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.

Path of the Elements Barbarian

 The most controversial choice in the WoW D&D book is that they recommend using the Barbarian to represent WoW's Shaman class. Shamans in WoW, though, are spellcasters, with only one of its three specializations built around melee, and even then acting a bit more like a battlemage/spellsword, weaving spells between melee attacks.

On a thematic level, WoW Shamans do have some overlap with D&D Barbarians, though, in that they are both tied to the primal forces of the world. Still, I would say that playing a Druid would likely give you a more direct analogue to the experience of playing a Shaman in WoW, except perhaps with the Enhancement spec (the aforementioned melee shaman).

But I truly think that the better way to approach the subclasses in this book is to see how they feel in a vacuum, beyond the Warcraft setting. With the possible exceptions of Death Knights and Demon Hunters, nothing I've seen here feels like it needs to be setting-specific, and there's sufficient overlap between WoW and D&D's style of fantasy that even the spells should fit quite easily into the Forgotten Realms or any other D&D setting.

Barbarians did already have an elemental-themed subclass before in the Storm Herald Barbarian, but that subclass, unfortunately, sucked. By going back to the drawing board will we see a glow-up akin to the Elements Monk? Let's find out.

Oh, and credit here goes to the Dungeon Dudes, who have released a two-hour video giving their own thoughts on all the subclasses, which is how I'm getting the features here.

Level 3:

Raging Elements:

When you activate your Rage, and then as a bonus action while raging, you can unleash an elemental effect from the following options. You use your Constitution as the ability to set spell attack and save DCs for this.

Icefury: You make a melee or ranged spell attack against a target within 30 feet. On a hit, this deals cold damage to them equal to a number of d8s equal to your Rage bonus. The next time this creature takes Fire damage before the end of your next turn, that damage is increased by 1d10.

    So, on a hit, this is going to be 2d8, then eventually scale up to 3d8 and finally 4d8. This will take your bonus action, so you're actually somewhat disincentivized to go the dual-wielder route. Note that we don't have to be the source of the fire damage to get the bonus d10.

Lava Burst: You target a creature within 30 feet, who must make a Dexterity saving throw, taking d4s equal to your Rage bonus in fire damage on a failure, or half as much on a success. The next time that the target takes lightning damage, the damage is increased by 1d8.

    Here we start to see the idea: you use Icefury on turn one, then Lava Burst on turn 2. The damage here is lower, of course, using only d4s instead of d8s, as is the bonus lightning damage, but the one saving grace here is that it's a save-for-half, so there's some guaranteed damage. Great against a Troll (not the playable species, but the standard D&D monster).

Lightning Bolt: You target a creature within 30 feet. The target makes a Dex save, taking d6s equal to your rage bonus on a failure or half damage on a success. The next time it takes cold damage before the end of your next turn, it takes an additional 1d6.

    And there we go - higher up-front damage than Lava Burst but lower bonus damage. Now, in a vacuum, you can of course just rotate through these three options to get the bonus damage each time. But if you have an ally who uses one of these damage types, you're actually pretty well-off just using the same feature over and over and buffing them (it doesn't matter much if the bonus damage triggers off of their thing - it's still ultimately coming from you).

    Damage-wise, if we're talking all hits and failed saves, the net damage if we can always get that bonus damage that Icefury does on average is 14.5 at first, then climbs to 19, and then 23.5. Lava Burst will do 9.5, then 12, and then 14.5. Lightning Bolt will do on average 10.5, then 14, and then 17.5. However, because you get half damage on Lava Burst and Lightning Bolt, this compensates a little for their lower damage. (If we had a 60% hit chance on Icefury, at level 10 this will be 12.35, while Lava Burst with a 50% chance to fail is 9 damage on average and Lightning Bolt is 10.5. Actually, that's not quite true - I think the bonus damage happens regardless, so it skews a little further to Icefury's favor).

