Dungeons & Dragons Playtests Four New Mystic-Themed Subclasses

Dungeons & Dragons has dropped their first Unearthed Arcana playtest of 2026, with four brand-new subclasses being tested. Today, Wizards of the Coast posted a Mystic Subclasses Unearthed Arcana playtest to D&D Beyond, featuring four magic-themed subclasses. The new subclasses include the Warrior of the Mystic Arts Monk subclass, the Oath of the Spellguard Paladin subclass, the Magic Stealer Rogue subclass and the Vestige Patron Warlock subclass.

The Warrior of the Mystic Arts is a spellcasting subclass that grants Monks the ability to cast Sorcerer spells up to 4th level spells. The Oath of the Spellguard is designed with protecting magic-casters in mind, while the Magic Stealer Rogue targets spellcasting and can empower their Sneak Attacks with magic stolen from nearby spellcasters. The Vestige Patron Warlock forms a bond with a dying god, with the god taking on a vestige form as a companion. The Vestige companion grows in power with the spellcaster. Notably, the Vestige Patron draws inspiration from the Binder from past editions of D&D.

There's no indication when or what this new Unearthed Arcana could be related to. There are several Unearthed Arcanas not currently attached to an announced D&D product, although two almost are certainly tied to a Dark Sun sourcebook.

You can check out the subclasses here. Feedback opens for the playtest on January 22nd.

 

[Hussar]

I haven't seen any in the last several years that seem to be built on the assumption that anyone is pushing through the whole thing in one go.

Dunno if it counts, but, Shattered Obelisk was certainly built around adventuring days. Each dungeon is about 6-8 encounters long. And, while the clock was very much abstracted, there was a sense of urgency in the adventures. Considering that came out in 2023, I'd say that's pretty recent.

 

[Charlaquin]

Umm, I'm not sure I understand the question. Regardless of the stucture, the only way to lose an encounter is to run out of HP. In an "adventuring day" paradigm, how do you lose an encounter?

In an adventuring day paradigm, the encounter isn’t the base point of balance. You don’t lose an encounter, you lose an adventuring day, by having to retreat and recover before achieving your goals. If you run out of spell slots or whatever and go back to town or camp for a rest, leaving the dungeon or other adventure unfinished, that’s a failure state. You did not complete the 6-8 encounter challenge, and as a result, something will change in the intervening time. The evil ritual is completed, or the dungeon gets reatocked, or whatever. In an encounter based challenge model, each individual encounter is designed to be a challenge on its own, rather than the challenge being getting through several relatively easy encounters without running out of resources. So, failing a challenge necessarily means running out of HP rather than simply calling it quits early.

And, frankly? Who cares? The odds of a group "losing" an encounter in any paradigm is vanishingly small. PC's almost never lose. That's the point. In a 6-8 Encounter Adventuring day, you're going to "win" 6-8 encounters. In an Encounter based system, you're going to win encounter. It's not any different. And, in both paradigms, you stop when you run out of ways of recharging your HP. In 4e, it was when you ran out of Hit Dice, in 5e, it's when you run out of spells.

Well, see, if you’re building a challenge model around the individual encounter and the party almost never loses an encounter, you’ve made an unchallenging game. Which I guess is fine for some players, but challenge is a pretty major gameplay motivation for a lot of players, so those players are likely to lose interest in your game. Meanwhile, in an adventuring day based model of challenge, it doesn’t matter if the players win most encounters because individual encounters aren’t meant to be challenging. Completing several of them in a row is challenging. And given the number of people who claim 6-8 encounters in one day is absurd, I’d say 5e is very challenging - most groups rarely if ever successfully complete a whole adventuring day. And it manages to be so challenging while also allowing players to feel powerful as they win most of their encounters. It’s a great model for high challenge with low lethality, which I think is a significant ingredient to 5e’s secret sauce.

In 5e, it's the casters that dictate pace more than anything. In 4e, the pace was dictated by the group and didn't really matter which classes you had on hand.
Back in my 3e days, when HP battery healing wands were so common, it was always the casters that dictated pacing. The casters are out of gas? Time to rest. We never ran into 5 minute working days because it took a lot longer than that for the casters to run out of gas.

