Brutal Strikes and Damage Output

 In 5.5, the old Barbarian feature Brutal Critical was replaced.

The old feature, conceptually, was cool: Barbarians would get particularly nasty critical hits when those landed. But the actual math on them didn't truly do much. Even though your critical strike chance is higher if you're using Reckless Attack (or some other method,) the small chance of actually getting a crit meant that that bonus damage was hardly the equivalent to a Fighter's third attack at level 11 or a Paladin's extra d8s on everything (though it did come two levels earlier). This did give the d12 Greataxe a bit of an advantage over the 2d6 Greatsword or Maul, because the feature only added a single die from the weapon at each upgrade point - so while the Greatsword is adding a d6, then 2d6, then 3d6, the Greataxe is adding a d12, then 2d12, then 3d12.

But when I've calculated that in the past, the small chance of getting a crit meant that it wasn't really until you got that third bonus crit die that the Greataxe finally overtook the damage of a Greatsword or Maul (though I might need to look back and see if I was accounting for Reckless Attack) because the 2d6 weapons do an average of half a point of damage more with each hit.

Brutal Strikes works quite differently. But it's also kind of weird, because while it does add a d10, and later 2d10 damage to your hit, the penalty you take, forgoing advantage, means that in most cases, that extra d10's effective damage per attack (rather than hit) winds up being about a wash, and sometimes even a DPS loss.

It is all dependent, of course, on your hit chance. With a higher attack bonus or lower AC of the target (in other words, the lower we need to roll on the die to hit) that d10 starts to look more appealing. But if I recall correctly, you need to have a pretty high hit chance for that to be the case.

Thus, I think, the real way to treat Brutal Strikes is not as a means for Barbarians to increase their damage output, but more as a means to get some additional utility with the various effects you can choose.

But let's actually figure out the math:

The stakes here are established by what we stand to lose versus what we stand to gain. A miss means we lose out on the rolled damage of our weapon, the Strength bonus, the rage bonus, and any other damage added by a magical weapon or other effect.

To simplify things, we'll ignore magic weapons. Instead, let's make the following assumptions:

In 5.5, it's a bit more encouraged to take General Feats other than Ability Score Improvements, because each of these give you half of one of those anyway along with some potentially big effects. Great Weapon Master is, I think, almost always the best of these for a Strength-based character (though I do think my Eldritch Knight with a Staff managed to beat my Eldritch Knight with a Greatsword, which was surprising). As a note, though, GWM will certainly skew things a bit, because it increases our output with a Great Weapon by a whole lot, and on top of that, it really likes it when we crit, which we will be less likely to do if we forgo advantage.

Is it realistic, then, to assume that we're just going with ASIs? This would make it very easy to have a 20 Strength by level 9 (when we get the feature) and while I doubt many players would eschew those really good martial feats (GWM, Polearm Master, maybe Dual Wielder. Not sure if there are any good ones from Arcana Unleahsed for a Barbarian) the Barbarian is a class that has a lot of stats they might want to boost (it would be pretty cool to have capped both Strength and Constitution before level 20).

Going with flat ASIs will perhaps extend more grace to Brutal Strikes than it's likely to have in a real character build. If it still winds up being pretty underwhelming, that will be doubly damning proof, but it might make it look better than it really is.

Still, we'll go for that because, hey, it makes my math simpler to do.

Thus, by level 9, we'll assume we're capped out at 20 Strength. Our Rage bonus is now +3, and if we're fighting with a Greataxe (while we're no longer incentivized to go with that thanks to the loss of Brutal Critical, it is a classic weapon for a Barbarian) that means our attacks have a +9 to hit and land for 1d12+8, or 14.5 on average, with a bonus from crits of 6.5.

Enemy ACs vary, of course, and especially at these mid levels, it's not impossible that you'll fight some really low-AC minions or some really high-AC legendary monsters. So, and I hope I don't regret this, we're going to see how this goes at ACs of 10, 15, and 20.

AC 10:

Without Brutal Strike:

Ok, here we're taking full advantage of our Advantage. Because our attack bonus is so high, this is actually going to be exactly the same math as if we were attacking something with an AC of 11, because the only way we can miss is thanks to the critical failure rule for rolling a natural 1. Thus, we have a 95% chance to hit, doing so as long as we don't roll a 1.

With advantage, though, the chance of a miss diminishes profoundly, from 5% to 0.25%, or a hit chance of 99.75%. As usual with advantage and no expanded critical hit range, our chance get a critical hit is 9.75%. So, 99.75% of 14.5 is... basically 14.5, if we round to the tenths place, or I guess 14.46 if we want to get slightly more granular. Then, 6.5x9.75% is about .63, so our total damage per attack when we take the advantage is 15.09.

With Brutal Strike:

Our hit chance is still very high here, and we're adding on a d10, so the hit damage jumps up by 5.5 to a flat 20, while our crit damage becomes an extra 12. Our hit chance is now simply 95%, while crits have gone to 5%. So, 95% of 20 is... 19 (this is easy given how familiar we are with probabilities out of 20 given the die we use) and 5% of 12 is .6, so we get 19.6 average damage, with some extra utility to boot.

    Clearly, against this low AC, the advantage is not really necessary, and the extra d10 is already nearly doubling the d12 like it would on a crit. So, here, the damage favors Brutal Strikes.

AC 15:

Without Brutal Strike:

Damage numbers on hit/crit are all going to look the same, but the chances have shifted a lot.

So, now our +9 has to land a 6 or higher on the d20 to hit. That's a 75% chance, and with advantage, our 25% miss chance diminishes to a 6.25% chance, or in other words, our hit chance is 93.75% Still quite good. Crits are the same as well, in basically every sense, so we can just talk about that as the same .63. So, we take the 14.5 on a hit times the 93.75% chance to hit, and that gives us 13.59, then add in the crit to bring us to 14.22.

With Brutal Strike:

Here, that 75% chance is fully in effect. Hitting with the Brutal Strike gives us that flat 20, so we're looking at 15 damage for hits, and then our 5% crit chance gives us the same .6 from before, so it's 15.6 average damage.

    We're still ahead, but only by a little bit - and once again, we need to remember that this is a character who does not have a magic weapon and isn't using Great Weapon Master.

AC 20:

Without Brutal Strike:

Ok, the only things that change here are the hit chances, so we now need to roll an 11 or higher, which is, very conveniently, a 50% hit chance. Getting advantage turns that into a 75% hit chance. So, 75%x14.5 is 10.88 (again, we're rounding to the hundredths place) and we get that same .63 to add for the crits, giving us 11.51.

With Brutal Strike:

Now we're really at a 50% hit chance, so we take that 20 we get on a hit and turn it into a 10. Then, that .6 for crits gets tacked onto it, and now we're talking a 10.6, simple enough.

    So, what does this amount to? Well, at high ACs, the damage you get from Brutal Strikes will, even in a scenario that really favors them, not be enough to make up for the loss of advantage.

That leads us to the following:

What skews this one way or another? (Here I'm going to go more abstract because I'm too lazy to do the math on all of this.)

First off, at higher levels, the bonus damage jumps to 2d10. That will certainly help Brutal Strike look more appealing, and lowering the minimum hit chance it requires to outpace not using it (not to mention the new utility features).

But on the other hand, feats like Great Weapon Master, along with magic weapons like a Vicious Weapon or buff spells from allies like Crusader's Mantle will all work to inflate the value of actually landing hits. That d10 can start go get lost in the crowd if we're adding a d4+2d6. I suspect that even GWM on its own (especially as it scales quite well at higher levels) will overtake Brutal Strike's advantages in terms of pure damage output.

+X magic weapons have a somewhat nonobvious effect, because while they increase the damage of a hit (which would push Brutal Strike down in value,) they also increase your chance to hit (pushing Brutal Strike's value up). In fact, I suspect that the higher hit chance likely outweighs the bonus damage's effect.

    Here's what I'll say, and consider as recommendation: in all of our scenarios, the damage output is actually quite close between the two options, whichever is on top. Now, again, maybe some other scenarios will change that (I probably ought to do a GWM version of these). But I think that kind of gives us an answer regardless:

    Brutal Stirke is not going to be a major method for directly improving your damage output. The d10, and later 2d10, are there primarily to compensate you for the loss of advantage when going for the various utility options the feature provides.

    I doubt that this was the design intent: I imagine that Barbarians were meant to get a nice big damage boost, but I don't think this accomplishes it.

    That being said, the utility it provides is very nice, and while some might seem redundant with various weapon masteries, consider first that you can use them while taking advantage of a different weapon mastery, and furthermore, that if you have a weapon mastery that creates a similar effect, you can combine them to have a far greater effect, like pushing a foe 25 feet with a combination of the Push Mastery and Forceful Blow.

