Path of the Spiritual Guardian Barbarian

 The Ancestral Guardian Barbarian was introduced in Xanathar's Guide to Everything. While perhaps overshadowed by the Zealot, which wound up in the 5.5 PHB, this has also long been a pretty well-established and effective subclass. Notably, Ancestral Guardians are one of a handful of subclasses across any class that is built to truly play a "tank" role in a group.

I actually have a ton of familiarity with the original version of this subclass, because one of my players in my 6-years-and-counting Ravnica campaign plays one. And I will tell you: he might not put out the most damage (though with an artifact weapon that deals an extra 2d8 damage along with other benefits, he's no slouch) what he does do very well is protect his allies. The key is, not only does he impose disadvantage on attacks against other targets than himself, but the soft-taunt debuff also extends damage resistances, to the point where, especially if the monster is doing any non-bludgeoning/piercing/slashing damage, they truly do less damage to anyone else.

The subclass is renamed here as Spiritual Guardian, which I guess just broadens out which spirits you might call upon. What I will say is that in the Ravnica game, I have had NPCs talk to the Barbarian and refer to him as a Shaman, because he literally is one - having a connection to unseen spirits upon whom he can call for aid, which is more or less the actual definition of a shaman. So, ironically, while I don't think the Barbarian is the best class to emulate a WoW Shaman, in this case at least the subclass literally has you play a shaman using the real-world definition.

Now, the rough concept of this subclass is to make it work for WoW's Enhancement Shaman. Don't get hung up on this too much: it's nothing like Enhancement. Actually, honestly, the Elements Barbarian is closer to what Enhancement feels like, while to get a real Elemental Shaman feel you'd want to go with something like a Circle of the Land Druid and focus on elemental damage types like lightning and fire, or maybe even just go with an Evoker Wizard (or a Genie Warlock, actually). The "ancestral spirits" theme of Shamans is really secondary to its "primordial elements" theme in WoW. And while Elemental and Restoration Shamans can both take the "Farseer" Hero Talents (a system that works as a kind of secondary subclass that is role-agnostic) that do actually have ancestor spirits appear and fight alongside you, Enhancement is the one spec that doesn't get this option.

So, really, even more than other suggested subclasses, we should kind of set aside the WoW of it all and truly treat this as its own, setting-agnostic option. I'm also going to try to take it on its own merits, in part because while I see the Ancestral Guardian in play, I'm not often looking at all of its features laid out in front of me. Naturally, my experience with the subclass will color my impression of this one. Will this be like the new Grave Cleric, where it would be good if we didn't have a better version that existed previously? Or will this one shine and actually be an improvement over something that's already solid? Or maybe it will be just a lateral move.

Let's get into the features.

(Credit here goes to the Dungeon Dudes, using their video ranking the WoW subclasses.)

Level 3:

Spiritual Protectors:

When raging, when you hit with a weapon or unarmed strike, you can choose one effect:

Distract: The target has disadvantage on attacks against creatures other than you or another Barbarian with this feature until the start of your next turn.

    The key change here (other than having two other options to use) is that this no longer imparts resistance to the damage of those attacks if the monster decides to go after your friends regardless. That actually does wind up being a pretty big nerf to this, as a monster might still decide they'd rather risk disadvantage to hit a target that will take full damage from their attack rather than hitting the Barbarian.

    It's very unlikely you'll have two Spiritual Guardians in the same party, but then, my party has two Storm Sorcerers. Obviously, this is the standard "soft taunt" that you see with Armorer Artificers and Cavalier Fighters, though I don't think they have carve-outs for others of their subclass. However, if you do have one of those two characters in your party, you should both blanket the target with disadvantage. I will say this is less exciting if you're using a weapon with Sap, though it does apply to all attacks.

Hinder: You can apply the Slow weapon mastery in addition to another mastery.

    Slow doesn't stack up, but if you really need to keep a foe from fleeing, this can help. Indeed, combining Distract and Hinder will help you lock down foes and keep them from hurting your friends (though if you slow them enough that they can't get to your friends, Distract is kind of redundant). Probably the most situational choice.

Strike: You deal an extra 1d4 of your choice of Cold, Fire, or Lightning damage.

    Ok, this is interesting. it's not a ton of damage, of course, but unlike other Barbarian damage buffs at 3rd level, this is going to apply to all attacks. You thus get slightly more value out of it if you're dual-wielding or can weaponize your bonus action through something like Polearm Master. 1d4 ain't much, but it's not nothing either when you can apply it to every attack. And this also gives you a good option when you just want to pour out as much damage as you can.

    Generally, I think the taunt has taken a nasty nerf, but the existence of these other options does make this a bit interesting, and not strictly worse. What it does is push this subclass a little away from the tank archetype - not fully away, but lets you play one that is more about damage.

Level 6:

Spirit Shield:

While raging, you can use a reaction when another creature within 30 feet takes damage to reduce the damage they take. Roll d6s equal to your rage bonus, and reduce the damage by the number rolled.

    I think this is the same as the old version (the math on how much you reduce might be different,) but this is going to help you mitigate what damage does go through. (Actually, now that I check, the damage mitigation scales up slightly faster, as you'd get d6s added at levels 10 and 14, while the rage bonus goes up faster than that).

Level 10:

Consult the Spirits:

Once per short or long rest, you can cast Augury or Clairvoyance without a spell slot or material components. The sensor for Clairvoyance takes the form of an invisible ancestor spirit.

    This is unchanged. It's also only rarely impactful. It's not that these spells aren't good, but this is a pure utility boost, and doesn't do anything for you in combat. Now sure, giving Barbarians stuff to do outside of combat is great, but you're not going to feel much of an impact here at this level.

Level 14:

Spirits' Fury:

Once per turn, when you roll an 18-20 on the d20 while making a melee weapon attack as part of the attack action, you can make one additional attack with the same weapon.

    This is a totally different feature from the old version, which would let you deal force damage to the attacker that triggered Spirit Shield. But what do we think of this? Well, first off, I do think this is the one real nod to Enhancement Shamans, who imbue their weapons (they always dual-wield) with elemental magic, most famously "Windfury," which lets their attacks trigger additional attacks that hit at the same time. Baseline, this is going to be going off about 15% of the time, though if we're always using Reckless Attack (or getting advantage some other way,) we'll have a 27.75% chance of triggering this, and with two attacks, that becomes a 48.8% chance. If we're dual-wielding with a Nick weapon, it can become a 62% chance to get it (though we'd prefer to get this on our main-hand attack, as we probably don't have the Two Weapon Fighting Style.)

    So this actually has a decent chance to happen, though I suspect you'll be very sad if you go through a few combats without seeing it trigger. I think I'd have to see it in play to get a feel for how fun it is for this to go off versus how frustrating it is when you never see it happen.

Overall Thoughts:

    My gut tells me that this is a bit like the Grave Cleric revamp, though less of a nerf when you break it all down. The big elephant in the room here is that the World Tree Barbarian is probably the best "tank" Barbarian - while that doesn't have any taunt-like feature, it is probably overall better at protecting allies. And this version, losing the blanket resistance it imparts to anyone the target hits, truly loses its most potent tanking feature. (As a DM, I'll often think "why even bother going after someone else if I'm getting disadvantage and doing no more damage on a hit than I would to the Barbarian?" which is precisely how a tanking feature should work.)

    So yeah, I don't think this is necessarily bad, but by pushing the subclass away from tanking and a bit more toward damage-dealing, it loses some of its identity. Now, the math on said damage-dealing is a bit of a question mark. I suspect that it's not going to keep up with Berserkers or Zealots, though, meaning that you're sort of straddling the "pump damage out" and "protect allies" roles, while D&D generally rewards specialization.

Oath of the Holy Paladin

 My "main," the character that I prioritize in WoW, bringing him first into any new expansion or patch content, eager to get him leveled up to the current level cap and then geared up as best I can in the current season fastest, is a Paladin. While I generally play Protection, the tank-focused spec, most - especially as they've leaned into allowing tanks to deal decent damage so that it's not that tedious to "solo" on them (while WoW has a lot of group-focused content, a lot of the game can be played on your own, especially with the introduction of Delves in the previous War Within expansion) - I have also had a fair amount of experience playing as a Retribution Paladin, their DPS spec.

Having played this character since my first days in WoW 20 years ago, and having spent about 19 of those years with this character firmly as my "main," you might ask me: how's the healing spec?

And my answer would be... No clue. I've never healed a dungeon on him.

See, in WoW, group roles are much more clearly delineated than they are in D&D. While healers do have damaging abilities (in part to help them when soloing,) their real, primary focus, is on casting healing spells to keep the party up. You're expected to keep every character at max HP, or as close as you can, and only if things are going very smoothly do you ever turn your attention to the bad guys.

This means that the game of a healer is very different than that of a tank or DPS character. DPS characters just try to most efficiently kill the enemies, while tanks will work to ensure that all the enemies are focused on them through a mechanic called Threat - but the way that tanks generate threat is by... damaging enemies. So ultimately, if you're used to playing a melee DPS character, tanking isn't really all that different, except that because the enemies are paying attention to you, you need to be the one pulling them into proper positions, as well as more closely monitoring your own HP and using damage-mitigation abilities to help your healer keep you alive.

Healers, though, are playing this weird triage/whack-a-mole game that I have never, in 20 years, gotten the hang of (largely I'm sure due to the fact that I don't really enjoy it and thus don't get practice).

