Unearthed Arcana Unearthed Arcana: Wizards & Warlocks -- Hexblades, Raven Queens, and Lore Mastery!

Master of Hexes
Starting at 14th level, you can use your
Hexblade’s Curse again without resting, but
when you apply it to a new target, the curse
immediately ends on the previous target.

Does this mean you can cast it one more time, or over and over again? And does the 1 minute duration reset upon a new target, or does it continue from the previous target?

 

[CapnZapp]

Let's get serious here: who honestly thought that there would be new Pact Boons?

I did and still do.

Like it or not, Patrons are the defining subclass mechanic for Warlocks and there's really not much, if any, cognitive grounds for new Pact Boons to incorporate.

Sure there are.

But more importantly: coming up with more isn't our task. We are the customers. We simply demand stuff. Then it's up to the designers to give it to us.

If the designers can't do it, perhaps WotC needs to hire some new designers...?

 

[CapnZapp]

As for this new Lore Wizard, I'm slightly sad.

Altering Spells would have been SO COOL to have as a spellcaster. But now you have to give up your identity and color as an Evoker or Diviner (or Dragon Sorcerer, or Lore Bard) to get it.

It would have been so much more fun if these cool toys (spell secrets, metamagic, and so on) were available for every spellcaster, perhaps as a feat.

Having to select a particular kind of spellcaster just to be able to gain extra complexity and wonderful crunch doesn't really do it for me.

 

[Lanliss]

The thing with the Shadow Hound has a long history with the Hexblade class, though. If you recall, the Hexblade was originally a martial class that also got a little bit of arcane spellcasting and had a familiar, where the familiar was actually pretty useful since it inherited the Hexblade's full BAB and half of its massive d10 hit dice. In any case, one of the class feature substitutions in... I wanna say it was PHB 2... let you trade out the familiar for a shadow pet that was invincible and acted as a constant-effect curse on anything adjacent to it. And as great as the familiar was, an invincible super curse was still a step up, so it was a popular substitution for a less-than-popular class.

It's not quite the same thing, but there's definite precedent for it as part of the class identity.

Well, I started with 5E, a couple years back, so I recall nothing of the sort.

 

[Morrus]

We are the customers. We simply demand stuff. Then it's up to the designers to give it to us.

You're confusing "customers" with "employers".

 

[Bishop_]

Altering Spells would have been SO COOL to have as a spellcaster. But now you have to give up your identity and color as an Evoker or Diviner (or Dragon Sorcerer, or Lore Bard) to get it.

Elemental Adept feat is out there yet. Sure not too appealing like Spell Secrets (you have to choose only one elemental damage type) but the feeling is there. But I understand your concern, feats are optional rules after all.


Regarding the Lore Mastery Arcane Tradition. It seems we have a consensus (in a broad sense) that his features overshadows the sorcerer metamagic options and stuff. But against others Arcane Traditions or Classes/Classes archetypes? For example, the Spell Secrets part that allows change saving throws is better than Diviner's Portent feature? Alchemical Casting is better than Evoker's Empowered Evocation? Or Master of Magic is better than the Bard's Magical Secrets feature?

And seems odd to me that a Wizard savant like the Lore Mastery doesn't have any ways to add spells with lower costs (in time and money) than other specialists to his spellbook.

 

[Charles Rampant]

As for this new Lore Wizard, I'm slightly sad.

Altering Spells would have been SO COOL to have as a spellcaster. But now you have to give up your identity and color as an Evoker or Diviner (or Dragon Sorcerer, or Lore Bard) to get it.

It would have been so much more fun if these cool toys (spell secrets, metamagic, and so on) were available for every spellcaster, perhaps as a feat.

Having to select a particular kind of spellcaster just to be able to gain extra complexity and wonderful crunch doesn't really do it for me.

The PHB is certainly lacking in nice feats for spellcasters. There are plenty of feats that make you think 'this is cool and character defining' for Martial - even the Charger feat, which I once saw a Paladin somehow conspire to use in every combat in Curse of Strahd. However, casters don't seem to get as many. I wonder if the problem lies with metamagic being given to Sorcerers, which - like Battlemaster Manoeuvres - makes it hard to then give the same idea to others. Either way, I do hope that we get some new toys for casters, and hopefully ones that allow people to do the characters that they want to.

 

[Curmudjinn]

I would absolutely take the Claw of Acamar on my Warlock, if only it didn't have to manifest as a stupid flail.

Why not simply allow any pact weapon you create to gain the special property of this and similar invocations without locking the warlock into a specific weapon choice?

It's a playtest document. Have it manifest into whatever fits your theme, if the DM is cool with it. It's not even close to game-breaking.

 

[Barolo]

I'm trying to understand your argument, but... it just doesn't make sense

(...)

Now then, let's look at some raw numbers.

Lore Wizard gets Alchemical Casting at 6th level, and at that point has essentially 5 metamagic options.

They have a free, at-will elemental substitution
They have a 1/day alteration of the saving throw
They can burn 1st level slots for +2d10 force damage
They can burn 2nd level slots to cast things with a range of 1 mile
They can burn a 3rd level slot to increase their DC by 2, for every target effected

Oh, and with Arcane recovery, 3 of those spell slot levels can be retrieved, just need a short rest.

