Angry Blind Readthrough: Xanathar's Guide to Everything.
Posted: Wed Nov 22, 2017 4:46 am
So I made a terrible mistake a few months back and joined Adventurer's League because, well, I didn't have anyone else to play with. After a few notable sessions (including one module that was so bad the DM literally apologized for having to run it) I was out, but not before preordering this book in an attempt to pay2win my character to glory, or at least some way of doing combat that wasn't a boring fucking slog.
What is this book?
This book is notable for being the first and only player splatbook released since...2014? Holy shit, it's taken them 3 years to put out an actual powerup book for players? What the hell were they doing all - oh.
You see, this book doesn't have "new content" so much as it is Mike Mearls' lunch break articles refurbished. The title is based off some beholder crime lord from Forgotten Realms you don't care about because its a crappy throwback. That said, let's dive in and see what we have! I'm not as familiar with Mearl's lunch break articles, so everything in this book is going to stand on its own merits.
I'm not optimistic.
Chapter 1: Character Options
Holy subclasses, Batman! Looks like there are about 30 new subclasses here, and right away we see the problem that a bunch of them are stupid overlap subclasses. Did we really need a religious barbarian in a game where the paladin exists and you can multiclass the two? The flavored soul makes a return in a game where all casters are basically 3e spontaneous classes. Fuck! There's also a bunch of random tables for personal characteristics. I have never seen anyone use these things, because usually if you're making up an imaginary elf you have the imagination to come up with these things on your own, but what do I know?
But because I don't hate myself enough, I'm gonna go through all these subclasses and give you all the lowdown. You're welcome.
Barbarian
Path of the Ancestral Guardian[/b]: This class is supposedly about calling your ancestor spirits to help you out in combat. The third level feature grants people you hit while raging disadvantage to attack and if they hit someone they deal half damage - unless they attack you. I get the mechanical function, but I'm not sure why specifically your ancestors fuck off when you personally get hit. Other features include...a random amount of DR granted as a reaction to OTHER PEOPLE, and free augury or clairvoyance. 10th level lets you use your shield to do a miniscule amount of reaction damage. This subclass makes no fucking sense! The spirits will seriously intervene to protect your enemies before they will aid you, their descendant/buddy/thing. This is dumb!
Path of the Storm Herald: When you get angry you shoot lightning bolts and shit everywhere. You pick a terrain type and get a stack of benefits, for example, desert gives an autodamage aura, fire resistance, and reaction damage equal to your barbarian level (fire of course). Nothing really stands out as super great except possibly the sea's 14th level ability to trip people on on attacking, but you are a god damn barbarian with reckless attack anyway. These effects also all require saves that scale off constitution and do piddly shit damage, so enjoy tracking that!
Path of the Zealot: It is a tried and true method of creating D&D content - if you add religion to any other class you can come up with a variation. You're not just a fire mage, you're a JESUS fire mage! Isn't that original?
Anyway, this path gives you an extra 1d6+half barbarian level damage on the first attack each round, free resurrections (seriously, if someone casts a res spell on you it doesn't cost any money), 1 saving throw reroll per rage, and the awe-inspiring abiity to hand out advantage on your attacks/saves for 1 round 1/day. Admittedly that can lead to some fairly powerful nova strikes and might be a reason to bring one of these guys along. Unfortunately it's capped at 10 guys so you can't empower a skeleton army, but I don't actually completely despise it.
Bard
So before I look at this section, I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that none of these classes are in any way on par with the Lore Bard and his skeleton army.
College of Glamour: Fey bard. You are extremely sexy in an RP sense. 3rd level ability lets you burn bardic inspiration to give a few temp hit points and a free move to Cha mod creatures, which considering that the movement doesn't draw opportunity attacks is a decent reset button if you get ambushed or something. If you rap for a minute you can charm Cha mod dudes for an hour until they take damage. 6th level you go into a super beautiful mode where you can cast command 1/turn for free as a bonus action (and charmed targets get no save) which is fairly decent for crowd control, but is only 1/day. 14th level gives you a super mode where people have to make saves before stabbing you and if they stab you get disadvantage on saves against you (1 per short or long rest). This doesn't seem terrible, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it over lore bard. I don't think it's a waste of a team slot though.
College of Swords: Another fighty bard. You get fighting styles, and are a god damn moron because you traded an army of skeletons for piddly shit bonus attack damage and an extra attack. Just don't do it.