I put all this forth to say that healing is very different in WoW as compared to D&D. D&D healing spells, even after the buffs in 5.5, are more about slowing down the gradual draining of HP over the course of a day, and often it's more efficient for a healer, be they a Cleric, Druid, or in this case, Paladin, to kill monsters rather than top up their allies. After all, if you do a Cure Wounds for 15 HP, and then the monster does 20 damage to your target, would it not have been better to hit that monster and potentially killed it before it could hurt your friend?

Now, the Paladin has always had a bit of healing available to them in D&D. In 5E, they both have a fair number of healing spells like the Cleric that they can prepare, but also their Lay on Hands pool, a predictable and very flexible healing feature that can be perfectly titrated to the amount of healing that is optimal for the situation (such as slapping a friend with just 1 HP to get them up if they're still making death saves during a fight).

Now, here's another nuance:

In WoW, your spec can change a lot of the fundamental ways your class works. Since 2012's Mists of Pandaria, which revamped how specs and talents worked (there another major revamp in 2022's Dragonflight, but these changes remain,) a Holy Paladin has, for example, more Mana to spend on healing spells.

In D&D, though, subclasses (even the big Death Knight and Demon Hunter ones) really can't mess with some of the class fundamentals (for one thing, it'd be a nightmare for multiclassing,) which means that Paladins are always going to be a half-caster. This means that they won't have any kind of resurrection magic until level 9, and won't get something like Greater Restoration until tier 4. And with slower spell progression, even their basica healing spells like Cure Wounds can't be upcast as much. Like the Alchemist Artificer, this kind of hamstrings them in comparison to something like a Cleric to be a really dedicated healer.

So, can this subclass make up for it? With all that preamble out of the way, let's take a look:

Oath Spells:

1st: Cure Wounds, Healing Word

2nd: Lesser Restoration, Prayer of Healing

3rd: Dispel Magic, Mass Healing Word

4th: Aura of Life, Death Ward

5th: Greater Restoration, Mass Cure Wounds

    This is a healer's toolkit for sure. It's not terribly exciting given that these are all spells a Paladin could prepare anyway - while that "frees up" a bunch of other Paladin spells... you could have prepared those instead anyway. This will, obviously, make sure that you're always packing a ton of heals. Is it maybe redundant? Yes. Will these spells come in handy? Sure.

Level 3:

Beacon of Light:

As a magic action, you can expend a Channel Divinity to wrap an ally within 60 feet in holy energy. For 1 minute, any time you heal a creature other than the affected ally with a spell or your Lay On Hands, the chosen ally also regains half as many HP.

    Note here that you can't actually target yourself with this, as it's an "ally," and I think the game defines that as someone other than yourself (while "a willing creature" would include yourself). This lets you do a kind of half twin-spell for a minute on healing spells. I think the ideal use case here is actually out of combat. You pop this and then start running Aura of Vitality (another spell that's actually really great outside of combat) and then put this on the person who needs the most healing, then go around healing all less-injured allies. To maximize this in combat, you'd need to be healing kind of every turn and then also hope that the target actually needs that healing each turn.

    As an out-of-combat heal-booster, this is actually pretty sweet, though.

Level 7:

Lightbringer's Aura

Whenever you cast a spell or use Lay on Hands to restore hit points to a Bloodied creature within your Aura of Protection, the creature regains an extra 1d6 HP.

    Now, the good thing here is that you're more likely to be healing allies if they are bloodied. Once again, though, this becomes insane when you're out of combat. There is nothing stopping you, if you aren't worrying about 6-second-to-6-second intervals, from just hitting an ally for 1 point of Lay on Hands at a time, which means that this turns, again, out of combat Lay On Hands, from a pool equal to 5 times your level into a pool equal to basically 4.5 times your level, which makes it far more efficient at healing. Just... only out of combat. If you're pumping in 15 points of LOH, this winds up boosting it to 18.5 average, so rather than a 350% increase, it's only a 23% increase.

Level 15:

Infusion of Light:

Whenever you cast a spell that deals Radiant damage, you refresh your Lay on Hands pool by a number of HP equal to the total rolled for the spell's Radiant damage, up to a maximum of 5 times your Paladin level.

    Given that your max LOH pool already is 5 times your Paladin level, this feels redundant unless this could push you over your max, which I don't think it would.

    But this is actually a really cool idea: If you use Divine Smite on a crit (and Divine Smite, remember, is now a spell, and of course it always did Radiant damage,) you could get a whole lot of LOH back. Now, there is a sight bonus action traffic jam here, but if you healed a friend for your full 45 LOH pool on turn 1, and then you do a 3rd level divine smite, that's going to look like 18 (or 22.5 against a fiend or undead target) LOH back to you.

    Genuinely, this is a very cool idea, and the ability to recuperate your LOH does help a bit with the fact that you're still a half-caster.

Level 20:

Holy Deliverance:

As a bonus action, you can imbue your Aura of Protection with holy power for 10 minutes (or until you end this for some reason). You can do this once per long rest, or restore a use by expending a 5th level spell slot. You gain the following benefits:

Healing Power: Whenever an ally starts its turn Bloodied in the aura, that creature regains HP equal to your Charisma modifier plus your proficiency bonus.

Sunlight: The aura is filled with Bright Light that is sunlight.

    By level 20, you would really prefer not to let anyone go unconscious, but this will prevent friends from having to roll death saves. More to the point, it's going to give them a moderate heal. How big of a heal? Well, at best we're looking at 11, or possibly 12 if we go for a second epic boon that boosts Charisma. That's not very much healing, to be honest. Also, sadly, Healing Power doesn't work with Lightbringer's Aura because this isn't a spell.

    So while it's not as bad as the Death Knight level 20 ult in that it actually does something on its own, I can't say it's the most exciting thing.

Overall Thoughts:

    There's a cool idea here: building a subclass that can make a Paladin act as a true full healer. The problem, again, as I said in the preambles, is that "true full healers" aren't really a thing in D&D. Even a Life Cleric is probably going to be doing some offensive stuff unless they're fully RPing as a pacifist.

    The best idea in this subclass is Infusion of Light, which rewards the Paladin for doing what the class is best at (smiting the hell out of monsters) by letting it do what it is decently good at (healing) more. But that doesn't come until level 15.

    Truly, I do think that this is a good healer, if you're talking about healing as specifically "restoring hit points," but it thrives after the battle, not during it. And other things a healer wants to do, like removing conditions or protecting allies from taking damage in the first place, are not really something this subclass gives you, at least not at a time that makes up for the slow spell progression.

    Funnily enough, while this was before even my time (I only played at the tail end of Vanilla WoW,) there was apparently a time in the early days, when the very first raid, Molten Core, was current, when people would bring Paladins into their raid purely to buff everyone outside of combat, and then have them leave and hop onto other characters who were better-optimized. So, here, that "these guys are useful when we're not fighting anything" identity is actually preserved.

    (Blizzard got a lot better at balancing the game over the years, and all three Paladin specs have had their moments as the top-tier performers in their respective roles.)

    I will say, though: given that D&D Clerics get to wear serious armor and wield big old weapons, I really feel like if you truly want to play a heavily-armored healer-warrior... just go with a Life Cleric?

    So far, to be honest, the only WoW subclass that has blown me away is the Mystic Brews Monk, and while some are doing really interesting things, I again feel that the desire to replicate WoW gameplay in D&D holds a lot of the design back. Mystic Brews shares nearly nothing in common with the Brewmaster Monk from WoW on a mechanical level, but it captures the flavor (so to speak) of the spec excellently.

    Much as I feel that 5.5 would have benefitted a bit with a less slavish devotion to rules established in 2014, I think this book might have benefitted a bit by striking out on its own with new mechanical ideas inspired by WoW's lore and vibes more than its game mechanics. And, look, that is a bit of this to an extent.

    Also, to bring some perspective here: this is a truly unique Paladin subclass that is doing something very different than other Paladins do, and I applaud that. But it's also evidence that I would love a design for half-casters that allows subclasses to turn them into full-casters, which I think would be a bold new avenue for subclass design that would also really help with a lot of subclasses that seem to gesture toward that without actually accomplishing it.

    We're nearly done with our WoW subclass round-up, and by Tuesday I should actually have access to the book myself. For now, thanks again to Insight Check for posting all of this. I believe the only ones we have left are the reprints/revisions, the Swashbuckler and Spiritual Guardian (formerly Ancestral Guardian).

Shadow Domain Cleric

 Buckle up and manage your expectations.

In WoW, there are several "hybird" classes, which are classes that can perform roles other than Damage. (In fact, only four classes our of its 13, the Rogue, Hunter, Mage, and Warlock, are DPS-only classes). Priests are not the only ones with just a single DPS spec - the same is true for Paladins and Monks, and when the Demon Hunter and Evoker came out, each only had two specs, so they also only had a single DPS option, though each has since been given a second dps spec. But what makes Priests unusual is that they still only perform two roles - healing and DPS - but they have two healing specs, Discipline and Holy.

Furthermore, until the Demon Hunter's Void-themed Devourer spec was added earlier this year, most classes had a pretty consistent aesthetic and theme - a Paladin was a wielder of the Holy Light regardless of whether they were a tank, damage-dealer, or healer. Similarly, a Shaman was calling up on elemental magic. But Shadow Priests take a class that looks quite classically heroic and good-aligned and went very dark, embracing dark magic, driving foes to insanity, and consuming them with necromantic plagues.