    Ultimately, if you want to know exactly when to use Brutal Strike or not to maximize your damage, you'll need something like a spreadsheet and also to know an enemy's AC (which your DM might not tell you - I generally let people know if they "just miss," meaning getting an attack roll 1 below their AC, or "just hit" when they hit the AC exactly, but otherwise reserve this information as a secret - though I'll also tell them if it's a humanoid in plate armor, and let them correctly conclude that they have an AC of 18). But I'd also encourage you to just kind of "feel into it," and then also possibly just think more about whether you need the utility effects of the feature for this particular fight (Forceful Blow does a lot more damage if the target is 10 feet from the edge of a cliff, after all!)

EDIT:

Ok, just because it feels worth investigating:

What happens when the bonus jumps to 2d10?

This happens at level 17, meaning we've gotten to tier 4. At this stage, I'd dearly hope that your DM has given you some really powerful magic weapons, even potentially an Artifact (the Barbarian in my longrunning Ravnica game has had a slightly tweaked version of the Sword of Zariel since about level 14 or 15, which I reflavored as being a Benalian weapon passed down by champions of Serra). Any bonuses to our damage when we hit will naturally de-value Brutal Strikes given that we're less likely to get that damage. But with Brutal Strike now dealing twice as much bonus damage, its value is obviously improved.

My conclusion when I wrote the earlier part of this post yesterday was that, given that you only stand to gain about a single point of damage in the most favorable scenarios, we really can't treat Brutal Strike as a means to improve Barbarian damage, and instead just see that d10 as compensation. A fairly equivalent feature could have allowed us to apply the secondary utility effects of the feature to a target when we attack recklessly once per turn without adding any damage if we were simply allowed to keep our advantage.

But how does that start to look when we double the d10s?

Ok, so, at level 17, we'll assume Strength is capped. It would be very reasonable to assume that we have at bare minimum a +1 magic weapon, but as usual, we'll just ignore magic weapons for the sake of this math. Again, I actually suspect that the greater chance to hit with a +X weapon favors Brutal Strike more than the +X bonus to their damage de-values it.

So, actually, then, maybe we want to pour all the benefits into this to prove my thesis that the damage boost is really not enough. So, sure, let's say you have a +3 Greataxe.

This means that, at level 17, we've got a +14 to hit, and our attacks, when raging, deal 1d12+12 damage (5 from Strength, 4 from Rage, 3 from the weapon).

Our previous AC ranges become a bit redundant - against an AC of 10 or 15, we actually have the same hit chance, because the only way to miss anything with an AC of 15 or less is to roll a natural 1. So we can just combine these two. At these levels, though, it might be worth looking into how things go if we attack an AC of 25. Only three creatures, to my knowledge, have that (the three CR 30 monsters in 5E) though technically there's one that can get higher (Sul Khatesh from Eberron has a base AC of 22, but can cast Shield at will, meaning she can effectively have an AC of 27 if the DM chooses to use that reaction every time). It seems worthwhile to give us a range, even if higher ACs will devalue Brutal Strike.

AC 15:

Without Brutal Strikes:

The damage of a hit is going to be 18.5, and a crit gets us, as always, 6.5 extra.

So, this is our 95% hit chance, but because we have advantage, we'll be getting instead a 99.75% chance to hit. 99.75% of 18.5 is 18.45, and then we have that same as always .63 from crits, so the average damage here is 19.08.

With Brutal Strikes:

Now, we add 2d10 to both the hit and crit damage, pumping hit damage up to 29.5 and crits up to 17.5.

95% of 29.5 is 28.03, and 5% of 17.5 is .88 (rounded) so we're looking at 28.91.

    Ten damage is maybe not as much as it was at earlier levels, but it's still a pretty significant boost. So, against a low AC, Brutal Strike actually looks quite worth it for the damage.

AC 20:

Ok, now we need to roll a 6 or higher, meaning a 75% chance (huh, these percentages look familiar).

Without Brutal Strike:

The 75% becomes 93.75% with advantage, so we get 18.5x93.75%, or 17.34, and then add the .63 from crits to get 17.97.

With Brutal Strike:

75% for real gives us 29.5x75% for 22.13 (sort of regretting rounding to the hundredths place, because this is a round number if we go to the thousandths) and then we get the .88 crit damage for almost precisely 23 damage.

    Our lead has shrunk, but we are still actually ahead. Guess that second d10 does help!

AC 25:

Now, we're going to need to roll an 11 or higher, so we get a 50% hit chance.

Without Brutal Strikes:

Our hit chance becomes 75% with advantage, so we can look at 18.5x75% for 13.88 damage and then the extra .63 for crits, for 14.51 damage.

With Brutal Strikes:

29.5x50% is 14.75, and then an extra .88 for crits puts us at 15.63.

    So, yeah, that second d10 does mean that we're looking at a damage boost at all ACs by this level.

    However: here's the main caveat: I highly doubt that a 17th level Barbarian will have taken nothing but ASIs. If they're fighting with a Greataxe, they've almost certainly picked up Great Weapon Master by this point.

    Now, GWM isn't going to just hand the non-Brutal Strikes option 6 damage that the Brutal Strike version doesn't get. In fact, the difference should be pretty easy to figure out, at least before we get to the Hew part of it. By this level, GWM gives us 6 more damage on a hit. 6x50% is 3 while 6x75% is 4.5. What that means is that the Brutal Strike option is now losing 1.5 damage versus the non Brutal Strike option, which wipes out the lead it had over the eschewing Brutal Strike choice. At lower ACs, of course, this isn't the case.

    Having now run a campaign in tier 4 for a couple years (note to future me: don't try to pack so much stuff into a single campaign's story) I will say that even if the big bosses will have ACs in the low 20s, most monsters that the party faces are still looking at ACs in the high teens, so we can honestly expect there to be more scenarios where Brutal Strikes does wind up a damage increase.

    I think that the harder but also more important question is whether it's enough of a damage increase. Given that Paladins and especially Fighters get a pretty massive damage boost at middle levels that they don't have to expend any resources to get nor take any kind of penalties for, I do sort of wonder if it would have been better to just give Barbarians the ability to add that d10 (and later 2d10) once on their turn with no strings attached. Indeed, if we compare this to a Paladin's Radiant Strikes, the Paladin gets, effectively, 2d8 extra damage for their two attacks (more if they're dual-wielding) every turn, which is more than the Barbarian gets with a d10. Not, sure, the utility from the Brutal Strike feature is cool - and is the main reason to use it, if you ask me - and might mean that tempering the damage bonus is required.

    But especially as the one class that truly cannot be casting spells in combat (ok, yeah, there are some weird builds out there where you multiclass Paladin and get concentration-free spells like Divine Favor) I don't think Barbarians would become suddenly overpowered by making Brutal Strike a pure benefit rather than a kind of "benefit with a cost."

    Should Barbarians do the most damage? No, actually. They're already the toughest characters to kill in D&D (believe me, the Ancestral Guardian in my campaign is basically unstoppable at this point) and I think it's reasonable to limit their damage output (this is also why I think Rogues should deal way more damage). But buffing this feature would not, I think, unbalance them.

Silver Pines

 Having heard good things about it from various sources, and figuring it was pretty cheap at only a bit over 20 bucks, I picked up Silver Pines. The game is a side-scrolling survival horror game, which in and of itself is kind of a fascinating idea. But what has really drawn me into it is the vibes and clear influences: if Alan Wake was heavily inspired by Twin Peaks, this seems to roll them both up like a katamari along with some other elements (one cheeky aspect is that you can find herbs to mix into healing items, like in Resident Evil).

A genre that really got started in the 3D era, the approach here is really interesting: the map is three-dimensional, to a point, but we move in side-scrolling vistas, moving forward into deeper fields "behind" where the previous action was, or moving outward toward the camera toward "shallower" fields. The effect means we get to explore a town that is laid out like you might in a 3D game, but where all the action is presented in a flat environment.

That, I think, does make dodging foes somewhat more of a challenge, at least on a psychological level.

The gameplay is fine - I don't really have a fully formed opinion on it yet - but what really impresses me are the vibes:

Our protagonist, a private detective (maybe) named Walker, wakes with a start in a classic old diner with seemingly no memory of how he got there. He's supposed to be looking for a musician named Eddie Velvet for a mysterious client. It seems his payment here is going to be some kind of debt wiped, though whether that is a monetary one or one of conscience remains unclear.

Thus, we're sent into Silver Pines, a small town somewhere in the Pacific Northwest (which does seem like the go-to spot for American horror - though again, it really traces itself back to Twin Peaks). There's a massive storm coming, and most of the town has evacuated, while the people still here are... weird.

After some quiet exploration with the usual convoluted Metroidvania-like backtracking needed to open up new paths, monsters start to show up - some of them are vaguely zombie-like, while there are also what seem like weird insects. Something is deeply wrong here.

The moment that really clinched my interest, though, was when we go down into a dark basement, and, upon flipping a lightswitch, the entire environment changes - we're now in the bathroom of some music club called The Rabbit Hole, and we speak with a customer and a bartender who are both deeply weird before seeing Eddie perform, only for us to wake up in the basement again once we're given a cryptic clue to Eddie's potential location.

