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.
It's much more book keeping to begin with. It has much more work in most tracking and teaching. If we are going that route we might has well go full vancian and prepare spells slots.
Also in general the spells I want don't match with spell progression for prepared casters. I usually want more 1st level spells especially at higher levels. Also there are a few spell levels like 4th that have worse selections. I would prefer either more 3rd and 5th level spells. Especially for druids which have 1 or 2 good options
I dunno, I've seen a decent amount of players basically match their spells known levels with their spell slots already just because they feel like it makes sense; it's not really more bookkeeping because you're already keeping track of exactly how many spell slots you have anyway.
It certainly does force you to make choices that you might not want to otherwise, but spellcasters are problematically overflexible at the moment, so reining them in a bit like this felt pretty fair to me.