    Now, how does this compare with the extra damage from Berserkers and Zealots? This takes our bonus action, while they will get their damage as part of their action. So while a Berserker is adding 2d6, then 3d6, then 4d6 on the first attack with reckless attack per turn, or 7/10.5/14, they could also be dual-wielding and get significantly more damage that way (though I do think even for Barbarians, Great Weapon Master remains the ideal option - which is at least more compatible with this). Zealots will get 1d6 + half their Barbarian level, so I think 1d6+1 to begin with (4.5 average) but eventually 1d6+10 (13.5). So that is less, though again, it's part of their action, allowing them weaponize their bonus action after turn one in some way.

    Conceptually I really like this, and I think it's decent, though it would be way better if we could use Strength for the spell attacks and to set the save DC. Still, Barbarians like a high Con, so we're probably not that far behind (I'd guess most Barbarians start with a +3 to Con). It is also, notably, a bunch of ranged options, but you also don't get punished for being in melee.

Level 6:

Echo of the Elements:

You learn the Elementalism cantrip, and you can expend a Rage to cast Daylight, Water Walk, or Wind Wall, using Wisdom as your spellcasting ability.

    As the only 6th level feature, this is a real bummer. The spells are cool, but you also can't really use them in combat, as Rage not only doesn't allow you to cast spells, but also prevents you from maintaining concentration on spells. Wind Wall in particular I don't really see being useful outside of combat.

Level 10:

Primordial Bond:

While raging, you gain resistance to Cold, Fire, and Lightning damage.

    Ok, this is decent, but a bit bland. These are all very common magic damage types (though very encounter-dependent).

Level 14:

Elemental Overload:

Your raging elements gain additional effects:

Icefury: Hit or miss, the target subtracts half the damage dice total from its next damage roll equal to half the damage dice total (rounded down) you deal with Icefury.

    Ok, so you can kind of dampen a foe's damage this way. We're looking at an average damage at this level of 13.5, so about 6 damage off of what they roll. It's not enormous, but not insignificant.

Lava Burst: The target and any enemies within 10 feet, regardless of how the target did on its saving throw, begin Burning.

    This is actually a hazard (not a condition, technically) that causes a creature to take 1d4 fire damage at the start of its turns until an action is used to put them out. This is very tiny damage by level 14, but it is technically AoE damage and will trigger concentration saves and also shut down regeneration in some monsters.

Lightning Bolt: The lightning jumps to a second target within 30 feet, triggering the same save and damage.

    Ok, well, that is effectively doubling the power of this option if we have a second target. Here, I will have to say that the video I'm using as a source does kind of abbreviate these descriptions rather than giving us the direct text, so I'm not clear on whether the bonus damage from each Raging Elements option happens regardless of successful saving throws or missed attacks. I'd hope it would, in which case this would debuff two targets to take bonus cold damage.

Overall Thoughts:

    I think this is fine. It's not great. The core mechanic is actually very cool, and in a vacuum might even be pretty well-balanced. It's rare that a fight goes for a lot more than 3 rounds, but especially given you can do this on the first turn when you rage, there's actually a decent chance you can get through one full rotation if that's what you want to do.

    But I also think playing to your allies' strengths is a great option as well. If you have a Wizard who uses Fire Bolt as their main cantrip, and maybe uses Fireball as a bread-and-butter leveled spell, you can just keep doing Icefury. Actually, if you get a Flametongue weapon of some sort, just do Icefury before your attack action every turn.

    The only problem I have with this is that they seem like they kind of gave up after coming up with Raging Elements. I feel like there's a world where you get special dispensation to cast Fireball, Lightning Bolt (or Chain Lightning, an iconic Shaman spell), and Cone of Cold while raging.

    There's very little here defensively - just the damage resistances. And that's not nothing. But it does feel like this wanted some extra oomph. I'd have loved, for example, to recycle some of the Giant Barbarian's ability to be kind of a ranged Barbarian (especially given that this is presented as the subclass to play WoW's Elemental Shaman, which is a ranged spellcaster).

    Like: here's how I think of this: as a DM, I would not warn a player away from taking this subclass. I think it'll be fine and flavorful. I just think they could have gone harder with it.

