UA: Defiled Sorcery

 If you had any doubts that this UA was Dark Sun themed, this and the Warlock to follow really cinch it. Dark Sun is ruled over by warring Sorcerer Kings whose magic has blighted the land. If you want a bit of that dark magic, look no further than this subclass, and become a Sorcerer King/Queen/Monarch yourself!

Defiler Spells:

1st: Inflict Wounds, Ray of Sickness

2nd: Blindness/Deafness, Ray of Enfeeblement

3rd: Bestow Curse, Vampiric Touch

4th: Blight, Hallucinatory Terrain

5th: Antilife Shell, Contagion

    So, off the bat I don't know if I'm crazy about any of these spells, except maybe Antilife Shell and Blidness/Deafness. Attack spells are obviously better now for Sorcerers thanks to Innate Sorcery.

Level 3:

Defile and Empower:

(Buckle up, this one's a big one).

Once per turn, when you roll damage for a spell you cast using a spell slot, you can roll a number of your unexpended Hit Point Dice (Hit Dice? What are we calling them these days?) up to a number equal to half the level of the spell slot expended, rounded up, and add the total rolled to one damage roll of the spell, expending the hit point dice.

Life Steal: Alternatively, instead of drawing on your own life force, you can try to steal life from another creature you can see within 30 feet. The creature makes a Con save versus your spell save DC (creatures immune to exhaustion succeed automatically). On a failure, in place of rolling your Hit Point Dice, you roll a number of the creature's unexpended hit point dice (up to half the level of the spell slot expended, rounding down, but still with a minimum of 1 die) and add the total to one damage roll of the spell, and the creature's hit point dice that you rolled are expended for them.

Once a creature fails their save against this Life Steal aspect of the feature, you can't use Life Steal again until you finish a Long Rest or expend 3 Sorcery points to use it again.

    Whoo boy, that's a lot. Flavorfully, this is freaking awesome. My reading of how this works is that if you try to use Life Steal for this, and they succeed on their save, you just don't get to empower the spell. Targeting larger creatures with Life Steal will give a better reward, but big monsters also tend to have higher Con modifiers, so it's a risk.

    As a reminder, in 2024 rules, you get all your Hit Dice/Hit Point Dice back on a long rest, rather than just half, so you can actually afford to be more liberal with this - as long as you aren't also going to need to heal up a bunch on a short rest.

    The bonus damage here is going to be decent - a bit like upcasting. If you use this with Blight, for example, you'll add 2d6 to the spell's typical 8d8. That's a little less than if you were casting Blight at 6th level. A Fireball could also add 2d6, so for the cost of your own potential healing, you could effectively upcast it to 5th level.

    The real shenanigans here is Magic Missile, which officially only uses a single roll for all of its missiles. Is that how, like, any DMs allow you to run it? Not that I've seen. But RAW, even a 1st level Magic Missile will do 1d4+1d6+1, an average of 7 per dart, or 21 guaranteed damage (ask your DM about this outside of the game before trying to pull it out in the middle of a fight, and don't be shocked if they shut it down).

    Also, as a note, if the party is willing to lend their vitality to this, they can opt to fail their saving throws. Have a Barbarian who is willing to toss a d12 or two your way?

Level 6:

Corrupted Caster:

You gain the following benefits:

Defiler's Ward: when you take a bonus action to transform Sorcery Points into a spell slot, you can roll a number of d6s equal to the level of the spell slot created, and gain Temp HP equal to the total rolled.

    My general experience has been that Sorcerers tend to convert spell slots into Sorcery Points rather than the other way around, but if you make a 5th level spell slot, you'd get an average of 17.5 Temp HP on top of the spell slot, so... a decent bonus.

Strengthened Rot: Damage dealt by your Sorcerer spells and features ignore resistance to Necrotic and Poison damage.

    Sadly, this is probably worthless. Almost no monsters are resistant to either of these damage types. Full immunity in both cases is far more common.

Level 14:

Withering Aura:

When you use Innate Sorcery, you create a 15-foot aura originating from you for the duration of Innate Sorcery, which gives the following benefits:

Defiling Shroud allows you to reduce the damage of enemies within the aura when they hit you with an attack roll by an amount equal to your Charisma modifier.

Essence Siphon lets you regain 1d4 Sorcery Points when a creature dies within the aura, but you can only benefit from this once per use of Innate Sorcery.

    Hot damn, this is good. The damage reduction doesn't take any action or have any limit, so if you get swarmed in melee (not great for a Sorcerer, but it happens,) this can potentially save you a lot of damage, and at least help out even against single big hits. The Sorcery Point restoration can be enormous: you don't have a ton of Sorcery Points to begin with. Using Sorcery Incarnate (the level 7 feature for all Sorcerers,) this could potentially make Innate Sorcery a SP-neutral feature if creatures die near you often enough.

Level 18:

Superior Defiler:

You gain the following:

Fouled Soul: You have immunity to the Poisoned and Exhaustion conditions.

    That's freaking great. Immune to Exhaustion? With the nerfing of Exhausion in 2024, more monsters can actually inflict it, and that's a scary condition. Poisoned is more common, but also less scary (and I feel like maybe less common at these high levels?)

Furthered Defilement: Your Withering Aura increases to a 30-foot emanation, and enemies within it cannot restore HP.

    Bigger aura is good. Shutting down healing is situationally good (and pairs well with the Gladiator Fighter).

Overall Thoughts:

    Conceptually, this subclass is very cool. And I do think Defile and Empower, which is the central subclass feature, has the potential to be very powerful. I also think it'd be an interesting challenge to play one of these in Dark Sun - maybe you're the child of one of the Sorcerer Kings, or you have the potential to become one. Can you be a hero when your power is so destructive?