Which Subclasses Should Get a Revision: Bard

 Once again, I'm looking at the many subclasses that came out in 5E before the 2024 core rulebooks to determine which, if any, ought to get a revised reprint. The criteria here are the following: it must have a cool concept that will excite players to try it, and it must have mechanics that fail to live up to that concept.

In other words, this will probably exclude the worst and the best subclasses. The worst because we don't really want to see them again, and the best because we can just use the ones that already exist. Of course, it's a bit more nuanced than that: some of the worst subclasses have actually pretty compelling concepts behind them. We saw with the Warrior of Elements Monk that they can take one of the worst (if not the worst) of all subclasses (The Way of Four Elements) and turn it into something actually quite decent and maybe even really good.

Caveat here: I've never really gotten the Bard as a class. It can be powerful, but the route to that power is generally indirect. So these judgments might require a grain of salt.

I'll give a simple Yes or No regarding each subclass as to whether I think they should work on a revision to it to publish, but I'll explain my thoughts and also touch on how certain I am of that choice. Generally speaking, the bar should be high to get a reprint, as I'd prefer that WotC work on brand-new stuff more often than not.

Swords: No

    I'm a bit torn on this one. When it was released, it more or less occluded the College of Valor as the go-to martial Bard. Valor got some buffs in the new PHB, including a Bladesinger-style extra attack. Now: do we need to see Swords get the same treatment? Would we want them to gain access to Weapon Mastery? Or can we just leave it be? I lean toward that latter choice, but I could be talked into feeling differently.

Whispers: Yes

    I love a spooky subclass, and this subclass is both spooky in a "scary" way and also in a "Cold War spycraft" way. While there is some real power to it, I think that this is a subclass that could use another pass to deal with some very situational subclass features (it's amazing that you can steal another creature's shadow to use as a disguise, but it does not come up a lot in-game).

Creation: No

    This one's more opinion. I don't actually have a great sense of how popular this one is, or how powerful.

Eloquence: No

    Here's an example of a subclass that feels strong in concept (I always imagine playing them like a lawyer) and also strong in mechanics. I think it's powerful enough as is and should be fine to keep as it is.

Spirits: Yes

    I love the idea of this class, and while I'd naturally play one as a Victorian-era spiritualist in a ghost story, you can definitely play this less spookily as just a storyteller physically manifesting your tales. This was always one of those subclasses that just kind of struggled because of the way its action economy worked, and with a few tweaks could, I think, reach its potential.

And that's our Bards! Next, we'll move on to Clerics.

Which Subclasses Should Get a Revision: Barbarian

I tried putting this all in a single post, but realized it was getting really unwieldy, and I think this subject probably deserves a more thorough examination.

Last year, we got a revised Player's Handbook (and DMG - the Monster Manual came out earlier in this interminable year). To mark both the 10th anniversary of 5E and the 50th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons as a whole, WotC released this revision not as a full new edition of the game, but as a modular add-on that could sort of phase-out outdated rules, class designs, and subclasses. 

Emphatically, though, the revisions were not a true new edition, and again and again it was repeated that old content, from adventures to subclasses to species, could still work with these new rules, and to a large extent be mixed-and-matched (though with a certain hierarchy - old subclasses could work with new versions of the classes, but you couldn't play, say a Path of the World Tree 2014 Barbarian. In some cases, new subclasses just wouldn't work with old classes, as they reference features that didn't yet exist.)

To me, this backwards compatibility comes with the implication that we shouldn't expect to see everything get updated. If it ain't broke, it doesn't need a fix. You can play an Order of Scribes Wizard or a Rune Knight Fighter using the 2024 versions of those base classes (just wait until level 3 to get the Wizard's first subclass features).

However, what we have seen WotC do to a large extent has been to introduce a whole lot of revisions to existing subclasses in their Unearthed Arcana playtests as well as actual published books.

For certain, some of the revisions we've gotten, like the Warrior of Elements update to the terrible Way of Four Elements Monk, have truly rehabilitated options that were once nigh-untouchable. There are some subclasses that I think could stand to be reprinted in a revised form.