Over time, admittedly, Discipline has started to take on this "balance of light and shadow" theming, but Shadow Priests have only changed as the game has sort of narrowed in on what Shadow magic really is - initially kind of a catch-all for dark magic, but now more specifically related to the Cosmic, Lovecraftian Void, playing up the madness angle (interestingly, one of their key spells, Devouring Plague, was recently reflavored as Shadow Word Madness) and also having a lot of weird aberrant creatures emerge through their spells.

Thus, if we weren't getting any new subclasses in this book, you might actually consider playing something more like an Aberrant Sorcerer or Great Old One Warlock. Given how I understand this subclass will wind up looking... you might still want to consider that.

But let's try not to let others' opinions shape ours and look at the features on their own terms.

Domain Spells:

Level 1: Dissonant Whispers, Shadow Word: Pain

Level 2: Crown of Madness, Mind Spike

Level 3: Summon Undead, Vampiric Touch

Level 4: Evard's Black Tentacles, Psychic Horror

Level 5: Dominate Person, Void Eruption

    Few things - Shadow Word Pain, Psychic Horror, and Void Eruption are all new. I believe that SWP is basically a DOT - which as I've mentioned before, doesn't work as well in D&D as it does in WoW, and I think the damage is quite underwhelming even for a 1st level spell. Psychic Horror if memory serves is a Fear/Stun spell, possibly with some damage along with it. Void Eruption is a big burst of AoE damage. Note that while I think Summon Aberration would have arguably been more appropriate here, Shadow Priests also do have a thing where they periodically shoot ghostly apparitions at their foes. This is all on-theme, and Summon Undead is really good (good damage and really good debuffs on foes). Dissonant Whispers is also quite good, though not all the spells here are as amazing.

Level 3:

Shadowform:

As a bonus action, you can expend a use of Channel Divinity to take on a shadowy form for 1 minute, or you can dismiss it early. It also ends if you become incapacitated or deal radiant damage with a spell.

    This last part is a bit rough - in WoW, the original version of this (which lasted until cancelled) would prevent you from casting healing spells. But in modern WoW, where they can curate the spells that each spec gets, it no longer does that. This will shut down a lot of great Cleric spells, though if you have your Spirit Guardians doing Necrotic, I think you can manage this.

Shadow Stealth: When in an area of Dim Light or Darkness, you can take the Hide action as a bonus action.

    I don't really see this shadow stealth come up a lot, to be honest. And we can't use this on the turn we activate it.

Void Empowerment: When you cast a spell using a spell slot that deals Psychic or Necrotic damage, you can add 1d6 to one damage roll of the spell.

    Ok, this could be pretty good, but let's also break down how it will work: does this buff Spirit Guardians? Only for one damage roll. Used on an instant-cast AoE spell (like I believe Void Eruption will be) this will be pretty good. I'd have just let this be added to cantrips as well. Toll the Dead getting an extra d6 would be pretty great, but alas.

    Really, I feel like this should do more - a d6 on all Necrotic and Psychic damage would be, I think, appropriate given that this isn't even an always-on subclass feature and still requires a resource. I also think something like Temp HP or a higher AC would be a better defensive feature (granted, Clerics in D&D are much better-armored than Priests in WoW).

Devouring Plague:

When a creature within 30 feet of you that you can see fails a saving throw, you can cause the creature to take 1d10 Necrotic damage. If you do, you regain HP equal to the Necrotic damage dealt. You can do this Wis times per long rest.

    Ok. The damage here is pretty low given that it's limited uses, though we'll see if this gets better. We are of course also getting healed with it, so the damage shouldn't be that high. I do like that there's A: no action required and B: doesn't have to be a fail against your spells and abilities. I'm going to keep an eye on this - if it sticks at this damage/healing to level 20, I think it starts to look kind of useless, though I will say that without any action required, it's not like you'll ever stop using this - it'll just be kind of a marginal benefit.

Level 6:

Dispersion:

When you are hit with an attack roll, you can use a reaction to disperse into shadowy energy. Until the end of your next turn, you have resistance to all damage (including the damage of the triggering attack), but you also cannot take any action, bonus action, or reaction. While dispersed, you gain a fly speed of 40 feet. When the effect ends, you can spend up to half your total Hit Dice, regaining HP as if you had finished a short rest.

You can do this once per short or long rest.

    First off: weird feature to translate into D&D, of all of the Shadow Priest abilities. But also... I kind of hate this. And part of the reason I hate it is because there could be situations where it's useful, but it's a real feel-bad ability. I mean, you are sacrificing your turn, more or less. You don't even get a free disengage with this. You can, sure, fly away from a foe that just hit you, but not as part of the initial reaction, and you also literally cannot disengage to avoid an opportunity attack. Is this actually going to really save you that much pain? In WoW, this feature does prevent you from using other abilities for a couple seconds, but WoW is so much faster-paced than D&D. A full turn without an action is utterly brutal. I hate this.

Level 17:

Vampiric Embrace:

While Shadowform is active, whenever you roll the d6 to add extra damage to a spell, one creature of your choice within 30 feet of you regains that many hit points.

    I try to keep my tone civil and constructive with these.

    Are you fucking kidding me?

    This is a d6 of healing, 3.5 average, at level 17. On a limited-resource buff you place on yourself, which also requires you to expend spell slots.

    As a point of comparison: the Life Domain at this level gets to just treat every healing spell like they rolled the maximum amount. A 1st level Cure Wounds with a +5 to Wisdom will thus go from an average of 14 healing to 21, or 7 extra healing, which is more than you could possibly get with this ever.

    And by level 17, you're probably not casting a lot of 1st level spells in combat.

    Truly, this is just a tiny little F-you for sticking with this subclass to tier 4.

Overall Thoughts:

    This whole subclass feels like a real missed opportunity, which makes me pretty sad.

    I think you could have built it as a Cleric that really focuses on damage-dealing. Giving us ways to heal allies when we deal damage does, sure, match a very minor theme in the WoW version, but that's the primary vibe of the Discipline Priest/Cleric. Instead, this should have been all about pouring out damage and eldritch madness.

    Broadly, my main critique of the WoW book's new subclasses is that by focusing on bringing recognizable spells and abilities from WoW into D&D, they've forgotten that these games just work very differently. But in this case, the actual Shadow Priest abilities they've chosen to recreate here are also not what I'd consider defining traits of the spec.

    Shadowform, certainly, is an iconic Shadow Priest thing, but to be frank, it's mostly because of the visual. You enter Shadowform and you will look like you're perpetually in vaguely purple darkness. You just click it on and forget about it.

    Much like Affliction Warlocks, though, this is a spec that in WoW is very much focused on stacking up multiple damage-dealing effects (though Affliction goes far harder on this,) which is just not something that works very well in D&D. If this subclass were instead focused around something like frightening creatures when you deal psychic damage to them (not entirely unlike an Undead Warlock's Form of Dread,) or something where you could, say, as a bonus action, send out Shadowy Apparitions to any creatures of your choice in a given range and deal either low guaranteed damage or perhaps have them save to take damage scaling with your Cleric level (and maybe limit it to a certain number of uses per day,) this would have, I think, better captured the actual feel of this spec.

    I also think that we need more dark-themed Cleric subclasses, and while we have the Grave Domain, sure (though I think Horrors Within tried to fix what wasn't broken and wound up nerfing it) I think Shadow in general would be a really evocative domain to play with. It's a shame that this is what we wound up with.

    I think the Oath of the Holy Paladin is also available to check out, which I'll visit next, but which I also suspect that I'm going to not love, as I think that it again tries to make something that makes sense in WoW work in D&D when it probably shouldn't (echoes of the Alchemist Artificer and trying to make half-caster healers).

Discipline Domain Cleric

 In WoW, each class (with the Druid as an exception) gets three specializaitons, which are essentially their equivalent of subclass. "Specs," as they're referred to by most players, will also define your group role - whether that's Tank, Healer, or Damage (often referred to as DPS for damage-per-second). Every class has at last one damage spec, while only some classes can tank or heal. Usually, if a class can tank or heal, they only get one spec to do either of those roles, so, for example, every healing Monk is a Mistweaver.

Priests are the sole exception: they have two healing specs. The Holy spec is built around direct, conventional healing - just good healing spells that restore HP to their targets like you would expect, and a reasonable-enough analogue to the Life Domain.

Discipline is a bit different.

First, a caveat: I've been playing WoW for 20 years, in every expansion. I've probably healed in a number of dungeon runs I could count on both hands with fingers to spare. Healing in WoW is something I just don't have the sense for, and given that I'm very comfortable tanking (another in-demand role,) I haven't ever felt the pressure to play a healer. So, basically, healing is a part of the game that I have comparatively negligible experience with. But I do at least have a broad sense of the way that the various healing specs work thanks to being on the receiving end of them.

Over the years, Discipline has had sort of multiple mechanical identities as well as flavor identities, but the broad gist is this:

First off, WoW classes and often specs will tend to be much more narrowly focused on certain damage types, and while Holy's handful of damage spells (to let you solo in the game or contribute damage if the party isn't taking much damage) all do Holy (equivalent to Radiant) damage, and Shadow's damage spells do I think exclusively Shadow damage (which sort of amalgamates what in D&D would be Psychic and Necrotic damage,) Discipline mixes the two.