Warrior of Mystic Brews Monk

 My first character in Adventurer's League was a Way of the Drunken Master Monk. I loved playing him, but when you lay out the subclass's features, it's clearly not the kind of "optimized" character you find in AL usually. For a class that, especially in 5.0, needed a fair boost from its subclass, you weren't getting a ton. Particularly bad, in my opinion, was Drunkard's Luck, the level 11 feature, which allowed you to expend two Ki points to cancel disadvantage on a d20 test (not that that term was used yet). Not just get advantage, but only cancel disadvantage, and the cost of two ki points.

The thing is, flavor-wise, I love the Drunken Master. It's a really fun idea, going for the tradition of Drunken Boxing, popularized and made famous by Jackie Chan (the degree to which this was ever used practically as an actual combat form is... unclear. But martial arts have often been a meditative and performative practice as well).

Now, World of Warcraft has, actually since before even WoW, had the idea of the Pandaren tradition of the Brewmaster (Chen Stormstout was one of the allies you could get for Rexxar in the "Founding of Durotar" campaign in Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne). Brewmasters combined martial arts with literal brewing of beer-like tonics and elixirs that could be used both to enhance themselves in combat and also as a weapon, spewing flammable brews on foes to burn them.

I had always thought that, given the heightened fantasy of D&D, it would make sense for Drunken Master monks to have some kind of brewing mechanic. Well. Guess what? The WoW crossover book is going to do exactly that in order to better embody the Brewmaster Monk from WoW. Let's look at the features. (Again, credit to Insight Check's video as my source.)

Level 3:

Bonus Proficiency:

Starting with the most minor feature, we get proficiency with Performance and Brewer's Supplies if we don't already have it.

    I would have liked to give them Alchemist's Supplies as well, but this is pretty minor. Performance is rare to use even on a Charisma character, but I'd also encourage DMs to let you make Dexterity Performance checks if it's a display of your martial arts techniques.

Drunken Technique:

When you expend a focus point using Patient Defense, your speed increases by 10 feet until the end of the current turn and you can make one Unarmed Strike immediately after the bonus action.

    So, this used to go off of Flurry of Blows, and would give you the speed increase and prevent you from taking opportunity attacks. A FP-spending Patient Defense now gives you both dodge and disengage, so this kind of makes up for the loss of your unarmed strike by giving you an unarmed strike.

    The only reason this isn't strictly a nerf is that you will get the benefits of dodging, though if we were using this to get away from foes, that might not be that helpful. That being said, you will be able to use this offensively - if you need an extra 10 feet to get to your target. Still, I think this could have been redesigned more radically, and right now it seems pretty bad, honestly - like, I'd prefer the Xanathar's version.

Level 6:

Tipsy Sway:

You get two benefits:

Leap to Your Feet: When you are Prone, you can stand using just 5 feet of movement.

    Unchanged, and certainly situational, but nice to have. Given Monk speeds, that 5 feet is nearly nothing.

Redirect Attack: When an enemy misses you with an attack roll, you can take a Reaction and spend 1 FP to cause that attack to hit one creature of your choice other than the attack that you can see within 5 feet of yourself.

    This is also unchanged. This situation might not come up as often as you like, given that you probably don't want to be in melee with two enemies at a time. But you sometimes are, and you can also use this on a ranged attack. But if you can turn one of the monsters' really hard-hitting attacks on one of its allies, this is great - when you can pull it off.

Mystic Brew:

When you finish a long rest while holding Brewer's Supplies, you can use that tool to magically produce a magical beverage with one of the following properties. A pint of the beverage appears in a bottle of flask you are carrying. If any beverage remains when you finish another short or long rest, it vanishes.

Only you can benefit from drinking the beverage. You must drink the full pint to gain its benefit, which takes 1 minute to drink. You then gain the benefits for 1 hour or until you drink another beverage.

    We will see how to extend this, but long story short: you get a buff potion that you can create every rest.

These are the beverage options:

Cinnamon Dragon: You can take a Magic Action to exhale toxic flames in a 30-foot cone. Each creature in the cone makes a Dex save (based on your Focus DC). On a failed save, the creature takes Fire damage equal to four rolls of your Martial Artts die and has the poisoned condition until the end of its next turn. On a success, they take half damage only.

