I’m not very likely to spend any real money on new D&D products anytime soon, not only because of Hasbro shooting themselves in the foot with their OGL 1.2 power grab, but also as a result of the way they shielded staff members who enabled organized harassment of their critics years earlier. But I did get a bit into 5th edition years before I was aware of all that, and D&D has been part of my life long enough that even if I don’t put any more money into the franchise, I have a hard time excising it from my thoughts. So I’m reading through these playtest packets even though I don’t plan to play the new edition (and it is a new edition, or a half-edition – the mechanical changes appear to be more significant than the 1e -> 2e transition, perhaps moreso than 3.0 -> 3.5, but less than any step in the sequence 2nd -> 3rd -> 4th -> 5th; I think of it as 5.5e). And similarly, I don’t fill out any of the playtest feedback forms, but I still spend time writing up my thoughts, if only for my own satisfaction.

Druids

1. The wording about losing features when you Wild Shape is terribly unclear; I have no clear idea what it’s supposed to include or exclude.
2. All specific animal shapes assumed are basically identical except for the ability to use equipment, which means we’re likely to see a lot of apes or other primates, raccoons, or other forms that have humanlike hands
3. Allegedly being a specific type of creature feels hollow: you aren’t really a dog without Scent, a skunk without musk, a bat without Blindsight, etc.
4. You can be Large (unlike Goliaths?), but can’t be Tiny, which means you can’t be a squirrel-sized squirrel until other party members have been Raising Dead and Teleporting for 2 levels. If designers want to deny players an ability that seems like it should be available they ought to explain why.
5. Elemental form is a disaster as a replacement for the ability to change into an actual elemental. Thematically, your druid was supposed to be turning into forms at the root of nature, not turning into forms which never occur in nature. Just get rid of it if it’s going to be this half-hearted.
6. Druids are being used as the games shapeshifter character type, but the game doesn’t appear that interested in having a shapeshifter – it might be better to lean away from Wild Shape if that’s the case. I mean, if Druid is the least popular class in play, maybe there’s no particular reason to maintain a Circle of the Moon, or a Druid where Wild Shape is a major feature.
   1. Also: it feels like designers are attempting to balance Druids around Wild Shape as a combat mode, which requires throwing away a lot of the interesting parts of the class (such as taking on various animal forms for useful features specific to that animals form – a chameleon’s ability to camouflage itself, for example). I’d rather see an ability to turn into animals that’s thematically meaningful but of limited combat use than a bland combat mode.
7. Other thematic issues
   1. Dropping the prohibition against metal armor takes away the thematic point of the Druid having Heat Metal; now that seems more like it should be a Wizard spell.
   2. Healing Blossoms is “nature” dressing on a ability that doesn’t feel Druidic.

The overall trend I see with the Druid redesign is an obsession with addressing perceived mechanical issues which neglects the thematic point of the class. There are other mechanical issues others have pointed out (the defined forms will have AC values which are much too low, for example), but I consider the thematic issues much more critical since they can’t be fixed by publishing errata with new numbers. I’m not fond of this approach to game design.

Paladins

1. Paladins get at-will spellcasting in the form of cantrips now. At this point, why not just give that to everyone? Why not just make every class a spellcaster – maybe not at level 1, but eventually?
   1. The idea of at-will spellcasting was an attempt to make magic characters that didn’t run out of magic. However, 5e gives it not just to characters whose primary schtick is magic (like Wizards and Clerics), but also classes who have only minor magical abilities (subclasses like Eldritch Knight and Spellthief). Full caster classes are still much more powerful in terms of their magical abilities, but the ubiquity of magic class abilities makes non-magical characters stand out, and not in a positive way – for example, characters with cantrips can generally make ranged attacks without worry of running out of ammunition. I feel at-will magic needs to be either restricted only to classes who are ride or die with magic, or it needs to be given to all classes even if it gets pushed back a tier or two.
2. Dropping previously iconic abilities like immunity to disease and strictly limiting abilities like the old detect-evil should come with a rationale – not necessarily in the finished document, but at least in design materials. Why are these changes being made?
   1. I’ve seen a lot of speculation that immunity to disease is being dropped because disease as a specific thing will be dropped and just replaced by more generic status conditions such as poisoned, or suffering levels of exhaustion, or reductions in maximum HP. Those might all be a reasonable mechanical implementation of disease effects, but I think it’s vital to immersion – at least for me – that class abilities are defined diegetically rather than just mechanically, if only because that tends to guide and inspire how players think about their characters and their place in the larger setting.
   2. I suspect the ability to detect evil is being minimized in part because recent editions have shown no idea what to do with alignment. That’s a shame – it wouldn’t be too hard to make alignment mechanically significant using existing 5e rules concepts and without a lot of overhead (and no limits on player decisions, either). I’ll have to write that up sometime…

I’ve seen a lot of other commentary about purely mechanical concerns – changes to the Paladin’s ability to smite and how that interacts with their various Smite spells, critical hits, etc. I’ll be honest: I recognize a lot of these considerations may be very significant to how the class actually works in play, but (a) they’re pretty boring to me, since they’re almost purely mathematical concerns, and (b) they mostly concern abilities which were added to Paladins in editions well after I started playing, so they seem extraneous to me; I think I’d rather see the Paladin rendered as a Fighter archetype rather than a class of its own (and I’d definitely prefer that for Rangers given 5e’s lack of concern for the thematic concerns Rangers were originally built around).