D&D (2024) What's your favorites new subclass?

[Tonguez]

The World Tree can mean different things in different contexts. Sometimes, it is the air itself, where the dome of the branches are the dome of the sky, while the clouds fling across, high on its branches. It tree full of leaves and leafless are the seasonal cycles of the sky. It especially connotes the air anchoring and rooting in place within land.

The World Tree can mean other things also. It is reasonable for some of the Barbarian subclass mechanics to refer to airy and skyey effects, even with the concept of an ordinary tree reaching upward into the sky.

Now if they had done this it might have been okay, like when Marvel made the world tree into a Wormhole map and The Bifrost a high energy teleport machine - that parts fine. Barbarian teleporters with supernatural perception and foresight fit.
What doesnt is trying to shoehorn in some woody vines because entangling roots are tree-related.

 

[Clint_L]

College of dance, for sure. The others have potential but still few rough edges, but Dance is pretty much ready to go.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Would it be more palatable if the subclass was all about turning into a plant creature as its main theme, and the extended reach was due to your arms becoming branch-like instead of your axe becoming branch-like?

I do agree that the "roots of the World Tree shooting out of your weapon" thing is a weird visual. I think I'd like the subclass more if it was the Path of the Treant (or whatever) instead of the Path of the World Tree. Instead of having all these subclass features invoking shoe-horned World Tree imagery, you'd just slowly turn into Groot/Swamp Thing/Daphne from Greek mythology/[insert other plant-person here].

LOL the world tree elements aren’t “shoehorned”, they’re the point.

A swamp thing Barbarian could be cool, sure. It would not be this subclass.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Dance Bard has to push Leading Evasion back. And the sharing has to be more limited.

Unless they wanna boost the everloving snot out of the Rogue and Monk version, I guess.

I really like the new Arch-Fey Warlock. It does a lot more and I really want to play it with Blade and Tome and recreate a character I played in a CoS game that fizzledat level 3. That PC was Tome, and used Shillelagh to fight with a cane using Charisma.

Tbh all the new subclasses are pretty cool, and a lot of the revised ones are much more appealing.

 

[fuindordm]

I really like the World Tree barbarian but I agree with others that Groot fighting feels off.

Regarding the "viking" cultural stamp, many other cultures/traditions have some version of an axis mundi that connects the material world to other worlds. It might not be a tree-it might be a river, a Dark Tower, a Pattern, an underworld passage, a vaguely defined transitional plane (like the astral) or any number of other things.

What distinguishes the axis mundi barbarian from an "astral" wizard or horizon walker ranger then is the extent to which their culture believes in an axis mundi with physical presence (you can travel to it in the real world) that you can bond with.

Frankly, giving them reach attacks as a manifestation of their particular axis mundi is a pretty good idea mechanically and thematically. It doesn't even need to have an obvious visual effect, they could just be instinctively drawing on the power source to twist space.

 

[Epic Meepo]

LOL the world tree elements aren’t “shoehorned”, they’re the point.

A swamp thing Barbarian could be cool, sure. It would not be this subclass.

The subclass wants us to think the World Tree elements are the point. Then it shoehorns the World Tree theme onto a Groot barbarian feature that has nothing to do with the World Tree except they both involve vegetation. To me, this subclass feels like it's two different, plant-themed subclasses spliced together: a teleport and support World Tree barbarian (mostly) and a largely-unrelated Groot barbarian (with vine attack imagery).

Sometimes, I get the feeling that WotC is trying to have its cake ("every class has exactly four subclasses!") and eat it too ("but we have five themes we like for this class, so we're cramming two of them into one subclass"). I feel the same way about the new Light domain cleric (whose description seems to imply the Light domain cleric is also a stand-in for the old Knowledge domain cleric). I'm not sure I like the conflation of the two, only vaguely-related themes.

 

[Scribe]

Sometimes, I get the feeling that WotC is trying to have its cake ("every class has exactly four subclasses!") and eat it too ("but we have five themes we like for this class, so we're cramming two of them into one subclass"). I feel the same way about the new Light domain cleric (whose description seems to imply the Light domain cleric is also a stand-in for the old Knowledge domain cleric). I'm not sure I like the conflation of the two, only vaguely-related themes.

I was reminded thinking on this last night, that Blizzard had originally had Hanzo and Genji, as 1 character. They then tightened the design and split it.

I prefer that focused approach personally.

 

[OB1]

The FeyBlade Warlock is so different from 2014 I'd almost call it a new subclass, and thus my favorite so far.

That said, of the actual new subclasses, I'm torn between Dance Bards and Tree Barbs as my top.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

The subclass wants us to think the World Tree elements are the point. Then it shoehorns the World Tree theme onto a Groot barbarian feature that has nothing to do with the World Tree except they both involve vegetation. To me, this subclass feels like it's two different, plant-themed subclasses spliced together: a teleport and support World Tree barbarian (mostly) and a largely-unrelated Groot barbarian (with vine attack imagery).

Sometimes, I get the feeling that WotC is trying to have its cake ("every class has exactly four subclasses!") and eat it too ("but we have five themes we like for this class, so we're cramming two of them into one subclass"). I feel the same way about the new Light domain cleric (whose description seems to imply the Light domain cleric is also a stand-in for the old Knowledge domain cleric). I'm not sure I like the conflation of the two, only vaguely-related themes.

It’s got one “groot” feature tho. Like the grab from 20ft away thing could go either way, but the only strongly “groot/swamp thing” feature is the reach extender, and even that is perfectly cromulent for a World Tree Barbarian.

It’s just…a world tree subclass. The level 3 feature is odd as a level 3 feature, IMO, and I’d rather see it and level 6 swapped, but at no point is it not doing “world tree”.

My Norse cosmology fascination makes me want it to have something related to gathering information/secrets or having shamanic visions, but I know the D&D World Tree isn’t the same thing.

 

[Epic Meepo]

My Norse cosmology fascination makes me want it to have something related to gathering information/secrets or having shamanic visions, but I know the D&D World Tree isn’t the same thing.

If the World Tree barbarian got shamanic visions instead of attacking vines, it would be would be strong contender for one of my favorite subclasses. The barbarian could benefit from a dedicated warrior-shaman subclass.