Unearthed Arcana Psionics Hits Unearthed Arcana

If you've been waiting anxiously for psionics to arrive in the D&D Unearthed Arcana column, your wait is over! The Awakened Mystic is a psionic class by Mike Mearls which - currently - has access to three psionic disciplines, with more to come later. Following on from Mike Mearls' question, Should Psionic Flavour Be Altered? (a discussion which promoted 750+ comments here on EN World, and is still ongoing), it sounds like he has answered the question with a resounding "yes". Rather than pseudo-scientific sounding terms like telepathy, clairovoyance, and the like, we have the disciplines Conquering Mind, Intellect Fortress (a callback to earlier editions), and Third Eye.

UPDATE - IMPORTANT NOTE FROM MIKE MEARLS: "For folks looking at the psionics material in today's UA, looks like there was a minor error. Not all the material is there." Keep an eye on it; I expect it'll be fixed soon.

UPDATE 2 - fixed! Updated document includes another three disciplines (Celerity, Iron Durability, and Psionic Weapon) and the basic rules to the class.

Find it here!

 

[TwoSix]

You could just say that god's abandonment of the world has allowed the far realm to leak in in small quantities. Explains a lot about Athas quite elegantly

Or the Far Realms leak caused the gods to flee, which adds a nice little sense of foreboding.

 

[Dire Bare]

This is neat, but it's 1/4 of a class and so far they haven't revisited any topics on Unearthed Arcana. The usefulness of the article series really depends on if they actually start revising in response to feedback.

However, this just suggest that down the road we're going to have 2-3 UA that are just revisits of this class. Or months of just repeated content. There are six UA articles already. Mearls could just revise and coast for the rest of 2015...

The whole point of the UA series is to give us new playtest material. Unless the overall response to a UA article is, "We don't want this at all!" (which is highly unlikely), we WILL see revised versions at some point down the line. What we don't know is how long it will take to see some revised material.

I'm not worried about a month here and there having "repeated" (i.e. "revised") material instead of new material, as it would be weird not to get the revised material. And I'm not worried about WotC "coasting" on "repeated" material at all, I'm sure we'll get a mix of revised material and new playtest material. Besides, "coasting" is the wrong word, as revising playtest material into final form is work, and not simply "repeating" older material.

Your fears make no sense to me, I guess.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

So Psionics is like an add on to another class showing that anyone can develop their mind into a weapon to enhance their base class?

Am I missing something or are you extremely hard to kill with Psionic Regeneration...like nearly impossible to kill?

Quite easy to kill really. Regen doesn't kick in until you're half dead already, and while coming back to 1 HP every turn is nice, you still die if you get hit with two melee attacks due to auto-crit, so it's not like going down isn't still a big deal. The ability is comparable to Healing Word or the no-concentration Regeneration spell, except it can't bring you up to full health. The way to leverage it is to have lots of hidden resources like the Shield spell, Absorb Energy, Lucky feat, etc., that make your bottom 50% of HP much tougher than the top half. But the immortal is still weaker in combat than a valor bard who self-casts Regeneration and has access to Aura of Vitality, which can heal not only himself but others.

Psionic regeneration isn't that strong mechanically, but it IS cool. I want an Immortal 5 Barbearian 5 who rages and Reckless GWM attacks 4 times per turn for 5 turns in a row. Not efficient but awesomely terrifying. I think I'll stat this guy up as a merc/villain NPC...

 

[mach1.9pants]

We haven't seen any restrictions like Barb and Monk armour bonuses with multi-classing yet. I certainly wouldn't bother about MC problems on a 5 level preview alpha build. Who knows, we may see a 'no other effects can apply to a psionic weapon' rider once the full class preview with MC is out.

 

[Jester David]

The whole point of the UA series is to give us new playtest material. Unless the overall response to a UA article is, "We don't want this at all!" (which is highly unlikely), we WILL see revised versions at some point down the line. What we don't know is how long it will take to see some revised material.

I'm not worried about a month here and there having "repeated" (i.e. "revised") material instead of new material, as it would be weird not to get the revised material. And I'm not worried about WotC "coasting" on "repeated" material at all, I'm sure we'll get a mix of revised material and new playtest material. Besides, "coasting" is the wrong word, as revising playtest material into final form is work, and not simply "repeating" older material.

Your fears make no sense to me, I guess.

Would you be okay then if the next six months of Unearthed Arcana was just revised versions of the material we've already seen?
That's half my fear.
The other half is that it's been six months and they have yet to revise anything. And we answered the survey giving feedback on the Eberron articles many months ago.

These fears could be moot. They could eventually do a book of UA, either as a free PDF or small softcover. Or they could have a new article and a revised article in the same month, or a second UA each month with revised content.

