class features is something that is new and different to me, but I don't know that it's bad.
The Warlock I have the strongest opinion on. I love the new design of the pact boons, and in particular, I think that the Pact of the Blade is basically now fixed at this point. However, I'm deeply skeptical of this UA's implementation of Warlock spellcasting. It feels as if Warlocks have been demoted to half-casters, when previously they were just pure spellcasters with a different spellcasting rhythm. I think Warlocks should never feel like they're scrambling via Eldritch Invocations to keep up in terms of spell power (even if not the number of spells they can cast) with other Mages.
Still, overall, as has been the case with this whole playtest, my general impression has been good. I have very few doubts that I'll be getting these new core rulebooks and using them for future campaigns. I wish that the company that published them wasn't so shitty (most recently, for future readers, they evidently hired the actual, literal Pinkertons, which I didn't know still existed, to bust someone for having unreleased Magic cards) but I have a ton of respect for the actual game designers like Jeremy Crawford and Chris Perkins who work on D&D, and I think it's those people whose work is showing through on this.
The genuine intent here does seem to be to get D&D working the way the players want it to, and the team has shown a responsiveness to player feedback that I think is commendable.
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