    (As an aside: in WoW's early days, there were strictly 7 damage types - physical, fire, frost, arcane, nature, shadow, and holy. You could get gear that would increase your resistance to one of these types, which was necessary to make for certain raid bosses, though there was never any "holy resistance" and physical resistance was just armor. Around the second or third expansion, they got rid of resistance on gear. Similarly, they stopped having monsters resistant to any type of damage players could do. Even when fighting through the Firelands raid, a Fire Mage or Destruction Warlock, both of whom do a lot of Fire damage, will still work just fine despite fighting a bunch of fire elementals. Instead, damage type has become a kind of keyword for certain class talents to key into, like having a feature that temporarily boosts all Shadow damage done. At some point, they started introducing hybrid damage types, like Shadowfrost, combining Shadow and Frost, or Radiant, combining Holy and Fire, which would benefit from buffs to either but if something temporarily shut down that type of damage, like a spell interrupt, you'd be locked out of both types. I'm actually not sure if some of the newer damage types, like Cosmic, are hybrids or just brand-new ones (I could imagine Cosmic being, like, Shadow and Arcane maybe?) Anyway, damage type is a big part of the defining aesthetic of classes and specs.)

Next, from the earliest days, Discipline has had a theme of creating damage shields - the equivalent of Temporary Hit Points - as a major part of their strategy, preventing damage proactively rather than waiting for friends to take a big chunk of damage. But at some point, I want to say around when Legion launched in 2016, they got a pretty extensive revamp to incorporate a new central theme: Atonement, which allows you to heal your allies by damaging enemies. Discipline thus became the "damage to heal" spec (a similar theme used to be a major option for the Mistweaver Monk, though I believe that has been deemphasized, even if the Monk was doing this first).

The theming is very faint in WoW, but Discipline is vaguely flavored as kind of an Inquisitor-like figure, though this is barely hinted at in-game, and mostly revolves around its willingness to us both the Light and the Void.

So: how do we translate this into D&D?

Domain Spells:

1st: Guiding Bolt, Shield of Faith

2nd: Arcane Vigor, Magic Weapon

3rd: Prayer of Mending, Protection from Energy

4th: Guardian of Faith, Stoneskin

5th: Circle of Power, Destructive Wave

    First off, Prayer of Mending is a new spell that basically heals an ally and then can jump to additional allies. I do wonder why we'd want Arcane Vigor as a Cleric, as it's kind of a crappy heal that's just there for classes that don't get any healing otherwise. But yeah, some decent stuff here, though the best stuff is already on the Cleric list.

Level 3:

Holy Bolt:

As a bonus action, you can use a Channel Divinity to make a ranged spell attack against a creature within 60 feet. On a hit, they take Radiant damage equal to 2d10+Wis, and you can choose a creature within 60 feet of yourself to regain 1d10+Wis HP.

    This isn't great for the following reason: the healing only happens if you hit the target. So you can spend your Channel Divinity on something that might totally whiff. I'll also say that this could probably use some better built-in scaling, maybe having some fraction of your Cleric level added to at least the healing. It is a bonus action, which is nice (and something Clerics I don't think are always using) but it feels like, especially at higher levels, this will just not be worth using. (The healing is just slightly higher than a 1st level Healing Word.)

Atonement:

When you cast a level 1+ spell that restores HP to one or more creatures, each of those creatures gains a blessing that lasts until the end of your next turn. Whenever you cast a spell that deals damage using a spell slot, each blessed creature regains HP equal to the level of the spell you cast to deal damage.

    This is a pretty direct translation of the WoW ability, more or less, though in that the healing is based on the damage you deal, as spell slots aren't a thing in WoW. That, though, is the rough part of this: at the very most, this could give 9 HP back.

    And I think this is going to be an issue in general with how healing works in WoW versus how it works in D&D. In WoW, if you're in content that is of an appropriate challenge based on your level and gear, healers are going to be constantly casting healing spells on the party, constantly topping them up, and so a kind of constant "ambient" healing is really great. But in D&D, no Cleric is casting a healing spell on every turn in combat unless things are going really bad. That being said, things going really bad might be where this shines. If the party is fighting a dragon, for example, and takes a big breath weapon attack, you might cast Mass Cure Wounds, putting Atonement on the whole party. Then, the dragon recharges its breath on the next turn, and three of your party members all go down. Well, just shoot off a Guiding Bolt at the dragon and all those unconscious allies will pop back up with 1 HP.

Level 6:

Luminous Barrier:

As a bonus action, you can expend a Channel Divinity to place a magical ward on each creature blessed by your Atonement. The creatures gain Temp HP equal to your Cleric level plus your Wisdom modifier. While a creature has these Temp HP, they have resistance to all damage.

    This is the reason to take this subclass.

    So, we do need to have some big AoE heal, and sadly we cannot do Mass Healing Word on the same turn as this. I do believe that Holy Nova (a WoW spell) is being added to the book as well, which is basically a "heal my friends and harm my foes" emanation spell, which could work for this. But at this level, you're going to be giving your allies probably 10 Temp HP that, thanks to the resistances, is more like 20. It's not quite Twilight Domain territory, of course, and is more resource-intensive. But this is the feature that I think is going to make players really strongly consider this subclass. Just to check out the math, this eventually becomes 25 THP that kind of counts as 50 thanks to resistances.

Level 17:

Ultimate Penitence:

Holy Bolt gets more powerful in the following ways:

Ascending Step: When you use Holy Bolt, you can teleport to an unoccupied space you can see within 30 feet before you make an attack roll.

Ascending Volley: When you use Holy Bolt, you can expend a spell slot as part of the bonus action to hurl a number of additional bolts equal to the spell slot level expended. You can direct the bolts to hit one creature or several, making separate attacks for each bolt.

    Why the hell would I want to use Holy Bolt anymore? I mean, ok, let's take this on its merits. This basically lets you get some scaling at the cost of a spell slot. If I burn, say, a 5th level slot, that's 5 bolts that each hit for 2d10+5 (presumably,) so like 16, and thus about 80 damage as a bonus action. Ok, that's actually not terrible, though we're expending both a pretty hefty spell slot and a Channel Divinity for it. And each bolt that hits is going to be doing about 10.5 healing.

    I think the problem here is the resource cost. This only looks really good if we're expending a high-level spell slot that we could probably use more effectively with an actual spell. Holy Bolt doesn't have any inherent scaling, and given the massive power of Luminous Barrier, I really don't want to be wasting my Channel Divinity on it.

Overall Thoughts:

    Boy, this would be a pretty bad subclass if Luminous Barrier weren't propping it up. But while Luminous Barrier is genuinely a very good feature (though only if we don't hold it to the same standard of the overpowered Tasha's domains) I think there are enough other good Clerics that I don't think I'd recommend this one.

    Again, I think one of the central problems (and this is a bit of a theme in this book) is that WoW and D&D, while thematically similar, are ultimately very different games, and strategies that are amazing in WoW (like constant streams of small heals on everyone in the party) are not nearly as effective in D&D. In a similar manner, damage-over-time effects are a huge part of how WoW plays, because you can be fighting even a minor monster out in the world for around 30 real-world seconds, meaning that DOT could tick like 15-30 times, whereas in D&D, combat rarely lasts more than 4 rounds, so ticking damage is only going to have a few opportunities to do anything. In the interest of re-creating the feeling of WoW gameplay, I think some of the design here suffers from being poorly optimized to work in D&D.

Newcomer's Guide to Orcs in Azeroth

 Orcs are, arguably, the most iconic people of the Warcraft franchise. While orcs have actually been part of folklore and myth dating back to Ancient Greece (Orcus was another name for Hades/Pluto, and orcs were like spirits of the underworld,) they became a staple of fantasy thanks to JRR Tolkien (among so many other genre staples). Tolkien's Orcs were universally evil - kind of the ultimate "army of bad guys," and it's something that Tolkien actually struggled with: he wanted there to be an evil army for the heroes to fight, and that they be monstrous, but Tolkien also felt, within his moral worldview, that there is no such thing as a sentient person who is born evil and can never be redeemed.

Tolkien never really came up with a definitive solution, though adaptations of his work have embraced an idea that he worked on in his drafts, which was that orcs were elves who had chosen an evil path, and went from preternaturally beautiful to distorted and hideous as a reflection of this evil. This connection between elves and orcs is reflected in other franchises, such as the Elder Scrolls, where Orcs are actually just one of the several Elf subspecies, or even in D&D, where there's an ancient rivalry between the elf god Corellon and the orc god Gruumsh.

Still, until even as recently as D&D 5.0, Orcs were assumed to be evil (and even half-orcs in the 2014 PHB were presented as, at best, resisting their evil nature).

However, there's a whole distinction drawn in fantasy between "Tolkien Orcs" and "Warcraft Orcs," because the Warcraft franchise was the first, or at least the first widespread and popular, property to approach orcs with nuance and treat them like their own people with a complicated history of both heroics and villainy.

It didn't start that way: In the first two real-time-strategy games before World of Warcraft, the Orcs were the bad guys. They had their charm, and I think WCII started to at least introduce the idea of them as a more nuanced group with internal politics. But their mission was still kind of genocidal conquest.

However, 2002's Warcraft III totally rewrote the story of the Orcs, and I think popularized the idea, now embraced in D&D 5.5, that Orcs should be counted among the many options for heroic fantasy peoples, no more likely to be bad guys than elves, dwarves, or humans.

So, what is the story of the orcs of Azeroth? Well... it doesn't start on Azeroth.

In the Warcraft cosmos, some planets have a Worldsoul. This is a sentient presence at the core of the world that is kind of an embryonic god. Azeroth, the primary world of the franchise, has the most innately powerful Worldsoul known in the cosmos, which is why so many cosmic forces are trying to possess it.

But while other worlds we've been to in WoW had Worldsouls, like K'aresh and Argus, the world that would be the Orcs' homeworld, and would be dubbed Draenor only a thousand years ago by the Draenei, did not.