And the Sorcerer?

They have 2 metamagics. At 20th level they'll have 4, still one less than your wizard.

-Want to do more damage, 1 point and you can reroll some dice and hope you roll higher.
-Make things harder to save 3 points and you can give one creature disadvantage. Want to do that to more than one target? Too bad, impossible.
-Need more range, single point to double range, but unfortuantely, you took empower and heighten up above and can't use this one.

*Want more points? Burn Spells, 1 pt per level (which makes your 3rd level spell equal to my 3 points for heighten)

*Want more Spell slots? Well, that will cost you, on average of 2 points more that the spells level. So that 3rd level slot you get back with a short rest, costs me 5 of my 6 sorcery points.... which means I only have a single point to work with, I'm losing resources, and you are gaining them back.


Of course you aren't going to burn them all the time, you're going to wait until the right moment, after all, your still a wizard, your identity isn't tied up in all this. You could cast spells as normal and still be a wizard. But when you do decide that investment is worth it, well, you do it better than the guy who sacrificed everything else you have.

I am neither agreeing or disagreeing, just want to point out:

• All full casters have the same spell slot progression.
• Wizards and land druids get a recovery feature that gives half class level worth of spell levels (1 to 10). This is limited to once per day after a short rest, when the caster must decide how to allocate all the slots.
• Sorcerers get sorcery points equal to class levels (starting at lvl 2, so 2 to 20), which they can use also to create spell slots. The cost is variable, but barring first level slots, this sorcery pool can be converted to spell slots with roughly 30% more efficiency than arcane recovery (for example, a 12 level wizard can recover 3 second level slots whereas a sorcerer can create 4 second level slots). Moreover, the sorcerer can do so on the fly, not needing to plan in advance.
• The sorcerer can also readjust their spell slots if they perceive this could be profitable. This is a corner case, as it is costly, but is still an option other casters don't have. (Of course, using a optional rule like spell points nullifies this advantage sorcerers have)

If a wizard can burn through spell slots to power their new metamagic-like feature, they are also expending resources the same way as sorcerers. To state that arcane recovery recovers spells for the wizard while burning sorcery points to create slots eats up resources for the sorcerer is a little misleading. In the end both are using extra resources, it is just that arcane recovery is less flexible and less efficient.

For more clarity, as pointed out above, comparing 3 sorcery points to a third level spell slot is also a little misleading. This is true, of course, when the sorcerer runs out of sorcery points, but up to there they had their sorcery pool, which is comparable to, and still more efficient than the arcane recovery.

Moreover, all sorcerers get font of magic and metamagic, while all wizards get arcane recovery and their spellbook. Apart from that, every other special feature those two classes get (barring wizard 18 and 20 and sorcerer 20) comes exclusively from their origins/traditions. The wizard presented is giving up a tradition to get sorcerer-like features, some of which will burn their spell pool faster, while all sorcerers get keep their baseline sorcery features while still enjoying their origin boons.

 

[Mercule]

Let's get serious here: who honestly thought that there would be new Pact Boons? Like it or not, Patrons are the defining subclass mechanic for Warlocks and there's really not much, if any, cognitive grounds for new Pact Boons to incorporate. We've got a magical weapon, a spellbook, and a familiar. Like I keep asking, what's left?

Well, let's see, there's a Pact of Blood, where the Warlock ends up with fiendish/whatever blood bond to his patron and gets access to invocations that allow him to trade hit points for meta-magic like toys.

The Pact of the Vessel would turn the Warlock into a pseudo-Binder who acts as a host for a forgotten being of power.

The Pact of the Seer gives the Warlock some ability to prophesy.

Those are just three that I came up with off the top of my head because I find your statement blatantly absurd. If I actually spent time and effort, I'm sure I could come up with plenty more. In the PHB, there are three Pacts and three Patrons. While I do expect to see more Patrons than Pacts, that does give grounds to assume there might be reasonable balance to the numbers of each that will be coming. Also, they've already shown us the Pact of the Star, which also shows an intent to publish more Pacts.

So, really, it seems strange that anyone would assume no additional pacts were coming. They are easy to create and WotC has already shown they intend to do so.

 

[Mercule]

As for this new Lore Wizard, I'm slightly sad.

Altering Spells would have been SO COOL to have as a spellcaster. But now you have to give up your identity and color as an Evoker or Diviner (or Dragon Sorcerer, or Lore Bard) to get it.

It would have been so much more fun if these cool toys (spell secrets, metamagic, and so on) were available for every spellcaster, perhaps as a feat.

Having to select a particular kind of spellcaster just to be able to gain extra complexity and wonderful crunch doesn't really do it for me.

Disagree. While I need to reread the Lore Wizard and mull over the specifics, I'm definitely happier having the meta-magic-like abilities segregated by class/kit. I consider it a huge step up from the feat model of 3E. Then again, the way feats were handled in 3E (meaning the prominence they had) was something I grew to hate about the system. Good basic idea, but overused and the execution made the game more brittle. I prefer the optional nature of feats in 5E by a wide margin.