D&D 5E 5e witches, your preferred implementation?

[Yaarel]

No. The D&D Cleric is a medium or heavily armored, anti-Undead, healing attacker.

Healing is fine, go with medium armor, swap out undead. Add domain. Despite Wiccan elementalism, most spells are nonflashy, like karma and bless, and that suits Cleric too.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

No. The D&D Cleric is a medium or heavily armored, anti-Undead, healing attacker.

It's not. Clerics don't come with heavy armour as a default. And it really seems that people are stuck in the past and don't get how subclasses work. You don't need to create completely separate class for every bloody thing that is missing couple of minor things you want, you choose an existing class that's the closest, and create a subclass that provides the missing bits.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

No, I don't like that it doesn't fit the Witch stereotype

Warlocks do not fly on brooms.

Broom of flying is an item that exists in the game already. Give them that. You're trying to duplicate a thing that already is modelled in the game.

They do not have a hodge-podge of learned recipes from people past, put together in a book that's half wizard's tome and half scrapbook.

Books of shadows. You're again trying to recreate an existing thing.

You don't slave over a cauldron to create potions. No creation of obscure remedies to handle very specific situations.

There are potion creation rules that all classes can use furthermore, Witherbloom sublcass does the exact thing you want. You're trying to recreate a thing that already exists.

Spoiler

Witherbloom Brew Level 6+ Mage of Witherbloom Feature
You gain proficiency with herbalism kits if you don’t already have it. When you finish a long rest, you can use an herbalism kit and a pot or cauldron to create magical brews. You create a number of brews equal to your proficiency bonus. Each brew requires its own flask. A brew retains its magical potency for 24 hours or until it is used. For each brew, choose one of the following effects: Fortifying . When you create this brew, choose a damage type from the following list: cold, fire, necrotic, poison, or radiant. A creature can drink this brew or administer it to another creature as an action. The recipient gains resistance to the chosen damage type for 1 hour. Quickening . A creature can drink this brew or administer it to another creature as an action. The recipient regains 2d6 hit points, and one disease or condition from the following list affecting the recipient ends (brew user’s choice): charmed, frightened, paralyzed, poisoned, stunned. Toxifying . As an action, a creature can apply this brew to a simple or martial weapon. The next time the weapon or a piece of ammunition fired by it hits a creature within 1 hour, the target takes 2d6 poison damage and must succeed on a Constitution saving throw against your spell save DC or be poisoned for 1 minute

You're not the strange wild person in the woods, delivering good ol' fashioned home advice as opposed to the Cleric and Druid's preaching and big flashy effects. No good ol' fashioned headology

That is literally just about how you choose to roleplay your character!

Warlocks fail at the Witch genre and aesthetic. If they're supposed to be the same thing, then the Warlock is a failure of a class from a sheer aesthetic level alone and doesn't meet any of the required bits.

You're literally and demonstrably wrong. All the things you want already exist. This sort of pointless reinventing already existing stuff is how rule bloat happens.

 

[Shardstone]

It'll never cease to amaze me how people can be perfectly fine with Wizard and Sorcerer being two different classes, but bring up Witch and suddenly there's no room, way, no mind in the universe that could somehow separate it from the flavor of the other classes.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

It'll never cease to amaze me how people can be perfectly fine with Wizard and Sorcerer being two different classes, but bring up Witch and suddenly there's no room, way, no mind in the universe that could somehow separate it from the flavor of the other classes.

I'm not fine with them being separate classes either. Sorcerers don't need to exist. Though they should mostly be merged with warlocks, not wizards.

 

[Remathilis]

It'll never cease to amaze me how people can be perfectly fine with Wizard and Sorcerer being two different classes, but bring up Witch and suddenly there's no room, way, no mind in the universe that could somehow separate it from the flavor of the other classes.

Any discussion about what should/shouldn't be a class inevitably ends in a reductio ad absurdum that there should only be two classes: hitting with stick guy and waggling fingers to cast spells girl. Everything else is a mixture of customization, options, refluffing and role-play.

The only winning move is not to play.

 

[Shardstone]

I'm not fine with them being separate classes either. Sorcerers don't need to exist. Though they should mostly be merged with warlocks, not wizards.

Points for consistency.

 

[Remathilis]

Yeah, but my OP was 'we already have witches'.

You only seem to dislike the fact that the witches we have are short rest based classes instead of long rest ones.

So? The existence of druids didn't stop the nature domain. The existence of rangers didn't stop the scout rogue. The existence of the cleric didn't stop the divine soul sorcerer. There are more than one way to represent the same archetype.

 

[Shardstone]

I think flavor I would do for a Witch is that every Witch is marked at birth. This mark causes supernatural phenomena to be attracted to them throughout their life. Devils, fey, other spellcasters, living spells, weird surges of wild magic; all of this is attracted to the witch. Unlike a Warlock, who seeks out occult lore and makes pacts, the Witch learns their magic by virtue of having to navigate the supernatural courts of their lives.

Witches collect into Covens: groups of Witches who are plagued by similar supernatural phenomena, and thus develop similar strategies (their subclass features) for navigating a natural world.

It is a class where the magic is forced onto the Witch from many different sources and the Witches themselves are learning both from interactions with these supernatural things and also from other Witches in their coven.

This I think is a unique enough flavor for 5E. Could you do this with a Warlock, Wizard, Sorcerer, Druid, Cleric, or Bard? Probably. But I could also do any of those classes with any of those other classes mentioned.

 

[Cadence]

I also don't need Ranger (Fighter or Druid alternate depending on edition), Barbarian (Ranger or Fighter doe), Paladin (Cleric or Fighter doe), or in some editions Druid (Cleric).

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As for dictionaries, I'm all for using them in most cases, but they do really badly for D&D classes. Wizardry is Sorcery, Sorcery is using magic with power of an evil spirit, Witchcraft is Sorcery.... And then go for Paldin, Druid, Bard, etc... Warlock is far closer to Witch than a lot of other class names and when most kids googled Warlock they'd see well, Sorcerer (see Witch), because all of them are on the same line of a Thesaurus. But if WotC is trying to be inclusive and wanted Warlock to be the Witch, they shouldn't have male-washed it and chosen the less popular name and would have given the tropes more clearly in various subclasses.

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Aren't we at the stage where having a witch in some some setting or splat book would be fine? Pathfinder sure would have. As for being in the PhB, unlike races, it feels to me like they would be overlapping too much but not sure which of Sorcerer, Druid, or Warlock fans would yell loudest if we got rid of them. Could some or all of them be Witch subclasses anyway? Namewise the firsts niche is just a DnDism, right?

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I've seen my Looney Tunes, it's the broom that's magical.