In WoW, there are four classical elements, but there are two kind of additional elements that both bind the other four together, but in diametrically opposed ways. Spirit is the element of harmony and balance, leading to a flourishing of life. Decay, its opposite number, is one of domination and dissonance, polluting and destroying.

Worldsouls, like a fetus drawing nutrients from their mother, require a ton of Spirit energy to grow and sustain themselves. On Azeroth, the resulting deficit of Spirit caused the elements to constantly rage against one another. But on Draenor, there was no Worldsoul, and so the elements were in profound harmony and balance.

It was actually a little too much.

The resultant surplus of spirit caused plant life, concentrated in massive living structures called Sporemounds, that grew and grew without stopping, and threatened to ironically choke out life on the planet. Excessive life might have led to the snuffing out of life on the planet.

It just so happened that Aggramar, one of the Titans of the Pantheon, saw this world and took an interest in preventing this dark fate. To cull the Sporemounds and restore balance, he created a massive giant of stone called Grond, to cull the excessive growth.

This wasn't like the Titanforged of Azeroth and the extensive Manifold, comprised of countless sophisticated facilities across the planet. This was just one massive stone giant the size of a mountain.

Grond succeeded in breaking apart the three massive sporemounds, but the plant (and fungal) life that came from them also affected him, eventually breaking him apart as well. The fragments of Grond would become still-massive but smaller giants, and eventually, the spirit essence of one of the sporemounds transformed the smaller fragmentary giants into beings of flesh and blood.

Over time, these more biological giants would evolve into smaller but more intelligent forms, leading to the ogres, and then a smaller off-shoot that would come to be the dominant humanoid life form on the planet: the orcs.

While the ogres were probably the first truly sapient descendants of Grond, and built a great empire in their time (led by a magocratic elite), when the orcs arose, they had greater numbers and more diversity of culture and practices, allowing them to eventually topple the ogres' Gorian Empire.

    (As a side note, the words "Orc" and "Ogre" are etymologically linked, so it's fitting that Warcraft Orcs are the descendants of ogres.)

For untold generations, the orcs lived in disparate tribes across the planet, the harsh and deadly planet instilling in them a culture of hearty resilience. The various tribes differed significantly in their cultural practices, but ancient traditions provided for the temporary creation of a Horde, which would see the tribes unite to face a common threat.

About a thousand years before the events of the Warcraft games, a strange, massive crystalline meteor landed in the lands of Nagrand (the site where Grond fell). This crystal, called Oshu'gun by the Orcs, was actually a space-faring vessel carrying with it the Draenei - Eredar refugees from Argus who had fled into exile rather than joining the demonic Burning Legion.

The Draenei settled on this new world, and with their advanced technology and magic, were able to build great cities and temples. For this millennium, the Orcs and Draenei treated one another with respect, mostly keeping their distance, but sometimes trading with one another and exchanging knowledge (it's probably for this reason that the Orcs call their homeworld Draenor, which means "Exile's Refuge" in the Draenei language).

However, Kil'jaeden, one of the two most powerful demons in the Burning Legion, eventually tracked the Draenei there.

The Draenei had seldom been able to stop on a world for very long (though when you live tens of millennia, a short period of time might be quite long from a human perspective,) but Draenor seemed safe to them, especially with the wisdom of the orcs to help them navigate the wild world. And so, they were lulled into a false sense of security.

The leader of the Draenei, Velen, had been one member of the ruling triumvirate of the Eredar people on their homeworld of Argus. He had actually been part of it when it was just a duumvirate, and it was Kil'jaeden who was his longtime partner in this role. The two had seen one another as brothers, and so when Velen left, Kil'jaden took it personally, vowing to exterminate the Draenei.

The orcs appeared to be his best bet.

Kil'jaeden began to work on the Orcs. His two biggest coups were Gul'dan and Ner'zhul.

Gul'dan was a pariah and outcast from his village, a spiteful and evil, but physically weak orc. Kil'jaeden had no reason to deceive a person that greedy for power, and so taught him the secrets of fel magic and coordinated with Gul'dan to form a secret base of power, a Shadow Council of other Warlocks. (Gul'dan is probably the worst person in all of Warcraft lore - there's not a single bit of "well, from my perspective I'm actually fighting for the greater good," instead just pure malevolence and contempt.)

Ner'zhul was the most respected and wise chief among the clans, ruling over the mystical Shadowmoon Clan. Ner'zhul was old, and his beloved wife Rulkan had died years earlier. Kil'jaeden appeared to Ner'zhul disguised as Rulkan's ghost, and warned Ner'zhul that the Draenei were plotting to turn on the orcs, to steal their lands and slaughter their people.

Ner'zhul, having such great respect among all the tribes, was able to convince the other chieftains that this threat was real, and they invoked the ancient tradition of the Horde.

The Draenei were blindsided, having existed in harmony (or at least peaceful respect) with the Orcs for a thousand years. Outnumbered several times over, the Draenei nevertheless put up a good fight, using both their technology and holy magic to defend themselves.

With the orcs desperate to defeat what they believed to be treacherous invaders, and frustration with the lack of decisive victories, Gul'dan made his move: Taking blood offered by the Pit Lord Mannoroth, he dared the orcs to drink the demon blood and gain its fel power. The chief of the Warsong Clan, Grom Hellscream, was the first to take him up on the offer.

The demon blood acted like a super-soldier serum, driving those who had imbibed it to utter bloodlust, dispelling any fear or trepidation, and any mercy. Fueled by this foul magic, the orcs overwhelmed the Draenei, and as the Horde fell into this bloodthirsty frenzy, toleration for abhorrent magics grew as well.

The Horde was led by a Warchief, and Gul'dan installed his puppet, Blackhand, the chief of the Blackrock Clan, in that role.

Most of the Draenei were slain in the genocidal campaign against them, with the few who survived going into hiding.

But the fel magic that the warlocks had used was both changing the orcs and changing Draenor. The environment began to die - fel magic was poisoning the land, and would lead to famine. At the same time, Kil'jaeden's master, Sargeras, had long desired to take the world of Azeroth.

With a bloodthirsty army desperate for new lands to conquer, Sargeras, through the possessed mage Medivh, and Gul'dan opened the two ends of The Dark Portal, linking Draenor and Azeroth.

Emerging into the remote Swamp of Sorrows on Azeroth, the Horde marched forward and invaded the human kingdom of Stormwind. Taken even more by surprise than the Draenei had been, Stormwind mounted an admirable defense, but ultimately fell.

However, for reasons that are a little complex to get into here, Gul'dan ended this "First War," as it would be called, catatonic. Without him to maintain control of the Shadow Council and thus the Horde, there was a new opportunity for Blackhand's second-in-command, Orgrim Doomhammer.

Doomhammer saw that the Warchief was a stupid, weak-willed puppet of the Warlocks, and so he took this opportunity to assassinate him, claiming the Warchief's mantle for himself. By the time Gul'dan reawakened, Doomhammer had all the power, and would not be a puppet.

While Doomhammer did not allow the Shadow Council to dictate the goals of the Horde anymore, he did still continue the campaign of conquest, moving north to claim the rest of the Eastern Kingdoms.

However, in part because Gul'dan ran off the moment Doomhammer didn't have him fully locked down (getting himself killed, I should add,) the tide turned against the Horde during this Second War, as the humans organized into The Alliance to combat it.

Ner'zhul, panicking that the demons of the Burning Legion would come and slaughter them, gathered a bunch of powerful artifacts on Azeroth and then fled back to Draenor, and there created numerous Dark Portal-like gateways to other worlds. But doing so was disastrous: the planet was shattered by the magical stress of all of these portals, partially drawn into the Twisting Nether. While fragments of the world remained, now called Outland, and were bizarrely still somewhat habitable, overall the planet was thrown into chaos, and mages of the Alliance would come and close the portal to prevent the magical chaos from engulfing Azeroth as well.

With their home cut off from them, and Doomhammer defeated in single combat by the young paladin Turalyon (though he was not killed,) the orcs on Azeroth (most of the species at that point,) were taken prisoner and kept in internment camps.

What had been intended as a temporary measure continued on for decades. At the same time, those orc warriors who had drunk the Blood of Mannoroth now found themselves undergoing withdrawal-like symptoms. Likewise, as the bloodlust faded, they had to reckon with the terrible things they had seen and done, which their Alliance captors thought was some kind of magical illness they called "Lethargy."

This indefinite internment of soldier and civilian alike led to abuses and cruelty against the captured orcs. Eventually, feeling an obligation to his people, Orgrim Doomhammer organized a rebellion, breaking free of his camp and seeking to liberate orcs from the other camps.

Among the people he liberated was a young orc called Thrall. Thrall was born on Azeroth during the First War, and was now coming of age. He was a talented Shaman, having studied under the wise old sage Drek'thar, and Orgrim saw within him a potential future for the Orcs - here was someone not tainted by the genocides and atrocities under Blackhand, who could look forward with optimism and idealism.

Doomhammer took Thrall under his wing and began grooming him as a successor. In the Arathi Highlands, though, one of the camp liberations went poorly, and Doomhammer was slain by one of the camp guards, a spear through his back. With his dying words, he named Thrall as the new Warchief.

The young Warchief continued the campaign of liberation for his people. However, not long after this time, the Undead Scourge began to break out in the kingdom of Lordaeron. Thrall was visited by a vision of the long-dead Guardian, Medivh, who announced that he would need to lead his people across the sea to fight an apocalyptic threat.

