Level Up (A5E) Relative balance of Herald subclass spell schools

[Larnievc]

I think this is the most important point—while it might be annoying now, the game designers are clearly hedging their bets on A5e being supported for a while, which I like to see.

That’s not a solution to the problem in the fete and now though, is it? If one subclass has many more spells than another it’s going to be a poor choice; all things being equal.

That’s similar to saying the OG ranger was fine because several years later Tasha’s was published.

 

[Timespike]

I do think that another thing to keep in mind is that the imbalance means less with a prepared caster than a known one. Yes, the Green Knight gets a huge arsenal of additional spells, but how many of those are going to edge out staples from the herald list? I'm currently playing a level 8 O5E paladin in one of the games I'm in and you really just don't get that many spells prepared as a secondary caster. Let's say I've decided to convert that PC to LU, and futhermore I'm fortunate and have a Charisma modifier of +4 (BTW, the original PC has a +3, so I'm giving myself an extra point here); that's a grand total of 8 spells of 1st and second level.

Off just the base herald list of from-the-O5E-SRD-spells, I'd consider shield of faith, divine favor, bless, and lesser restoration to be absolute prepare-these-every-day essentials.

So that's 4 spells to pick from. Looking at the new spells from A5e, I really want calculated retribution and force of will. Now we're at 6.

So as an 8th level character, I have 6 prepared spells out of 8 decided before I even start looking at what I get from my subclass.

YMMV, of course, but it's like a buffet. You technically have all these options, but your stomach can still only hold so much.

 

[lichmaster]

I do think that another thing to keep in mind is that the imbalance means less with a prepared caster than a known one. Yes, the Green Knight gets a huge arsenal of additional spells, but how many of those are going to edge out staples from the herald list? I'm currently playing a level 8 O5E paladin in one of the games I'm in and you really just don't get that many spells prepared as a secondary caster. Let's say I've decided to convert that PC to LU, and futhermore I'm fortunate and have a Charisma modifier of +4 (BTW, the original PC has a +3, so I'm giving myself an extra point here); that's a grand total of 8 spells of 1st and second level.

Off just the base herald list of from-the-O5E-SRD-spells, I'd consider shield of faith, divine favor, bless, and lesser restoration to be absolute prepare-these-every-day essentials.

So that's 4 spells to pick from. Looking at the new spells from A5e, I really want calculated retribution and force of will. Now we're at 6.

So as an 8th level character, I have 6 prepared spells out of 8 decided before I even start looking at what I get from my subclass.

YMMV, of course, but it's like a buffet. You technically have all these options, but your stomach can still only hold so much.

I agree, it's probably more a perception problem: it may be unsettling or annoying to see that some archetypes have a much larger spell list, but you're only ever able to choose a small fraction of those. Heck if you're prone to decision paralysis, having less spells to choose from is a boon.

 

[noodohs]

YMMV, of course, but it's like a buffet. You technically have all these options, but your stomach can still only hold so much.

That's the problem, though. Holy champions don't have those options. They have no options, actually. And having the option is really useful depending on the game. If you're in a game with a druid, the green knight really has nothing to offer in terms of spells that the druid can't do better (in fact, given that green knights kinda get all the druid spells, I'm not really sure what the point of the archetype is other than sounding cool). But if you don't have a druid and you do have a cleric, now all those nature spells become useful while the healing spells become less so. It becomes a pretty versatile archetype since you can fill in gaps situationally. Since Holy Champions don't get options at all, they are either completely relevant or completely irrelevant. The point is that all archetypes should at least have the options. It's really meaningless to give them things they literally cannot ever use and saying, "Well I'm never going to use those," doesn't make it better. At any rate, I have put it in as a bug because regardless of your personal feelings about how you might play a Herald, giving them an option they cannot use is clearly not intended.

 

[Timespike]

You are well within your rights to put in a bug report for anything you'd like. If I somehow implied otherwise, that was not my intent.

 

[Timespike]

I have to admit that on further consideration, I do like the idea of giving radiant/necrotic to Holy Champion, though. That does feel like an elegant fix.

 

[noodohs]

Yeah, I think that might work as a quick fix, though maybe adding more spells to the good/evil lists might be better? More work though, probably. I leave that to the writers to determine as I don't really know what their intent was for the archetypes.