College of Whispers: You are a SPOOKY SPY BARD! You can talk to people and make them feel SPOOKY while also burning bardic inspiration to do extra psychic damage by stabbing people. At 14th level you can magically blackmail people to do things for you, but they won't fight for you or anything because that might not suck. Also as a bard I'm pretty sure dominate person is on your spell list, so what the fuck are you doing with your life? You traded a legion of skeletons that break bounded accuracy for this? Go sit in the god damn moron corner. Also you get a disguise ability that only works on people you killed...only works for an hour...and is granted to a class that has disguise self on its skill list. You can do all this shit with a bluff check and your spell list. Fuck right off.
Cleric
New cleric domains!
Forge: I get gods of smithing are pretty popular in mythology, but do people play Hephaestus clerics? Bitching aside, you might expect this domain to give you divine power to make sweet-ass magic weapons and shit. This being written by Mike Mearls, a man completely terrified of giving D&D players useful or interesting abilities, you would be completely wrong. You do get animate objects as a domain spell, and the ability to summon random nonmagical equipment out of thin air, but the rest of your abilities center around wearing heavy armor, resisting fire, and being tanky. Skyrim lets you make magic weapons, why can't "the world's greatest roleplaying game?" The closest you get is basically being able to grant a +1 bonus to an armor or weapon for a day. That's it. There are opera characters who are better at smithing than you. Opera characters. Just...stop.
Grave: This is one of those undead-hunting death god things that seem extremely popular with designers but in my experience are eschewed by PC death cultist necromancers instead. For hilarity it lists Anubis as granting the Grave domain...when he also grants the Death domain that turns you into a necromancer. You can sense undead, negate critical hits on your party members, deal more damage with cantrips, and give people vulnerability on attacks. You get to auto-maximize healing spells on people who are at 0 hp. If you really must be a healbot cleric the life cleric exists, and there's a better death domain in the DMG. Skip it.
Also the cleric only gets 2 domains. I don't know why.
Druid:
Circle of Dreams: You are a fey druid, which should not in any way be confused with the fey paladin, fey bard, or fey warlock. At least the druid is a nature-themed class that might actually hang out with faerie pals. You get...more healing, an magic sphere that buffs rest areas, Wis/mod 60 foot teleports per day, and a weird-ass feature that lets you use divinations or teleport to the place you last long rested at 1/day. The bonus action teleport is kinda good, everything else sucks.
Circle of the Shephard: You commune with the spirits of nature, unlike all the other druids who...worship nature? I'm confused. Anyway this seems to be the summoning focused druid. You can buff summons hp in a game filled with monster HP bloat, you can grant AoE buffs that heal dudes better, fuck with your reaction for attack bonuses, or hand out small amounts of temp hp. Higher levels let you summon when KO'd and heal summons in your buff area. Summons are disposable anyway. If this gave a sweet attack or damage boost like the necromancer's skeletons I might consider this, but as I recall the best use of druid summons is to get a bunch of polymorph spamming pixies.
The druid also gets only 2 subclasses, but you get a 2 page table of what creatures live where so you can argue with your DM over what creatures you're allowed to transform into.
Fighter:
Oh god, really?
Arcane Archer: Fucking really? We need to make ANOTHER fighter-mage class to support being a fighter-mage with a bow? We have hexblade warlocks, bladesingers, eldritch knight, and multiclassing! Why is this difficult?
Anyway, this is like the battle master fighter from the PHB but they get their own subsystem of special moves based on archery instead. Why we can't just add new moves to the battle master is beyond me. Anyway, these all scale off your intelligence mod for saves, and you are an archer so you need Dexterity. Every single arrow move grants a save except force arrow which is just tacking on a crappy 10-foot aoe to your arrow shot. The Banishing Arrow might be useful as it's a Cha save remove people from combat for a round, the blinding arrow is vaguely useful, but this really isn't worth giving up battlemaster manuevers or EK buffs. None of the effects last longer than "the end of [the target's] next turn" so you could just be a wizard who carries a bow and curses people. Seriously, just do that instead.
Cavalier: You get a pretty neat ability that lets you stop people from moving within 5 feet of your reach if you hit them and they provoke AoOs for doing so. As I remember this is a feat in 5e. 18th level you get an extra AoO, and you get the fighter mark from 4e at 3rd. It's kind of amazing, this is supposed to be a horseman class but you really want to play it as halberd infantry. Even then, you can just be a battle master with feats that let you mimic hold the line, you don't NEED the fighter mark mechanic because you have a reach weapon that lets you trip people/stop movement and do a fair amount of damage, and the extra AoO comes online at the same time the casters are abusing shapechange. Be a battle master instead.