Thrall heeded the prophecy, leading the Horde to Kalimdor. There, he led his people in the fight against the Scourge and the Burning Legion, even teaming up with the human Jaina Proudmoore, who had received a similar prophecy from Medivh, as well as the local Night Elves.

Thrall also secured the membership of the Darkspear Trolls and the Tauren in this campaign. He and Grom Hellscream confronted Mannoroth, slaying the demon whose blood had poisoned their people.

Following the war, the Orcs settled on the desert peninsula that Thrall named Durotar, after the father he had never met, Durotan, and built the great city of Ogrimmar, named for Doomhammer.

Now, that just gets us to the beginning of World of Warcraft, and there have been a lot of developments since then, but you get the general gist.

There is only one variant on the Orcs, so we'll talk about them here:

Mag'har Orcs:

The demonic influence on the early Horde left a lasting impact: Fel magic, the magic of demons, is generally green (sometimes if concentrated enough, it becomes a deep red, but mostly it's expressed in green). The orcs, even those who did not drink the Blood of Mannoroth, slowly changed color over the years, which is why they're green.

However, this is not how they look naturally, instead having more earthen tones of brown.

When the Dark Portal was first re-opened, the Horde (now a multi-species coalition) sent an expedition back to the Orc homeworld, and there they found some orcs who had refused to join the Horde back in those early days. Some objected to the malign influence they sensed within the Horde, while others were simply left behind by the militaristic, fascistic leaders of the Old Horde who saw any physical weakness as something to be excised from their culture.

But these Mag'har, meaning uncorrupted in Orcish, were somewhat amenable to this reformed, evolved Horde.

However... Ok, we have to talk about Warlords of Draenor.

Warlords of Draenor was the worst expansion WoW has had. I know some people say Shadowlands is the worst, but I think they must have blocked this one out of their memory if they actually believe that.

The biggest reason for this is actually just a gameplay thing: the expansion was underbaked, and you spent most of it hanging around and waiting for NPC champions to complete missions for you.

But another big flaw was that it was a convoluted nightmare of a premise:

So, in the prior expansion, Garrosh Hellscream, son of Grom, who had been (foolishly) put into power as Warchief when Thrall was needed to focus on his Shaman powers, had gone full-on racist, fascist tyrant, forcing the Horde to rise up in rebellion against him. Garrosh was defeated and de-throned, but he broke out of prison with the help of a rogue bronze dragon. The dragon took him back in time, but also to an alternate timeline, in a version of Draenor prior to the Horde's demonic corruption.

Seeking revenge on both the Alliance and Horde for his downfall, and believing that "pure-blooded" orcs would be unstoppable, Garrosh met with this timeline's version of his father (in a timeline when he had never been born, so Grom had no clue who Garrosh was) and offered, instead of demon blood, a whole bunch of modern, industrial technology instead.

Garrosh maneuvered his father to become the Warchief of this "Iron Horde," and invaded Azeroth with it. Naturally, the Alliance and "vanilla" Horde responded by traveling through the Dark Portal, which had been attuned to this alternate Draenor, and struck back against them.

As it turned out, having modern technology is not as much of a trump card when you're fighting two superpowers that also have that technology, so the Iron Horde was swiftly put on its heels, and the alternate-universe Gul'dan unseated Grom, getting them back into that whole Demon Blood thing.

However, this period was probably very short, and only a fragment of the Iron Horde remained to undergo this demonic corruption. Grom fought alongside his former foes from Azeroth against the demons and corrupted orcs, and this timeline was ultimately left with a Horde that could sort of step back from all of this evil warmongering and a Draenei population that had not been devastated by genocide at the Iron Horde's hands.

Strangely, the timeline of this version of Draenor kind of "caught up" with Azeroth's a few years later (from Azeroth's perspective,) and something about the world - whether the timeline had been unstable, or the demonic corruption was still poisoning it, or if the zealous Draenei had drawn too powerfully upon the Light - was killing it. The surviving Mag'har, a generation or two after the time of the Iron Horde, were invited to come to Azeroth and join their alt-timeline brethren.

Now: if you read this blog, you know me: I'm all about bizarre timeline shenanigans. But this? This is too convoluted even for me.

Notably, since the quests that unlocked the playable Mag'har, we've basically not touched at all on any of this story, and that's fine with me.

I believe the WoW D&D book is going to have a variant Orc species to play as one of the Mag'har (though maybe not? The PHB Orc ought to work fine for either,) but unless you want to try to fix the narrative here with your own deuterocanonical ideas, I'd say just have the Mag'har in your campaign be from prime-universe Outland rather than alt-universe Draenor.

Mystic Brews Monk vs Wyvern

 I know the book isn't out yet, but I'm really excited by the fairly extensive revision to the Drunken Master Monk, which is reborn in the WoW book as the Warrior of Mystic Brews. My Monk in WoW, while he's like my second-lowest priority class, is the Brewmaster spec (which is the Monk's tank spec in WoW,) and I also played a Drunken Master up to level 12 in Adventurer's League in 2019.

I really like the concept of a Drunken Master Monk, though I think the old version had some cool ideas that just didn't go far enough.

However, primarily through the addition of the Mystic Brew feature, the subclass has taken on a new life, and I suspect that it will be among the best Monk subclasses, maybe falling behind the Mystic Arts Monk (Mysticism is apparently very good for Monks) simply because of the power of spellcasting.

The Monk got a big glow-up in 5.5, though the general theorycrafting community does tend to think it falls short of other martial classes, who are also generally behind the pure spellcasters. Still, Monks are very fun to play (if you can stand not to have the diversity of options as a spellcaster - again, there's the Mystic Arts subclass for you) and I suspect this might actually be the most fun to play simply because of all the silly shenanigans you can pull.

I think this is true of just about every subclass in the book except possibly the Oath of the Ebon Blade and Demon Hunter, but I strongly recommend DMs allow this to be used in any setting, as this truly feels like the Drunken Master finally realized to its full potential.

While Brewmasters are a tank spec in WoW, I think this subclass can do fine as a damage-focused option. There are some new feats that could be really good for mitigating damage, and I think the 5.5 Monk innately has some powerful defensive capabilities with Deflect Attack, so you could actually wind up quite tanky with I believe the Stagger and Sway feat.

However, we're going to build for damage here. And just for fun, I want to use the new Fists of Fury feat, which increases your damage the more times you hit a target in a turn. This does mean we're probably not doing our usual Grappler build, but we'll talk about this when we get to feats.

I typically ignore species here, but I'll make a couple notes. First off, the WoW book is including the Pandaren, a race of humanoid pandas that are Chinese-coded, and whose culture is the origin point for WoW's Monks, though this tradition is now I believe available to every playable race in that game. Given especially the brewing/boozy theme here, I think Dwarves of all stripes would make a lot of sense for this character as well. But I don't think either of these will affect our damage output, so we can just leave that aside.

Tavern Brawler does feel particularly appropriate as an Origin Feat for this subclass as well, and it will actually have a bit of an effect on our damage (though a minimal one). Again, I'm going to ignore it. (DMs, let your players treat improvised weapons as monk weapons. At worst, you're potentially giving them different damage types.)

So:

Ability Scores:

Monks are a little starved for ability scores. Via point-buy, you could take 15s in Dex, Con, and Wis, and then take a background that buffs all three to get even 16s across the board. I hate having a lot of negative modifiers, though. So I'd probably do something more like getting 15s in Dex and Wis and then letting Con sit at a +2 via a 14. If we take Sailor to get Tavern Brawler, we can bump Dex and Wisdom, getting a 17 in Dex at level 1 and then a 16 in Wis, which would give us a very respectable starting AC of 16, and would leave our saving throws (important for our chosen brew) at a decent level. Here, of course, being a Dwarf would help a bit with that lower Con, so that at least for HP purposes we effectively have a +3 instead.

Now, Tavern Brawler fits beautifully with this subclass, but it's not inherently the best option for us, as we mainly just get the ability to reroll 1s and then get a free 5-foot push with our attack action. And in fact, at least at level 10, we're not going to be taking the Attack Action. So, we might actually go for something else. Alert is always great, Tough is going to likewise help us with the lower Con modifier (and the Monk's baffling d8 hit die - I will never stop complaining about that). Frankly, I really like Skilled just because, well, practically everything outside of combat is skill checks.

Feats:

So, you know what, I said we were going to take Fists of Fury, but here's the thing - as I said before, we're actually not going to be taking the attack action on our turns. While we'll still be making three unarmed strikes most turns thanks to Flurry of Blows, the benefit here is a lot lower. Fists of Fury increases the damage you deal when you hit the same target (important to limit the power of this subclass's 17th level feature, though that's not in the purview of this post) in the same turn. With 5 attacks (two from action, three from Flurry of Blows,) that means that if we hit with all attacks (which is probably not as likely as you'd want it to be) you'd wind up getting a total bonus of 1+2+3+4, or 10. That's quite good, and nearly on par with Great Weapon Master for a pre-tier-4 Strength-based martial character (Fighters get more out of it). But given that we're probably only making three attacks instead, that bonus actually winds up being a pretty pathetic 3.

That being said (and I'll stop beating around the bush soon enough) sometimes we will be using our Attack action, so we could get something out of it. But I truly think that this feat will be amazing for just about every other Monk (and might start being more appealing for us at level 11+) but for now, I actually think it's not right for us.

So, what feats do we take a 4 and 8?

Well, generally I think that, because of how important maxing Dex and Wisdom are, I'd probably only go for a single non-ASI feat among our 4 non-Epic Boon levels. So, one of these will just be a +2 to Dex, while the other will be... something else. I think Sentinel could be good, or Crusher. Mage Slayer, as always, can be good. Boy, it's tough.