 

[TwoSix]

Interesting. I partially recant. However, it'd be really nice then if they mention the Dal Quor/Quori/Kalashtar connection first, before the Xoriat one. Its kinda like saying "Eldritch knights are beings of power who can use MAGIC! Oh yeah, wizards can too."

For Eberron, I'd say the dominant psionic plane really depends on what kind of story you want to tell. Dal Quor for intrigue style games, and Xoriat for more Khyber oriented kill the twisted aberrations games.

 

[Celtavian]

Quite easy to kill really. Regen doesn't kick in until you're half dead already, and while coming back to 1 HP every turn is nice, you still die if you get hit with two melee attacks due to auto-crit, so it's not like going down isn't still a big deal. The ability is comparable to Healing Word or the no-concentration Regeneration spell, except it can't bring you up to full health. The way to leverage it is to have lots of hidden resources like the Shield spell, Absorb Energy, Lucky feat, etc., that make your bottom 50% of HP much tougher than the top half. But the immortal is still weaker in combat than a valor bard who self-casts Regeneration and has access to Aura of Vitality, which can heal not only himself but others.

Psionic regeneration isn't that strong mechanically, but it IS cool. I want an Immortal 5 Barbearian 5 who rages and Reckless GWM attacks 4 times per turn for 5 turns in a row. Not efficient but awesomely terrifying. I think I'll stat this guy up as a merc/villain NPC...

Psionic regeneration is very tough, especially at reducing downtime.

 

[ceejzz]

Why should the immortal be able to action surge more times per day than the fighter.

ignoring multiclass scenarios, the fact that the mystic does not get an extra attack makes their "surge of action" inferior to the fighter's "action surge", imo. at level 5, action surge grants the fighter 4 attacks plus a bonus action, and wizards suggests most traveling days have 2 short rests, iirc, which works out to 3 action surges a day. meanwhile, the immortal's surge of action gives them two attacks five times a day, with no bonus action, and no other resources to expend.

of course, from lvl 6-10 (i.e. before fighters get their third attack), the immortal gains more psi points that they can use. at lvl 10, they can get their extra action 12 times per day at the cost of their bonus action. this again comes at the price of all their other powers, though. then, at level 11, i think fighters pull ahead again, as they get three attacks, which gives them 6 attacks on turns they use action surge.

once i take all of that into consideration, i don't think that surge of action is greatly better than action surge, especially after level 11 (note that many of the martial classes have better damage than the fighter until level 11, at which point the fighter pulls ahead). the one thing i will concede is that we haven't seen the higher level traits yet - if mystics get extra attack at higher levels, that will make them much stronger.

I like the feel of the class but it is prone to multiclass abuse and is overpowered currently. The point system allows you to convert all those 1st and 2nd level slots into 3rd level slots. That is why these powers have to be less powerful than their spell counterparts. Instead they are slightly more powerful. Most wizards would gladly burn their first and second level spells for more fireballs, but they can't unlike this class. How ridiculous would this class be carried out to level 20. Good rough draft. But it is a very rough draft.

i can agree with this on some level - it doesn't seem completely fair that a mystic gets more uses of its strongest abilities than the spellcasters do (although again, there is an opportunity cost here, as i leave myself with very few psi points in a hurry). my only rebuttal would be that the current system helps differentiate mystics from spellcasters in a mechanical sense - if they had "psi slots" like casters have spell slots, then their play styles may feel too similar.

if it is too strong, though, then maybe they can keep the system, but scale back the point. hopefully enough people playtest the class to interrogate this idea further.

 

[Fralex]

Quite easy to kill really. Regen doesn't kick in until you're half dead already, and while coming back to 1 HP every turn is nice, you still die if you get hit with two melee attacks due to auto-crit, so it's not like going down isn't still a big deal. The ability is comparable to Healing Word or the no-concentration Regeneration spell, except it can't bring you up to full health. The way to leverage it is to have lots of hidden resources like the Shield spell, Absorb Energy, Lucky feat, etc., that make your bottom 50% of HP much tougher than the top half. But the immortal is still weaker in combat than a valor bard who self-casts Regeneration and has access to Aura of Vitality, which can heal not only himself but others.

Psionic regeneration isn't that strong mechanically, but it IS cool. I want an Immortal 5 Barbearian 5 who rages and Reckless GWM attacks 4 times per turn for 5 turns in a row. Not efficient but awesomely terrifying. I think I'll stat this guy up as a merc/villain NPC...

They probably just forgot to include that "you stop regenerating at 0 HP" clause.

 

[Celtavian]

Now I've read it some, it looks fairly balanced. A few classes would combine with it better than others. Most abilities aren't better than casters. It looks like it would combine nicely with some martial combinations.