Samurai: At third level you can arbitrarily give yourself advantage on attack rolls AND temp HP 3/day. This almost looks like the ticket to using 5e's not power attack feats to try to end combats before 3 hours, until you remember the battle master fighter can just do this more often and gets more tricks too. You get a mental saving throw proficiency, and the ability to trade advantage for an extra attack at 15th level (you do not care about this) and an extra turn on hitting 0 hp (or you could have gotten an ability that made you always better at fighting and less likely to die). Be a battle master, say your arts are secret samurai martial arts, and boom.
Monk
Drunken Master: Clearly you had a lot of booze in your system when you decided to be a monk in 5e, why stop there? I don't even know why you would take this. You can spend ki points to redirect attacks that miss you...in melee...and they can't hit the original target. You can get up from prone by spending less movement (yay?) and your 17th level feature is to get three more flurry attacks which might almost make people care about you if you didn't have to target different critters with them. Too little, too late.
Kensei: Pick 2 weapons (1 melee, 1 ranged) spend ki points for small bonuses with these weapons. Of note is that you can spend ki points to get a +3 enhancement bonus on a weapon for a minute. You're still a monk, don't do it.
Way of the Sun Soul: You shoot lasers that are different than the lasers shot by crappy elemental monks. You can shoot a laser that deals damage equal to your martial arts die, cast burning hands, and..fuck it. It's just a bunch of underpowered radiant damage abilities. Just don't do it.
Paladin
Two new paladin oaths. Paladins are actually pretty good in this edition, so maybe I won't be clawing my eyes out and asking Cthulhu for death?
Oath of Conquest: You swear to conquer people SO HARD they cry. You get domination spells as your special spells which makes sense and is actually kinda cool (though they scale off a secondary stat so have fun). You get +10 to an attack as your channel divinity which is probably going to power Great Weapon Master with a smite. Alternatively you can frighten dudes in an AoE and get bonuses against them. I'd play one.
Oath of Redemption: You talk to bad dudes about Jesus to make them not be bad anymore. You are a holy warrior who is sworn to peace, pissing off 99.9% of your parties who just want to murder the bad dudes and steal their stuff. You're a sucker who takes damage for other people as well, but you get disabling enchantments and wall of force on your spell list. Unfortunately I'm pretty sure this gets into the usual vow of peace bullshit, meaning that either you piss your party off or you fall and become a necromancer.
Ranger:
This is a class that sucks and is widely known for sucking. Can we save it?
Gloom Stalker: Shit, you get greater invisibility as a warrior. That's gotta be worth something, right? You also get a weird ambush mechanic where you get a bonus on initiative rolls equal to Wis mod and get an extra attack on the first turn of combat that deals an extra 1d8 damage. You also get darkvision and invisibility to darkvision (this will never come up if your party has anyone without darkvision, but could be situationally useful), amd at 15th level can impose disadvantage on anyone who attacks you. You also get to take another attack 1/turn when you miss. It's cute but not good.
Horizon Walker: You get the hunter's mark from 4e, but you also get the weird spell equivalent, and I think they stack? So you can do it twice if you get it all set up? Also some teleportation spells and haste. Weirdly you get Banishment and that shit is a Cha save, so you might actually be acceptable in polite company, but your damage is weird and fiddly. I guess you could run around as a hasted dude marking guys with your bonus force damage, but you're still an autoattack martial in padded sumo land.
Monster Slayer: Another not-Hunters Mark ability that coexists with the spell. You get banishment again and defensive bonuses against your target as well as 1/short rest counterspelling forcing a caster to make a wisdom save against your secondary stat. Your high-level ability is getting a free attack against your target if it makes you make a save - and if you hit your save succeeds. That's actually a very good ability, but I don't know that it's worth taking 14 levels of ranger.
Rogue
Inquisitive: As a bonus action you can make an insight check against a target and sneak attack them regardless of condition for a minute. I was about to sing this ability's praises, but then I looked it up and all you need for sneak attack is for one of your party members to be standing next to the enemy. If no one in your party is a melee combatant or summoner grab this, otherwise pass unless you really need to see through illusions or shapechangers. At 17th level you get an extra 3d6 sneak damage for all intents and purposes, but good luck getting a game to go that long.
Mastermind: Trade being an assassin or something for social bonuses, a worse redirection ability than the much, and immunity to truth magic (at 17th level). Don't do it unless you're in a really social campaign, and even then you can probably do anything this class does by being an assassin and arguing with the DM over your skill outputs. Waste of time.
