New Unearthed Arcana is out, Ranger Revised!

Natural Explorer and Primeval Awareness stick in my craw. I've got a quibble with Beast Companions being nearly immortal too. If it dies, I'd rule it stays dead. You have to get a new one. Unless you want to use a high level spell to bring it back like PC's.

Natural Explorer

You ignore difficult terrain.

Change it to natural or non-magical terrain.

You have advantage on initiative rolls.

I do not like this. Very abusive as a level 1 feature.

On your first turn during combat, you have advantage on attack rolls against creatures that have not yet acted.

Too powerful for a level 1 ability, especially if you have advantage on initiative. Every rogue will dip one level into ranger for these.

Primeval Awareness

You have an innate ability to communicate with beasts, and they recognize you as a kindred spirit. Through sounds and gestures, you can communicate simple ideas to a beast as an action, and can read its basic mood and intent. You learn its emotional state, whether it is affected by magic of any sort, its short-term needs (such as food or safety), and actions you can take (if any) to persuade it to not attack. You cannot use this ability against a creature that you have attacked within the past 10 minutes.

Am I understanding this correctly? Communicate makes me think of spells like Speak With Animal. Or is this just an auto-pass Handle Animal check to gain information on a particular animal's status?

Additionally, you can attune your senses to determine if any of your favored enemies lurk nearby. By spending 1 uninterrupted minute in concentration (as if you were concentrating on a spell), you can sense whether any of your favored enemies are present within 5 miles of you.

I dislike the ranger having this innate 5-mile radar they can use almost any time. Using a spell slot to represent the magic required to use this supernatural sense seemed appropriate to me.

/r/dndnext Thread Link - dnd.wizards.com