A few notes:

WotC has shown itself not to actually be that great at doing this. The Banneret Fighter in Heroes of Faerun is only questionably better than the old Purple Dragon Knight (its 2014 predecessor) and is still probably the worst Fighter subclass in all of 5E. (Likely due to the initial playtest version being a radical redesign that gave you an actual amethyst dragon companion, which might have been way different from the lore of it, but would have almost certainly been a better subclass, and no subsequent playtest of the more-in-line-with-the-old-version we got).

The way I intent to evaluate the subclasses is this:

First off, if the mechanics of a subclass are fine, we don't need to touch it. This is going to mean leaving some of my favorite subclasses behind in a lot of cases, like the Undead Patron Warlock (which I honestly would have preferred seeing in the 2024 PHB over the Celestial, as I think it's a more "core fantasy" idea). The Undead Patron was always pretty decent, mechanically, and so I don't think it needs an update (though a setting-agnostic reprint wouldn't be out of the question. Maybe this was a bad example.)

Second, the concept has to be interesting enough for us to revisit it. If the core idea of the subclass is kind of dull, I don't see any need to return to it.

In other words, it needs to have Bad Mechanics and a Good Concept.

We'll be looking at all WotC-published subclasses that have not gotten a reprint already (or aren't known to be getting one in an upcoming project). That does mean skipping the Artificer entirely, as we know that all four existing Artificer subclasses are being published in Forge of the Artificer, which was meant to come in August, and is now coming in December. We will be including those with a revision that made it into Unearthed Arcana, though.

With that preamble out of the way (which I'll skip in subsequent posts,) let's look at the Barbarian subclasses: The Battle Rager, the Ancestral Guardian, the Storm Herald, the Beast, Wild Mage, and the Giant.

Battle Rager: No

    The concept for this is so weird - a Barbarian who must wear armor, and specifically a special kind of armor that functions as a bad weapon. Now, I think that perhaps there is a place for subclasses that go against the grain of their class - the Kensei Monk, for example, made the class that doesn't need weapons now actually want to use weapons. Perhaps an armored Barbarian subclass is an area worth exploring. I think at best, they'd need to build this thing from the ground up, and if you're doing that, probably just come up with something new.

Ancestral Guardian: No

    On the flipside, this subclass actually works just fine. I don't really see any reason to revisit it. Having one of these in my long-running Ravnica campaign, it's a subclass that does frustrate me a bit as a DM, because it really nearly forces you to focus on the Barbarian, but that's the whole point: this is a tank subclass. But it already works fine, so we don't need a new version.

Storm Herald: Yes

    This subclass always seemed very cool, but it was very limited by its design. Not only are its damage bonuses anemic, but the need to pick your storm once and stick with it also meant that the variety and choices it seemed to present weren't actually there. Storms are a classic metaphor for chaos and primordial power, which is core to the Barbarian fantasy, and it would be really great to see this one done justice (which means a better revision than what we've gotten in the UA).

Beast: Yes

    First off, I think they could lean into this subclass as a horror-themed one, really emphasizing a lycanthropic motif. Like any subclass that grants natural weapons, it also really needs to get some kind of scaling with magic items (I really wish they'd designed Wraps of Unarmed Prowess to buff not just Unarmed Strikes, but also natural weapons).

Wild Magic: No

    Don't get me wrong, I like this subclass. It's the most whimsical Barbarian by far. But I don't know that we really need an update to it. This isn't a subclass that I think was every considered overpowered or anything, and I'm sure you could find some way to redesign it for more power. And conceptually, it's fun. But I just don't think we really need to re-do it. Again, the bar to reprinting should be a pretty high one.

Giant: No

    While the World Tree Barbarian has overtaken this one as the "hey, a Bugbear with a Polearm would have an insane reach" subclass, I think that this subclass already works just fine as it is. We've got a decent concept and pretty good mechanics, so there's no real need to return to it.

