Apart from the game crashing on saving (making me redo the grove fight twice), the patch is actually neat in many aspects. The role-playing side of playing as a bard is very well-done, and it'd be great to find magical instruments down the line that add extra effects to inspiration - mechanically, though, they NEED to be overhauled together with the reaction system. The way inspiration and cutting words work is unacceptable and involves very awkward enabling/disabling of effects that is the opposite of ergonomic. Vicious Mockery is a win in and of itself, though. And Expertise, at long freaking last!
The visual changes are... here and there, honestly. Hair no longer being gender-locked and having highlights as an option is great, but the colours are all off now. They all had contrast turned up a few notches, from the looks of it, and some (like the raven black) look really weird, while all the irregular colours are now too bright and artificial-looking. Physics got disabled on every hair style for some reason, but were (somewhat jankily) added to the githyanki half-plate's leather straps, so the character wearing it now provides a more or less constant supply of fanservice. Gnomes look nice, although you can notice how some of the faces/features are lifted from the other races' heads, going back to the appearance variety discussion.
Speaking of gnomes, the svirfneblin just having advantage on Stealth checks at all times is *kind* of a messy implementation. It should at least probably only work indoors, which shouldn't be too hard to implement? (just slap a tag on each area that denotes whether or not it counts as outdoors/indoors).
Still, it's not as dissapointing (to me), as the last patch was. Reactions have to be done properly before the release, though. They simply have to. And heads/bodies would need a re-work similar to hair's to be more customizable so that the visual aspect of character creation is finally acceptable.