The game has a very precise and detailed but still hand-drawn look to it, and has that kind of spooky and dilapidated aesthetic that I enjoy so much. The deeper I go, the more I question to what degree Silver Pines is a real place, and there's a real discrepancy between the behavior of some of the people you meet, which honestly makes me more worried about the "normal" people than the weirdos.

Walker's disorientation mirrors our own, and I'm not sure he even knows who he really is.

I'm playing on the recommended "survival horror" difficulty, and the game sure seems to be pretty stingy with resources, but there also aren't a huge number of foes. You do get a melee weapon, but this does get damaged as you use it, so ultimately any wasted attack does feel like a setback.

I do think it's really interesting how Lynch's nostalgia for mid-century America has generated its own kind of aftershock of nostalgia. Alan Wake borrows a lot from Twin Peaks (including more or less re-creating the RR Diner with the Oh Deer Diner,) and while I think you could simply assume Silver Pines is just looking at the same source material for inspiration, we also get televisions with weird clips from TV shows, much as we got in Alan Wake (and I believe Max Payne II, though I have yet to play that, and am honestly just waiting for the remakes coming out next year).

Anyway, I started the game a few days ago but didn't come back to it until today, but I think I'm starting to get the rhythms of it (which are, honestly, not too dissimilar to those of other survival horror games I've played recently).

Layers of Reality and Alan Wake

 As I try to honor this spookiest of months, I've been thinking about horror.

Alan Wake is probably my favorite narrative in gaming, particularly the way it is presented in the second game. While there is blood and gore to be found in the games (though more the second) the horror of it is not really concerned with the visceral and disgusting. Indeed, the "monsters" in the Alan Wake games are primarily just people who have been taken over by the Dark Presence. The most inhuman we really get with foes in Alan Wake II are the "Divers," which are sort of visually distorted, but upon killing them, their human bodies are kind of straightforwardly just... human bodies (technically there are inhuman monsters because there are Taken Wolves, but these are... seemingly at least, just wolves).

It's actually kind of interesting that Control Resonant in particular dialed up the inhumanity of its monsters - whereas the previous game had presented its Hiss foes mostly as human FBC employees who had just been driven to murderous madness, but still used guns and similar weapons, the sequel expanded on the physical warping of the Hiss to give us a far greater variety of deeply misshapen monsters.

But again, going back to Alan Wake, the monsters are more of a symptom of the larger problem: that reality itself is being made darker.

Why is it becoming darker? Well, yes, there's this idea that the Dark Presence is some sort of power or force (something the FBC would call a resonance) that infects things. But it's not actually totally clear to what degree the Dark Presence truly exists outside of Alan's writings.

Nor is it clear what level of reality we actually stand in as we play the game.

This disorientation, I think, is the key to the horror - something that is perhaps not as viscerally unnerving as a body mutilated by some alien force that is then attacking you, but one that makes you question everything that's actually going on.

Let's talk specifically about Alan's parts of Alan Wake II. As the second game, they took this idea of dualities as a central motif, including the equal parts of the game in which you play as Alan versus when you play as FBI agent Saga Andersen. While we're going to have to loop Saga into this as well, we'll start by tackling Alan's side of the story.

We'll realize later on that the stories we're jumping between are not actually happening simultaneously - Alan's chapters take place before Saga's. But that, in and of itself, is only partially true, because time itself doesn't function in strict linearity.

Here's the metaphor I'd use, and a metaphor that is nearly a literally description of what happens: look at your bookshelves. Do you have a series of books? (Ideally a trilogy?) Now, you're meant to read those books in order, from volume 1 to 2 to 3. And in most cases, the events you read about are taking place sequentially, mimicking the passage of time. But in a very literal sense, those books, the words that are printed on their pages, are all there right now. You can open to a page in book 3 and then read a passage out of book 2.

And that's literally what we do in the game: we start with the first chapter of Return, the third book in the trilogy, which describes Saga's experiences in Bright Falls and Watery. But then, we go back and read (or rather, play) through the beginning of Initiation, the second book.

In Alan's parts of the game, we wander around a bizarre, perpetually midnight-and-raining version of New York City, venturing into various memorable locations that are puzzleboxes we need to navigate. While wandering, though, we can easily and instantly jump into Alan's Writer's Room.

The implication, as I see it, is that the experience we have as Alan traversing this "Noir York City" is actually a representation of the text that Alan is writing in the writer's room. The whole city and its dangers are a work of fiction. But because the Alan who is the main character of this work of fiction is the one experiencing it, that one feels like it's all real and happening.

Now, I think the way that the three main Alan chapters are described is as if they're different drafts of the story - they all share similar elements, where he investigates the site of some terrible murder that involved Scratch and/or the Cult of the Word. And yet, the playable segments are referred to as Chapters.

So: if we were somehow to get our hands on a real copy of the finished Initiation novel (not the Return manuscript, which Alan searches for through these parts, but the book that Mr. Door holds up in their first talks how interview,) what would we actually see? Would the finished book simply be the final draft, perhaps giving us the adventure known as "Zane's Film?" Or is the writing of Initiation overall, with its multiple drafts, actually what the second book in this trilogy is?

In other words, while Alan in Noir York City is a character in that novel, is Alan in the writer's room its true protagonist? Is Initiation a book about the writing of a book called Initiation?

A few posts back, I used M.C. Escher's "Print Gallery" to demonstrate what I think is going on here: the picture, in true Escher fashion, is a visual paradox (and one that requires a blind spot in the center to function) where an image in an art gallery expands to become a depiction of the art gallery and its surroundings itself. The image contains itself.

And I think that something similar happens with Alan: if the version of him in Noir York City was merely an imagined, fictional, non-sentient homunculus, then this would all be fairly simple and straightforward. But I think that Alan, as a sentient being, is forced to exist on multiple levels of reality, his consciousness spread out and stretched over these various versions of himself. To put it another way, while his sapience (a complete logical system of thought) is duplicated for each version of himself and acts as a closed system, his sentience (his actual experience of perception and sensation) is forced to endure countless contradictory inputs. Given that at least some of his sapiences are aware that this is happening, those ones struggle with the utter cacophony of the very idea of it, and that's where we see versions of him that are falling into utter madness. The number of separate Alan's that are running simultaneously is staggering: while it's basically impossible to tell in-game, the various shadows Alan faces in his chapters (the ones that don't just fade out) are actually versions of himself, using his character model in various clothing, just with such distortion and blurring that you can't really see. Are these each fragments of his own mind that seek to disrupt the process, fearing what should happen if he finishes his project, or trying to stop him for other reasons?

Now, this layering could be a glimpse at the alien nature of the Dark Place, sure. But I think that there's a lot that implies that this is also happening in the real world.

I will say, some elements of the story do kind of pull back on the most profound and disturbing implications of what might be happening: the seemingly localized nature of Alan's reality-warping writing of Return imply that this is an alteration to a baseline, "true" reality.

In Control, there's a lot of the lore that is explained through Jungian terms. I'm going to disclaim here that I have only read a bit of Jung (part of Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious) and so I'm mostly jumping off with a lot of my own ideas.

But essentially, here's my take: the central premise of science is that there is an objective reality that exists whether we understand it or not. While that reality might be one made of rules rather than concrete matter (given that Quantum Physics demonstrates how, at least on tiny scales, things exist more in mathematical probabilities) it still holds that if you want to figure out the truth of that objective reality, you use observation of that reality to form a hypothesis, and then devise tests for that hypothesis, and if the tests do not refute that hypothesis, it is likely (or at least likelier) that your hypothesis describes reality at that level. It is a bit like Plato's Cave - there's a reality that exists, and while our senses and perceptions are flawed, we can pursue a more precise model for what those actual figures casting shadows are the better we refine our methods. Again, though: the objects that cast the shadows are assumed to be real, regardless of how well we are able to describe them from our observations.

But suppose that consciousness and perception are not merely a strange but fortuitous byproduct of organic chemistry that led to the evolution of brains, but instead, that the universe would not exist in the first place unless something were able to perceive it. And then, perhaps, the perception of reality would make reality.

I think most scientists would scoff at this, but then, they would, because science is built on the "there's an objective reality" premise. (And in fairness, I tend to align more with the scientifically-minded out there, even if I hold this latter premise as a possibility). But the world as conceived by Remedy really does seem to operate on this idea of perception shaping reality, only with phenomena we don't see in the real world (or at least that I've never seen in the real world) that make such a conclusion harder to deny.

So, like Alan with Initiation, when we play as Saga, we're playing through the text of Return. But... is what we experience merely a presentation (an adaptation, if you will?) of that text, or is it that Return as a text has somehow predicted or made this reality happen?

Indeed, this actually applies to the first game as well: Alan spends a week in the Dark Place writing Departure, and I assume that the subsequent events of the game after he wakes up in his precarious car are the text of the manuscript. (I think there's a novelization of the game, and so perhaps that novelization could be the exact text that Alan wrote.)