And unless I'm forgetting something, that's our Barbarians for pre-2024 5E that have not gotten reprinted already. Next, we'll look at the Bard.

Is Midnight Coming Faster than Any Previous Expansion?

 During WoW's first ten years, the folks at Blizzard constantly talked about wanting to release expansions on a faster schedule. The one-year-expansion was a goal that they were constantly chasing. But when they really leaned into that, shortening Warlords of Draenor's patch cycle (other than a kind of nothing 6.1 that gave us in-game voice chat - trying to solve issues that were typically handled via third-party programs) to just one major content patch, it still took just as long to get the follow-up, Legion, together.

While my nearly-40 brain still thinks of Legion as being fairly recent, I realize that younger players (such as there are) might not have even been playing during the shift from Warlords to Legion. Let me tell you this: it was enormous. Warlords was a profoundly anemic expansion, with minimal outdoor world content and one fewer raid than we were used to getting (though starting in Shadowlands, the "intro raid" kind of went away and hasn't come back, so technically there were just as many raids as we got in Shadowlands, Dragonflight, and War Within). Legion is remembered as among, if not the greatest of WoW expansions in large part due to the fact that there was just so much to do.

But I remember at the time, when they justified the limited scope of Warlords by stating their intent to release annual expansions, that I had the following reaction: what if we don't want annual expansions?

New expansions are exciting and fun, but they are also a reset. While you could argue that every major patch is a bit of a reset - gear of a certain quality goes from being the most elite, difficult-to-attain stuff to being trivially easy to grab from world quests, while the challenging content now awards higher item-level stuff than what was previously attainable, there are other factors at play - primarily things like secondary stats, which actually become less effective when we get to higher levels. You spend an entire expansion getting a higher and higher critical strike chance (which can have real notable changes to the feel of a spec like Fire Mages) and then it all goes down again.

But then there's also the monetary factor: expansions are just as expensive as a brand new video game (well, maybe not quite, now that games are going for like 70 bucks in some cases). We're already paying a monthly subscription for WoW, so if you think about it, a 50 dollar expansion every two years means an extra 25 bucks a year, which then doubles if we get more frequent releases.

While Blizzard seems to have thought that they were going to be able to follow up Warlords of Draenor with the next expansion in the fall of 2015, ultimately this proved erroneous - Legion didn't come out until 2016, which meant that we sat with Warlords' final patch for well over a year before we got anything new.

That, clearly, wasn't ideal. I remember that when Legion was announced at Gamescom in 2015, it got a very muted response from the crowd, who seemed skeptical in the wake of the disappointment of Warlords (to be fair, Gamescom is also in Germany, a country with a very different cultural vibe than America, so this muted response might have also just been a cultural thing).

In 2023, when War Within was announced, they took the unprecedented step of announcing the following two expansions, with these three making up the Worldsoul Saga. This strange thing about that is that we didn't really have a grand period of speculation this year about what could be coming after War Within - we already knew, and until the Last Titan comes out, we're on a known path.

In Shadowlands and Dragonflight, we've had a "season four," where all the content that had been released with the expansion rotates to be the new, current content. It's a relatively easy way to give players something to do while they wait for the extensive design, development, and playtesting of the next expansion. I was surprised to find that War Within would not have this.

And, it turns out, Midnight's pre-patch is expected to arrive in January - just two months from now (though toward the end of the month). Pre-patches tend to come only 3-4 weeks (there might have been one that was as much as 6) before the launch of an expansion, which means that we can pretty confidently expect Midnight to launch as early as February or maybe March of 2026.

That would put it far ahead of basically every expansion launch ever. Burning Crusade launched in January of 2007 (the only launch in an odd-numbered year, with Vanilla going through fall of 2004, then all of 2005 and 2006). Wrath came out in November of 2008. Cataclysm was December of 2010. Mists came out in September of 2012. Warlords was November of 2014. Legion was August of 2016. Battle for Azeroth was August of 2018. Shadowlands was November of 2020. Dragonflight was November of 2022. And War Within was August of 2024.

