Let's just note here that the dire wording of the title is meant as a joke. At the Creator Summit yesterday, one of the ideas mentioned about the 2024 Player's Handbook is that every class will get four subclasses in it. For most classes, this is an upgrade - Barbarians, Bards, Druids, Rangers, and Sorcerers only had two each in the 2014 PHB, and Fighters, Monks, Paladins, and Warlocks got three. But Clerics' and Wizards' respective cups ranneth over, with 7 Cleric subclasses (8 if you count Death Clerics, but that's in the DMG, not the PHB) and 8 Wizard ones.
The vast overrepresentation of subclasses for these classes does make a little sense given their role in worldbuilding and establishing mechanics. Clerics are tied, generally, to gods, and the variety of divine domains can be a useful thing for DMs building homebrew worlds to populate their divine pantheon with (though it doesn't always work out how you expect - the Spelljammer campaign I'm running in my homebrewed cluster of worlds has a Cleric of Rastvar, who is my neutral good god of invention, scholarship, and astronomy, who went with Trickery Domain as their subclass). Wizards' subclasses in the PHB simply reflect the eight schools of magic, tying their mechanics directly to that broader rules system used to classify spells.
Those eight schools of magic go back, I believe, to 1st edition, so that's basically sacred at this point. Subsequent subclasses for Wizards have been forced to go into alternative design space.
I could imagine, actually, seeing all four of the 2024 PHB Wizard subclasses getting new names that break them away from strict ties to those schools of magic, if for no other reason than that a new player who never had the 2014 book might go "hold on, why are there evocation, necromancy, conjuration, and divination wizards, but no illusion one?"
In other words, Wizards might go in a very different direction, which could mean that none of the 2014 subclasses get reprinted.
If things were to go this way, the one exception I could imagine is the School of Necromancy - perhaps renamed, instead, as the Arcane Tradition of "Necromancer." We have two later-implemented Wizard subclasses that either are or could easily be changed to have a name that describes the type of Wizard, rather than the school to which they belong. My Wizard could be a Scribe, given his Order of Scribes subclass. One that has the Bladesinging subclass could be called a Bladesinger.
The reason I pick out Necromancer specifically is that, unlike a lot of the other Wizard subclasses, there's a very strong and established vibe and fantasy trope affiliated with that word. Evokers, Conjurers, and even Enchanters can be kind of interchangeable in fantasy (not to speak of the conflation of Wizards and Sorcerers - while the show as a bit of a mess, I loved the way that The Falcon and the Winter Soldier defined a Wizard as a Sorcerer With a Hat, after Doctor Strange was erroneously called a Wizard, even if that's precisely what he is in D&D terms).
Now, it's possible then that we'd still get some of the other popular subclasses printed under new names to match this new, less restrictive nomenclature. Divination (which I think has got to be the subclass I see the most, especially from more min-maxy players) could be a Prognosticator or Soothsayer or Augur. Evocation could be called Elementalists (though this name might better suit an as-yet nonexistent subclass that would play around with elemental damage types). Conjuration could be Summoners.
The subclasses I could imagine being more likely to fall by the wayside here, I'm largely basing on the rarity with which I tend to see them. I don't think I've ever seen someone play an Enchantment wizard. Illusion can be very powerful, but can swing to either being way too powerful or, if the DM gets sick of it, nearly powerless. Abjuration I have, actually, seen someone play, but I think most people aren't so interested in playing the defensive wizard, and I actually think Bladesingers are probably harder to kill anyway. Now, Transmutation is actually kind of the ultimate utility Wizard (and of course, I got a lot of exposure to one thanks to Critical Role's second campaign,) but one of the oddities of it is that it's basically meant to be an alchemist until they made Alchemist a subclass for Artificers. (The Transuter Stone is obviously meant to play the role of the Philosopher's Stone.)
So, here I might feel more comfortable making predictions for what the four Wizard subclasses would be. While they might change names and possibly shift identities a little, I think we can expect to have the following:
Evocation would probably stay because it's the simplest "I cast fireball" wizard subclass. Necromancy, again, I think covers a whole other major fantasy trope, and is an obvious and iconic fit. Divination is very popular, and I think also covers another big fantasy trope (the only point against this is that I think the role of future-predictor often falls to more mystical/spiritual figures with a divine vibe). Finally, perhaps I'm biased because my best friend played one in the first campaign I ever ran, but I think Conjuration is sort of the perfect "next most standard" Wizard after Evocation.