Yeah, I agree that’s a big point in 4e’s favor over 5e. I don’t think that’s a flaw of the resource attrition model though, I think it’s a flaw of 5e’s uneven resource models. When martials are primarily at-will based and casters are primarily long-rest based, the casters control when long rests happen, which is not ideal. A better mix of resource models between classes, without going as far as early 4e did in giving everyone the same resources at the same levels, would be ideal. Late 4e, (from like PHB3 on, including Essentials, IMO) hit the sweet spot.

 

[Charlaquin]

Oh, I know, trust me. But they have found that groups run so few encounters per day that many aren't taking short rests at all, which to me means probably less than 4 encounters.

Yeah, personally I think a big part of the problem here is the 1-hour short rest. They really should have been 10 minutes IMO. Having some resources that have to last all day, some that you can count on once per encounter, and some that you can use multiple times per encounter is a really great thing for either encounter based or adventuring day based challenge.

Has it? I haven't seen it, but I know you've said you actually play that way. I wonder how many groups actually enjoy the game when run that way, ie which of us is more normative. (I suspect that neither of us is ever accused of being normies in any other context!)

Well, what I mean is that people seem to enjoy the way 5e’s combat is designed. Whether that’s because they play full adventuring days and enjoy that challenge or because they do much fewer encounters per day and enjoy the lack of challenge is ultimately kind of immaterial. That’s why I’ve been saying I think it’s a strength of the model that players have the power to decide to retreat and recover after only a few encounters if they want to.

I’ll say, in my experience, players I’ve played with do seem to like the way I run things. I stock dungeons with roughly 4 medium encounters, 2 easy encounters, and 2 hard encounters worth of stuff, I make random encounters hard to deadly in overland travel and trivial to easy in dungeons, and I use those random encounters as the primary source of time pressure. Most often, players will get through 3 or 4 encounters in a day before tapping out. Depending on the specifics of the adventure, it is usually possible for the players to achieve their goals without having to do every encounter, especially if they look for ways to avoid fights when they can. And I give experience for circumvented encounters same as I would for “winning” them through combat. Seems to be really fun and satisfying for the people I play with.

I haven't seen any in the last several years that seem to be built on the assumption that anyone is pushing through the whole thing in one go.

No, indeed, I think having the option to stop part way through and rest if you need to is an intentional part of the design. I am a strong advocate of using some sort of dungeon restocking mechanic to make sure this is costly and feels like a concession, but I also think the restocking should favor easier encounters so that retreating doesn’t make it feel like all your progress up to that point was wasted. It should be possible to chip away at a dungeon gradually. Restocking just insures that 5-minute workdays feel inefficient.

Maybe someday we will get a version of the game that looks a lot like 5e but is balanced around short rests rather than long rests.

Maybe. I think long rests are a better macro-level challenge, but I would prefer if short rests were assumed after every encounter instead of after 2 or 3 of them.

 

[Yaarel]

What if? Hit points and hit dice refresh by long rests, but spells refresh by short rests.

Then everyone is on the same schedule for hit point attrition, including Wizard and Fighter. But by switching to short rests to refresh spells, the spellcasters balance better with noncasters (because fewer spell slots or spell points are available at any one time, so less nova), and these classes keep better pace with each other.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

This would very much be news to any old school player.

I am an old school player! Started with Basic D&D and AD&D in 1982. There are people who will tell you that early D&D was played only one way. This is not true, if anything it was more diverse then than it is now. There were a lot of people who took the view that the role of DM was to be adversarial, and so ideas like restocking dungeons with tougher monsters was aimed at punishing players for daring to "win". But there were also plenty of people who felt that the role of DM was to make sure everyone had fun.

How much ink is spilled on things like time keeping and how long your light sources last?

Not that much in White Dwarf, which was my go to fan magazine. There was lots of stuff on building interesting worlds, creating convincing NPCs, good versus bad proper names, that sort of thing.

you always had to go back to town

Which was common and normal, and generally hand waved. "We go back to town." "Okay, you spend two weeks recovering and return to where you were." Hence the Diablo town portal scrolls. It's a direct lift from early D&D.

which meant that the dungeon restocked and encounters got harder?

Sometime is was restocked, but always easier, since you knew what to expect. More often not though, on account of fighting the same monsters was, like, boring.

designed around the assumption that the PC's would need to fill their tanks periodically.

They refilled their tanks whenever they ran dry. Which might be sooner or might be later.