So: are the events of the first game (post prologue) playing out after Alan gets out of the Lake initially, or are they playing out in the words that he writes down there?

And to me, I think the really bizarre, cosmic horror of these game is that the answer is yes. That reality itself is constantly being created by imagination and creativity, sometimes of a very dark variety. Now, maybe it's not all coming from the Dark Place. Perhaps other realms, like the Astral Plane as seen in Control, are also having a profound influence on this reality. And maybe it's a two-way street. Obviously, Alan's ideas of a grimy, gritty New York like the one in his Alex Casey novels is what makes the version of New York he traversers in Initiation.

Is Alex Casey his fictional creation? Yes. Is Alex Casey a real investigator? Yes. Are the echoes that Alan finds at the various murder sites the real Casey's thoughts when he was chasing down a murderous cult in New York, or were they the monologues Alan had written in his Alex Casey pulp detective novels? Yes.

All the layers of reality and fiction are simultaneously real. And that's where the horror really comes from.

What Was Ula'Tek?

 While we got the Unbinding of Kith'ix as the true finale to this patch of Midnight, the chapter in this story ultimately revolved around the massive snake-monster, Ula'tek.

In the distant past (we're talking, I believe, pre-War of the Ancients, though WoW's timeline has always been a little fuzzy - this would have to have been after Tyr's flight from Ulduar, given that Kith'ix and Zakazj were sent by Loken to hunt the defiant Keeper down) the ancient Amani struggled to defeat Kith'ix, and a desperate priest chose to summon Ula'tek to defeat them.

Now, Ula'tek is ultimately bestial in nature (is it the only final boss of a major raid with the beast creature type?) and thus, it would seem most likely that it's some kind of Loa - perhaps a dark Loa along the lines of Hakkar the Soulflayer, who would play such a central role for the Gurubashi to the south.

And yet, every indication seems to be that there's a sharp line of distinction between Ula'tek and the Loa. Both in the ancient past and in modern day, the sort of "mainstream" Amani preferred to rely on the four patron Loa of their culture: Akilzon, Jan'alai, Halazzi, and Nalorakk, but the summoning of Ula'tek was considered an act of rejection toward the Loa, which implies that, bestial or no, Ula'tek is not a Loa, and presumably by extension not any sort of Wild God (my understanding is that Wild Gods like Malorne or Xuen would simply be called Loa by the Trolls, even if the cultures that revere them have other terms for them).

So... what is she?

I don't really have a concrete theory here, but I suppose there are some possibilities:

First: maybe she's just a powerful monster. Not deific in any way, not bound to any particular cosmic force. Just a really, really, really powerful and semi-immortal monster. But that's not terribly satisfying: after all, when we've encountered massive and powerful creatures of any sort on Azeroth, they tend to fit into the cosmology in some way. Ozumat is some sort of Old God creation, for instance. But I think we can rule that possibility out given that Ula'tek is in opposition to Kith'ix (not to say that creations of the Old Gods have not warred with one another before - hell, that was kind of their favorite thing to do back in the Black Empire days). But there's no real "psychic madness" element to Ula'tek's M.O., and we don't actually see any examples of Old God-related creatures being reptillian (primarily they're either mollusk-like or arthropods, or in the case of the Aqir, a little bit of both).

Second: maybe she is a Loa, just not one that is worshipped in the same manner. I'm deeply skeptical of this possibility because NPCs almost explicitly refute it. But also, Ula'tek never speaks, and may not even be sapient, though some of her offspring are, so... it's weird.

And... I don't really know that I have any other compelling ideas.

I'm also not terribly confident we'll ever get a concrete answer: Ula'tek was a big threat with the spreading of her venom, but plot-wise, it led us to a dark conclusion for Zul'jan and his nationalistic/expansionist ambitions and carried with it the dark twist of Kith'ix's unbinding. (Also, I was talking with a friend who pointed out that this expansion has seen us losing an NPC with almost every raid. Also, the Voidspire might be the first raid where we don't even remotely accomplish our goal, though I'd argue Sanctum of Domination at least comes very close to that).

Perhaps this will remain a mystery until some future plot development several years down the line thinks to expand upon it. Consider, for example, that 2.3's Gods of Zul'Aman patch didn't really tell us at all what was going on with Zul'jin or Malacrass' plans (and in fact, the "priests who had stolen the Loa's powers" were simply called Akil'zon, Nalorakk, Halazzi, and Jan'Alai, so there was no real reason to think we weren't just fighting the actual Loa themselves, other than the fact that they had humanoid forms). It took like 19 years to flesh all that out and find out what was actually going on in that raid. Perhaps a decade from now, we'll have to deal with some crisis involving numerous kaiju, of which Ula'tek was one.

Off the Beaten Path with Character Concepts in Azeroth for D&D

 Ok, so, we got this whole article telling you how WotC would have you re-create characters from World of Warcraft in D&D. Some of these are slam-dunks - I think a Retribution Paladin is a one-to-one equivalent of an Oath of Vengenace Paladin. Some are... controversial to say the least (truly, I think that WoW's Shamans live more comfortably under the umbrella of D&D Druids).

But I get it: there's a desire to make the systems fit together as best as possible.

However, as I've mentioned, I think one of the really fun possibilities for a WoW/D&D crossover is to make characters in Azeroth that you couldn't currently make in WoW.

On the simplest level, this would be doing something like making a Gnome Paladin or an Orc Druid - race/class combinations that you can't do in WoW (over time, they've become far more liberal with what races can play what classes, and at this point, I believe that Warriors, Hunters, Rogues, Monks, Mages, Priests, Warlocks, and possibly Death Knights are all available to every playable race).

But I'm sort of more curious about how you could go far outside the box.

So, let's go through the various classes and talk about classes and subclasses not mentioned in the book would fit into Azeroth.

Artificers (all subclasses):

WoW has never been strict about medieval, pre-industrial aesthetics. While the high-tech Gnomish culture, or the greasy industrial Goblin culture, or the far-future spacefaring Draenei culture are all pretty clear touchstones for technology on Azeroth, even more traditional medieval fantasy cultures, like the humans of Stormwind, have things like Harvest Golems that assist in their agriculture, which are basically like big bulky scarecrow robots (these basically always go berserk, forcing you to fight them).

The Alchemist and Cartographer subclasses (has anyone actually played a Cartographer) can easily fit in even when eschewing such industrial aesthetics, though there's truly no need to do so in an Azeroth campaign. Meanwhile, Re-Animators will fit very nicely among the Forsaken culture, who really own all the necromantic experimentation and spooky vibes - the Forsaken capital city of Undercity (or, in more recent years, the reclaimed actual Lordaeron City under which the Undercity was constructed) is guarded by Abominations, which are basically big, powerful flesh golems.

Barbarians:

We did see the Berserker called out as a potential path to evoke a Fury Warrior if you didn't want a Champion Fighter (a multiclass of the two would also work great). But I think that the primal power of the Barbarian can apply to tons of WoW cultures, fitting in quite well with much of the Horde, but also potentially among the Titanforged races (dwarves, gnomes, humans, and all their derivatives). Indeed, humans' primal ancestral connection might harken back to their vrykul ancestors, who were constructed by the Titans to act as warriors. Wildheart Barbarians might makes sense in cultures with strong druidic traditions (though Night Elves, at least, historically had more Fighter or Ranger-like warriors in the Sentinels). Zealots could also work great for cultures with a strong religious tradition, such as the Draenei (especially Lightforged Draenei) or humans. Azeroth also has, in fact, several World Trees. The Haranir in particular (made playable just this year with the release of Midnight) come from an underground land where the roots of all the world trees intersect, so this would be a slam-dunk for them (I believe Haranir can be Shamans, so this might not be as off-label as it seems).

Bards:

There is no playable Bard class in WoW, but there are certainly performers. I don't know that there's any real deep lore to look into, but some possibilities are to consider the metal band Elite Tauren Chieftain (a band that some of the old-school Blizzard developers play in and have in-game characters to represent them). What little guidance I have here is that the Blood Elves do have a strong musical tradition (the core of their homeland is "Eversong Woods" and the Earthen of Khaz Algar have a tradition of theater similar to ancient Greece. Goblins, in their broad 20th-century-America vibes, have rock stars and such. I do think a Lore Bard might be a member of one of the major archaeological societies - the Alliance's Explorer's League or the Horde's Reliquary, or their joint project, the Dragonscale Expedition.

