Illrigger Playtest Revised Open Beta Round 2 (Patreon)

Hey MCDM Fans,

Forgive us for sending two updates in the same day, but it’s time to raise Hell … again! The second round of the open beta playtest for The Illrigger Revised starts now.

You may remember that in April 2021, we put out The Illrigger on our shop and Patreon. Several weeks ago we ran the first open beta for the revised version of the 5e class and based on our surveys, more than 70% of folks preferred the new version to the old. But the class still needed some tweaks, so the product’s lead designer Sadie Lowry took all your comments and went back to work at her infernal forge and has now bestowed upon us an updated playtest for The Illrigger Revised.

Compared to the April 2021 release, the revised version of the class still drips with fiendish flavor, but it has been rebalanced to better progress with the rest of the fifth edition classes and provides more options for customization. It also contains two new subclass options: the devilishly charming Hellspeaker and the blood-magic-wielding Sanguine Knight.

Now we need your help. You can check out The Illrigger Revised here: https://mcdm.gg/IllriggerOpenBeta

Once you review the playtest materials, please complete the playtest survey linked below:

https://forms.gle/Lg36Dri3bY7WidDg9

It may look long, but most of the questions are optional. As a heads up, we want to know what you like and dislike about the class. We don’t need your complex solutions to fix the problems you find. In fact, it’s better if you don’t. You can simply say, “This is overpowered,” or “This is too complicated to be fun,” and let us figure out how to fix it. The reasons for this are threefold:

1. First, if you design your own stuff to fix our problems, it gets us into legally murky territory if we use a similar solution. For this reason, we don’t even read long-winded solutions to problems. If a suggestion is simple, for instance, “This class feature giving advantage on attacks is too powerful on top of everything else it grants,” that’s fine.

2. If we do ask for solutions, many folks give them without saying what the issue is. That means we have to do a lot of backwards engineering to figure out the issue so we can actually address it.

3. Proposed solutions often don’t work because they include options we’ve already tried internally and have already ruled out for one reason or another, or they don’t take into account other game mechanics that could be affected by the change. We find the results of testing are far more useful if we ask for what we want from folks, which is, “Please tell us the problems. We’ll figure out the solutions.”

This playtest ends on 8/14 at noon Eastern, which is also when the survey closes.

Once this version is ready for release, we’ll update the files for anyone who has purchased the Illrigger on our shop and we’ll also update it on the original illrigger Patreon post.

You can come chat about The Illrigger Revised and other MCDM products on the MCDM Discord. Check the Server Guide for information about how to join the Playtest channels.

Ab Inferno,

James Introcaso

MCDM Lead Designer