Rounding off to the nearest month (BC's January 16th release date is right on the border, so it's arguable whether January of 2007 ought to count for Vanilla or BC, especially considering how lengthy expansion launches/installations were back then,) I've determined how long each expansion has actually been "the current expansion." Oddly, Shadowlands is the most precisely two-year-long expansion (it was technically two years and five days, as it launched on Nov. 23rd of 2020 and Dragonflight was Nov. 28th of 2022).

Vanilla: 25 months

BC: 23 months

Wrath: 25 months

Cataclysm: 22 months

Mists: 25 months

Warlords: 22 months

Legion: 23 months

BFA: 26 months (to be fair, Shadowlands was delayed due to Covid)

Shadowlands: 24 months

Dragonflight: 23 months

War Within (assuming Midnight launches in late February): 18 months

But yes, this shows that, if Midnight truly launches in late February or early March, the War Within expansion will be the shortest expansion by four months, and down 5.8 months from the average of all previous expansions/vanilla. With typically biennial releases (the average prior is 23.8 months, which is pretty close to 24) we're going to have an expansion that was only a year and a half long.

Is this a bad thing or a good thing?

Well, to be fair, every expansion has had something of a long tail. 3.3's Fall of the Lich King came out in early December of 2009, a bit over a year after the expansion's launch, but then it would be almost exactly a year before the launch of Cataclysm (though Cata had a lengthy pre-patch, which included the old world revamp, so there was new stuff to do prior to the expansion's proper launch).

Ghosts of K'aresh came out in August, so that means that the content lull we usually get after the final major patch of an expansion is significantly shorter, which is probably a good thing (though it does put a little more time pressure on me to try to get an actual full set of hero-level gear and upgrade it to mythic appearances. My main has all but the belt and cloak, the latter of which I'm genuinely not sure how to get).

Now, what does this mean for Midnight and The Last Titan? Should we expect a kind of acceleration of expansion releases? Will we be playing The Last Titan as early as later summer or fall of 2027?

Furthermore, if Blizzard has finally gotten this efficient at putting out new expansions, would we prefer that they just make those expansions bigger instead?

Consider, for example, that in Mists of Pandaria, Legion, and Battle for Azeroth, we actually had four fairly substantial raids. BFA dropped class tier sets, so the actual distinction between Uldir and the later raids was kind of non-existent. But in Mists, Legion, and Warlords of Draenor, there was a kind of "intro raid" that didn't give us tier sets, and shared armor models with the first "major raid," but was still pretty substantive. Mogu'shan Vaults, Highmaul, and the Emerald Nightmare were serious raids that came out before we started getting tier pieces in places like The Heart of Fear/Terrace of Eternal Spring, Blackrock Foundry, or The Nighthold. Previously, we had also had four raid tiers in Wrath of the Lich King. Vanilla and BC were kind of messes in this regard, with lots of raids that didn't totally fit into these paradigms (officially, tier 1 was Molten Core, tier 2 was Blackwing Lair, and tier 3 was Naxxramas, but there were the two Ahn-Qiraj raids that came out I believe between BWL and Naxx that certainly seemed like pretty substantial raids).

Anyway, it's just kind of remarkable that War Within is going to wind up being so short compared to other expansions.

For D&D 2024 To Be a Continuation of 5E, They Need to Stop Reprinting So Much

 We, and by this I mean humans, find comfort in the familiar. It's safe, it's nostalgic.

When the folks at WotC decided to come out with revised core rulebooks for 5th Edition as part of a 50th anniversary project for D&D, they made the decision to not make a clean break with the super-popular 5E rules (which themselves came out during the 40th anniversary) but instead to build upon the system, to add rather than to eclipse.

Now, they had an opportunity to fix various problems that had existed within the game. We saw some classes that had struggled in terms of power enhanced. Others (the Ranger) got big changes that I think didn't quite get them there.