Swashbuckler: For some reason game developers have an unholy terror of just giving these guys bullshit bonuses that let them fight as though they had heavy armor weapons. They note that this is the archetype of duelists and pirates, but don't point out that duelists and pirates generally flourish in environments not conducive to heavy armor nor do they make an attempt to address this problem. The 3rd level feature gives them the ability to make an attack that prevents attacks of opportunity for the turn. This is supposed to let you run in and run out, but you don't actually have the movement speed to stop an enemy fighter from moving up to you and hitting you with his greatsword. You do arbitrarily get to sneak attack a creature you're fighting by yourself, but you don't get any useful defensive abilities to prevent your ass from being splattered all over the ground.
Sorcerer
Someone please stop me.
Divine Soul: it's the fucking 3.5 flavored soul. You...get to raid the cleric spell list along with the sorcerer one. You can now be a sorcerer with animate dead and blow the ever living fuck out of bounded accuracy. You get some wings, healing on KO, and the ability to spend sorcery points to power up healing spells (blech) but really you're taking this because you want cleric spells as a sorcerer. Beats the shit out of being an asshole with a random chance to fireball their own party.
Shadow Magic: We have the warlock and the necromancer, do we really need another dark caster? You get some death resistance features (seriously, half the subclasses get features that trigger upon you going down. It's like they expect you to suck), a summonable dire wolf that eats sorcery points, a teleport in darkness even though I'm pretty sure sorcerers get teleportation spells, and a ghostform at 18th level. Oh, and you can cast darkness you can see through which apparently really excites people on the internet. Note that there's nothing like, say, empowering your spells with necrotic damage or anything that would make a shadow fireball different than a normal one.
Storm Sorcery: you get permanent flight at 18th level, which for this edition is amazing. You get some minor weather control abilities. When you cast lightning/thunder spells, people take half your sorcerer level in damage. This has worse nuking class features than the friggin thunder cleric, it's hilarious. However, you can levitate 10 feet for the low cost of 1 bonus action a turn and be immune to melee forever. This owns.
Warlock
Celestial: Fucking seriously? We have a class that makes pacts with gods for power and it's called the cleric. They even give this stupid warlock cure wounds to rub it in. Yeah, it's a warlock with healing abilities that is totally different than the light cleric. Just because you can hack one class to work like another does not make it a good idea. Now the idea of an angel summoner isn't a terrible one, but this is just a phoned-in tacking on healing crap WITH a bonus "stand up when knocked out" feature. Again. Fuck you.
Hexblade: You made a pact with a magic weapon instead of a thing, and this is TOTALLY DIFFERENT than the blade pact warlock because we are original and creative. You get some paladin smites, a weird curse where you curse one dude to get extra damage, deal crits on a roll of 19, and if you kill him you heal warlock level+Cha. You can't transfer this and it's usable once per short rest. You get medium armor, shields, martial weapons, and you can use Cha instead of Str or Dex for attack rolls. Is this...is this actually a SAD warrior/mage? Holy shit! Also you can stab dudes so hard they rise as specters in your service, which gets +Cha to hit and +.5 warlock level temp HP (sadly only 1 ghost a day). At 7th level people cursed by you have a 50% chance to miss with attacks if you burn a reaction and at 14th level you can transfer your curse but lose the healing. I'd probably rate it the highest of the warrior mages because of SAD and being a full caster.
Also there are some new warlock invocations. Eldritch Smite lets you burn warlock spell slots when you stab dudes with a pact weapon for extra damage and looks like you can combo it with paladin smites to do a bunch of burst damage. There's a few that let you deal an extra +cha to a cursed target as a bonus action or teleport to the cursed target, but overall kind of lame.
Wizard
War Wizard: What if, instead of being a baller who could force people to auto-fail saving throws or lead a legion of skeletons that out-dps'd anything in the game, you wanted to have some fiddly, shitty defensive abilities and a minor amount of extra force damage on your spells? This is the class for you! Enjoy the dunce cap you useless sack of shit!
That's the last of the subclasses. The book proceeds to dump an entire THIRTEEN pages of tables for shit like "parental abuse suffered as a child" and "favorite rap artist". This is in addition to the two pages of background shit for each class. They literally had 3 years to come up with a player options book and have to resort to padding. This is not a good sign.
Now we get feats. Except instead of giving us general feats anyone could take, these are racial feats. I don't know why developers love them so much, no one ever takes these unless they're powergaming. I have never seen anyone want to burn feat slots to be more elfy, but they will burn feat slots to take an elf-only feat for damage boosts. Again, it's the same old tired shit - drow spell-like abilities, elves get the eladrin teleportation, halflings get rerolls, gnomes get to turn invisible...wait a minute...4e racial feats? What the fuck are you doing here? Get the hell out! No one liked you! Go die in a fire!
