D&D 5E (2024) New Classes for 5e. Is anything missing?

[Parmandur]

I dmed to artificers. Artificer's magical buffs are very minor.

No more nor less minor thsn any other Gosh Class would 9t could be, within the bounds of the rules. And they get Spells.

 

[Parmandur]

If you don't go BIG, there's no point in the class existing.

Quod erat demonstratum.

 

[Asisreo]

Yeah, I think "put their eggs in one basket, then that basket got cut and never replaced" is sort of a theme for the Next playtest. That is, exactly the same thing happened to the Warlord Fighter; despite the crappy edition-warrior rhetoric used in that one podcast, Mearls did explicitly say in a tweet that martial healing was in, and if DMs didn't like that, they could just forbid people from playing it. But then they said, "Hey, this makes more sense as a thing ANY Fighter could opt into, so let's use this cool new Specialties mechanic!" Aaaaand...then Specialties were not particularly popular (I didn't mind, personally, but I get why they were disliked), so they axed them. At which point, they were almost certainly aware that there just wasn't enough time to playtest any new stuff...so they just quietly dropped the subject and never spoke about it again.

The perils of outright dropping mechanics when people don't respond well to them, rather than at least trying to make them work: you're constantly going back to the drawing board, despite time being a rather finite resource.


Oh it can, sure. The issue is getting people to accept creating stuff. See also: dragonborn being widely panned and mocked by critics of 4e upon release, yet as of 2020, they were the third most popular race in D&D (after human and half-elf, assuming you split Elf into its various sub-races; if you don't, Elf-combined rises to third, and Dragonborn is fourth overall.)


See, it's exactly this kind of logic that's incredibly frustrating.

Why would you even bother making something where "all the features are just renamed versions of what the EK and BS have"? Of course that would be pointless, even foolish. A proper Swordmage should actually have its own mechanics. Ideally, they should be ones where you can see some kind of relationship to what Bladesingers or Eldritch Knights do, because that enhances the lore of the situation (making EK and BS more like half-steps toward Swordmage, rather than half-steps from Fighter to Wizard or vice-versa), but that's an ideal that may not always be workable.

Hence why I suggested the "Spell Combat" proposal earlier, using runes that ride on top of physical attacks to deliver spells. Or perhaps you literally dual-wield, with a sword in one hand and a spell in the other like how it's done in Elder Scrolls games, and Swordmage blends the two together in its own unique way. Maybe if you hold a spell focus in your offhand, you can shape magical energy into various forms for a round, e.g. a shield of force or a bonus-action attack or a temporary utility effect like "pull one enemy into melee range" or "ensnare one foe within 15 feet" or whatever.

It's not that hard to come up with actually-interesting but reasonably-straightforward mechanics to play around with in this space, ones that differ from EK, BS, and Paladin. But what can be really, really hard is getting some folks to even consider the possibility that something with new mechanics could actually be interesting to engage with.

Edit:
And, on the subject of D&D Clerics in fiction: I challenge you to find any example in fiction, let's say before 1960, of a holy warrior wearing relatively heavy armor (doesn't have to be plate precisely, but shouldn't be parsed as light armor, e.g. not just leather), who fights abominations in the name of their deity, but does not fit the mantle of Paladin. I have set the date specifically so that we avoid picking up fiction that has its roots in the Cleric, which is exactly what I'm criticizing.

If I were a betting man, I'd put real money on the idea that the vast majority, if not the entirety, of your examples will come from Crusader-related literature or King Arthur's knights, both of which very much look more like Paladins than D&D Clerics.

It's not the mechanics that is the problem, it's the playstyle. Wizards and Sorcerers can be mechanically similar, but the wizard's playstyle revolves around managing and studying spell descriptions IRL. You have to know how Unseen Servant works before you can use it to its potential. Sorcerers are resource-managers with granular control over their spellcasting. They are flexible in their magical prowess.

What's a swordmage other than a Paladin or other almost-gish in playstyle? Stand there, do good damage, take good damage, and apply effects. That's the problem with currently-designed swordmage homebrews and why people call it redundant to paladins and eldritch knights.

Honestly, the two existing half-casters are too broad for a swordmage to comfortably exist. Paladins are budget tanks, healers, support, and single-target attackers. Rangers are budget strikers, controllers, expert, and AoE attackers.