The PHB had something of an obligation to go back to its own existing subclasses and give us updates to them - the subclasses therein were presented as the core of those class' fantasies. They also broadened out options for classes that had been somewhat neglected in 2014, while reining in the two that had, for some reason, gotten far more subclasses. (I don't totally agree with the decisions of which subclasses they picked - the Swashbuckler fantasy feels far more core to the Rogue fantasy than the Soulknife, and I say that as someone who plays a Soulknife.)

However, the promise of 5E 2024 or 5.5e or whatever you want to call it, was backwards compatibility. If you want to play a School of Conjuration Wizard or a Samurai Fighter with the 2024 versions of these classes, you can: there's only some slight adjustments you need to make, like delaying subclass features that used to come at levels 1 or 2 until level 3.

D&D has a long and storied history, with many established campaign settings and adventures. Many of 5E's early adventures were new takes on classic ones: Princes of the Apocalypse was its remake of the Temple of Elemental Evil. Curse of Strahd was the remake of the original Ravenloft module. Tomb of Annihilation was a riff on Tomb of Horrors.

These, however (at least Curse of Strahd and Tomb of Annihilation) were well received because they added a ton, and really felt remade from the ground up.

To be sure, a lot of 5E character options are like that: I think either 3.5 or 4E had an "Avenger" that was transformed into the Oath of Vengeance Paladin subclass.

But this was necessary: the way that the game worked in previous editions was, I believe, different enough that you couldn't just plug in an old subclass to the new system and expect it all to work (in fairness, I think 3.5 was pretty close).

Of the two books with new character options coming out in 2025 - Forgotten Realms: Heroes of Faerun and Eberron: Forge of the Artificer, there are a total of 13 subclasses. Seven of those are revisions of existing subclasses.

Now, I'll concede that the Artificer ones (which make up 4 of the 7) probably needed to come with the revised Artificer. Like the 2024 class revisions, the Artificer is getting some significant changes (though we'll have to see it in print to know precisely what changes those are - the biggest I recall is the change from infusions to everything being Replicate Magic Item, with no base item required).

However, what we have seen in the Unearthed Arcana playtesting materials has been, by a huge majority, previously-existing stuff.

Worst, in the most recent one, only a handful of the subclasses presented have any real meaningful changes. The Path of the Spiritual Guardian is only slightly, slightly different from the Path of the Ancestral Guardian. I don't need a new version of this.

Now, to be fair, Heroes of Faerun does give us some truly new stuff, and even as early as Xanathar's Guide to Everything, we were getting some reprints (the Swashbuckler and Mastermind, and Storm had appeared in SCAG, if memory serves).

But I think the danger that WotC could fall into with 5.5e is that they seek to just sell us the same stuff with minor tweaks, relying not on excitement over cool new ideas but more on a fear of not being "up to date" on things.

And I think that the brand will suffer a lot if the latter is stronger than the former.

Now, I think there is a distinction to be made here:

I like the new Bladesinger, but I don't think we needed it. The Bladesinger was already a very popular subclass, and needing only to delay picking it up one later level would have been a perfectly acceptable "update" to it in 5.5.

A subclass like the Purple Dragon Knight/Banneret, on the other hand, was absolutely godawful, possibly the worst subclass in all of 5E. Thus, you could imagine that i'd be an interesting one to revisit and make actually good. Sadly, the new Banneret is... well, it's better than the SCAG version, but I mean that very much to damn with faint praise.

See, I think that there should be two gates that a revamped subclass has to go through: first, it needs to be an exciting, cool thing that players would want to see again. Second, it needs to have failed to live up to its potential.

I will say that, in the recent UA, I found that the Warrior of Intoxication (terrible name) did at least start to add something really fun to the old Way of the Drunken Master. The brewing mechanic, while it needs some serious iteration, added something truly cool and fun and powerful to a subclass that needed something like that (also, to those, like the folks on the Eldritch Lore Podcast, who didn't like adding this mechanic to a subclass based on a real - if possibly only performative - martial arts style, I would ask you: you know this is a fantasy game, right? That we don't need to be bound by the real world? Let me belch flames!)

