I’m gonna come out and say, even with the statement, I’m not in favor of preemptive defederation like this.

I know the admins of an instance are hosting us basically out of the goodness of their own hearts, and I appreciate that. And I understand they can do whatever they want, and we can move to a different instance if we want. I get it.

But I joined .world because I wanted a neutral instance that would connect with pretty much everyone unless they were particularly problematic. Could hexbear be particularly problematic? Sure, maybe. But I think there’s a big difference between defederating in response to a problem and defederating in anticipation of a potential problem, especially since the users aren’t given a chance to discuss it. Like, I know we’re not technically entitled to give our input if we’re not admins, but I think it would be nice, y’know?

If it was just some small instance of trolls that’s one thing, but hexbear is actually quite a big instance, so this is a very impactful decision. I don’t like it being made preemptively behind the scenes like this.

Gonna jot my thoughts down, feel free to point out anything I might be missing!

Oh, wow, some actually good capstones! Though some are still a bit disappointing…

I shouldn’t be surprised they reverted the restriction on preparing spells based on the exact levels of your spell slots, but I thought that was a pretty reasonable nerf to spellcasters. I liked that change much more than the three spell lists thing.

Whew, they un-fucked Druids. I think this version of Wild Shape is quite reasonable. I’d probably allow learning a few more different forms tbh but this seems pretty fair.

Hmm. Am I missing anything, or does the Elemental Monk still not look very good? The 3rd level feature is a lot of text and good flavor to really not do anything that impactful, and the 6th level feature is basically a worse fireball. Happy to see they’re aware it’s bad, but I’m still not feeling it.

Nooo Quivering Palm nerf?? I loved that ability, it was so cool.

Giving Weapon Masteries to Paladin and Ranger was necessary IMO. They fundamentally play like martials. Though I do think pure martials should still be better at it.

Well, Paladin Smite spells finally work how everyone has been suggesting they should since 2014. I think it’s a good change.

Hunter Ranger looks pretty nice now. While I still kinda miss the old multiattack feature (I just thought it was cool), this seems reasonable, and way better than the last UA version.

Steady Aim is back!! Probably because I told how important it was to me in the survey.

Oh wow, I really like Cunning Strike. That’s a cool way to give them options in combat. I still kinda think they should have Extra Attack though.

This is a huge playtest, so there might be something in here I hate that ruins it all, but I actually feel really good about this one. A lot of the changes I really didn’t like were fixed or reverted, and there’s a bunch of new stuff I really do like. My outlook on 1D&D (or 5.5 or whatever we’re calling it) has substantially improved today.