Cleric:

The Light is one of the most widespread religious faiths in Azeroth, common among humans, blood elves, dwarves, and draenei, so the Light domain is certainly a reasonable option. I think this would also work great for Tauren worshippers of An'she, the sun spirit, or Night Elves who worship Elune, the moon goddess. War Domain might be a way to reflavor something like an Orc Shaman who focuses more on battlefield glory. Trickery Domain, I will admit, doesn't really spark any clear connections, though there are some Troll Loa who might have priests that rely on trickery. The Grave Domain could work great if you wanted to be a priest of Bwonsamdi, the patron deity of the Darkspear Trolls (the primary playable Trolls) and who actually worked his way to the top of the pantheon of the Zandalari Trolls as well (he could also work as a Trickery deity, actually). Arcana Domain probably works best for Gnome Clerics, who tend to treat their priestly healing powers more as medical intervention.

Druid:

Circle of the Moon is obviously covered quite well, as is Circle of the Stars. Circle of the Land, again, works great for a healer Druid, and I also think could be an alternative if you want to play a Shaman who actually focuses on spellcasting. Circle of the Sea fits quite well with the Kul Tiran (a human nation) Tidespeakers, who commune with the Tidemother (who is totally not secretly the evil Naga queen Azshara. Nope, nothing Lovecraftian about their ancient tradition entreating a deep-sea goddess) to guide Kul Tiras' peerless ships through stormy waters.

Fighter:

Eldritch Knights could come in a few forms: there's plenty of traditions of arcane magic where you could imagine the Kirin Tor, for example, training guards and soldiers to help protect vulnerable mages. But I think there's another deeper cut here: Orcish Blademasters, who traditionally were part of the Burning Blade clan, and used magic to enhance their weapons and also literally used the Mirror Image spell to confound their foes. Psi Warriors are a tougher nut to crack: there's not a ton of "psychic"-themed stuff in WoW outside of perhaps the Old Gods. Perhaps you're a reformed member of Twilight's Hammer (or its later incarnation as Twilight's Blade)? Going in a very different direction, maybe your psychic powers are linked to the Worldsoul, and Azeroth herself has imbued you with these gifts. And then... Bannerets can... just kind of be... like, Soldiers?

Monk:

The Warrior of Shadow might actually work pretty well with the Shado-Pan, the elite monastic order in Pandaria that safeguards the land from the insidious Sha. Meanwhile, the Warrior of Elements could be an alternate interpretation of the Shaman tradition (particularly Enhancement Shamans). The Warrior of Mystic Arts, likewise, would work in any culture with an arcane tradition, which is basically all of them.

Paladin:

The Oath of Ancients actually fits quite nicely with some of Azeroth's oldest cultures, such as the Zandalari Trolls or the Night Elves. Indeed, Night Elves are soon going to (finally) get to play as Paladin in an upcoming WoW patch, but certainly a Paladin devoted to Elune or the various animal deities they literally refer to as Ancients would likely go Oath of the Ancients, likewise the Trolls who derive their strength from the Loa (Loa and Ancients are basically the same kind of being, just with the different cultures using different names for them and having different specific Wild Gods they worship). As for Oath of Glory... I don't know that there's any specific culture this would work best for. Plenty of cultures have arenas and pit fighting (though Trolls probably have the most extensive gladiatorial tradition). Noble Genies is a real stretch - Genies are not nearly as ubiquitous in Azeroth as they are in traditional D&D settings, where they're actually just a specific species of powerful air elementals. They're mainly found in southern Kalimdor, near the deserts of Uldum, so you might find some of these amongst the goblins of Gadgetzan or the human Wastewander peoples. That said, if you reskinned this to make the "Noble Genies" instead Azeroth's four Elemental Lords, this could work in any culture with a shamanic tradition.

Ranger:

Gloomstalkers can fit into a few different possibilities: the Night Elves make use of darkness to fight their foes. Alternatively, you could use this to represent the Dark Ranger, a tradition created by Forsaken "Banshee Queen" Sylvanas Windrunner originally when she was part of the Scourge. Honestly, yeah, forget the Night Elves. Gloomstalkers can be what you use for a Dark Ranger. Fey Wanderers are tougher - there isn't a ton of "Fey" in Azeroth (the only beings we've ever seen referred to explicitly as Fae are in the Shadowland afterlife of Ardenweald). But if we treated the various Wild Gods and beings related to them like the Keepers of the Grove and Dryads (which are basically the male and female versions of the same species, which is sort of "deer centaur,") strongly tied to Night Elf culture, this could fit in quite well among Night Elves. Hollow Wardens, to me, fit best with Kul Tirans, and specifically the witch-haunted woods and mountains of Drustvar (a region within Kul Tiras). Both Drustvar and the Worgen/Human kingdom of Gilneas have pretty good spooky-but-not-undead vibes, so I could imagine Hollow Wardens being a tradition (even if a taboo one) amongst both nations (notably, Kul Tiras was founded by explorers from Gilneas, so it would make sense for them to share traditions like this). Winter Wardens might simply be from cultures in cold regions - if you're a human from Northrend, or perhaps one of the Earthen there.

Rogue:

Arcane Tricksters, once again, might just fit into any culture with an Arcane tradition. Maybe it developed in the Underbelly of Dalaran, the complex sewers of the city that served as a bit of a black market for this magocratic metropolis (and which got lifted with the rest of the city when it took off into the air). Thieves... could be from anywhere. Now... Scion of the Three is one that is so Forgotten-Realms-specific that I think you'd really need to figure out a way to re-flavor them. Perhaps you replace Bane, Myrkul, and Bhaal with, like... Kil'jaeden, Archimonde, and... perhaps Mannoroth (feels more appropriate to promote that Pit Lord than to have Sargeras counted as an equal to the two Eredar lords). Alternatively, you could make the "three" be the three Old Gods who were still alive when WoW launched, meaning C'thun, Yogg-Saron, and N'zoth.

Sorcerer:

So: Aberrant Sorcerers are almost certainly touched in some way by the Old Gods or the Void. Among Void Elves, this is a pretty straightforward option, but anyone could easily have been mutated by the Old Gods and granted aberrant powers (I guess the least likely are Draenei and Orcs, who aren't from a world that has much of an Old God infestation - though there were some hints that there might have been some Old God influence on Draenor way back in the day). Clockwork Sorcerers could easily be influenced by the Titans, who originally created the ancestors of Dwarves, Humans, and Gnomes (and possibly more) as constructed automata that later gained free will and transformed from stone and metal into beings of flesh (notably, the Earthen, who will be playable, are the form the dwarves originally took,) so they might be imbued with Titan magic. Wild Magic is harder to pin down, but honestly, despite Arcane magic being the magic of "order," it often results in a lot of bizarre things happening, so any kind of magical accident could easily imbue you with such powers. Spellfire Sorcery is a bit more FR-specific, though I could possibly see this being a weird manifestation of the Holy Light in any light-worshipping culture. Shadow Sorcery could be someone imbued with either the power of the Void (not unlike Aberrant Sorcerers) or it could be the power of undeath, with some encounter with the Undead Scourge or even direct connections with the Shadowlands.

Warlock:

Ok, let's talk patrons: Great Old Ones, you've very easily got the Old Gods, or alternately, the Void Lords. Bam, done. Archfey, I think you're best off looking into the Wild Gods, which could include the Ancients worshipped by the Night Elves, Loa worshipped by the Trolls (who vary a bit more, certainly with some animal gods but also more humanoid Loa like Bwonsamdi and Mueh'zala) or the August Celestials, revered by the Pandaren. For Celestial Patrons, the obvious ones would be the Naaru, who are revered in Draenei culture particularly, and are crystalline and honestly quite alien beings made of Holy light (who have a nasty propensity for turning into void beings.) An alternative, though, could be the Titans or, more likely, the Titanforged Keepers, such as Odyn, Thorim, or Freya, whom I think could reasonably be represented by the Empyrean stat block. Undead patrons could, of course, include the Lich King or various actual liches like Kel'thuzad or possibly the one friendly Lich, Amal'thuzad (who's part of the Ebon Blade). If you wanted to push for more otherworldly options for your Otherworldly Patron, powerful beings from the Shadowlands might work here, like The Primus or Prince Renethal (the latter being more or less a friendly vampire, the current leader of the Ven'thyr - you could go with the villainous Sire Denathrius if you prefer the drama). Now, Vestige options could include a good number of fallen deities, good and evil: Ursoc, the bear ancient, died and was denied rebirth, or we've got the various slain Old Gods (Y'shaarj being the one that died like, a million years ago). Technically, the Titans other than Sargeras spent a very long time kinda-sorta dead before they were able to reconstitute themselves. The T-Rex Loa of Kings, Rezan, dies in Battle for Azeroth. Basically, I don't think you'll have that much of a problem finding a good patron (while I'm sticking to 5.5 subclasses, Azshara would make a pitch-perfect Fathomless patron).

Wizard:

Here, it's kind of silly: I mean, Mages are meant to represent all manner of arcane scholars. It's just a matter of WoW's game mechanics that has them all focus on blasting foes with magical energy. So, I'd say, broadly, that every Wizard subclass can just fit in with whatever arcane tradition. The exception here is Necromancers, which I think would be considered taboo in most cultures, with the exception of the Forsaken. Necromancers might be former members of the Cult of the Damned (the living, cult wing of the Undead Scourge). I mentioned earlier the idea of Eldritch Knights as a way to represent Orcish Blademasters, though I also think Bladesingers could be a way to do this.