Chapter 2 is "Dungeon Master's Tools". I'm stopping here before the bottle of Drano in my kitchen looks super attractive.
What is this book?
This book is notable for being the first and only player splatbook released since...2014? Holy shit, it's taken them 3 years to put out an actual powerup book for players? What the hell were they doing all - oh.
You see, this book doesn't have "new content" so much as it is Mike Mearls' lunch break articles refurbished. The title is based off some beholder crime lord from Forgotten Realms you don't care about because its a crappy throwback. That said, let's dive in and see what we have! I'm not as familiar with Mearl's lunch break articles, so everything in this book is going to stand on its own merits.
I'm not optimistic.
Chapter 1: Character Options
Holy subclasses, Batman! Looks like there are about 30 new subclasses here, and right away we see the problem that a bunch of them are stupid overlap subclasses. Did we really need a religious barbarian in a game where the paladin exists and you can multiclass the two? The flavored soul makes a return in a game where all casters are basically 3e spontaneous classes. Fuck! There's also a bunch of random tables for personal characteristics. I have never seen anyone use these things, because usually if you're making up an imaginary elf you have the imagination to come up with these things on your own, but what do I know?
But because I don't hate myself enough, I'm gonna go through all these subclasses and give you all the lowdown. You're welcome.
Barbarian
Path of the Ancestral Guardian[/b]: This class is supposedly about calling your ancestor spirits to help you out in combat. The third level feature grants people you hit while raging disadvantage to attack and if they hit someone they deal half damage - unless they attack you. I get the mechanical function, but I'm not sure why specifically your ancestors fuck off when you personally get hit. Other features include...a random amount of DR granted as a reaction to OTHER PEOPLE, and free augury or clairvoyance. 10th level lets you use your shield to do a miniscule amount of reaction damage. This subclass makes no fucking sense! The spirits will seriously intervene to protect your enemies before they will aid you, their descendant/buddy/thing. This is dumb!
Path of the Storm Herald: When you get angry you shoot lightning bolts and shit everywhere. You pick a terrain type and get a stack of benefits, for example, desert gives an autodamage aura, fire resistance, and reaction damage equal to your barbarian level (fire of course). Nothing really stands out as super great except possibly the sea's 14th level ability to trip people on on attacking, but you are a god damn barbarian with reckless attack anyway. These effects also all require saves that scale off constitution and do piddly shit damage, so enjoy tracking that!
Path of the Zealot: It is a tried and true method of creating D&D content - if you add religion to any other class you can come up with a variation. You're not just a fire mage, you're a JESUS fire mage! Isn't that original?
Anyway, this path gives you an extra 1d6+half barbarian level damage on the first attack each round, free resurrections (seriously, if someone casts a res spell on you it doesn't cost any money), 1 saving throw reroll per rage, and the awe-inspiring abiity to hand out advantage on your attacks/saves for 1 round 1/day. Admittedly that can lead to some fairly powerful nova strikes and might be a reason to bring one of these guys along. Unfortunately it's capped at 10 guys so you can't empower a skeleton army, but I don't actually completely despise it.
Bard
So before I look at this section, I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that none of these classes are in any way on par with the Lore Bard and his skeleton army.
College of Glamour: Fey bard. You are extremely sexy in an RP sense. 3rd level ability lets you burn bardic inspiration to give a few temp hit points and a free move to Cha mod creatures, which considering that the movement doesn't draw opportunity attacks is a decent reset button if you get ambushed or something. If you rap for a minute you can charm Cha mod dudes for an hour until they take damage. 6th level you go into a super beautiful mode where you can cast command 1/turn for free as a bonus action (and charmed targets get no save) which is fairly decent for crowd control, but is only 1/day. 14th level gives you a super mode where people have to make saves before stabbing you and if they stab you get disadvantage on saves against you (1 per short or long rest). This doesn't seem terrible, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it over lore bard. I don't think it's a waste of a team slot though.
College of Swords: Another fighty bard. You get fighting styles, and are a god damn moron because you traded an army of skeletons for piddly shit bonus attack damage and an extra attack. Just don't do it.
College of Whispers: You are a SPOOKY SPY BARD! You can talk to people and make them feel SPOOKY while also burning bardic inspiration to do extra psychic damage by stabbing people. At 14th level you can magically blackmail people to do things for you, but they won't fight for you or anything because that might not suck. Also as a bard I'm pretty sure dominate person is on your spell list, so what the fuck are you doing with your life? You traded a legion of skeletons that break bounded accuracy for this? Go sit in the god damn moron corner. Also you get a disguise ability that only works on people you killed...only works for an hour...and is granted to a class that has disguise self on its skill list. You can do all this shit with a bluff check and your spell list. Fuck right off.
