I was hoping to have some some rather detailed looks at changes (especially to Fighter feats and Rogue skills) up by now, but it looks like Amazon.com, in their infinite wisdom, hasn’t deigned it necessary to ship my preorder of the v3.5 D&D core rulebooks. We are told to expect significant changes to Gnomes, Bards, Barbarians, Druids, Monks, and Rangers, and well as some resettlings of numerous skills, feats, and spell descriptions.
Though I’d hate to sound like an AO player crying “nerf!” at the slightest hint that some other character class has been improved, I have seen little from the WoTC folks to allay my concerns that Rogues are getting the proverbial shaft here. The only skill changes that I am presently aware of (in my pitiable, bookless, misery) are the elimination of Animal Empathy as a skill, and the merging of Intuit Direction and Wilderness Lore into a new, more semantically correct “survival” skill. Fighters will be getting a new set of feats with the intention of keeping the class indispensable as it progresses in levels, all the spellcasting classes have changes to their spells, and all the mongrel classes got a hefty rework.
Expect an update on Rogues within a few hours of my package showing up (whenever that is). I just hope they had enough stocked and I won’t be left waiting till December. Is it unreasonable to expect shipment withing 6 days of initial distribution? Ok, it is, but this is a longstanding hobby of mine and I get impatient.
There’s that phrase again;
“semantically correct.”
😀
Per Mirriam-Webster: semantic means “of or relating to meaning in language,” so I dare say it is applicable in this case, as well as in the contexts I normally use the term (webnazi diatribes). I like the idea of tightening up the spell naming contentions (which occurred with the v3.0 D&D). Wilderness Lore was a Wisdom-based skill. This was an unnecessary change from the otherwise-applicable convention in v3.0 D&D that any “Lore” skill is an Intelligence-based skill, also known as “knowledge” skills. Unnecessary exceptions only cause confusion, and changes like this are quite easily made.
Besides, most wilderness navigation was handled by Wilderness Lore checks anyway, so Intuit Direction was an almost entirely useless skill to dump points into.