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.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Building around the encounter as the primary mode of challenge rather than the adventuring day can absolutely work, and 4e was an excellent example of that design done very well. Though, I find that the main drawback of that approach is it tends to mean you have to win every encounter or die (or critically injured or whatever if character death is off the table). The nice thing about the attrition model of difficulty is that retreating to recover offers a failure state other than death or knockout.

But, well, you don't need to do that. Just like you don't need every adventure to 100 % enforce that the player characters run 8-12 encounters before they can take a long rest, and force that the 8th or 12th encounter is a life or death struggle while the rest were kinda boring, unexciting affairs...

You can still vary the difficulty considerably. Even if there is no attrition! One of the nice things of combat is that they are always life or death struggles, because not just can you have bad dice luck, but you can also just make a series of bad decisionst hat lead to death. With reasonable smart play and not terrible bad luck, you're guaranteet to win, but let's see if we actually make the right decisions! Let's see if the nice spell or power that could make this a real cake-walk actually lands! Let's see if the Bard can get close enough to the Ranger as he dropped to 0 hit points from bad luck before he has to make death saving throws and spend a whole turn bleeding on the floor instead of killing Goblins (or at least, missing easy shots).

And sometimes, it's also fun to just kill stuff with style. Let's feel grand for a change, instead of going by the skin of our teeth!

 

[Charlaquin]

Meh.

How many times have your players failed to complete an adventuring day?

All the time. In my experience players generally start to feel uneasy about their resources and start discussing leaving the dungeon or barricading themselves in a room to rest after 3 or 4 encounters. Sometimes they content themselves with just a short rest and push through for another couple of encounters, sometimes they don’t. Either way, abandoning a dungeon partway through and returning to find it restocked is pretty common.

After all, the encounter balance paradigm means that you can still balance easier and harder encounters to control the pacing of the story. "Successfully Completing" an arbitrary number of encounters in order to satisfy some sort of nebulous condition that the players likely aren't even privy to doesn't really work as a way to control the pacing of the game.

Indeed, the players control the pace, pressing on or turning back according to how safe they feel, which is a great thing in my opinion. As I keep saying, it allows the players to choose their own difficulty by pushing through more encounters or resting after fewer.

It basically means you have a bunch of mostly throw away encounters.

You have a lot of encounters that are not significant challenges on their own, yes. But they aren’t throwaway, they’re an important part of the resource attrition game. Each encounter wears down their resources a bit more, without ever putting them at significant risk of death. Like I said, it allows for high difficulty with low lethality. It also just feels good to be able to win lots of encounters easily, which I think is a big part of why this model has been so popular despite lots of people who misunderstood the adventuring day advice in the DMG complaining about them. It helps players feel like their characters are powerful, without sacrificing challenge.

I'm very much not a fan of the "adventuring day" balance.

I could tell.

 

[Remathilis]

So did we ever figure out why these subclasses are "mystic" rather than "arcane"?

 

[Paul Farquhar]

All the time. In my experience players generally start to feel uneasy about their resources and start discussing leaving the dungeon or barricading themselves in a room to rest after 3 or 4 encounters

If your resources are exhausted, then it’s either that, return to the town, or die. And you can’t save anyone if you are dead.

And D&D is a game of chance, with dice and stuff. You cannot predict when your resources will be exhausted.

 

[Charlaquin]

The advice the DMG probably actually needs to provide is this:

The classes are balanced around the idea that they can handle a certain number encounters per day. If they do more, they will struggle and run out spells, hit points and similar resources. If they do less, particularly classes that rely on spells or similar "daily" resources will feel more powerful, because they can spend more on their resources on a single encounter, and contribute more.

I wouldn’t focus so hard on class balance, honestly. Rather, I would put the emphasis on 6-8 medium encounters being what a typical party can expect to have enough resources to complete. If parties spend a lot of spell slots, they will find the early encounters very easy, but may struggle with later encounters, and the challenge comes mainly from trying to portion out your resources appropriately.

Maybe it could add some strategies to address this:

If your campaign will often have less encounters than expected, you can increase the challenge of individual encounters to make characters run out of resources more quickly, but beware that this still benefits the spellcaster and similar classes that recover most of their resources during an long rest.
You could create scenarios where the spellcasters will need to use some of their spells outside of regular encounters, but beware that this can make them feel mandatory to have and outshine the non-spellcasters.