Cleric
New cleric domains!
Forge: I get gods of smithing are pretty popular in mythology, but do people play Hephaestus clerics? Bitching aside, you might expect this domain to give you divine power to make sweet-ass magic weapons and shit. This being written by Mike Mearls, a man completely terrified of giving D&D players useful or interesting abilities, you would be completely wrong. You do get animate objects as a domain spell, and the ability to summon random nonmagical equipment out of thin air, but the rest of your abilities center around wearing heavy armor, resisting fire, and being tanky. Skyrim lets you make magic weapons, why can't "the world's greatest roleplaying game?" The closest you get is basically being able to grant a +1 bonus to an armor or weapon for a day. That's it. There are opera characters who are better at smithing than you. Opera characters. Just...stop.
Grave: This is one of those undead-hunting death god things that seem extremely popular with designers but in my experience are eschewed by PC death cultist necromancers instead. For hilarity it lists Anubis as granting the Grave domain...when he also grants the Death domain that turns you into a necromancer. You can sense undead, negate critical hits on your party members, deal more damage with cantrips, and give people vulnerability on attacks. You get to auto-maximize healing spells on people who are at 0 hp. If you really must be a healbot cleric the life cleric exists, and there's a better death domain in the DMG. Skip it.
Also the cleric only gets 2 domains. I don't know why.
Druid:
Circle of Dreams: You are a fey druid, which should not in any way be confused with the fey paladin, fey bard, or fey warlock. At least the druid is a nature-themed class that might actually hang out with faerie pals. You get...more healing, an magic sphere that buffs rest areas, Wis/mod 60 foot teleports per day, and a weird-ass feature that lets you use divinations or teleport to the place you last long rested at 1/day. The bonus action teleport is kinda good, everything else sucks.
Circle of the Shephard: You commune with the spirits of nature, unlike all the other druids who...worship nature? I'm confused. Anyway this seems to be the summoning focused druid. You can buff summons hp in a game filled with monster HP bloat, you can grant AoE buffs that heal dudes better, fuck with your reaction for attack bonuses, or hand out small amounts of temp hp. Higher levels let you summon when KO'd and heal summons in your buff area. Summons are disposable anyway. If this gave a sweet attack or damage boost like the necromancer's skeletons I might consider this, but as I recall the best use of druid summons is to get a bunch of polymorph spamming pixies.
The druid also gets only 2 subclasses, but you get a 2 page table of what creatures live where so you can argue with your DM over what creatures you're allowed to transform into.
Fighter:
Oh god, really?
Arcane Archer: Fucking really? We need to make ANOTHER fighter-mage class to support being a fighter-mage with a bow? We have hexblade warlocks, bladesingers, eldritch knight, and multiclassing! Why is this difficult?
Anyway, this is like the battle master fighter from the PHB but they get their own subsystem of special moves based on archery instead. Why we can't just add new moves to the battle master is beyond me. Anyway, these all scale off your intelligence mod for saves, and you are an archer so you need Dexterity. Every single arrow move grants a save except force arrow which is just tacking on a crappy 10-foot aoe to your arrow shot. The Banishing Arrow might be useful as it's a Cha save remove people from combat for a round, the blinding arrow is vaguely useful, but this really isn't worth giving up battlemaster manuevers or EK buffs. None of the effects last longer than "the end of [the target's] next turn" so you could just be a wizard who carries a bow and curses people. Seriously, just do that instead.
Cavalier: You get a pretty neat ability that lets you stop people from moving within 5 feet of your reach if you hit them and they provoke AoOs for doing so. As I remember this is a feat in 5e. 18th level you get an extra AoO, and you get the fighter mark from 4e at 3rd. It's kind of amazing, this is supposed to be a horseman class but you really want to play it as halberd infantry. Even then, you can just be a battle master with feats that let you mimic hold the line, you don't NEED the fighter mark mechanic because you have a reach weapon that lets you trip people/stop movement and do a fair amount of damage, and the extra AoO comes online at the same time the casters are abusing shapechange. Be a battle master instead.
Samurai: At third level you can arbitrarily give yourself advantage on attack rolls AND temp HP 3/day. This almost looks like the ticket to using 5e's not power attack feats to try to end combats before 3 hours, until you remember the battle master fighter can just do this more often and gets more tricks too. You get a mental saving throw proficiency, and the ability to trade advantage for an extra attack at 15th level (you do not care about this) and an extra turn on hitting 0 hp (or you could have gotten an ability that made you always better at fighting and less likely to die). Be a battle master, say your arts are secret samurai martial arts, and boom.