    Now this is where we get cooking. At this level, this will be 4d8 damage, or about 19 on average, which replaces two attacks that are probably doing 1d8+4 each, or 8.5 each, meaning that even against a single target, this is going to probably out-damage your attacks (obviously AC versus Dex save bonuses for the monster can change this, though its save-for-half nature gives us almost a Graze-like benefit here). While getting magic items like Wraps of Unarmed Prowess might skew this a bit, if we can hit more than one target, this is going to basically always out-damage are regular attacks. Then, there's the poison aspect, which is also great. The only times I wouldn't use this is if we're fighting creatures that are immune to fire damage or if we really need to be careful not to hit friends or civilians. Remember that you no longer need to take the Attack action to use your bonus action unarmed strike or Flurry of Blows (and can even do those before your action,) so this can really be used liberally.

Heavenly Spirit: You gain resistance to two of the following damage types: Cold, Necrotic, Psychic, or Radiant.

    This one's more situational: do you know what kind of damage you're expecting to encounter?

Refreshing Dip: You have a pool of dice the same type as your Martial Arts die. The maximum you can have is equal to your Wisdom modifier plus half your Monk level rounded down. Whenever you regain HP, you can expend and roll one die from this pool to regain additional HP equal to the number rolled.

    So, this can be a decent healing boost, though the size of the pool is pretty big: with a +3 to Wisdom, at this level you'll have six dice. Are you likely to be healed six times over a day? It does pair really well with an ally's Lay on Hands - just have them hit you with a single point and then roll the die. But yeah, my default Brew will certainly be Cinnamon Dragon.

Finally for this feature, when you create a magical beverage, you can expend 1 FP to extend its benefits to 8 hours.

    I would recommend you do this every time. 1 hour is decent, but 8 hours means having this up effectively all day. Even if you do have a 16-hour adventuring day, you'll probably have a Short Rest somewhere in there to refresh this. Now, because you make the brew at the end of the rest, I assume you'll need to always have that one point "invested" in the brew, and don't just immediately get it back (otherwise, why would we even have this cost?) But I think that's super worth it. Again, unless you really need the benefits of the other two, I think Cinnamon Dragon should be your default choice any day you're expecting combat and aren't in, like, the elemental plane of fire.

Level 11:

Wizened Brewer:

You gain three new options for your Mystic Brews feature.

Blue Lightning: Whenever you take a reaction that isn't making an opportunity attack or casting a spell, you can make one Unarmed Strike as part of that reaction.

    Monks use reactions all the time for Deflect Attacks, so you can punish a foe for striking you. I don't know that this is going to necessarily be an extra attack every round, but it's going to probably be a lot of extra attacks. Funnily enough, this lets you punish a foe for landing a hit on you with this and punish them for missing you with Tipsy Sway.

Drunkard's Luck: You gain Heroic Inspiration if you don't already have it. In addition, you can give yourself Heroic Inspiration when you make an ability check or saving throw without it.

    So, we need to parse this: I think there are two readings. One is that you effectively can just have advantage on all ability checks and saving throws, which would be insane. A more conservative reading is that you get it on every other one, as the check or save you make without it can't use that Heroic Inspriation, but the next one can. Even with this more conservative reading (and one that I actually think is less likely,) this is quite good. (Infinitely better than the original version of Drunkard's Luck). Notably, this is also going to be far better in non-combat situations, where you're mainly making ability checks, so a great choice for a day of cloak-and-dagger intrigue or the like (but which is still useful in combat if it breaks out).

Stumbling Monk: When you take a bonus action other than Patient Defense, you can also use Patient Defense immediately after that Bonus Action.

    This one's a bit wonky, but the simplest upshot is that you'll basically always be Disengaging with this, as Monks basically never don't use their bonus actions. However, in a bizarre way, you can kind of turn this into a means of pumping out more attacks: You use Flurry of Blows (at this level adding three attacks) and then spend a second FP to get the dodge part of Patient Defense, which, with Drunken Technique, gives you an additional unarmed strike, letting you make 4 attacks with one bonus action.

