Hello again, everyone!

I've reached the point where I've tried much of the EA content and am having trouble motivating myself to start another fresh character. I figure, then, that it must be time to share. While this will primarily be a suggestions thread, I do wish to say that I've had a really great time with the EA in the 250 or so hours I've logged so far, and have every intention of being right here to do this all again when more content is released.

Character Creation Content
  • I know that voice work is not exactly the most fruitful of labors, but I would love to see just one more voice for male characters that can capture the deeper registers that many players are used to hearing in Dwarves and some Humans (and certainly Half-Orcs, if you intend to include them at some point.)
  • On this topic, the "Hells. Something just woke up down here." Line from Voice 3 doesn't sound like it's coming from the same character as the voice's other prompts, and could probably use a rerecording.
  • Other players have brought up concerns about models clipping with worn weapons, and I wanted to add that the Githyanki Male is so tall and thin that I've noticed a gap in the neck region of certain chunky armors, where the armor's neckline is too wide for the Gith's small neck.
  • On the topic of Gith, Gith characters are granted a free skill proficiency that isn't listed in their racial traits and honestly probably shouldn't be there, given how strong the Gith's other racial abilities already are.
  • I've seen on the forums talk of the Mixed Half-Elf: the original Half-Elf from the 5e PHB that gains the skill focus feat at first level instead of specific elven racial abilities. This subrace of Half-Elf is rather important to a lot of players, and I would like to see it included as well, in order to offer some challenge to the supremacy of Wood-Elves in standard roguery.
  • In this same vein, Halflings could really use another of their racial abilities represented in game. +2 Dexterity and Lucky doesn't feel like enough compared to the base abilities of other races. Personally, I would suggest adding Halfling Nimbleness, which allows Halflings to move through space occupied creatures larger than them (PHB 28): this would add a cool feature to halflings that can be plainly seen in game without pushing the race over the top.


Gameplay
  • I've been rather disappointed at my inability to use the disengage action that enemies use in combat. Jump suffices under most circumstances to get me away from enemies, but often I find myself needing to move downward without triggering an AoO, and jumping in that scenario forfeits the rest of my turn to prone and causes falling damage. A proper disengage would also help character without a great deal of athletics to move through crowded spaces. (Fellow Players: if you can actually Disengage with some esoteric command, please let me know how, because I haven't been able to figure it out).
  • I am of the opinion that the distance an enemy is pushed by the shove ability should be reduced for all creature sizes and/or their trajectory curves should be tightened so they don't soar so far. This should make shove-cheesing a bit more difficult and shove itself a tad more realistic (not that realism is necessarily what we're going for, but still).
  • I'm for the proposition that I've heard from many other members that the game would play better with lower enemy Hp values and higher AC values, as one would find in a typical 5e game. I understand that many players are frustrated with repeatedly missing; that is, however, the 5e you signed up for: d20 is basically built on a 50% success rate for individuals of equal skill. That's not so bad in practice, either: better, I would wager, than having an 80-95% hit chance and getting super frustrated whenever you miss despite that. The excess Hp also begins to invalidate traditional combat as the game pushes on, with shove-cheesing and barrel-bombing becoming far more attractive strategies when faced with Ogres, Gnolls, Hook Horrors, and other creatures that can approach 100 hp. If enemy Hp values weren't so high, some of the more controversial combat tools, such as persistent burning damage, could probably be turned down a notch, which would help save player lives as well.
  • I wanted throw an idea out here to handle DoT via burning in a scalable way by turning burning into a stackable status, so brief exposure to flame (such as being struck or even missed by a Firebolt) doesn't do so much damage that it makes other cantrips obsolete, but characters who run through a large area of flame or who are pelted with multiple alchemist fires or firewine barrels are significantly more "on fire" (think of the effects of such an arrangement on Scorching ray, for example). Obvs the number of possible stacks and scaling of damage and things would have to be worked out, but we're in EA, right? That's what this time is for.
  • Sickles concern me. 2d4 damage is too much for a light weapon; they render the Duel Wielder feat moot apart from its AC bonus, since the largest one-handed weapons in the game at present do only 1d8 damage. They also present the notion that the plan may be to introduce more weapons that use higher die values for their damage as the game progresses, which I guess is viable but is also saddening, as it breaks pretty heavily from the atmosphere created by D&D's damage scaling. I personally would be disappointed if I had to trade my Greatsword in for a Falchion or something in act II, because Falchions are modified to now do d28 damage a hit, and so on.
  • My current understanding is that you don't get Advantage on your attack rolls just for being behind an enemy, but that that enemy needs to be threatened by another character. If the case is that you can gain Advantage alone in this way, though, then that's a feature I believe should be removed. Getting behind an enemy on any given turn is comically easy, and protecting yourself from attacks from behind is nearly impossible, especially when considering that you can't rotate your character once you're out of movement.
  • There's a lot of talk abound about Dialogue, and I would agree with many in the community that the Dialogue as it stands in the current EA release needs a once over for consistency and narrative clarity. Many are finding the Tiefling/Druid tension hard to swallow because we are only really told and never shown what's going on between them and the dangers posed by the Tieflings are never really communicated to us as players very well, which reduces Kagha's motivations to a caricature of xenophobic evil and accelerates the plot between them to open violence way too quickly for many's tastes.
  • I do of course echo the community's concern over the availability of Long Rests, though I myself hardly ever do; I don't feel there's much to say about it here, though, because it's self-explanatory and I bet limits are already being considered.

Last edited by Contra; 26/10/20 10:54 PM.