Yeah, since I'm not a spellcaster, I'm not sure if I would even have the capability to control the orb... I dunno... It's more useful for me, since I don't have any spellcasting capability, and picking up some utility would be nice... But if it's pretty much going to be impossible for me to control maybe it wouldn't be worth it... Man. I dunno. Conflicting.
Gilgamesh was really complaining about it, being a Kenku. I acquiesced. I meant your claws more to be a back-up weapon you'd always have, not anything more.
Yeah, when I first saw the maul, I thought it was really good as well. But after reading up more, except at low levels (which, to be fair, is the level we are at), it actually doesn't seem that good to me. If you are using feats from the main book that is. Using feats there seems to be three main types of fighters: Two weapon fighters, who probably want dex as their main stat and thus their offhand attacks are going to be better then maul anyway. Great weapon/pole arm users, who would benefit from maul at a low level but at higher levels have much better use for their bonus action. And sword and board fighters, who, admittedly do seem like they could use maul a little bit, but actually they probably also want to be dex based fighters, so maul wouldn't actually help them that much. (Also this is assuming you're not a Eldritch Knight, who looks like they have tons of more important things to bonus action with)
Uh. That said, if you're just using the basic rules, fighters are pretty bad, and maul, as it stood, was good for them as they had nothing else to use their bonus action on unless they were TWFing. (Although now it's not good for them even then)
As just a backup weapon though, makes sense. (although isn't that much of a improvement, since as far as I can tell there is no issues with just being unarmed, so the difference between maul and fighting unarmed is just 2.5 damage on average, not bad, but not amazing ether.)
Now, if you want to complain about a race feature being op. Dat bonus armor.