Well, screw it: maybe we're planning to take this character into tier 3, at which point Fists of Fury will start to pay dividends once we're no longer constantly belching fire. Again, I think you'll get more career-long power out of this feat as any other Monk, but it's still going to have its uses for us.

It will, though, make our math a little annoying (though I have an idea of how to deal with that). So, by level 10, we'll have capped Dexterity at 20 and Wisdom will be 16.

Mystic Brew:

While it doesn't come online until level 6, the Mystic Brew feature is the real core of this subclass. The option we're going to pick is Cinnamon Dragon, which lets us spew a 30-foot cone of fire damage, with a Dex save for half, every single turn as a Magic action.

If we invest a Focus Point when we make it at the end of a Short or Long rest, the brew lasts 8 hours. It takes a minute to drink it, but at 8 hours, we will just assume that we down it the moment we leave camp (or approach the dungeon) and that it should see us through to the next rest we get.

While we might pick other Brews at level 11, the only other options we get at level 6 are defensive/survival ones. And we want damage.

Game Plan:

So, while a 30-foot cone can make it hard not to hit allies if they're all spread around, it's also narrow enough that we can probably angle it to avoid hurting our friends. Cinnamon Dragon does not affect objects (at least RAW) so we should be fine using this in a wooden tavern hall.

We have 10 Focus Points at this level, though we spend 1 of these to get Cinnamon Dragon to last long enough that we can count on it being active. So that's 9. If we assume a 3-round combat (and we're ok emptying the tank) we should try not to exceed 3 Focus Points per turn. I think we can actually do what we want with just two.

Step one, we run over to the Wyvern. Then, we will start off using our Flurry of Blows. At level 10, this is three attacks. The first time we hit, we're going to spend an FP for Stunning Strike. (There's our two FP.) Then, as an action, we're going to exhale our fire breath on the hopefully-stunned Wyvern.

And then it's just kind of lather-rinse-repeat. If we need to get away from the Wyvern, we can sacrifice two of our Flurry of Blows attacks to burn an FP on Patient Defense, activating Drunken Technique, which increases our speed by 10 feet and also refunding us one unarmed strike, but this will naturally be less damage. Also, if the Wyvern has a rider, we can potentially redirect missed attacks at them, but we're again kind of assuming a white-room vacuum.

So, shall we math it out?

Mathing it Out:

Flurry of Blows:

Attack One:

This is where the math is going to get hairiest. The first attack, though, is simple:

We have a +9 to hit at this level, and each hit lands for 1d8+5, or 9.5 on average. The Wyvern has an AC of 14, so we hit on a 5 or higher, meaning an 80% hit chance. We add 4.5 on a crit. So this attack is 9.5x80%, or 7.6, and then 4.5x5%, or .225 (a number we ought to just know by heart at this point given how common d8 weapons are). So, that's 7.825 average damage.

We use Stunning Strike on this if we hit. Herein the math gets wonky, as we enter the Schroedinger's Stun. The Wyvern, with a +3 to Con saves, will save against our DC of 15 on a roll of 12 or higher, meaning it fails 55% of the time.

Attack Two:

In the 80% timeline where we did hit the target, we actually get advantage regardless because of Stunning Strike's compensation for a successful save. So, at advantage, our hit chance becomes 96% with a crit chance of 9.25%. So, 9.5x96% is 9.12, and 4.5x9.75% is roughly .44. However, thanks to Fists of Fury, we're actually doing 1 more damage on a hit, so we're going to add .96 to that damage as well, meaning our average damage (in this scenario) is about 10.7.

However, in the 20% chance we missed on the first attack, we're going to just have a straight attack roll with no bonus to damage from the feat, meaning that this is 7.825.

So, 10.7x80% is 8.56 and 7.825x20% is roughly 1.57, so our second attack is hitting for 10.13.

Attack Three:

The timelines branch again.

We have to now consider the following scenarios (I'm sure there's some way to abstract this, and the numbers are probably going to barely shift, but I'm being thorough!)

First (best): we stunned the target on the first attack, and hit again on the second attack. This requires that we hit on attack 1 (80%), that the Wyvern failed its save (55%) and that we hit on the second attack (96%). That's a roughly 42% chance. This results in our being able to add 2 to the damage of the attack and also have advantage on it.

Second: We hit the target on the first attack (80%), and stunned it (55%), but somehow managed to miss the second attack (4%). That's a roughly 2% chance. Here, we are still adding 1 damage to the attack if we hit.

Third: We miss the target with our first attack (20%) but then hit with the second attack (80%). That's a 16% chance. It doesn't matter if we stun the target or not as we'll have advantage regardless, but we do get to add 1 damage to a hit.

Fourth: We hit with the first attack (80%) but they are not stunned (45%). We then hit with the second attack (96%). That's about 35%. So we don't have advantage, but we do add 2 to the damage here.

Fifth: We hit with the first attack (80%) but they are not stunned (45%) and then we somehow miss with the second attack (4%), so this is like 1%. Here, we get a +1 bonus to damage, but no advantage.

Sixth: We miss with the first and second attacks, meaning no bonus and no advantage. 4% chance.

    Am I missing something? Let's add up these chances. Ok, yes, that's a full 100%. Phew. Note that we're going to need to come back here to see if it's stunned before our Fire Breath.

Scenario 1: Ok, so this is 11.5x96% or 11.04 plus our .44 crit bonus with advantage, for 11.48. And then the scenario's 42% chance gives us 4.82 abouts.

Scenario 2: 10.5x80% is 8.4, and then we get an extra .225, so we've got 8.625, happening just 2% of the time, so it's .17 (it does add up! Kinda!)

Scenario 3: 10.5x96% is 10.08, and add our .44 crit bonus to make it 10.52. Then, this is 16% of the time, giving us 1.68.

Scenario 4: 11.5x80% is 9.2, and then we have the .225, so this is 9.425, 35% of the time, for a total of about 3.3.

Scenario 5: This is actually the same damage as scenario 2, so 8.625, but this is just 1% of the time, so it's adding only .09 roughly to our total here.

Scenario 6: Just like the first attack, the damage is 7.825, but happens 4% of the time, so it's giving us .31.

Thus, the total average damage for our third attack (it was a long walk) is 10.37. Was all of this worth it? I'll leave that to you.

    So, just to take a breather here and consolidate some numbers, our damage from Flurry of Blows is going to wind up being a total of 28.325.

Cinnamon Dragon:

Cinnamon Dragon is going to deal 4d8 fire damage in a cone. It's a save-for-half effect, though it also poisons the target on a failed save (that won't be part of our damage calculation though). So, on a failed save, we're looking at an average of 18 damage, and on a success, 9.

Our DC is 15. The Wyvern has a +0 to Dex saves, if they can make the saving throw, they will fail on a roll of 14 or lower, or 70% of the time.

But if the Wyvern is stunned, it will automatically fail its saving throw.

Let's start with the simple half: if it's not stunned, we're going to deal 18 damage 70% of the time and 9 damage 30% of the time. We can actually just treat this as 18x85%, giving us 15.3 more damage per turn.

However: what if we stun the Wyvern? Well, in those scenarios, we'd be guaranteed that 18 damage (or at least 18 on average - not guaranteeing damage rolls) because a stunned creature automatically fails Dex saves.

But how likely is it that we stun the target?

Do we really want to go down this road?

Here is what I will say: on the first attack, if we hit (80%) we will then have a 55% chance to stun them, so this becomes 44%.

The only scenarios where the Wyvern is stunned on subsequent attacks are going to be in that 20% range where we missed with the first attack. We can refer back to our third-attack scenarios here. To stun on the second hit, we would have had to have missed on the first attack and then hit on the second, which is our scenario 3 from before, which is a 16% chance, and then we have the 55% chance to have stunned them, so this gives us 8.8%.

Now, to have stunned on the third attack, we would have had to miss on both the first and second attacks (scenario 6, a 4% chance of happening) and then hit (80%) and then have the Wyvern fail the save (55%) so we're looking at about 1.8%

Ok, so the thing is stunned by the time that we get to the Cinnamon Dragon 54.6% of the time.

We're almost there!

So, 54.6% of the time, we're "guaranteed" 18 average damage. That's 9.828. The 45.4% of the time that we don't have them stunned, it's 15.3 damage, so that's 6.946. That means that our Cinnamon Dragon spew is doing on average each turn 16.77 (about) damage.

And thus, at long last, we find our damage average per turn, which winds up being about 45.1.

    So, this certainly falls behind some of my other "builds." Some of the recent ones, like my Battle Smith, Conjurer, and whoa-jeez Necromancer get quite a bit more. But let's also consider a few nuances here:

    First off, I think we cannot ignore the fact that as soon as there's just a single additional target in our cone attack, the damage here takes off like crazy. If there's a second Wyvern, admittedly we won't have stunned it, but that's still adding 15.3 damage, which truly does rocket this character up to comparable damage numbers with those higher-damage builds (ok, not the Necromancer, but they've got to have a DM who is ok with you walking around with 15 skeletal archers at all times).

    The fact that this sizable AoE is going to be there for you basically at all times is kind of nuts. It's not a Fireball, but it's not that much lower in terms of damage. Unless your party exclusively fights individual big monsters, you're going to have a lot of opportunities to catch at least two and possibly several more foes in that cone. Also, remember that the free version of Patient Defense les you disengage as a bonus action (you only need the FP to add the dodge).