    I still think that Cinnamon Dragon gives these a run for their money, but while the other two options at level 6 were probably more situational and not as good, these three all look like they have a lot of potential, and I'm not sure which of these really is the best "default" option. That's a good thing, though, because I think all of these are good and well worth the 1 FP to get them for 8 hours. (And if Drunkard's Luck lets you use the Heroic Inspiration the moment you get it, that's kind of insane.)

Level 17:

Master Brewer:

When you create a magical beverage using your Mystic Brew feature, you can choose two different options and produce one magical beverage. Drinking it will provide the benefits of both options.

    This is great. This lets you have a bit more flexibility, and potentially work in something that is going to be more situational with something else that is more broadly useful, or just in general have two really great benefits working at the same time. The fact that these buffs will both be maintained for just a single FP (which at level 17 isn't that expensive) is very nice.

Intoxicated Frenzy:

Immediately after you use Patient Defense, you can move up to your Speed. During this movement, whenever you enter a space within 5 feet of a creature, you can make an unarmed strike targeting the creature. In addition, when you hit a creature with an unarmed strike granted by this feature, they make a Dex save or are knocked prone. We can only target a creature with these unarmed strikes once per turn.

    An update to the original subclass capstone, this is better. First off, if we have Stumbling Monk going, this means that we will always be able to effectively dash whatever bonus action we take. If we use Step of the Wind, we'll be able to move twice our speed as a bonus action if we have that brew up, meaning we'll be blindingly fast. We will also, thanks to Drunken Technique, potentially get one additional unarmed strike (if we spend an FP). What we essentially get here is a Monk AoE, as at this level we're talking about something like 110 or 120 feet of movement, and then like 165 or 170 (can't remember when we get a 60-foot movement speed) if we do that aforementioned combo. At that speed, we can probably pass by every foe on the battlefield.

    Now, a single attack against all those enemies isn't going to be that much damage, but we could also knock a lot of them prone.

    The real benefit here, though, is that this is free. In fact, we'll never actually need to use our normal free bonus action Unarmed Strike again, because we can just Patient Defense instead and will get at the very least our attack against the target we would have been attacking anyway. Ok, technically if we can't move for some reason, we'll need the normal attack, because we do need to "enter" a space within 5 feet of the target to use this. But if we have any wiggle room at all (and with the disengage from Patient Defense, we don't need to worry too much about where foes are positioned) we should always use this in its place, because of the ability to knock a foe prone.

Overall Thoughts:

    Look, some theorycrafter might find out that this isn't actually that powerful of a subclass, and is still weighed down by endemic problems with the Monk (despite its 5.5 buffs). The Mystic Arts Monk is probably better simply by virtue of being a spellcaster.

    But this is so damn fun. The subclass won't really take off until tier 2, admittedly, though Monks in general are pretty good in tier 1 thanks to their built-in pseudo extra attack. But once you start belching fire, I really feel like this is going to be just super fun to play.

    Man, I really wanted my next character to be darker in theme, but I'm feeling the pull of the whimsical here. I think I actually already did a "vs Wyvern" post on the UA version of this, but I might want to get into the weeds and especially see how the new Monk-targeted feats in the WoW book will affect it. At the very least, I can imagine this becoming one of the top Monk subclasses.

    (This is also the problem with friends who do only years-long campaigns. I really wanted to play the new Elements Monk and have not had a chance, and now this one's pushing it out as the subclass I most want to play.)

Demon Hunter "Ranger"

 Like the Death Knight, the Demon Hunter is one of WoW's hero classes, which is a bit ironic, as both the Death Knight and Demon Hunter are probably more accurately "antihero" classes.

While Death Knights are a pretty ubiquitous fantasy trope that dates back at least to the Ringwraiths from Lord of the Rings, WoW's take on Demon Hunters is very different from what you might find in other IPs. At the most basic level, the thing that makes WoW Demon Hunters distinct is the answer to the following question: "Do you mean you're a demon who hunts or someone who hunts demons?" which these guys would answer "Yes."

