New Unearthed Arcana Brings Back Five Subclasses

Five existing D&D subclasses are getting a rework in a newly released Unearthed Arcana. Four of the subclasses come from Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, while the fifth is the Oathbreaker subclass for Paladins from the 2014 Player’s Handbook.

The revised subclasses are:

• Path of the Spiritual Guardian Barbarian (previously Path of the Ancestral Guardian)
• Path of the Storm Herald Barbarian
• Cavalier Fighter
• Warrior of Intoxication Monk (formerly Way of the Drunken Master)
• Oathbreaker Paladin

The Path of the Spiritual Guardian has received a revamped Spiritual Protectors ability with a choice of effects. The Storm Herald’s Storm Aura now scales with Rage damage and the Raging Storm now has redesigned environments. The Cavalier’s Unwavering Mark no longer has limited uses. The Warrior of Intoxication now has the ability to create potent drinks that grant abilities when drank. The Oathbreaker has received some updates bringing its abilities in line with the revamped Paladin’s ability.

The survey for the new subclasses opens on November 6th.

 

[eclair~]

Dropping "Drunken Master" from the subclass name comes from the same place as a lot of surface-level name changes regarding the 2024 Monk.

The developers claimed that they wanted to reduce the Eastern/Wuxia flavouring of the class. Then they went and published a PHB where almost every artwork of the Monk class and subclasses are clearly Eastern-flavoured. They even renamed Monk subclasses of "Warrior of X", in a blatant attempt to specifically evoke Eastern "warrior monk" imagery, i.e. "Shaolin warriors". Every post-launch subclass that has been posted in 2024 UA is derived from "Eastern mysticism". Even the subclass that didn't have any outright magical abilities now explicitly runs off of magical alcohol—they purposefully added Eastern mysticism to a subclass that didn't have that mysticism element to it. They made being a drunkard an explicit part of an Eastern-flavoured subclass, whereas previously it was entirely optional.

Then they changed the name, under the pretense of not imposing an Eastern flavour on the class, all while deliberately making it so that the class can't support any fantasy other than a stereotypical Wuxia warrior monk—or shonen anime protagonist.