 

[Parmandur]

Honestly, the two existing half-casters are too broad for a swordmage to comfortably exist. Paladins are budget tanks, healers, support, and single-target attackers. Rangers are budget strikers, controllers, expert, and AoE attackers.

And don't forget the Artificer playing in the same space.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

It's not just as easy as "if you don't like it, don't use it." Class bloat affects the game as a whole. Designers have limited amount of time and resources. Also, having too many classes limits the conceptual and thematic space of the other classes. Like how if sorcerer and warlock were one class, the resulting class could be mechanically and thematically less pigeonholed, it would have a greater number of subclasses when the designers wouldn't need to waste time writing duplicate subclasses for similar themes. I rather have fewer broader, more flexible and better supported classes, than loads of narrow, gimmicky and thematically thin classes.

Given the comparatively slow pace of published books in 5e, I sincerely doubt that design time is a factor in whether or not they add new classes. Hell, they even actively playtested several psionic class things before eventually scrapping the idea. I mean, do you feel that the books published during the months (was it years?) that they were working on the psionic stuff were dramatically worse than those from before? If not, that objection would seem to be far more theoretical than practical.

Absolutely disagree on the "limits the conceptual and thematic space of other classes." Why should it? Particularly if we're adding new classes to what already exists? It's not like the addition of a Swordmage can take away the Eldritch Knight, Echo Knight, Battlesmith, Hexblade/Blade Pact, Arcane Trickster, or the entire Paladin class, after all. Making classes that share thematic elements is, if anything, par for the course, it's why people see similarities in the Druid and Ranger, the Cleric and Paladin, etc. The Cleric neither ceased to exist nor got sidelined because of the existence of the Paladin. They evolved in parallel to one another, both growing and changing as time went on. Again, in practice, this concern seems to be largely inapplicable; actual classes don't get trodden over just because there are thematic or conceptual similarities. (If anything, what actually causes that trodden-over effect is people balking at classes being made too different!)

As for the Warlock and Sorcerer, I see it exactly the reverse. Both archetypes--Faust and classic Merlin--would be necessarily watered down, forced to both express the same fundamental tools. It would be ridiculous to merge the classes only to then make a whole mess of tangled exceptions for how you can't use X pact with Y patron or vice-versa. So you end up with "Pact of the Dragon" Sorcerers-as-Warlocks who, as noted, can apparently belch up a Book of Shadows because great-great-great-great grandma got busy with a bus-sized lizard. Instead of actually expressing those archetypes meaningfully, you'd be taking away the ability to address that struggle with an innate part of yourself, or the struggle against imposed authority--and those are two very different struggles. Trying to pretend that "I sold my soul to the devil" is the exactly the same as "I am a devil inside" just makes both stories weaker.

Yes, I'm glad that there are not officially published options for the assassin's auto-kill and the swordmage class features that are so powerful and different that they can't be allowed to be used by anyone else. It's my opinion. I'm not doing anything to keep you from having them. I don't need them. I won't boycott WotC if they publish them.

Frankly, this sounds like arguing in bad faith; if you assume that the stuff that others want is broken, and that's why you don't want it published, then you're assuming from the get-go that publishing them is bad. I, and others, have given easily half a dozen different potential approaches that do not in any way sound inherently broken and out of line with the rest of the game. So, since it apparently needs to be said: assuming a Swordmage that is actually reasonably balanced, what harm does it cause to the table of Irlo and friends when published as an official document?

And frankly, most of such additional classes are not needed and are just bloat. The subclass system is great, people should utilise it more. With it you can have both broad and flexible classes and more specific themes represented via subclasses.

And there are some things where it simply doesn't work. People have told me--repeatedly, and I want to say you're among them--that the kind of features Warlord fans desire are simply unacceptable as part of the Fighter kit. That alone indicates it needs its own class, if it can be implemented in a balanced way. Given the number of attempts to make it happen (including from Level Up, as I understand it), that certainly doesn't seem to be a wild notion.

You're also begging the question, as an aside. "Not needed and just bloat" is literally just repeating yourself, because all it means is "more classes bad, less classes good." "Bloat" is a pejorative to mock and insult any increase someone doesn't like. If you want to make an argument out of it, you actually have to defend why adding another class means things suddenly become "bloated," rather than just pointing the finger and shouting the insult.

