D&D 5E Jeremy Crawford Discusses the Wild Soul Barbarian and Path of the Astral Self Monk

[gyor]

Ok, I an old fart. Some the stuff you are mentioning I never heard of. I start back in 1E so what is
Shair?
School of Invention?(sounds like Ravenica )
Artificer (what if get from forums is they create stuff which do spell stuff)
Jolo (I not going to google my mind may not handle the result)
Of course back in the day you could tell my wizard apart from Morrus' wizard. My wizard look like James Bond from the original Casino Royale in a three piece suit and white Persian cat. Morrus' look like the wizard kid from the Saturday morning cartoon but with white hair.

Shi'ar are Al Qadim wizards what have a special mini genie like familiar they use as a spellbook. The send this Familiar off to fetch spells for them. There is more to it then that, but it's the basics.

 

[Parmandur]

The first edition Magic User was a generalist wizard, and it continued to exist in 2nd. And a lot of the negativity towards the Invention wizard was caused by it's Ravnica context being concealed.

I was referring to the Loremaster, primarily.

 

[Parmandur]

The non-specialist as a contrast to a specialist traces it's roots back to the inclusion of the Illusionist, and was properly codified in AD&D.

Most of those attempts were actually testbeds for some entirely absurd mechanics, like the School of Invention being a probe for Ravnica. Which is probably why UA wizards, even the ones crammed with lots of story potential like the Theurge, traditionally don't cross the approval threshold for playtest content. I'm almost entirely sure that the only reason the School of War Magic exists in print is because they had to print a Wizard Subclass for Xanathar's and they ran out of time and ideas for anything else.

And lets face it, those surveys really don't have the level of granularity that they should. The questions are basically "Do you like this?" If enough people (not most mind you, just like 30% or whatever the threshold is) answer 3/5 or less (because being good isn't good enough! it has to be loved~), the entire subclass gets totally scrapped instead of worked on. Even if the reason they didn't like it is because there was that one overpowered ability that they include just to provoke feedback, which obviously needs to be nerfed. Or this armor makes no sense out of context. Or they just don't like the Wizard class in general, so they don't care for any potential Wizard subclass to begin with.

The reason the War Wizard made it through is that it hit the 70% approval threshold. Simple as that.

UA is for concept testing, not fine tune critiques. They have in-house playtesting for that. Just because something is thrown back on the drawing board doesn't mean that they will never make another pass at it: see the Artificer, which went through, what, four versions before being finalized (incidentally, Crawford says in this video that the Artificer work is all done, too).?

 

[Parmandur]

More popular than any traditional Wizard School.
But that's missing the forest for the trees.

Consider this:
Bladesingers are the most popular Wizard School, and they are a race restricted subclass.
Restricted to the least popular PHB race.
A race that is less popular than most splatbook races.
Additionally, it eats up your PHB+1 pick for organised play.

And despite all that, they are more popular than Warmages. Who in turn are more popular than even the bog-standard Evokers, who were included in the Basic rules. This makes Wizards schools an anomaly. Every other class has a PHB option (if not the Basic Rules option) in their number one slot.

I really don't know how its possible to make it any more clear: The demand for non-Specialist wizards is through the roof. Yes, the Specialist schools were an easy and obvious pick for additional subclass options, but WotC absolutely dropped the ball by not including a Generalist Wizard from day one.

Elves are the most popular pick after Humans: the D&D BEyond Legendary Bundle user data is a bit suspect on that front.

 

[Parmandur]

There are some classic concepts still missing, like the sha´ir or a devoted elementalist. I'd like to take a primordial/archomental as my Warlock patron, too, and beyond reflavoring the Fiend Pact for a fire entity I'm uncertain how to accomplish that.

Those are kind of edgy concepts, though: that's bringing the weird.

 

[Parmandur]

Tons of them. It baffles me how Jeremy could actually think that they'd gotten most of them.

Because he has the data on what concepts people expect to see. Sha'ir is a weird one.

 

[mortwatcher]

I really don't know how its possible to make it any more clear: The demand for non-Specialist wizards is through the roof. Yes, the Specialist schools were an easy and obvious pick for additional subclass options, but WotC absolutely dropped the ball by not including a Generalist Wizard from day one.

but they got rid of the restrictions that the generalist wizard avoided and as such they got rid of the need for a generalist

the closest you can come to a generalist would be probably diviner, since portent is useable for pretty much anything and is in no way relevant to only spells and the incentive to pick divination spells in the other features is pretty weak

 

[Parmandur]

but they got rid of the restrictions that the generalist wizard avoided and as such they got rid of the need for a generalist

the closest you can come to a generalist would be probably diviner, since portent is useable for pretty much anything and is in no way relevant to only spells and the incentive to pick divination spells in the other features is pretty weak

I totally think there is room for something like the Loremaster, an Arcana Expertise generalist. Maybe not one who steps on the Sorcerer's toes, though.

 

[gyor]

Because he has the data on what concepts people expect to see. Sha'ir is a weird one.

I don't concider it a weird one, it's been in every edition since it first appeared, imcluding 4e, but I admit it's subjective.

Anyways given the way Jeremy was talking about these subclasses, its very clearly for Rick and Morty.

 

[Parmandur]

I don't concider it a weird one, it's been in every edition since it first appeared, imcluding 4e, but I admit it's subjective.

Anyways given the way Jeremy was talking about these subclasses, its very clearly for Rick and Morty.

I think you are right about that: the timing works out, the weirdness works out.

It has been in many editions, but the Sha'ir is not a bog standard trope in mainstream fantasy literature and films the same way as a Necromancer or Illusionist. And that's what he means: moving forwards, increasingly niche options will bubble up, particularly for more narrow Classes like the Monk and Barbarian.