Builds I Want to Screw Around With

1. * Wood Elf Finesse Barbarian *(wielding a Katana). Why? Being ridiculous wasn’t enough for you? Well, they get Dex&Con to AC, and the new Rage requires you keep hitting people to maintain it (Wood Elf adds 5 ft move to the 40 ft Barbarian move for 45! Also adds to dex/wis). I want an illustration of a katana-wielding elf barbarian…
2. Mt. Dwarf Lightbringer Cleric. Why? Lightbringer clerics don’t get armor proficiency, but Mt. Dwarves get light/medium armor (and a +1 bonus for wearing medium/heavy). Take Combat Reflexes, and twice per round you can react to melee attacks by preemptively casting Searing Light! And you don’t have to be squishy while you do it, either. Go point-blank spells, or swing that Battleaxe (also compliments of your dwarf lineage).
3. Trickster Gnome Paladin. Uses Charisma for all saving throws, gets an advantage on all Charisma saves… Oddly enough, Trickster Gnomes make terrible Illusion Wizards because of redundancies, but great Paladins? Also, can you say, Medium mount?
4. Disarmer Fighter. Take Unarmed Strike and Disarming Strike feats (Disarming Strike lets you perform Disarm in addition to attacking that round), and you can steal weapons from people (you can hold on to a weapon you disarm from someone still). Currently Fighters are proficient with absoluately every weapon in the game, so you can beat them with whatever you take!
5. Dual Spiked Shield Fighter. They’re light weapons. Seriously, you can dual wield them because they’re light weapons. Also, they do d6 damage and give +2 ac.
6. Sniper Rogue. Not nearly as clever as the others, but has the potential to do 13d8 with the longbow at level 19. The new Sneak Attack mechanics and Rogue Schemes mean you can Sneak Attack someone who isn’t in melee range of an ally. Finally, ranged Sneak Attacks become viable!

Summary and Critique on Changes

Advantage/Disadvantage

Probably one of my favorite changes. Basically, factors may add Advantages or Disadvantages to a d20 roll, one cancels one of the other. If you have more advantages you use the better of 2d20, if you have more disadvantages, the worst of 2d20. If you break even or don’t have either, it’s a normal roll.

Skills

Skill simplification was one of my favorite features in Pathfinder, and I like the system here immensely (skills are just stat checks, and “taking a skill” is adding a scaling die to it). Advantage and disadvantage come in to play a lot here, as you can imagine.

Full Attacks

…are gone, replaced with increasing the number of dice you roll for your weapon once per turn (called Deadly Strike, which for high BAB classes scales up to a 5d pool). This speeds up combat, and is a good thing. To make this rule less complicated, every weapon is a single dice of damage, which means the Greatsword is a d12 now instead of 2d6.

Finesse is now a weapon feature that makes said weapon completely dex based, great change. There are even finesse 2-handers, like the katana!

Two weapon fighting is greatly simplified & improved. There’s no penalty, but they both must be light, and you don’t get stat bonus damage on the offhand (both limitations can be feat’d).

Playing a small melee doesn’t lower your damage anymore, it just makes heavy weapons swing with Disadvantage.

Ranged attacks get to just add stat damage now, second range increment is used at Disadvantage.

Casting

Unlimited cast cantrips mean your Wizard won’t shoot his eye out with a short bow, another great idea borrowed from Pathfinder. Oh, and each caster’s damage spam cantrip scales like a melee’s Deadly Strike (typically like a long sword).

Spell dcs now scale with your level, which is a change I’ve been waiting for a very long time. Since the dc is no longer a concern, some spells scale in effect if they’re prepared in a higher slot, sweet deal.

Rituals now allow ten minute versions of utility spells without costing a spell cast, again, awesome update.

Needless to say, it’s a great time to be caster, my first Fifth edition character was a Wizard =)

The Bad

Sorcerer and Bard aren’t released yet. There are very few feats/spells, you can no longer gain armor/weapon proficiency from feats (besides short/longbow). Oddly enough this makes the racial weapon/armor proficiencies a lot more important, which I really like.

Monk and Ranger are basically half finished. The Ranger gets some small perk packages, that follow a theme based on a favored enemy, but are not exclusive to that type (example, Favored Enemy Giants gives you stuff to dodge larger creatures, not just giants).

What Ranger needs is some weapon specialization class features again. Not necessarily feat sets, but definitely two or three sets of class features for different combat options. I would actually love to see them get: Crossbow/Longbow/TWF and-or 2hander sets. If they were the only class that could rapidly load crossbows, I think it would be a cool niche.

Monk needs to be better at doing Unarmed damage than a Fighter (expertise dice and extra actions). There, I said it… They just get an Unarmed Combat feat for free, no scaling Unarmed damage, no flurry. At max level they can do a couple Ki tricks up to 4 times/day, but that would be the only time you’d be inclined to use Unarmed… They finally get the equivalent of full BAB, which I’m happy with. I would probably house-rule something about giving them an extra stage or two of Deadly Strike to simulate Flurry of Blows, but only when they are Unarmed.

The Good

Omg, Cleric has almost as many flavors as the Pathfinder Sorcerer now! They vary from having no armor proficiencies to having plate/shield/great weapons, I love it. One variant I’m going to have to play is called the Lightbringer, who can react to melee swings against him by preemptively casting a damage cantrip.

One version of the Paladin is Evil or Neutral and gets Frightening Presence, which is sweet.

Somehow, Rogue pulled ahead as the top archer. The new Sneak Attack mechanic revolves around taking Disadvantage when you don’t currently have one, and then the Rogue variants have different conditions that give you Advantage (to cancel it out). What does this mean? Well, at level 20, while the Fighter could do 5d8+1d6(by expending a quarter of his expertise dice for the day), the Rogue can do 13d8, if the target isn’t threatened by melee (using Isolating Strike to break even Advantage-wise). Oh, I forgot to mention that Sneak Attack becomes d8’s eventually!