    Ok, now, this was all off the top of the dome, so I'm sure I must have skipped some 5.5 subclass (College of the Moon, that's the one. Er, just have them be a Night Elf). But if you're not feeling inspired by the options presented, I think these are some suggestions on how you could take alternative class options to Azeroth.

Two New D&D Beyond Posts Provide Greater Detail for WoW Subclasses

 Actually, one of these came out eleven days ago, but I just found out about it.

Anyway:

The WoW D&D book is both very exciting for me as a longtime WoW player who also loves D&D while also being a terrifying specter of the dilution of D&D through a bunch of crossover-IP corporate synergy nightmares. Did I get excited to play the Final Fantasy Magic the Gathering set? Yes. Has the prevalence of Universes Beyond in Standard made me stop playing Magic the Gathering as much as I used to? Also yes.

But at least for now, I'm happy to just turn off my captialism-weary brain and embrace the rank consumerism of this corporate crossover because, hey, I've been dreaming up a D&D/WoW crossover ever since reading through Tomb of Annihilation, where you can find that weird chair that transports people to other worlds, and thought it would be hilarious if a party blipped out of that adventure and wound up in downtown Orgrimmar. (We'll see how things go when we're getting UB products for IPs I don't give a shit about.)

Anyway, the articles suggest ways that you can re-create WoW classes and specializations with the book, and then gives details on the various subclasses included in it.

Let's start off with a caveat:

If I were to run an Azeroth adventure, or perhaps even more if I were to be a player in one, I'd probably be inclined to go against the grain and not try to make a character that directly corresponded to the way they play in WoW. Whether that's just creating a character that has no real precedence like an Artificer (while conceptually, an Artificer would have no problem fitting in with WoW, until/unless we get a Tinker class as has often been rumored, there's no player class that really corresponds to it. That said, my Goblin Survival Hunter uses a mechanical - think construct - pet and that spec is all about throwing bombs and literally "Conjuring a Barrage" with a shotgun, meaning I think he'd actually be best-represented by a Battle Smith Artificer rather than a Beast Master Ranger) or tweaking existing concepts to make a better-feeling character that perhaps fits closer to my idea of what a WoW spec ought to feel like (like my Undead Subtlety Rogue going with a mix of Echo Knight Fighter and Arcane Trickster Rogue).

Here's what I'd say if I were running a campaign or adventure in Azeroth: I'd strongly encourage players to use the guidance provided here, but I'd fully allow for people to play anything from 5.5 (and most things from 5.0). There's nothing remotely like a Bard in WoW (though you could argue an Augmentation Evoker at least functions in a similar "buff your allies more than yourself" manner) but I see zero reason why they couldn't exist in Azeroth just because the developers haven't added that to the game.

In a similar manner, the approach to the Shaman class is... unexpected, so I'd fully embrace a player who wants to play... actually truer to the WoW Shaman, something like a Circle of the Land Druid.

But with all that preamble out of the way, let's review what the articles actually tell us.

We'll start with the WoW class guidance.

Interestingly, both WoW and D&D 5E have thirteen playable classes (at least until Dark Sun adds the Psion to D&D). While there's a nearly one-to-one correspondance between some of them (surely the Druid is the equivalent of the Druid) it's not a perfectly-aligned mix. There's no Artificer or Bard or equivalent in WoW.

Now: WoW's classes each have three (or four for the Druid) specializations. While this most closely corresponds to subclasses in D&D, the expression of these ideas doesn't work totally the same. Group roles: tank, healer, or damage, are not nearly as strictly delineated in D&D. Specializations thus will be a separate mechanical idea that have more minor benefits. Let's take a look at the WoW classes alphabetically:

Death Knights:

Death Knights will use the new Oath of the Ebon Blade subclass for Paladins. This replaces several Paladin features beyond the typical subclass levels, like swapping out Lay on Hands for Death Coil (a feature that can add damage to foes as a bonus action or heal friendly undead, including the Death Knight themselves). All three specializations are represented in this subclass, which will each grant a separate rune to carve into the Death Knight's weapon, which grant various benefits.

Demon Hunters:

Demon Hunters, like Death Knights, use the framework of another class, in this case the Ranger, but replace certain features. Its three specializations will affect what subclass spells you get. Demon Hunters will be able to use soul fragments carved from foes to fuel various abilities, including getting to cast more spells, and they also get a new Fighting Style feat that allows them to get Warlock cantrips, so you can have, for example, Eldritch Blast if you want to go for the Devourer specialization (which is more spell-focused).

Druids:

Druids are a far simpler class to convert to D&D, but there are some exciting and notable changes here. Balance Druids can easily be represented with the Circle of the Stars subclass, simply flavoring their Starry form as instead being a shift into their Moonkin (think a sort of magical antlered, upright-walking Owlbear) form. Restoration Druids just go Circle of the Land. Meanwhile, the Guardian and Feral specializations both go Circle of the Moon, but here's the kicker: All Azerothian Druids will get access to new Wild Shape forms: Bear form, Cat form, and Travel form (which itself seems to get both Aquatic and Flight versions, much like in WoW). What I believe these will be are scaling templates that you can use from level 3 to level 20, which is something they experimented with in the One D&D testing two or three years ago, but abandoned. If they let the attack bonuses and damage of their attacks scale with Wisdom (just let the attack bonus be your spell attack bonus) I'll be overjoyed and more or less think this fixes the Circle of the Moon subclass.

Evokers:

D&D, as far as I know, is the only game that makes a really clear distinction between a Wizard and a Sorcerer, and even if their spell selection is similar, the concept of them as classes is quite distinct. Evokers, the newest class in WoW (introduced in 2022,) though, actually fit quite well into the idea of a Draconic Sorcerer. However, given that WoW Evokers have three specializations, there will be some variation: different specializations will be given different subclass spells, with Preservation Evokers, for example, getting healing spells, and Augmentation Evokers getting more beneficial/buff spells. (I suspect that Devastation will look the most like a standard D&D Draconic Sorcerer, but perhaps we'll get some fun spells like Deep Breath).

Hunters:

Another pretty 1-to-1 equivalent, the Hunter is basically D&D's Ranger. Here, the Marksmanship specialization is simply represented by the Hunter subclass (this feels like a weird fractal pattern) but with encouragement to stick to ranged weapons to match the specialization. Both Beast Mastery and Survival, though, are represented with the Beast Master subclass. In WoW, Beast Mastery is a ranged specialization like Marksmanship, while Survival is the Hunter's sole melee "spec." However! While you might think they'd just call it a day, apparently if you are going for the Beast Mastery specialization from WoW, you'll actually replace Roving with a new feature called Pet Specialization. In WoW, Hunter pets can have one of three specs, Tenacity, Ferocity, or Cunning, and so I assume this will correspond in a similar manner. But I find this interesting because it takes something that might be "settled" with a simple use of existing D&D player options and futzes with it a bit.

Mages:

Mages are pretty clear analogues for D&D Wizards, but due to WoW's general focus more on combat as its primary mechanic (I'd argue D&D also centers combat, but not to the degree that WoW does,) all Mages focus on blasting foes with magic from afar, the only real distinction being the flavor of magic (with various interesting mechanical effects). Thus, all Mages are considered Evoker Wizards. But your specialization will grant you some distinct features: Arcane Mages will get a feature called Clearcasting, where if you land a critical hit with a spell, you can cast a cantrip as a reaction, as well as enhancing your Force damage dealt. Fire Mages will get some additional fire spells like Flame Strike (which they do get in WoW as their main AoE spell) and the ability to cause foes to burn when they deal fire damage to them. Frost will gain access to new spells that deal cold damage and inflict the Restrained condition, with another feature that lets them deal bonus damage to restrained creatures (similar to WoW's central Frost Mage mechanic, Shatter). While I think it'd be far too limiting to restrict players to only one Wizard subclass, I do appreciate that they're adding all these interesting features to distinguish them - I just wonder if players will have to give something up for them.

Monks:

Again, this is a class with a clear counterpart in D&D, so it's not too hard to convert. However, there appear to be a few new feats that will allow Azerothian Monks to better represent their powers. Windwalker Monks will simply take the Warrior of the Open Hand subclass, but they can grab a Fists of Fury feat that increases the damage they deal with each subsequent hit. Mistweavers will go Warrior of Mercy, and can get a feat that allows them to reduce incoming damage to allies or give temporary hit points. Brewmasters get a reworked Drunken Master subclass renamed Warrior of Mystic Brews. While this subclass retains several features from the old Xanathar's subclass, they also now incorporate an actual brewing mechanic, where you can make potions that grant you benefits for an hour (or 8 if you spend a Focus Point when making the potion,) and eventually you get to mix two of your brews together to get both benefits. But old features like Tipsy Sway, Intoxicated Frenzy, and Drunken Technique remain from the old version of the subclass (though we'll have to see if they've been tweaked.)