Monk
Drunken Master: Clearly you had a lot of booze in your system when you decided to be a monk in 5e, why stop there? I don't even know why you would take this. You can spend ki points to redirect attacks that miss you...in melee...and they can't hit the original target. You can get up from prone by spending less movement (yay?) and your 17th level feature is to get three more flurry attacks which might almost make people care about you if you didn't have to target different critters with them. Too little, too late.
Kensei: Pick 2 weapons (1 melee, 1 ranged) spend ki points for small bonuses with these weapons. Of note is that you can spend ki points to get a +3 enhancement bonus on a weapon for a minute. You're still a monk, don't do it.
Way of the Sun Soul: You shoot lasers that are different than the lasers shot by crappy elemental monks. You can shoot a laser that deals damage equal to your martial arts die, cast burning hands, and..fuck it. It's just a bunch of underpowered radiant damage abilities. Just don't do it.
Paladin
Two new paladin oaths. Paladins are actually pretty good in this edition, so maybe I won't be clawing my eyes out and asking Cthulhu for death?
Oath of Conquest: You swear to conquer people SO HARD they cry. You get domination spells as your special spells which makes sense and is actually kinda cool (though they scale off a secondary stat so have fun). You get +10 to an attack as your channel divinity which is probably going to power Great Weapon Master with a smite. Alternatively you can frighten dudes in an AoE and get bonuses against them. I'd play one.
Oath of Redemption: You talk to bad dudes about Jesus to make them not be bad anymore. You are a holy warrior who is sworn to peace, pissing off 99.9% of your parties who just want to murder the bad dudes and steal their stuff. You're a sucker who takes damage for other people as well, but you get disabling enchantments and wall of force on your spell list. Unfortunately I'm pretty sure this gets into the usual vow of peace bullshit, meaning that either you piss your party off or you fall and become a necromancer.
Ranger:
This is a class that sucks and is widely known for sucking. Can we save it?
Gloom Stalker: Shit, you get greater invisibility as a warrior. That's gotta be worth something, right? You also get a weird ambush mechanic where you get a bonus on initiative rolls equal to Wis mod and get an extra attack on the first turn of combat that deals an extra 1d8 damage. You also get darkvision and invisibility to darkvision (this will never come up if your party has anyone without darkvision, but could be situationally useful), amd at 15th level can impose disadvantage on anyone who attacks you. You also get to take another attack 1/turn when you miss. It's cute but not good.
Horizon Walker: You get the hunter's mark from 4e, but you also get the weird spell equivalent, and I think they stack? So you can do it twice if you get it all set up? Also some teleportation spells and haste. Weirdly you get Banishment and that shit is a Cha save, so you might actually be acceptable in polite company, but your damage is weird and fiddly. I guess you could run around as a hasted dude marking guys with your bonus force damage, but you're still an autoattack martial in padded sumo land.
Monster Slayer: Another not-Hunters Mark ability that coexists with the spell. You get banishment again and defensive bonuses against your target as well as 1/short rest counterspelling forcing a caster to make a wisdom save against your secondary stat. Your high-level ability is getting a free attack against your target if it makes you make a save - and if you hit your save succeeds. That's actually a very good ability, but I don't know that it's worth taking 14 levels of ranger.
Rogue
Inquisitive: As a bonus action you can make an insight check against a target and sneak attack them regardless of condition for a minute. I was about to sing this ability's praises, but then I looked it up and all you need for sneak attack is for one of your party members to be standing next to the enemy. If no one in your party is a melee combatant or summoner grab this, otherwise pass unless you really need to see through illusions or shapechangers. At 17th level you get an extra 3d6 sneak damage for all intents and purposes, but good luck getting a game to go that long.
Mastermind: Trade being an assassin or something for social bonuses, a worse redirection ability than the much, and immunity to truth magic (at 17th level). Don't do it unless you're in a really social campaign, and even then you can probably do anything this class does by being an assassin and arguing with the DM over your skill outputs. Waste of time.
Swashbuckler: For some reason game developers have an unholy terror of just giving these guys bullshit bonuses that let them fight as though they had heavy armor weapons. They note that this is the archetype of duelists and pirates, but don't point out that duelists and pirates generally flourish in environments not conducive to heavy armor nor do they make an attempt to address this problem. The 3rd level feature gives them the ability to make an attack that prevents attacks of opportunity for the turn. This is supposed to let you run in and run out, but you don't actually have the movement speed to stop an enemy fighter from moving up to you and hitting you with his greatsword. You do arbitrarily get to sneak attack a creature you're fighting by yourself, but you don't get any useful defensive abilities to prevent your ass from being splattered all over the ground.