So, the background is that ten thousand years ago, the Night Elf Illidan Stormrage more or less acted as a double agent, ostensibly working alongside the Highborne collaborators who had sworn themselves to the demonic Burning Legion while actually working actively to subvert the Legion's plans. Put into a position to commune with the Dark Titan himself, Sargeras flooded Illidan with fel energy, burning out his eyes while giving him nightmarish visions of the Legion's apocalyptic goals. Blinded but now imbued with second sight, Illidan used the demonic powers he had been granted to help bring the invasion to an end. However, because of his perceived betrayals and his use of forbidden Fel magic, he was imprisoned by the Night Elves' Wardens, where he remained in a dark vault for ten thousand years.

When the Scourge invaded Kalimdor during the Third War, a desperate Tyrande Whisperwind broke into the vault and released Illidan, hoping that his expertise in demonology would help them deal with the Scourge's then-masters in the Legion, the Dreadlords. Aided, ironically, by Arthas Menethil (who, as champion of the Scourge, sought to help the Lich King free the Scourge from its Legion masters,) Illidan consumed the profound fel magic of the Skull of Gul'dan, transforming him into a half-demon and giving him the power to strike down the Dreadlords' leader Tichondrius.

Having once again helped to secure victory by becoming even more monstrous, Illidan fled into exile following the Third War, but this time, he brought with him a contingent of sympathetic Night Elves, whom he began to train in his arts. Later, when the Blood Elves came to him seeking a way to sate their magic addiction, he took in a number of them as well. These Illidari now became an entire army of Demon Hunters, whom Illidan led in guerrilla attacks against the Burning Legion across many worlds.

So yeah, these aren't just simple monster hunters, but people who have transformed themselves into half-demons like Illidan. Each holds within them a demonic soul, and they also ritually gouge out their own eyes, letting the demonic power within them grant them second sight. Traditionally, they fight with warglaives, large bow-shaped double-headed swords that they dual-wield, essentially turning themselves into living buzzsaws.

Only elves have ever become Demon Hunters, and only recently were Void Elves able to join their ranks, though it's not clear if this is a physiological requirement or just a cultural history.

Like the Death Knight, the Demon Hunter uses the framework of an existing class, in this case the Ranger, while going a bit beyond a normal subclass by changing some of the existing base class features. Let's take a look:

Level 1:

Spellcasting:

You can use an Arcane Focus instead of a Druidic focus for your spellcasting.

    This is 99% just flavor. Indeed, Staves count as both arcane and druidic foci, and are the only ones I believe that are automatically also a standard weapon type (the Quarterstaff.)

Level 2:

Deft Explorer:

When you pick languages for your Deft Explorer feature, you can choose Eredun and Nathrezim as options.

    Another very minor thing. Both Eredun and Nathrezim are languages of different types of demon, with Eredun as the kind of "lingua franca" of the Legion, based on the language of the Man'ari Eredar (and thus probably very similar to the Draenei language) while Nathrezim is the language of the Dreadlords, whose real name is... Nathrezim. The Dreadlords are a bit unusual among demonkind, though their origins in the Shadowlands are... something I bet a lot of DMs will want to ignore given how convoluted that makes the story (mind you, the Natrhezim are at least from by far the coolest part of the Shadowlands, it's just that this plot reveal was... a wild choice).

Fighting Style:

You gain a new fighting style option: Void Warrior.

Void Warrior: You learn two cantrips from the Warlock spell list, which count as Ranger spells for you and use Wisdom as their spellcasting ability.

    So, the recently-added Devourer specialization in WoW for Demon Hunters is actually a ranged spellcaster. If you want to play in this style, picking up some ranged cantrips to be your bread-and-butter action makes sense. While Eldritch Blast won't get the benefits of all those eldritch invocations, it's still a great option and works well with Hunter's Mark (more or less just like Hex). But you can also potentially pick up some spells like Booming Blade (though we don't get Bladesinger-style extra attack). I'd really only pick this if I wanted to commit to that spell-focused Devourer playstyle and go full Wisdom-focused.

Demon Hunter Spells:

You will get additional spells prepared, with one at each spell level granted to all Demon Hunters and one for your specialization, which is Devourer, Havoc, or Vengeance.

