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We started a low level game with just my wife and I. My wife is running a ranger and I am running a sorcerer with draconic bloodline.
To start the campaign off I started with the free Hollow's Last Hope. It's a great 1st level adventure. You can imagine it was a bit challenging with 2 players. To make up for this the players are on the fast advancement experience chart and halfway through the module they leveled up.
For starters, we don't have a healer so the higher hit points were the only way this module was playable from start to finish. As it was I added 2 healing potions in the middle to make it survivable. When I first heard about the increase in HP I was a bit skeptical but now that I've played it I must say I like the change. We used the racial hit points and I really like that method.
Skills changes were overall positive. I like that there is now a fairly specific way to determine what magic items are without playing guesswork. Spellcasters now have another skill to worry about, Appraise. Appraise to learn magic items gets an solid B+ from me.
We made use of the changes in the Heal skill extensively. The wording can be cleaned up a bit but please keep the healing rules changes, getting 2HP/level per night healed instead of one was a big help. This skill just went from being a not so great skill into being a must have for my campaign. One thing that's not clear is whether you can heal yourself. Changes to the Heal skill get an A-.
I've always been a big fan of the Stealth/ Perception roll up and using it in play has proved it's a great call. This gets an A+
My character was a Gnome Dragon Blood Sorcerer, I've always had a soft spot for the underdog of the arcane casters and this gave me a chance to try out the changes. With a party of 2 and 4 spells per day it's impossible to stay on the sidelines so my sorcerer wound up in mage armor and using his claw attacks for about half the combats. My take on the claws is that they are decent, it gives him 2 attacks per round and the damage is comparable to most weapons he would use so he winds up being much more effective than he would be with a single melee weapon. Obviously many casters are not going to wind up fighting it out on the front lines but I think it's a cool option and there are other bloodlines for the less aggressive.
Overall the sorcerer and the draconic bloodlines gets a B-, the big thing that bugged me was the anemic 2 skill ranks, having a bonus class skill from the bloodline is pointless since the class doesn't have enough ranks to do anything skills wise. The only other feature I would really like to see is inclusion of the Battle Sorcerer as an option. For the claw based sorcerers this would be awesome!
We haven't had a chance to test the much of the Ranger class changes yet so I don't have a lot of comments about the ranger changes.
The changes to the Races made me a little skeptical at first, I'm still not entirely sold. One nice thing is we were willing to take 2 previously weak racial choices. I've always been a fan of gnomes but have never really found a draw. It's now a very sorcerer friendly race with a plus to both CHA and CON plus the small size AC is excellent. The half elf changes are mostly good bringing this race for seriously sub-par to being a decent option. Racial changes for the half elf and gnome get an A for making these races viable. I'm not so sure about the rest of the racial changes though. (Halfling Ranger fav class!!)
I'll post some more comments when we get some more play time in.
- Dennis da Ogre
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Odd, I was going to edit in page numbers but can't edit my post. Here they are:
Races Half Elf and Gnome: p9-10
Hit Points: p14
Draconic Bloodline: p45
Appraise Skill: p55
Heal Skill: p59
I wanted to add a few more comments while I'm thinking about them. I was seriously considering taking Arcane Armor Training as my third level feat then I realized it's almost completely worthless. The feat is a combat feat (I know this concept is going away in the Beta but I don't have those rules yet) so I can't use it with Dodge.
Worse yet using Arcane Armor training is a swift action which means you can't use it with any swift action spells including quicken spell. To me this is a real deal breaker. Any sort of combat type caster is going to use quickened and swift spells a lot. Please fix this!!
-- Dennis