Well, the thing is, you can adjust that way, but it makes combat swingier. Fewer encounters of higher difficulty increases the risk of a character dying to a lucky (or unlucky, as the case may be) roll or series of rolls. That’s always a possibility, but the risk of it increases significantly as the difficulty of an individual encounter increases. The default assumption of many relatively low difficulty encounters is intended to preserve difficulty while making character death pretty unlikely, unless the players plan their resource usage poorly and continue to press on anyway.

An alternative is to make stricter requirements on long rests, so that even if the characters can spend a night, the environment might not be suitable to it. Consider adding dedicated rest spots that can be reached within the limit, or even magical items, potions or rituals during adventures that can provide the benefits of a long rest where the players are too far away from the usual rest options.
You could also simply say that characters usually can only gain the benefits of a regular long rest after n encounters. Avoid however punishing smart play - for example, if the player characters circumvent encounters by clever scouting and maneuvering out they shouldn't be worse off then if they had just forced a combat scenario.

Yeah, that’s a better way to achieve 6-8 encounters between long rests without having them all come in one actual day. The so-called “gritty realism” resting variant from the 2014 DMG is another way to do it: 8-hour short rests and week-long long rests.

 

[Charlaquin]

But, well, you don't need to do that.

You don’t have to make every encounter challenging. But, the condition for failing an individual encounter is running out of HP. That means if the individual encounter is your primary unit of challenge, you either make it a significant risk that characters will run out of HP, or it isn’t a challenge. On the other hand, with the adventuring day as the primary unit of challenge, the condition for failing the challenge is not getting through all of the encounters. You can make each individual encounter relatively non-threatening, and still have a challenging adventure.

 

[Charlaquin]

If your resources are exhausted, then it’s either that, return to the town, or die. And you can’t save anyone if you are dead.

And D&D is a game of chance, with dice and stuff. You cannot predict when your resources will be exhausted.

Correct. You have successfully described the way in which the game is challenging.

 

[Maxperson]

Y’all are clearly demonstrating why WotC decided not to explain the adventuring day in the 2024 DMG. Nowhere in the 2014 DMG does it say you MUST have 6-8 encounters in a day, and if you aren’t putting those 6-8 encounters on the critical path through the adventure and providing time pressure to prevent the players from taking rests, you’re doing it wrong and your game is doomed. It’s an intentional part of the challenge that players won’t know how many encounters they’re going to need to face, and might accidentally use their resources inefficiently. They’re supposed to be able to decide to retreat and rest before having done 6-8 encounters if they feel they need to. The 6-8 encounter guideline tells you how much a typical party can handle not how much they need to be forced through. Yet, everyone still interprets it as a requirement and then gets mad about that requirement. So, they decided if everyone is going to misinterpret their explanation of how the system’s underlying math works and get angry at their own misinterpretation, may as well just not explain it. It’ll still be true that 4-5 PCs can handle 6-8 medium encounters between long rests if they get 1-2 short rests in-between, whether the DM consciously knows that or not.

No, the adventuring day isn't a must do. However, there are three ways to do encounters in 5e.

1) Don't do the adventuring day and have a low number of encounters that the party pretty much always curb stomps. That's fun for a lot of people, but not a lot of others.

2) Have a few encounters of much higher CR, which if you get a creature than can survive a party nova and then dish back, dishes back in such a swingy manner that one misstep or even no missteps can result in a TPK.

3) Use the adventuring day to challenge the group. That's fun for a lot of people, but not a lot of others. Especially if all of those encounters happen in a 24 hour period of time.

That last part is where they went wrong. They shouldn't have described it as a day, but rather just advice on the number of encounters to challenge a group before the next long rest and then given advice on stretching out long rests over days or weeks if that works better for your group.

Since new players will generally be getting the 5.5e DMG, all they had to do is change the name and alter the advice a bit and it wouldn't result in what "Y'all are clearly demonstrating" here. So I don't buy what you are saying as a good reason not to have its inclusion in the new DMG.

 

[GarrettKP]

So did we ever figure out why these subclasses are "mystic" rather than "arcane"?

Probably because they are trying to reclaim the word away from Psionics.

 

[Maxperson]

Is that true about rare steak? That’s crazy to me, I love a rare steak! I usually order medium rare if I’m at a restaurant to be on the safe side, but when I cook them myself I aim for rare.

I love steaks rare and medium rare(depending on the cut). When I met my wife, she always asked for hers to be well done, because medium rare and rare always looked too red and bloody to be good. One day she asked me to taste a bite of my steak. Now she orders hers medium rare.