Truly, though, what I want is for at least 80% of new character options to be truly new, or at least for them to be truly new to 5E. Backwards compatibility is kind of meaningless if you're just going to update everything from 2014-2023.

I already own Xanathar's Guide to Everything. I don't want to buy it again.

Using Vampires in D&D 2024

 In the 2025 Monster Manual, the idea of "variant" monsters, which in 2014 were shown through green boxes with various tweaks you could make to a monster, was set aside in favor of just giving us full stat blocks. This was also done with the Dracolich and Shadow Dragon templates, which were overlayed, essentially on existing dragons.

Vampires are, of course, the quintessential gothic horror monster. While there are higher-CR undead creatures, like the Lich or the Death Knight (and I was so happy that they made the Death Knight legendary in 2025,) the Vampire does hold a certain mystique to it. Of course, Count Dracula is arguably the most iconic horror villain of all time, and I think there's something about how a vampire's thirst for blood has, at least since Stoker's novel, become a metaphor or analogy for sexual urges and the discomfort we feel around them. In fact, I was wrong in the previous sentence, because Stoker's novel was itself a bit of a response to the decades-older novel Carmilla, in which a female vampire preys on a young woman, with heavy implications of a homosexual undertone to the whole affair. (Viewers of the Castlevania anime from a few years back might recognize her as the vampire who rivals Dracula's power. Also, Varney is from an even older serialized story from the mid 19th century).

In D&D, Strahd von Zarovich is canonically the original vampire within its multiverse, transformed into the undead abomination by the Dark Powers and becoming the first of Darklord of the Domains of Dread.

Vampires are hard to kill: historically, there were various folk beliefs on how one must deal with them - sometimes burying them face-down so that if they tried to claw out of their graves they'd only dig themselves deeper, or beheading them and placing their head between their legs, or plunging an iron or wooden stake within their heart. Real peoples' remains have had these treatments, often when the body (for whatever reason) failed to decompose quickly enough and elicit fears that they weren't truly dead.

In our modern era, nerds tend to come up with some strict pop-culture rules about monsters that were generally looser when people (or I should say when a large proportion of people) actually believed these things existed. Generally, there are two really pervasive ideas about how a vampire can be killed: exposure to sunlight and a wooden stake to the heart. Sometimes fire or beheading are also included (I watched through the entirety of Buffy the Vampire Slayer during my freshman year of college, right after the show had ended, and for the most part, I think of "The Buffy Rules" as the most broadly agreed-upon rules about vampires, perhaps with the exception of their faces changing when their fangs came out - that was a stipulation by the network to make it clear that the things this teenage heroine was killing were not just people).

The 2025 Monster Manual gives us a veritable feast of vampire monsters to choose from. While the 2014 one gave us the Vampire Spawn (a lower-level vampire that could be a threat to a tier 1 party, but will start to be the sort of monster you fight in droves as you get into higher tier 2) and the Vampire, a CR 13 legendary monster, meant to represent a true and genuine threat, and a reasonable tier 2 endboss.

We did get a Vampire Warrior and Vampire Spellcaster variant for this, which bumped it up to a CR 15, though it was mostly just some tweaks.

2025 gave us some interesting new options:

The Vampire Familiar isn't actually a vampire, at least not yet. They're a humanoid servant of the vampire, playing a character like Renfield (though not actually the way Renfield is in the book itself, where he's really just a mentally disturbed victim rather than any sort of actual help to Dracula) or actually like the familiars in What We Do in the Shadows (to take a far sillier example) like Guillermo (on the TV version of it).

Now, both the Vampire Spawn and Vampire can work quite well as your standard "hot vampire." The Vampire Nightbringer, new to 2025, is quite different.

Notably, while vampires in most media look pretty much like humans, except perhaps they are paler (due to their inability to go into the sun) and have those nice sharp canines, occasionally they are depicted as far less human. Count Orlok, in F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu - which was literally an unauthorized adaptation of Dracula with all the names changed to avoid a lawsuit (and some changed plot details,) showed its central vampire as this hunched, hairless, truly inhuman creature (also, he had fanged incisors rather than canines).