Paladins:

Once again, a clear counterpart class exists. And here, the Protection and Retribution specs are very simply represented in the existing Oath of Devotion and Oath of Vengeance subclasses, respectively, with no apparent mechanical distinctions (if you want to be strict about it, Protection should go with a one-handed weapon and shield while Retribution should go with a big two-handed weapon). However, Holy Paladins will take the brand-new Oath of the Holy subclass. This subclass really focuses the Paladin on their healing capabilities. Perhaps to shore up the Paladin's limited half-caster spellcasting resources, Oath of the Holy Paladins can restore their Lay on Hands pool by dealing radiant damage to foes, and a few other subclass features, including their level 20 "ult" will also help them heal.

Priests:

While D&D Clerics are more heavily armored, the Priest is pretty unambiguously the WoW version of the Cleric class. Holy Priests will simply go with the Life Domain and call it a day. But the other two specializations are both getting their own brand-new subclasses. Discipline Domain (for Discipline Priests) will focus on being able to heal and deal damage at the same time. Probably the most distinctive feature is Atonement, which is a temporary buff (not sure how temporary) that can be applied to creatures they heal which then causes anyone with the buff to gain more HP when the cleric deals damage to an enemy. The standard Holy Bolt channel divinity option is buffed in various ways by the subclass to also aid in healing. Meanwhile, Shadow Priests get the new Shadow Domain, which focuses a bit more on psychic damage and has various ways to disperse into a shadowy form to avoid taking damage from foes and also heal up allies as you deal necrotic or psychic damage.

Rogues:

Once again, a fairly one-to-one equivalency. Assassination Rogues strangely enough go with the Assassin subclass. Subtlety Rogues go with the Soulknife subclass (which actually makes some sense given that the Shadow damage that they deal in WoW can stand in for both Necrotic and Psychic damage in D&D). Outlaw Rogues will take the new revised Swashbuckler subclass. The Swashbuckler looks like it will be fairly similar in early levels, but then get some new features at higher levels, such as new Cunning Strike options, and eventually (I think this is the capstone) will get the ability to get an additional attack against a target that they've hit with Sneak Attack (it'd be fantastic if you could get a second Sneak Attack, but I'll temper my expectations).

Shamans:

Probably the most unexpected equivalency, Shamans are represented in D&D as Barbarians, which is very strange for a class that, in WoW, is very spellcasting-focused (even its melee specialization, Enhancement, uses its melee strikes to grant it the ability to instant-cast spells like Lightning Bolt). That said, the connection with a deep, primordial past and the ancestors does at least fit in with the D&D conception of a Barbarian. Shamans, though, replace Primal Knowledge with a new feature: Totems, which allows you to easily summon objects that grant buffs to allies in a radius (and while they last a short time, it seems you have an unlimited ability to put them back out there as a bonus action). Like Priests, we're getting two subclasses, one of which is a revision of an existing one. Enhancement Shamans are represented by the Path of the Spiritual Guardian, a revamp of the Ancestral Guardian subclass (ironic given that in WoW, Enhancement is the spec that doesn't get access to the "ancestral spirits" hero talent tree, Farseer, but whatever). The Spiritual Guardian subclass does look like it's getting a new capstone feature, which allows you to make an additional attack after hitting with a "powerful blow." (Not sure if this means a critical hit or a Brutal Strike.) Elemental Shamans will use the brand-new (I hope brand-new, because they should probably just sweep what remains of the Storm Herald under the rug, at least mechanically speaking) Path of Elements, which gives the Barbarian ways to deal fire, cold, and lightning damage to foes, and encourages them to cycle through these different damage types, as well as getting access to some utility spells (unspecified). Restoration Shamans are encouraged to go with Path of the World Tree, seemingly interpreting the WoW Resto Shaman's healing as the protective abilities that the World Tree Barbarian gets.

Warlocks:

Again, a class that exists in both WoW and D&D, even if the concept is a little different. New eldritch invocations will help you get some more minions out there. Destruction and Demonology Warlocks use the Fiend subclass, fittingly enough, with Demonology getting some Eldritch Invocations to keep their summons alive longer (hopefully we'll also get some lower-level spells to summon fiendish minions: maybe Hand of Gul'dan as a 3rd level spell or something that gives us some flimsy little Wild Imps after hitting for minor AoE damage). Affliction Warlocks will, surprisingly if you ask me, take the Great Old One subclass, with new invocations that allow them to summon Aberrations and deal more damage with curses. This one is actually a bit surprising, given that if Affliction were going to go outside of Fiendish magic, I'd have thought it more likely they'd go either Undead (which to be fair is not in the PHB) or Archfey, given the existence of hag-like witches in admittedly just like a single zone from the Battle for Azeroth expansion. Great Old One Warlocks would have been my guess for how to do a Shadow Priest if they weren't making the whole Shadow Domain subclass. But oh well. There certainly are plenty of aberrant monsters to make pacts with in Azeroth.

Warriors:

Finally, Warriors are a near-perfect equivalent for Fighters. Both Arms and Protection Warriors are encouraged to make Battle Master Fighters, and just using a Great Weapon for Arms and going sword-and-board for Protection. There will be some new maneuvers, though, that might further distinguish their powers. Fury Warriors are encouraged to take the Champion subclass (and dual-wield,) though this is the only case where the book, or at least the article, suggests going a little off the beaten path and suggests you go with the Berserker Barbarian instead (which I also think is a very direct equivalent to the Fury Warrior other than the fact that you can't wear heavy armor).

    So, there you have it: clear guidance and in some cases new character options for playing every WoW class in D&D. I think this is cool, but here are some thoughts on it:

I think that if you are a DM who is familiar with WoW (like I am,) but your players are totally or mostly unfamiliar with it as a setting, I'd try to encourage your players to try using this guidance to build their characters. If, however, your players are already perfectly familiar with Azeroth as a setting and WoW as a game, I'd say that it'd be totally fine and even fun to go off the beaten path. For example, there's no playable Necromancer in WoW (though the Unholy Death Knight is pretty darn close,) but it would, I think, make perfect sense to allow a player to play a Necromancer Wizard (perhaps more likely if they're Forsaken, but perhaps they're a deprogrammed former member of the Cult of the Damned.) Similarly, while there's no Bard class in WoW, we do have characters like (the long-dead and currently ghostly, but friendly) Lirath Windrunner, who would have totally been a Bard. And honestly, Gnome, Goblin, and quite a bit of Draenei culture is super Artificer-heavy (one of the minor but recurring Draenei characters is literally called Grand Artificer Romuul.)

Frankly, I think the main appeal to importing Azeroth to D&D is to give us the freedom to do things we couldn't do in WoW, coming up with our own stories and adventures and letting us play heroes that the rules of the MMO don't allow for. Thus, this guidance is all well and good, for sure. But I think it should be treated more as a prompt than a restriction. Surely we could have some Kul Tiran Tidespeakers represented by Circle of the Sea Druids, or elite Kirin Tor Battlemages represented by Eldritch Knight Fighters. Maybe a Farseer (a title generally used for powerful and respected Shamans) could be a Diviner Wizard.

Again, the guidance is cool, and I'm really excited to see how the mechanical tweaks and changes all work. But I'm most excited to kitbash the hell out of all of this and repurpose it, either to change how an Azerothian adventure would play out, or to use the options found here to enhance adventures in my own homebrew worlds or other canonical D&D settings.

Raising the Dead - Mechanical Questions About Playable Undead in 5.5

 While we are not actually getting the World of Warcraft D&D sourcebook until next month, there have been a few previews, and thanks to the exposure of Dungeon Masters, the WotC-produced actual play show that has been running short campaigns to showcase new products (not unlike the original incarnation of Acquisitions Incorporated, actually,) a few things have been revealed from it.

The most interesting of which is the ability to play as the Undead.

Now, here's a funny thing:

In World of Warcraft, the playable Undead race has been around since the game's launch in 2004. Presented as "Forsaken" in the book (a word that the playable undead apply to themselves as a kind of national identity in WoW, and largely synonymous with their particular breed of sentient and free-willed undead,) this is the first D&D species in all of 5E to have the Undead creature type. The irony, though, is that in World of Warcraft, despite the race being literally called "Undead" and the existence of creature types in a similar manner to how they work in D&D (a slightly different list of types, but the concept is the same) that includes Undead, WoW Undead player characters are actually classified as Humanoid.

Now, both D&D and WoW strive for balance, but given both the ability for developers to constantly tweak WoW with patches and such and also the narrower tolerance for imbalance in a game where you might not be able to get into a raid with a guild if you can't get your DPS numbers high enough, WoW's need for balance between its various players options is certainly greater, and making Undead (the race) count as Humanoid (the creature type) just heads off a ton of problems that could arise.