That, then, would leave Abjuration, Enchantment, Transmutation, and Illusion out in the cold. I could maybe imagine swapping Transmutation in for one of the four in the previous paragraph, but overall this looks plausible to me.
Now, let's look at Clerics.
Life Clerics we already know are in, as they're presented as the primary subclass for the class. That's also quite appropriate, as the Life Cleric is all about the most typical role the Cleric plays, which is healing.
That leaves us with six divine domains that need to be culled down to three (assuming, of course, that we don't get newer subclasses like Grave Clerics rolled into the PHB - an assumption I'm going to operate under).
And frankly, I'm not sure that any of these is quite as iconic, so this is a bit of a tough call. So, I'm going to start with the subclasses I think are more likely to be cut, rather than those more likely to be carried over.
And first on that list has got to be Nature Domain. Nature Domain is one of those subclasses that kind of borrows flavor from another class, in this case, it's the "Druidy Cleric." And certainly, there are nuances to draw about the way that gods of nature and the wilds might provide divine magic that is distinct from the primal magic of druids - essentially letting you be a cleric of the kind of god that druids would worship. But this is another subclass I've never seen anyone ever play, and I think that between the "preserving life" elements of the Life Domain and the "wrath of nature" elements of the Tempest Domain, Nature finds itself in a kind of vague in-between world that doesn't really have much of a purpose.
The next choice here is trickier, but I think that my cut would be Knowledge Domain. While not going quite as far as Nature, there's a bit of off-brand feeling to this subclass - though which class you're imitating is admittedly somewhat open to debate, with perhaps a bit of Wizard and oddly a bit of Rogue (in the Rogue-as-investigator identity). That being said, I did mention how divination magic is usually depicted in a mystical, divine manner in fantasy (I mean, it's literally DIVINation,) so perhaps this is an obvious keeper if you really play up the Knowledge Domain as a kind of oracular seer.
Now, the next one I'm sort of surprising myself by. When I first read the PHB, I had guessed that Light Domain would be the "standard" Cleric, possibly due to my background playing World of Warcraft, where The Light is the sort of classic, holy force in that game's cosmos (interestingly, among its five main types of dragons, there are distinctions made between Life and Nature). But I actually think that the classic holy spellcaster - the "white mage" in Final Fantasy terms - is the Life Domain, and can be flavored very much along that "angelic, golden light" aesthetic, which leaves Light as a Cleric that literally focuses on shining lights and such, and that's actually something I could see cutting (though they are the only Clerics who get Fireball).
That would leave Life, Tempest, Trickery, and War Domains. Again, I could see swapping one of these out for a more Oracular Knowledge domain cleric. But which one?
I've seen people playing all four of these, so I don't know that popularity would be the guide. Of these subclasses, the Trickery one seems like the least obviously Cleric-like (though, of course, one must remember that there are plenty of Trickster gods, and Invoke Duplicity is something that Loki does all the time in the MCU - and Loki is nothing if not a trickster god). War Domain, you could argue, overlaps a little with the Paladin, but on the other hand, war gods are common in fantasy (and real world mythology) and often come in both good and evil flavors (again, like in real-world mythology. Both Lawful Good Athena and Chaotic Evil Ares would be appropriate choices for the War domain) and the D&D Cleric has always been a little more martial than just representing a priest.
So, very tentatively, my guesses for what subclasses we get in the 2024 PHB are the following:
Cleric: Life, Tempest, Trickery, War.
Wizard: Conjuration, Divination, Evocation, Necromancy, with Evocation as the "standard" subclass.
In future posts, I'll do another round of predictions for other classes to see what subclasses we might find.
As a disclaimer/reminder, the Creator Summit also made mention of a College of Dance Bard subclass, which means that there's plenty of possibility that a lot of classes will get entirely new subclasses. For these particular classes, I think there's already so much there to work with, especially if they're willing to make significant reworks and changes to the mechanics, but I might toss out some ideas for other classes as to new things we might see.
Also, I don't know when we're likely to get the next UA - it's a big one, so it might take longer to come out than the previous cycle did, but perhaps that only means that the survey period will take longer. Or maybe they'll just dump a ton on us at once. They only have another year or so for these tests, so they've got to get it all out there.
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