All:

1st: Throw Glaive

2nd: Sigil of Flame

3rd: Metamorphosis

4th: Chaos Nova

5th: Destructive Wave

    All but the last of these is a new spell. Throw Glaive is a surprisingly good ranged attack that works a bit like Chromatic Orb, bouncing to additional targets. I don't remember the details on the other spells quite as well. Sigil of Flame I believe will deal damage to a foe and other nearby foes. Metamorphosis transforms you into a demon with various benefits. Chaos Nova is (if it's like the WoW version) an AoE stun that also deals some damage, likely in an emanation. Metamorphosis in particular is really iconic to the class.

Devourer:

1st: Consume Soul

2nd: Misty Step

3rd: Soul Reap

4th: Collapsing Star

5th: Steel Wind Strike

    Again, several new spells, and these I don't recall so well. Hilariously, I remember that Collapsing Star is either really good or terrible. We'll see when I get the spell in front of me.

Havoc:

1st: Fel Rush

2nd: Eye Beam

3rd: Blink

4th: Fire Shield

5th: Conjure Volley

    Fel Rush is a buff that lets you move faster without provoking opportunity attacks and damage foes you pass by. Eye Beam is a spell that lets you shoot out lines of damage each turn as an action. I actually think Fel Rush will wind up being pretty good for both mobility and some AoE damage

Vengeance:

1st: Infernal Strike

2nd: Fiery Brand

3rd: Demon Spikes

4th: Banishment

5th: Sigil of Chains

    Again, lots of new spells. Infernal Strike sends you flying to a targeted area and then damages foes you land nearby. Fiery Brand I believe is placed on a target and deals some fire damage and (if it's like the WoW version) reduces the damage they deal. Demon Spikes boosts your AC while also punishing foes for attacking you. Sigil of Chains will create an area that pulls foes to the center of it.

    Broadly, of course, we're still half-casters who will rely more on our weapon attacks (in most cases) but there's way more area-effect spells here than Rangers tend to get, so that could be interesting. Half-casters can start leaning a bit more on their caster side especially at higher levels.

Soul Fragments:

Whenever you finish a long rest, you gain a number of soul fragments equal to your Wisdom modifier (minimum 1). These are tiny objects that are like a crystal. They last until you finish a long rest, at which point they disintegrate. If you ever move more than 30 feet from a fragment, it teleports onto you person.

    (So basically just treat it as a resource rather than something in your inventory.)

The number of Soul Fragments you gain on a long rest goes up at levels 13 and 17 by 1 (so Wisdom +1 at 13 and Wisdom +2 at 17).

    Practically, this means we'll have 2 or 3 at early levels, and then possibly by 13 we might have 3-5, and then by 17 probably 6-7.

You can use Soul Fragments in the following ways:

Double Jump: You can expend a soul fragment to cast Feather Fall or Jump without expending a spell slot.

    These are both useful spells, but not hugely impactful. Mainly if this means conserving spell slots, that's good.

Soul Cleave: Once on each of your turns, when you take the attack action, you can expend a fragment and replace one of your attacks with a whirlwind of soul energy. Each creature in a 10-foot emanation from you must make a Dexterity saving throw, taking 1d12 + Wis psychic damage on a failed save, and you regain HP equal to your Wisdom modifier.

    This is a save for none, but I also think no one has to fail a save for you to get the admittedly minor heal. Still, this is sustainable AoE damage, which is pretty good (we'll see how it's sustainable in a moment).

When an enemy dies within 30 feet of you, you can use your reaction to regain an expended Soul Fragment.

    While it'll suck if we've used our reaction already, this is a reasonably generous range and also does not require us to get the killing blow. Realistically, in combat, you should probably be getting a lot of these back, and there's a kind of beneficial feedback loop here, where Soul Cleave might help you take down lots of minor foes and give you back a soul fragment.

    Note that there is a "bag of rats" problem here, so DMs will probably want to define "enemies" as something other than just "that squirrel you decided you don't like."

Spectral Sight:

You have blindsight with a range of 10 feet.

    This is great - a free fighting style, and one that will help in lots of situations, including when you have party members who like to use Darkness (so, Shadow Monks, Shadow Sorcerers, and Warlocks of all stripes). Simple but great.

Level 7:

Torment:

A creature marked with Hunter's Mark has disadvantage on attack rolls against targets other than you.