Now, Death Knights, the first class to be added to the game four years after its initial launch, are also undead, story-wise. While the process of creating a Death Knight versus the way that the Forsaken came to be the way they are is very different, in both cases, the root cause was the Undead Scourge and the Lich King. While Forsaken who rose from death prior to the breaking of their bond to the Lich King began their unlives as shambling zombies, Death Knights were always possessed of their humanoid-level intelligence and capabilities, just essentially magically brainwashed into fighting for the Lich King. Forsaken (and I'll just use this to refer to the race/species in both games to simplify things) can also be Death Knights, which means that you started off as a human, died to the Plague of Undeath, rose again, broke free of the Lich King's control, were then killed and raised yet again by the Lich King, then once again broke free of the Lich King's control (to be fair, given the ongoing timeline of the game, there are cases where Forsaken might have initially risen from death already with free will, and also Death Knights who were raised by Bolvar Fordragon, who was the Lich King but one who more or less acted as a warden for the Scourge, meaning that his Death Knights were always there to protect Azeroth, rather than menace it).

Anyway, like Forsaken, in WoW, Death Knights also count as humanoid. There is an exception: they have an ability called Lichborne that temporarily makes them undead and removes certain debuffs (what we'd call conditions in D&D) as well as making themselves valid targets for the healing of the Death Coil ability. But broadly speaking, they're humanoid, which again, heads off various balance issues.

So, it is interesting to me that in the upcoming D&D book, both the species and the subclass-that's-more-than-a-subclass will count as Undead.

This is interesting for a few reasons:

When they were originally testing the "Gothic Lineages" in Unearthed Arcana prior to the announcement of Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, they actually experimented with having Dhampir and Reborn officially count as both humanoid and undead (or possibly humanoid and construct for Reborn). There was "reminder text" that said that spells that normally wouldn't work on undead, like Cure Wounds in 5.0, would work on them because of the humanoid creature type there as well. I put that reminder in quotes because that's not obvious: such spells said they didn't work on creatures of that type, and so you'd assume that if you had that type, even if you had another type, the spell wouldn't work.

But 5.5 kind of fixed that: the vast majority of spells that once excluded Undead and Constructs from their benefits now have no such restrictions. There's nothing stopping you from casting Healing Word on the Battle Smith's Steel Defender or on the Necromancer's Skeleton familiar (though I don't know that it would be the most optimal play). Indeed, our first playable Construct species was in 5.0 with the Autognome, which had a special list of healing spells that would work on them despite being constructs (a list that was not actually comprehensive). But with the 5.5 updates to the spells, the Warforged, released as humanoid in 5.0, were made Constructs in Forge of the Artificer, and as far as I know, there's no real downside to that anymore, as I believe any beneficial spell will work on a Construct.

Despite this fix, Ravenloft: Horrors Within didn't change the creature types of the Dhampir or Reborn. In the former case, though, I'll actually say this was 100% the right call: the very premise of a dhampir is that they're the living offspring of vampires. The whole point of a dhampir is that they're vampire-like, but not undead nor bound to be evil. Dhampir are often vampire hunters, actually, like Blade from the Marvel comics, Alucard from the Castlevania series, or Vampire Hunter D from... Vampire Hunter D. (The D honestly might just stand for Dhampir, which the English dub of Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust infuriatingly translates to "Dunpeal" despite the fact that Dhampir is a... well, maybe not English in origin, but it's certainly a European-origin word.)

So, a lot of spells got the restriction on Constructs and Undead removed. Similarly, the Cleric's Turn Undead feature now specifies that it only affects undead creatures you choose - and thus you can (if you choose) avoid screwing over your Forsaken, Death Knight, or Forsaken Death Knight party member.

But!

There are some problems that might arise.

The biggest is resurrection magic:

There are only a few resurrection spells in the game - by my count, and not including weird things like Clone, we've got Revivify, Raise Dead, Reincarnate, Resurrection, and True Resurrection. Let's look at each of these:

Revivify, the quick mid-combat resurrection spell that requires the target be dead for no longer than a minute, has no restrictions. We're gold on this one.

Raise Dead, which gives you a 10-day window and thus can potentially be left unprepared until you need it, however, won't work on a creature that was undead when it died.

    This is kind of interesting: what I assume the point of this restriction is is to make spells like Finger of Death or a Death Tyrant's Negative Energy Cone scarier - if an ally dies affected by these, you can't just raise them.

But there's a sort of interesting question this raises: if you Revivify someone who died to a Shadow Dragon's breath and then rose as a Shadow... are you bringing the (probably) humanoid character back to life? Or do you just get the Shadow the party had to put down back to attack you again? Maybe that's a weird case because the Shadow is probably a separate "body" from your friend's corpse. But in a Finger of Death scenario, if your friend gets zombified by it and you revivify them after taking them down as a zombie, is the zombie's corpse a humanoid corpse or an undead corpse? (This is also relevant for Animate Dead - can my necromancer just endlessly recycle the corpses or bone piles I used to make my undead army, or do they lose their juice once I've turned them undead the first time?)

Reincarnate also requires you to target a humanoid who has died. That actually makes a lot of problems for more beyond the undead - you can't use this on a Thri-kreen, Plasmid, Warforged, Changeling, Kalashtar, or Forsaken, each of which (in their latest printing) don't count as humanoid. 5th level spells are not kind to our Forsaken or Death Knight PCs.

Resurrection has the same limitation as Raise Dead - it simply doesn't work on a creature that was undead when it died.

    Ok, but here's the insane thing: can we cast this on an undead creature who hasn't died as undead yet? Like, again, if our buddy gets killed with the Lich's Finger of Death spell, can we cast it on the still-active zombie? After all, they weren't undead when they died, and they haven't died again yet, so... does that work?

Finally, True Resurrection. This is the ultimate "you can basically always get a PC back if you have a 17+ level Cleric or Druid" spell, where I think you basically only can't use this if they were killed by a Nightwalker or some such thing. Even if a creature was undead at their death, True Resurrection restores them to their non-undead form.

    But that, in and of itself, creates weird issues for our Forsaken and Death Knight characters. If we cast this on a Forsaken character, do they... have to become Human? Changing their species? This is a part of Reincarnate, so it's not like there's no precedence. Honestly, this could be an amazing story moment, especially if you're playing up the Alliance/Horde conflict in your Azeroth adventures, given that the Forsaken are not on great terms with living humans given that their primary experience with the latter is, like, the Scarlet Crusade (mad religious zealots convinced that anyone outside their ranks is tainted by the Undead Scourge and must be eradicated). But this could even be a character's quest - seeking to be freed from the curse of undeath if they should find a cleric powerful enough to restore them.

    For a Death Knight, though... I mean, species traits aren't nothing, but again, there's precedence for a spell - specifically a resurrection spell - changing that, even randomizing it. But what do you even do with a Death Knight that has been restored to true life via True Resurrection? Do they... do they just become a more conventional Paladin?

Ok: big grain of salt time:

We don't actually have the book in hand (I think some YouTubers do as part of the promotion for the book, but I sure as hell don't have it,) so there's every possibility that the book addresses all of this. It might be as simple as saying that in both these cases, these spells work fine on Forsaken and Death Knight characters, as a special carve-out.

What might be a little more fun, though, would be if they make certain Necromancy spells duplicate that function. Let's say that Animate Dead gets an alternate use, similar to how the Plant Growth spell has two modes. In this case, maybe Animate Dead effectively works like Raise Dead for undead PCs. You get a nice benefit: that it's a more forgiving window of time compared to Revivify and it doesn't have a consumed spell component, but the downside is that you need someone who can cast the spell. Now, Clerics actually simply have Animate Dead on their spell list (something I think I've literally never seen a Cleric cast, though to be fair, I don't know I've actually seen Animate Dead in action before at all). But it also means that, say, a Wizard might be the one to bring your Death Knight back.

Certainly, I think that unless you have a blanket ban on resurrection magic to up the stakes of your campaign (something I think both the current and previous campaigns of Critical Role have done) in which case this distinction isn't really a problem, you shouldn't penalize players for picking this species and/or subclass.

See, I think resurrection magic in D&D is a pressure valve. Stakes are great to have, and the danger of losing a PC can make for a more exciting game.

But as I think many years of watching shows and reading books in which characters get killed off left and right has taught me: sometimes it's less interesting for a character to simply get killed off than for them to continue onward in the face of peril. (I gave up reading the Saga comic series when a character who should have been completely immune to the danger of being killed off was, somehow, killed off for basically no reason and with no real impact on the story.) Yes, death is a fail state in D&D, and games need fail states, but there's a reason why in video games you get to reset to the last place you saved. You're not ready for that story to be over.

Again, the WoW D&D book sounds like it's going to be doing much bolder experimentation with what you can do with the 5E framework - something I wish that non-Universes Beyond books would try more. Perhaps if it's a success, we might see such experimentation in core D&D products. I'd be very much down for that as a direction - after twelve years of 5E, I think we can stand to get a bit more radical with design.