Ancestry / Heritage depth

[Lanathar]

So one of the things from the playtest when initially released was how small the “bucket” of abilities each ancestry got was.

It got boosted by feats but some of these didn’t make conceptual sense and seemed like it meant waiting until level 15 to get all the racial abilities (including biological ones that should be relatively standard)

This was commented upon a lot

Is this where heritages comes in as a “fix” to this to give you more at the start that distinguishes you from other races than your ability boosts and one or two other things ? I am not sure how much information has been released on this - both up to 1.6 and between then and now.

I guess I always liked the concept of heritage feats but assumed that they would be more akin to the racial specific feats in PF1 that very few people took so that you could become a “paragon of x race” rather than just closer to what we are used to . So the execution at least in the first playtest version was not really in line with the pitch

What is know about what has happened since if anything ?

[Malk_Content]

Heritages have been buffed up a bit and give a lot more of the distinct flavour abilities for each Ancestry. Some stuff that was felt should be core to Ancestries have just been put on Ancestries themselves.

I see Heritages as a bundle of racial traits that is more balanced and easy to parse than PF1's list of traits that can all be swapped out. So there isn't actually a huge amount tying all Elves together, the subgroups can be pretty diverse, but there is more tying the sub groups together than in PF1.