 

[Minigiant]

It's not just as easy as "if you don't like it, don't use it." Class bloat affects the game as a whole. Designers have limited amount of time and resources. Also, having too many classes limits the conceptual and thematic space of the other classes. Like how if sorcerer and warlock were one class, the resulting class could be mechanically and thematically less pigeonholed and it would have a greater number of subclasses when the designers wouldn't need to waste time writing duplicate subclasses for similar themes. I rather have fewer broader, more flexible and better supported classes, than loads of narrow, gimmicky and thematically thin classes.

Think with the printing of TCOE that WotC is close to the point of subclass bloat as they force themselves to provie more and more subclasses to the current 13.

The New Cleric Subclasses are OP. They couldn't get the Strixhaven ones to work. And they choose the weakest base classes to support in Fizban's. And they don't know what to do

The addition of 2-3 classes would open fresh windows of design and remove the onus to provide tons of subclasses for the lore-stretced current ones.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Honestly, the two existing half-casters are too broad for a swordmage to comfortably exist. Paladins are budget tanks, healers, support, and single-target attackers. Rangers are budget strikers, controllers, expert, and AoE attackers.

Again, completely disagreed. It requires creativity, sure, but all you've really said is "people who have tried just copied X or Y, and that would leave us with X, copy-X, and Y, which isn't worth it."

And I'd agree with that! If, of course, that was what I wanted to do. Obviously, this means that anyone who wants these classes has the onus to articulate how to make them in a way that ISN'T just a copy of X or Y, but I and others have already proposed those things. My proposed "Spell Combat" thing--no spell slots, uses-per-day runes that ride on weapon attacks and get strung into spells--has gone over well with other Swordmage fans in the thread. I proposed specifically to be a reversal of what Paladins do, so it couldn't just be a playstyle copy of Paladin or EK. Because if it were, then yes, I completely agree that it would be a waste of time--just reskin those other classes and go. But I don't want a reskin of either of them. I want a class that is built, from the ground up, on the principle that fighting is magic--that you're limited if you try to do one without the other.

 

[Irlo]

Frankly, this sounds like arguing in bad faith; if you assume that the stuff that others want is broken, and that's why you don't want it published, then you're assuming from the get-go that publishing them is bad. I, and others, have given easily half a dozen different potential approaches that do not in any way sound inherently broken and out of line with the rest of the game. So, since it apparently needs to be said: assuming a Swordmage that is actually reasonably balanced, what harm does it cause to the table of Irlo and friends when published as an official document?

One more time, then I'll let it be.

I don't want the proposed assassin's auto-kill class feature (described in detail in another thread) and the proposed swordmage's big-effects-with-no-save class features to be published because, as described, they do not appear reasonably balanced. It's not an assumption. It's an observation and judgment.

 

[Mecheon]

And frankly, most of such additional classes are not needed and are just bloat. The subclass system is great, people should utilise it more. With it you can have both broad and flexible classes and more specific themes represented via subclasses.

And I argue against it. Exploring new mechanical spaces in a self-contained space, that's what classes are trying to do. You're expanding sideways to give each thing a unique space and carving pieces off to explore on their own, rather than piling more on top of archetypes that may not apply to it.

The assassin is oft considered a weaker rogue class. What if rather than just shrugging and left it be, we, instead, carved it off to explore what makes it an assassin and try to get it to a baseline degree it works with other classes, without being weighed down by no longer needed expectations from being a rogue. On the Gish side of things, the EK has its problem that, even without all of its spells, its a perfectly usuable fighter, and therefore you've gotta give it a low amount of spells to counter this. What if instead, you made a specific chassis to work for the Gish idea, so you didn't have "Fighter but can throw out some spells" or "Caster who can get into melee but is mostly effective either being an unhittable tank or just blasting like any other wizard"

Subclasses are as much bloat as classes, its just they have to carry the weight put on them from their raw class. Sometimes it can work fine and lead to fun things, like a lot of the Warlock ones. Other times, the sheer root of the class just interferes with what's trying to happen and doesn't give it its full mechanical allowance to explore fully. And then other times we get the Strixhaven experiment.

Its just like that the whole thing with the racial stuff. Just like how ever dwarf apparently comes out of the womb knowing about stoneworks, even if he's Urist McBeachaxe, the beach-living dwarven lifeguard who's never set foot in a building made of anything but wood, apparently every battlefield commander has to be a skillful fighter, because everyone remembers that time Alexander the Great carved a dude up with his action surge.

 

[Minigiant]

Quod erat demonstratum.

Artificer infusions
Barbarian Rage
Bard magic
Cleric magic
Druid magic
Paladin Divine Smite
...