Hey there! Thanks for taking the time and effort to to write this up and add your voice. Most of what you talk about are things that many of us here have reported on, and for a large part you'll find little disagreement here.
Despite what Larian says, it seems as though their claim to have started with pure D&D 5e and then tweaked back must only have been done on paper or in theory, because the game itself, in its earliest builds was very clearly built in its majority on the D:OS2 engine and system. Since then, they've actually moved quite a few things closer to 5e rules, and have shown a willingness to listen, at least in some cases, to the EA tester feedback about doing so... so there is hope that it may start to feel like D&D eventually before release. The best things any of us can do is to continue to report on the areas that feel wrong and keep the pressure on for them to relinquish their broken homebrews one by one.
If you can spare the time and energy, I'd strongly encourage you to also submit this post to Larian's direct feedback form, so it goes right to them. You can find that (
Here).
Elevation = Advantage. No. That's not how it works with the ruleset you're allegedly following. Giving such a massive boost to probability of hit (often upwards of 80% hit prob) when firing down and such a massive kick to firing up (ranged combat characters getting a 30% hit prob) makes most encounters nearly impossible if one side or the other has height. It makes "taking the high ground" the single most important part of a combat. And it creates other issues with difficultly balancing.
This is a big one here on these forums – you'll find very few who genuinely think this homebrew should stay. Most who talk about it are in your position. Until one patch ago, they also used to hand out Advantage for standing behind the enemy – which you could do every turn all the time just by literally stepping around them, no other expenditure (They haven't implemented proper reactions, and didn't use actual facing rules, so the attacked character had no tool for denying the silly 'I step around you while it's my turn then take my free advantage' bit. It just happened, constantly). It was ridiculous. They've since removed that backstab advantage, but haven't caved in on high ground advantage yet.
Shove = Bonus actionThis also breaks the game immensely and ties to the above. Most fights are "get to the high ground and push people off". It's not about much else other than watching your moves and your bonus actions. Add to that the fact that a character can Dash (Action and Move action) across the field, then execute a shove to push an enemy off the map makes the fights laughably trivial on either side. If I can get a push on a big bad, that's that, no muss no fuss. At the game table I would never let an enemy kill a PC in the first combat round this way.
A large majority at least feel similarly to you on this score, too. Most seem to feel that returning shove to 5e standard, and having it replace an attack, would be ideal – so martials with extra attack can still shove then attack or attack then shove if they want. That's part of the value of extra attack, and shouldn't be diminished by handing freebie bonus shoves out like candy to everyone. We also used to have bonus action disengage for everyone, and we still have bonus action hide for everyone (Rogues literally just got bonus action dash as their cunning action, with nothing else). Disengage, at least, has been restored to a full action for non-rogues, as of the latest patch.
The decrease in ranges for spells and ranged weapons plays into this as well – movement has not been decreased, but ranged weapons and spells have been crippled, so range just does not matter in this game, because your enemy can always close to you on their turn, regardless. This couples with the point you make below about stealth cheese and combat braking – because if you are undetected when you shove someone, it's an automatic success, even if you'd have no chance of succeeding at all normally. It's just 100% guaranteed, if you're stealthed when you shove. It's very broken and very silly.
Combat Cheese
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Importance of Clairvoyance
The “I doesn't feel like playing D&D” come sup from a lot of other commenters as well, so don't worry – you're not alone here. The people who like these mechanics are generally the people who come from earlier Larian games and enjoyed them there. I'm not one of those people. I hated it in D:OS2, and I don't want to see it here, in a game that is being advertised as D&D. I'm here to play dungeons and dragons, that's what was advertised... and this isn't it.
Camp Supplies appear un-splitable
To be fair to Larian here, Camping supplies were introduced as a mechanic last patch, because prior to this every single food item that you found (and the game is drowning in food items everywhere) could be eaten as a bonus action for healing. Often not minor healing either – we're talking a pig's head healing a level 3 character for 16hp or more. Unlimited bonus action healing for everyone all the time, basically. They've stopped the eating of food items now and replaced them with these camping supplies things, and it's interesting, but there are still bugs in it... it's a recent addition though, so I'm happy to give them a patch or two to iron it out. Others have reporting the splitting problem
In reality... this issue is not to do with camp supplies themselves. It's to do with Larian's inventory system. The camp supplies problem only highlighted it to more people. You cannot take something out of a container if it wold over-encumber you. You cannot split something that is in a container without taking it into your inventory first. Things automatically stack up and add their weight together if you send them to the same container. This is a really simple logic problem that should never have made it into the first beta of the game in the first place... but it endured because it didn't come up very often and before camp supplies there were few things that you could stack up enough to create the problem easily. Now the issue is more visible, so, hopefully, it'll get fixed.
The Larian fix will probably actually be NOT fixing the issue itself, and creating a work around... Which probably means that next major patch, the camp supplies check will be able to see and use camp supplies that are in the camp chest directly, circumventing the problem without fixing it.
Rogues don't workI imagine this isn't how it works because that might be hard to code, or it might "feel wrong". And frankly, it DOES feel a little wrong. Why does the rogue do all this damage just for being near a friend? But that's how DND5E is balanced. It puts some power back to the rogue when finding a hiding spot over and over again is simply time consuming. When controlling the rogue I kept finding myself trying to get hidden, and pop back out again to get the appropriate bonus damage that I would have NATURALLY gotten if this had been coded correctly.
So, this is another one that has been around since the early days, but it wasn't really noticed by most people until recently. Previously, using the sneak attack button (ugh) would make a normal attack regardless, so the game wasn't telling you when it wasn't applying sneak attack, and there was no signifier for it doing so or not.
Just recently, they did two things: removed backstab advantage, and made sneak attack error if its conditions weren't met, according to the game. What this has done, is highlighted ore clearly the fact that the way the game is assessing whether the rogue has advantage or not, and whether it counts you as having an ally in a suitable position, is simply not working properly. You don't notice it when you have advantage all the time anyway, and when the skill goes off all the time anyway, even if the game doesn't think the conditions are met. Now that those things aren't always the case any more, this error of computation has become more visible. Here's hoping it leads to a fix soon.
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Thanks again for your feedback, and for takinghte time to give it! More well thought-out posts are always a good thing here. Again, I'd like to encourage you to submit it to Larian directly. For some of the issues, I'd also encourage you to consider using their formal bug reporting form too, if you can spare the time and energy, because every independent report, from distinct voices, they get matters in this regard. You can find hteir formal bug reporting form (
Here).
Good luck with your streaming ^.^