Unearthed Arcana Unearthed Arcana Sorcerers: Favored Souls, Phoenix Sorcery, Sea Sorcery, & Stone Sorcery

Favored Soul (again), Phoenix Sorcery, Sea Sorcery, Earth Sorcery.

Could this be the start of Elementalists?

 

[Raunalyn]

After a bit of a break, Mearls & Crawford's Unearthed Arcana is back - and this time it introduces four new Sorcerous Origins: The divinely inspired Favored Soul, the immortal flame-powered Phoenix Sorcery, the elemental Sea Sorcery, and earth magic with Stone Sorcery. As always, these are playtest rules -- "These game mechanics are in draft form, usable in your campaign but not refined by design iterations or full game development. They are not officially part of the game. For these reasons, material in this column is not legal in D&D Adventurers League events."

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[Raunalyn]

Ok...I really like the Sea Sorcerer. Flavorful and mechanically interesting.

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

I like the flavor, but I find it strange that none of the new subclasses make any use of the sorcery points. They all manage to look like the class has ''magic blood'' but I feel it lacks the distinctive ''I can manipulate and influence the raw basis of magic itself''. Its like they are more ''thematic mages'' than ''creature of pure magic''.

Also, I do not understand the addition of the Smite spell-line to the Earth-themed sorcerer.

 

[MechaTarrasque]

I like most of them (and maybe all of them, still thinking on the phoenix).

I admit I was wrong in thinking they weren't going to keep access to cleric spells for the favored soul. It seemed like having those and melee attacks would be too much, and this is better (plus the requests for a buffing sorcerer are fulfilled). If you squint right, the stone sorcerer (with all those paladin spells) could be the divine melee sorcerer, and at any rate, it is a melee sorcerer, which is a good thing.

Sea sorcerer is sweet. Curse of the Sea and Shifting Form are two good mechanics that I hope the surveys support (sorcerers could use more of those kinds of subclass features).

I am a little uncertain about the phoenix one. The fluff makes it sound like the sorcerer takes damage from the mantle of flame, but I don't see that in the mechanics. Holy Jean Grey, but Form of the Phoenix is nice.

 

[Xeviat]

I'm disappointed that they went away from extra spells known for the Favored Soul. They dropped these for the Storm Sorcerer, so I understand. I also both do and don't like that the Favored Soul has no connection to a specific deity; no favoritism of domain spells or things like that. This differentiates them from the Theurge Wizard archetype, but I think it makes the Favored Soul a little bland.

The Sea Sorcerer's cantrip buff is super cool. I hope we see more stuff like that in he future, maybe in feats?

I also love the Earth Sorcerer's AC boost. 13+Con? Sign me up. It's little, but it really speaks to how they act.


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[Raunalyn]

I like the flavor, but I find it strange that none of the new subclasses make any use of the sorcery points. They all manage to look like the class has ''magic blood'' but I feel it lacks the distinctive ''I can manipulate and influence the raw basis of magic itself''. Its like they are more ''thematic mages'' than ''creature of pure magic''.

Also, I do not understand the addition of the Smite spell-line to the Earth-themed sorcerer.

Yes, that is odd. Some of the effects could benefit from the Sorcery Point usage that Wild and Dragon sorcerers have (don't recall off the top of my head if Storm Sorcerer does).

I really didn't like the Stone Sorcerer...just doesn't feel very sorcerer-y to me....

 

[Morrus]

I'll turn that into an actual post for you, [MENTION=72670]Raunalyn[/MENTION]. Don't you worry!

 

[MechaTarrasque]

I like the flavor, but I find it strange that none of the new subclasses make any use of the sorcery points. They all manage to look like the class has ''magic blood'' but I feel it lacks the distinctive ''I can manipulate and influence the raw basis of magic itself''. Its like they are more ''thematic mages'' than ''creature of pure magic''.

Also, I do not understand the addition of the Smite spell-line to the Earth-themed sorcerer.

Good catch on the sorcery points. A fairly common complaint is that the sorcerer doesn't have enough sorcery points, so maybe they are trying to move away from subclass features that use them. If they ever made 5.5e, then I wouldn't mind if they took sorcery points away from spells altogether and just had them feed into subclass abilities (and if sorcerers wanted to use points, they could use the DMG point system), but I am almost certainly in the minority (although I don't see how they can solve the budgeting problem unless they seriously up the number of sorcery points, and for balance reasons, I don't see that happening).

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

After reading the document again, I considered something (sorry if it seem obvious): I think that, maybe, WotC are testing different features for archetypes they intend on releasing some day, but they add ramdom flavors to them to confuse the readers on the true archetype flavor they are creating. I found in the artificer UA that the gun-thing archetype was oddly similar to how I imagined the classic Arcane archer. In this week UA, it seems to me that if you removed the whole stone and earth theme of the Earth origin, you win what I think looks like the Magus/Swormage class from previous editions.
Aegis + shield/Weapon prof + Innate armor + weapon-based spells = my swordmage from my old 4th ed. game.