    So, I think the "target-dummy" nature of these calculations does this subclass a bit of a disservice. I will also say that there's probably a better feat for this than Fists of Fury, though what in particular doesn't spring to mind.

    This is also a subclass that actually starts to get kind of insane (at least in theory) with the higher-level features. A big part of that will also involve debuffing foes, like knocking them prone with Intoxicated Frenzy at level 17. An AoE poison on a dex save is actually potentially really strong (team up with a Necromancer using Summon Undead's Putrid form and you've got some guaranteed paralyzes).

    So, yeah, like I said earlier, I think Mystic Arts can out-damage, but I do think there's enough complexity here and strategy you can follow to make this a really interesting, powerful, and fun subclass.

My First TPK (Sort Of) and Why I'm Starting All Future Campaigns at Level 3 or Higher

 So, my Ravnica-based (though they're now fighting through New Phyrexia in what is sort of the penultimate "act" of the campaign, after which they're fully going into the D&D multiverse at level 20) campaign has been going on for about six and a half years at this point, and given how high-level the party is, with a Sorcerer who can cast Wish and a Cleric that can cast True Resurrection, and just a whole bunch of high-level spellcasters (the only non-caster, the Barbarian, also has a super-powerful artifact weapon,) I basically never worry that much if they can handle what I throw at them. They've literally already fought the Tarrasque, so while I can probably make a harder encounter simply by using more monsters (the level 19 finale fight is going to have them in a rematch against a Lich villain they fought before hitting level 17, but now with, like, two Planetars, two Purple Worms, I think an Archmage in there and a bunch of other minions).

But I've also had the slowest-running secondary campaign, which I put together to run while my best friend, who runs our usual Wednesday game set in Exandria, is unavailable. This "side campaign" has only had like three sessions, or I guess now four. After going for nearly a month without one of our regular games (but not having enough of the players in the side game to play,) this Wednesday I decided to throw together something to run for just the two players who were available.

This campaign is set in my homebrew setting, which, as time goes on, I've allowed to take on more of my "Weird" sensibilities, with modern technology cropping up, among other things.

The two players (whose characters in my Ravnica game are now married) play a pair of old ladies who live together in a small town called Eigan's Crossing. The joke is that despite being best friends and next-door neighbors, they never actually learned one another's names, and now it's just too awkward to ask. Orovikki (sometimes going by Oro or by Vikki) is a Goliath Fighter, hulking and tall with a big old glaive, while Lorraine is a Gnome Druid. Gruff, the Shifter Warlock, and Brak, the Dragonborn Ranger, were unavailable for this. (It's actually a pretty well-balanced party!)

Anyway, the party in that campaign is very much in the middle of an adventure where I want the plot to move forward without giving them a long rest (though honestly, now I'm questioning that). This was the first campaign I started that was meant to be strictly 5.5, so I had players start at level 1 and have insisted that they earn the equivalent of the required XP to get to level 3 (I did let them jump to level 2 after the first session). So, neither character has a subclass, and the Druid only has three 1st level spell slots.

The point is, though, that I made this story a flashback, to the two characters in their hometown, in something that would have happened before the start of the campaign (never mind that they were level 1 at the start of the campaign and were level 2 here.) But by necessity, they had plot armor.

The adventure I built for them was not very combat-heavy. Taking inspiration from Alan Wake (as I am wont to do) they went to a house in town rented to a foreign novelist (the writer is from my world's America equivalent, while they're in the sort of England/France/Germany equivalent, though I'm not going to make people do accents, and honestly, I think that there's a growing "Pacific Northwest" vibe to this region as well). Their task was something very mundane, bringing a book on botany that the local florist had promised him. But there was something weird going on:

The house seemed empty, the door ajar, and a couple of notable issues: first, that there was a strange, thick black ichor deposited on things (I described it as being so thick that it didn't so much drip as tear). And there was also a strange door in the house's courtyard (I used the Spooky House map from the DMG, with some minor alterations) in front of which they found a manuscript page, typewritten, that described them finding the page.

Building it basically as a Survival Horror dungeon, the ladies eventually found a room with a typewriter, but it was missing the letters O, P, E, and N, which were required to finish typing out the page they found in the typewriter, which was the only way to get that strange door in the courtyard to open.

The danger, though, is that there was a monstrous being in the house, stalking from room to room. The former caretaker of the house (which was owned by a noble family with dark secrets) had been warped either by the energies of the house or the writing of Henry Wortham (our Alan Wake equivalent). The description I used for the monsters in this was based on the foes you encounter in Silver Pines, which I'm very slowly working my way through, being sort of warped and stretched humanoid forms.

The idea, I thought, was that the party would have to flee the monster. But I think that A: the monster wasn't actually that dangerous to them (it was an Ogrillon Ogre, which does have a decent bank of HP) and B: we didn't really have the time to make it a true "room-by-room" dungeon crawl.

Also, I think D&D doesn't actually make fleeing foes that viable given how initiative order and movement speeds work. That will wind up being relevant later.

So, actually, the unfortunate thing that was once Lester Carmichael did get one hit in against Lorraine, but an Entangle spell (brilliantly described as using the floral print wallpaper as the source of the vines - shoutout to my very creative players) made it pretty easy for them to take him down, even if it took a few rounds.

They were then able to explore the house unimpeded.

Another concession to trying to fit this into a single night was that if I were truly going for a survival horror feel, I'd have probably had a bunch of really trivial encounters hidden around the house. I do also think that it might be best, if you're doing a dungeon crawl, to actually map out each room in succession as you go on the table for your players. I have a pretty small vinyl battle map, which is great for how portable that makes it, but it would be hard to do this entire house, even if only doing a single floor (the map in the book is 37 squares wide, while my map is 25 1-inch squares across at its widest). But thinking about a place like Woodside Apartments in Silent Hill 2, any individual Lying Figure or Mannequin isn't that much of a problem - it's the slow drain of each unsuccessful dodge or each bullet it takes to bring them down that makes them scary.

I like the idea of a Mr. X-style stalker enemy, but I think these peppered minor foes that you are expected to defeat might work better in D&D.

Anyway, with the house safe to explore, they solved some very minor puzzles (some of which were less puzzles than just "do the obvious thing, but it's creepy or gross," like reaching down into a murky toilet (as a concession to taste, I made the druid realize that the murky water was not sewage, but groundwater that had seeped into the plumbing).

Opening the door in the courtyard, they descended through a tunnel into what they didn't realize was a kind of overlap between the physical world and the Shadowfell, where Henry Wortham, the author, was trapped (very much Alan Wake-style).

At the end of the corridor, they found a radio, which they could tune to hear Henry's voice, where he described how he was held by four captors he couldn't fight back against. Those captors, or perhaps manifestations of them, emerged from the darkness around the radio using Grimlock stats.

The fight... did not go well for our heroes.

I think there were a couple factors at play: first, once one of them went down, it was a nasty death spiral. And with only two players, there just wasn't enough of an opportunity to get someone up and also keep the pressure on the monsters.

They did take two of the Grimlocks down, but when they tried to run, there just wasn't the opportunity to get away - especially when one of them was unconscious, but even if they were both fine, any movement they did could be matched by the monsters.

I will say, when I first started running D&D, I would tend to have them fight individual monsters with the maximum CR that the DMG said they could handle. This led to some profoundly anticlimactic fights, where the players killed the monster before it could do anything. The 2014 DMG also added a multiplier to the challenge of a fight as you added more monsters, which meant that if you wanted to overwhelm them with numbers, you'd wind up really straining your XP budget just to throw a much of CR 1/8 creatures at a 3rd level party.

But perhaps there was some wisdom to that.

After all, the Ogrillon and the Grimlocks were actually perfectly equivalent in terms of XP (200 for the Ogrillon and 50 apiece for the Grimlocks) but the action economy really favored the Grimlocks, with four attacks apiece as opposed to the Ogrillion's one.

The Grimlocks also only have 11 HP compared to the Ogrillon's 52, which means that the total damage required to take all four down is less, but that damage has to be put out to four different targets. And while 11 isn't that much HP, at level 2 at least, even a great-weapon-wielding Fighter who is hitting for 1d10+3 with their attacks is actually less likely to one-shot one of them than not, meaning that you're talking about probably like 8 total successful hits total to bring the four Grimlocks down. That's 4 rounds for a two-player party, which means the Grimlock team is getting 16 attacks in that time.

I had a similar experience running a low-level side-campaign. This was a fully 4-player party at level 3, but I had picked a bunch of low-CR monsters who all had two attacks apiece. Even though they were all quite weak monsters, I had to nerf the fight mid-stream because it was clear that they were just going to overwhelm the party with little recourse (I basically just took away their multiattack).

Now, fights can and should sometimes be deadly and dangerous, to make the stakes meaningful.

But I think at these low levels (and admittedly, running with just two players really threw combat balancing out of whack - even if we had six Grimlocks against three heroes, there would have likely been a little more at the party's disposal in general. Maybe the Dragonborn Ranger could have done some AoE damage with a breath attack, for example) the difference between a reasonably-balanced encounter and a deadly clusterfuck is on a razor's edge.

As I had said, though, the party had plot armor. Much like how failure in Alan Wake II is rationalized as a draft to be fixed with editing, I had Henry Wortham decide that this wasn't going to work on getting him out of the Shadowfell, and so both Oro and Lorraine came back to consciousness in the actual campaign adventure, the memory of this spooky house fading like a forgotten dream.

Technically, though, this is the first time I've TPK'd a party. I don't like it.