We, and by this I mean humans, find comfort in the familiar. It's safe, it's nostalgic.
When the folks at WotC decided to come out with revised core rulebooks for 5th Edition as part of a 50th anniversary project for D&D, they made the decision to not make a clean break with the super-popular 5E rules (which themselves came out during the 40th anniversary) but instead to build upon the system, to add rather than to eclipse.
Now, they had an opportunity to fix various problems that had existed within the game. We saw some classes that had struggled in terms of power enhanced. Others (the Ranger) got big changes that I think didn't quite get them there.
The PHB had something of an obligation to go back to its own existing subclasses and give us updates to them - the subclasses therein were presented as the core of those class' fantasies. They also broadened out options for classes that had been somewhat neglected in 2014, while reining in the two that had, for some reason, gotten far more subclasses. (I don't totally agree with the decisions of which subclasses they picked - the Swashbuckler fantasy feels far more core to the Rogue fantasy than the Soulknife, and I say that as someone who plays a Soulknife.)
However, the promise of 5E 2024 or 5.5e or whatever you want to call it, was backwards compatibility. If you want to play a School of Conjuration Wizard or a Samurai Fighter with the 2024 versions of these classes, you can: there's only some slight adjustments you need to make, like delaying subclass features that used to come at levels 1 or 2 until level 3.
D&D has a long and storied history, with many established campaign settings and adventures. Many of 5E's early adventures were new takes on classic ones: Princes of the Apocalypse was its remake of the Temple of Elemental Evil. Curse of Strahd was the remake of the original Ravenloft module. Tomb of Annihilation was a riff on Tomb of Horrors.
These, however (at least Curse of Strahd and Tomb of Annihilation) were well received because they added a ton, and really felt remade from the ground up.
To be sure, a lot of 5E character options are like that: I think either 3.5 or 4E had an "Avenger" that was transformed into the Oath of Vengeance Paladin subclass.
But this was necessary: the way that the game worked in previous editions was, I believe, different enough that you couldn't just plug in an old subclass to the new system and expect it all to work (in fairness, I think 3.5 was pretty close).
Of the two books with new character options coming out in 2025 - Forgotten Realms: Heroes of Faerun and Eberron: Forge of the Artificer, there are a total of 13 subclasses. Seven of those are revisions of existing subclasses.
Now, I'll concede that the Artificer ones (which make up 4 of the 7) probably needed to come with the revised Artificer. Like the 2024 class revisions, the Artificer is getting some significant changes (though we'll have to see it in print to know precisely what changes those are - the biggest I recall is the change from infusions to everything being Replicate Magic Item, with no base item required).
However, what we have seen in the Unearthed Arcana playtesting materials has been, by a huge majority, previously-existing stuff.
Worst, in the most recent one, only a handful of the subclasses presented have any real meaningful changes. The Path of the Spiritual Guardian is only slightly, slightly different from the Path of the Ancestral Guardian. I don't need a new version of this.
Now, to be fair, Heroes of Faerun does give us some truly new stuff, and even as early as Xanathar's Guide to Everything, we were getting some reprints (the Swashbuckler and Mastermind, and Storm had appeared in SCAG, if memory serves).
But I think the danger that WotC could fall into with 5.5e is that they seek to just sell us the same stuff with minor tweaks, relying not on excitement over cool new ideas but more on a fear of not being "up to date" on things.
And I think that the brand will suffer a lot if the latter is stronger than the former.
Now, I think there is a distinction to be made here:
I like the new Bladesinger, but I don't think we needed it. The Bladesinger was already a very popular subclass, and needing only to delay picking it up one later level would have been a perfectly acceptable "update" to it in 5.5.
A subclass like the Purple Dragon Knight/Banneret, on the other hand, was absolutely godawful, possibly the worst subclass in all of 5E. Thus, you could imagine that i'd be an interesting one to revisit and make actually good. Sadly, the new Banneret is... well, it's better than the SCAG version, but I mean that very much to damn with faint praise.
See, I think that there should be two gates that a revamped subclass has to go through: first, it needs to be an exciting, cool thing that players would want to see again. Second, it needs to have failed to live up to its potential.
I will say that, in the recent UA, I found that the Warrior of Intoxication (terrible name) did at least start to add something really fun to the old Way of the Drunken Master. The brewing mechanic, while it needs some serious iteration, added something truly cool and fun and powerful to a subclass that needed something like that (also, to those, like the folks on the Eldritch Lore Podcast, who didn't like adding this mechanic to a subclass based on a real - if possibly only performative - martial arts style, I would ask you: you know this is a fantasy game, right? That we don't need to be bound by the real world? Let me belch flames!)
Truly, though, what I want is for at least 80% of new character options to be truly new, or at least for them to be truly new to 5E. Backwards compatibility is kind of meaningless if you're just going to update everything from 2014-2023.
I already own Xanathar's Guide to Everything. I don't want to buy it again.
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