Sorcerer
Someone please stop me.
Divine Soul: it's the fucking 3.5 flavored soul. You...get to raid the cleric spell list along with the sorcerer one. You can now be a sorcerer with animate dead and blow the ever living fuck out of bounded accuracy. You get some wings, healing on KO, and the ability to spend sorcery points to power up healing spells (blech) but really you're taking this because you want cleric spells as a sorcerer. Beats the shit out of being an asshole with a random chance to fireball their own party.
Shadow Magic: We have the warlock and the necromancer, do we really need another dark caster? You get some death resistance features (seriously, half the subclasses get features that trigger upon you going down. It's like they expect you to suck), a summonable dire wolf that eats sorcery points, a teleport in darkness even though I'm pretty sure sorcerers get teleportation spells, and a ghostform at 18th level. Oh, and you can cast darkness you can see through which apparently really excites people on the internet. Note that there's nothing like, say, empowering your spells with necrotic damage or anything that would make a shadow fireball different than a normal one.
Storm Sorcery: you get permanent flight at 18th level, which for this edition is amazing. You get some minor weather control abilities. When you cast lightning/thunder spells, people take half your sorcerer level in damage. This has worse nuking class features than the friggin thunder cleric, it's hilarious. However, you can levitate 10 feet for the low cost of 1 bonus action a turn and be immune to melee forever. This owns.
Warlock
Celestial: Fucking seriously? We have a class that makes pacts with gods for power and it's called the cleric. They even give this stupid warlock cure wounds to rub it in. Yeah, it's a warlock with healing abilities that is totally different than the light cleric. Just because you can hack one class to work like another does not make it a good idea. Now the idea of an angel summoner isn't a terrible one, but this is just a phoned-in tacking on healing crap WITH a bonus "stand up when knocked out" feature. Again. Fuck you.
Hexblade: You made a pact with a magic weapon instead of a thing, and this is TOTALLY DIFFERENT than the blade pact warlock because we are original and creative. You get some paladin smites, a weird curse where you curse one dude to get extra damage, deal crits on a roll of 19, and if you kill him you heal warlock level+Cha. You can't transfer this and it's usable once per short rest. You get medium armor, shields, martial weapons, and you can use Cha instead of Str or Dex for attack rolls. Is this...is this actually a SAD warrior/mage? Holy shit! Also you can stab dudes so hard they rise as specters in your service, which gets +Cha to hit and +.5 warlock level temp HP (sadly only 1 ghost a day). At 7th level people cursed by you have a 50% chance to miss with attacks if you burn a reaction and at 14th level you can transfer your curse but lose the healing. I'd probably rate it the highest of the warrior mages because of SAD and being a full caster.
Also there are some new warlock invocations. Eldritch Smite lets you burn warlock spell slots when you stab dudes with a pact weapon for extra damage and looks like you can combo it with paladin smites to do a bunch of burst damage. There's a few that let you deal an extra +cha to a cursed target as a bonus action or teleport to the cursed target, but overall kind of lame.
Wizard
War Wizard: What if, instead of being a baller who could force people to auto-fail saving throws or lead a legion of skeletons that out-dps'd anything in the game, you wanted to have some fiddly, shitty defensive abilities and a minor amount of extra force damage on your spells? This is the class for you! Enjoy the dunce cap you useless sack of shit!
That's the last of the subclasses. The book proceeds to dump an entire THIRTEEN pages of tables for shit like "parental abuse suffered as a child" and "favorite rap artist". This is in addition to the two pages of background shit for each class. They literally had 3 years to come up with a player options book and have to resort to padding. This is not a good sign.
Now we get feats. Except instead of giving us general feats anyone could take, these are racial feats. I don't know why developers love them so much, no one ever takes these unless they're powergaming. I have never seen anyone want to burn feat slots to be more elfy, but they will burn feat slots to take an elf-only feat for damage boosts. Again, it's the same old tired shit - drow spell-like abilities, elves get the eladrin teleportation, halflings get rerolls, gnomes get to turn invisible...wait a minute...4e racial feats? What the fuck are you doing here? Get the hell out! No one liked you! Go die in a fire!
Chapter 2 is "Dungeon Master's Tools". I'm stopping here before the bottle of Drano in my kitchen looks super attractive.