D&D 5E (2024) What should the 15th Class be?

[Minigiant]

Personally I think that the Arcane half caster gish popularity is still high because many cartoons anime and video games show magical swordsman who combined their weapon strikes with magical movement or effects that aren't possible with the Eldridge night because the elders night doesn't have enough spell power nor with the blade singer because such spells would be overpowered in the hands of a wizard

Millennials are driving the sales of D&D at the moment and many of them grew up on JRPGS & action cartoons and anime.

Then you have older millennials like myself who grew up in the arcade and still wish to finally let us play a character that runs with fighting game mechanics.

Gimme catch a demon cultist in an infinite air juggle combo to power my Super meter. The real Bag o Rats.

 

[Zardnaar]

Personally I think that the Arcane half caster gish popularity is still high because many cartoons anime and video games show magical swordsman who combined their weapon strikes with magical movement or effects that aren't possible with the Eldridge night because the elders night doesn't have enough spell power nor with the blade singer because such spells would be overpowered in the hands of a wizard

Millennials are driving the sales of D&D at the moment and many of them grew up on JRPGS & action cartoons and anime.

Then you have older millennials like myself who grew up in the arcade and still wish to finally let us play a character that runs with fighting game mechanics.

Gimme catch a demon cultist in an infinite air juggle combo to power my Super meter. The real Bag o Rats.

Its more or less how I see it. EK doesn't really feel like a gish to level 7ish even though they technically cast spells before then.

Its a good class imho still a 5.5 fighter. Does require a fair bit of knowledge to build it as well.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Knight - heavy armour, chivalric code (in different variants), mounted proficiency, ability to defend others (some sort of one-person shield wall maybe), high consistent damage (as in, best of all classes) - a tank with real serious teeth.

Not a Warlord - no healing of any kind, no baked-in leadership qualities, no taunting.

No leadership qualities is flat out not a knight. Full stop. Everything else works just as well for a warlord. It’s just a renamed warlord with specific gear focus. Which sounds fine.

Assassin sounds good too but please, make it a full non-caster.

Eh. The obsession with making everything that has any nonmagical iterations be strictly nonmagical annoys me. D&D is very magical.

Batman is best when most of the rest of the justice league is metahuman or supernatural. We have Batman and Green Arrow already. We don’t need to make Wonder Woman into a mundane human with magic items.

The assassin has so much mysticism in its DNA, it’s silly to me to insist on making it mundane.

At most, I could support an Assassin that uses Discipline to do superhuman mystical death stuff.

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

While I think that Swordmage would be a good additional class, I'm not sure that "Arcane half-caster" would be a good way of doing so. There are plenty of classes and subclasses that get both spells and extra attack and just put up a buff or two before attacking purely with their weapon.
Swordmages should probably be doing something magical whenever they swing their weapon. I'm not sure that conventional half-caster mechanics would fit that paradigm.

 

[renbot]

I have to admit I'm generally underwhelmed by the suggestions people have. Pretty much every request is either a highly specialized variant of something in an existing class, or a hybrid of two existing classes.

Given how rarely we see new full classes, I would much rather see something completely new and off the wall, even if it doesnt fit some standard archetype. How about an anti-magic user, a lawyer, a magic baker, or intelligence-based shade of blue? I dunno. Something we haven't seen before, rather that just tweaking what we have.

Something like Magic of Incarnum or the Pact/Binder of Vestiges would be cool.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

because while bladesinger might be powerful as a fullcaster wizard with additional martial capabilities on top it's actually pretty ass at actually capturing the desired fantasy of the swordmage, of someone who seamlessly synergizes martial technique and magical effects into a single fighting style.

Exactamundo.

A swordmage is a character for whom swordplay is magic, and magic is swordplay. To separate the two would be like asking a flautist to separate their left hand and breathing from their right hand and embouchure: ridiculous, and more importantly pointless.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Something like Magic of Incarnum or the Pact/Binder of Vestiges would be cool.

I did like the Binder/Vestiges concept, and that could be used to bring back the D&D Next playtest Warlock, which was a really neat idea. (TL;DR: It was VERY invocation-based, albeit not by that name...and every invocation-like thing you took actually had a visible cost, e.g. Devil's Sight would literally change your eyes, while One with Shadows might literally take your shadow away.)

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Can't really do a assassin in modern D&D.

Of course you can. There are many unofficial ones that do the fantasy very well.

Kind of implies instant death. Current assassin is weak sauce as an assassin and a rogue.

The current assassin is only weak because it doesn’t make you better as sneaking up on someone early on and has nothing going for it after round 1 until late levels. There are fixable problems.

Best you could do is a John Wick /Assassin’s Creed style assassin, which is just a rogue subclass with dagger bonuses.

Shadow assassin. Assassin based on discipline and esoteric martial mysticism. Semi-divine “hand of divine judgement”. There are a lot of assassins.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Assassin key feature options:

Shadow Strike: once per round, When you are hidden or the target is incapacitated, or the target has not acted yet in this combat, your successful attack deals d10 instead of d6 sneak attack damage (if using this as an alt subclass feature. If using it for a base class, just make it a handful of damage dice)

Death Mark: Bonus action to study a target and mark them. You crit on a 19 against the target and have advantage on checks to find them or hide from them.

Hidden Blade: When you hit and deal sneak attack damage, you can reduce the damage by 2d6 and immediately move up to your half your speed and make a stealth check with advantage. (Pair with shadow strike)

 

[doctorbadwolf]

The biggest hurdle to most “15th class” ideas is that they all have some way to cobble them into existence in current rules.

So, the question is, which has the least existing representation?

Probably the warlord, even though I’d rather see a base class gish or assassin.