    It's funny: Rangers have one of the highest hit dice, but unlike Fighters and Paladins, they're not typically put in a "tanking" role. That said, if you're kind of playing against type and fighting with a ranged weapon from afar, this can also be more or less a blanket disadvantage on some major foe as long as you stay away from them.

Additionally, once per turn when you hit a creature targeted by Hunter's Mark, you can impose one of the following effects:

Aura of Pain: The target subtracts 1d4 from the next saving throw it makes before the end of your next turn.

    That's not too bad, and can help set up your allies.

Chaos Strike: The target takes an extra 1d8 fire damage.

    So this means that the spell is ultimately adding 1d6+1d8 to your attacks, though remember that this is once per turn.

    I'm not terribly impressed with this, in part because I'm one of the people who really wish that Rangers weren't forced into using Hunter's Mark all the time. If it was meant to be a core feature of the Ranger class, it shouldn't have been a spell. Or, alternatively, it shouldn't have been a concentration spell. I really liked how the Hollow Warden kind of extricated itself from the 5.5 focus on Hunter's Mark, and it's frustrating to see this subclass, which is meant to even further distinguish itself from the general Ranger, falling back on this design choice.

Level 11:

Illidari Knowledge:

You have new uses for your soul fragments:

Disrupt: You can expend two soul fragments to cast Counterspell.

    So... it doesn't technically say "without a spell slot," though I have to assume that's what is meant here. But it's also not on the Ranger spell list nor any of the subclass spell lists, so is this just to give us access to a spell we normally wouldn't have? If it also takes a spell slot, this is godawful. Counterspell is not nearly as good as it was in 5.0 (which I am happy about). Could be clutch, but probably won't come up much.

Warglaive Mastery: As a bonus action, you can expend a soul fragment to cast Throw Glaive without expending a spell slot.

    Now this is great. Throw Glaive doesn't do a ton of damage (especially for a level 11 character), and we obviously cannot upcast it with this feature, but if we have a spare bonus action, this is a great way to get a bit of extra damage out there. Note that it is a ranged spell attack, so we might have disadvantage on the attack if we're already in melee.

Level 15:

Soul Shatter:

Soul Cleave damage increases by 1d12 (to 2d12+Wis). Also, if you roll initiative and don't have any soul fragments, you regain one.

    Setting aside the light scaling, we have a really frustrating reappearance of the "refill but only on an empty tank" feature that I thought had been consigned to the ash heap of class design history. This should just be "regain an expended soul fragment when you roll initiative."

Level 18:

Improve Spectral Sight:

This replaces Rangers' Feral Senses.

You have Truesight with a range of 30 feet.

    While Truesight isn't strictly better than Blindisght (you can still lose it if blinded,) this feels like a very reasonable progression for the Demon Hunters' ability to see beyond the veil that would be a bit overpowered at low levels. Hold on... is Blindsight actually better than Truesight? I guess Truesight lets you see through physical transformations as well like polymorph, so neither is really strictly better. And Demon Hunters are always looking out for demons disguised as humanoid people.

    Note that Feral Senses would give us Blindsight to 30 feet, and while we do have 10 feet of Blindsight, there's technically a scenario where we could be blinded and then have an enemy 15-30 feet away from us that is now harming us in a way that a normal Ranger wouldn't be.

Overall Thoughts:

    I think that this design is far more conservative than the Death Knight, and that's a shame because while the Death Knight benefits a lot from being on the overall chassis of the Paladin, the Ranger is not as inherently powerful a class (arguably the weakest of the inherent spellcasting classes). I do think that the Ranger makes the best sense to build the Demon Hunter on, but I'd have liked a more radical reimagining of what the class could look like.

    Furthermore, after the Hollow Warden introduced new "tech" to break the Ranger from its 5.5-imposed reliance on Hunter's Mark, the Demon Hunter doubles down on it in a really annoying way.

    All this being said, I do think that the new spells here might be the saving grace - I don't know that these spells are necessarily that powerful, but they do a lot of things Rangers can't typically do, so I'll want to see one of these in play before I resign myself to underwhelmed disappointment.