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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Benjamin Olson" data-source="post: 9734361" data-attributes="member: 6988941">Well, Dark Sun-ness aside, it's a rare UA where I actually like all the subclasses. The unabashedly evil ones are probably more likely to be something I use for NPCs, but I can definitely imagine using all of them for something at some point.As the above indicates, I don't find them boring thematically, but I do agree that the mechanical implementation is, on the whole, uninspired, plays it too safe, and requires a bunch of byzantine design verbiage to do so, and that this is a tendancy of 2024 D&D (arguably also 2014 D&D, but I think it is clearly getting worse and more ridgid in the tendencies I dislike).For example the defiler sorcerer has the ability to empower their spells by stealing another creature's hit dice. This is an unusual enough mechanic for 5e to require a boxed note about how enemies have hit dice. But then they are afraid to do anything really interesting with it. Stealing the hit dice does not damage the creature, so it's actually irrelevant (unless you are stealing from party members for some reason) the 98% of the time that you don't confront the same enemy again after they've had opportunity for a short rest. In eight years of 5e DMing I've had enemies expend hit dice maybe twice, and I take a much more "enemies play by the same rules as players" approach than most DMs. So really this is just a once a day empowerment ability (with an option to recharge with a sorcery point fee) that they've managed to create a whole paragraph of rules to support. The point being that the designers are far too concerned about the balance they think they have, and make abilities that, even when in some way unique, end up feeling samey.Personally I would have had it be an option to empower spells by sucking the life from the land, killing every plant and non-hostile tiny beast in a 15 foot radius or something. Let the DMs figure out what the consequences of PCs going around causing circles of wasteland and let the Players figure out goofy ways to make sucking the life out of plants and/or a random squirrel somehow work for their schemes. Keep it simple and evocative, with invitations to creativity.</blockquote>

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