This style of vampire does show up in vampire fiction sometimes, and sometimes also incorporates bestial features like big, bald wings. In Francis Ford Coppola's film, Bram Stoker's Dracula, the vampire has many different forms, including one that is extremely bat-like (true to the novel, he's also able to go out in the day, his powers somewhat diminished, but in this case he just looks like Gary Oldman when he was in his mid-30s, in period costume). Still, though, we have other examples to look at: Again, looking to Buffy, the lore in that show is that the first human vampires were created by vampiric demons called Turok-Han, and the most ancient vampires, like the first season's big bad, The Master, start to look more like them over time. Also, the being mistaken for an angel in Midnight Mass is a pale-skinned, hairless winged figure who is, despite the misapprehension by Father Paul, is most certainly a vampire.

Nightbringers are vampires in this mode. They are tougher than Vampire Spawn, but not legendary creatures and at a lower CR than the legendary versions. As a note, these can fly, and they are also bound only by some of the standard vampire weaknesses: they are not harmed by running water and they do not require an invitation to enter a home.

I will also note that Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft gave us creatures literally called Nosferatu. These are nearly the same CR as Nightbringers, but mechanically quite different. But flavor-wise, they are the gaunt, hairless, less-human-looking vampires.

The classic vampire is CR 13, and still operates with a mechanical theme that the old version did - there were some adjustments (they lost their health regeneration and just got more HP to compensate, and then they just do more damage) but the overall idea of them is pretty similar: they can easily charm foes to do their bidding and they are very slippery. They also have a quick way to survive any encounter in which they're reduced to 0 HP, in most cases forcing its foes to track it to its resting place and kill it there. (There are some fiddly rules questions about how this actually works - like if it shouldn't even be able to move if it's at 0 HP while in Mist form, but this is a very "rules as intended" reading required).

But now we come to the Vampire Umbral Lord.

Here's kind of where I wanted the crux of the post to focus on (just got carried away with my preamble): The Vampire proper is clearly built to fill the standard Gothic Horror monster role: the slipperiness and the ability to charm are meant to make hunting it very tricky. Interestingly, the bite attack can be a threat to players if it deals the downing blow, but given that it deals only 19 damage on average, I actually think it makes far more sense for the vampire to threaten friendly NPCs.

In other words: if we are to recreate Dracula as a story in D&D, Dracula is our vampire, the party is Seward, Quincy, Arthur, and maybe Jonathan, while the goal is to defeat the vampire before Lucy and then Mina are turned. (Van Helsing is probably our powerful NPC ally).

Don't get me wrong: a Vampire can potentially be a tough fight, largely because of their bonus action charm ability, and their actual attacks have become more powerful with the new version.

What role, then, is the Umbral Lord meant to play?

My sense is that the Umbral Lord is the "spellcaster variant" vampire spun out into its own full stat block. Because of this, it actually shares very few abilities or features of the standard vampire. For one, their escape mechanic is far harder to counter: as long as they aren't in sunlight or running water, they simply teleport to their resting place - meaning you can't track or entrap them in Mist form (in fact, they don't have any shapeshifting ability). Umbral Lords don't even actually need to get close to a creature to drain them, having a bonus action drain with a 30-foot range (which I'd flavor like them calling the blood out of a person's body in a stream toward them).

Between this and having the Hunger of Hadar spell as a recharge ability, in a lot of ways, I see the Umbral Lord as stepping a bit out of the Gothic Horror genre and into dark fantasy. The standard Vampire wants to possess and/or drain their victims, and may even, like Dracula, have this agenda of spreading vampirism to create a kind of empire.

The Umbral Lord is the one who wants to blot out the sun and fully transform the world into one of darkness. (World of Darkness?)

A few things come to mind: one is that I imagine a Vampire Umbral Lord to be more likely to be kind of ideological in their ethos and also their methods. Sure, your classic vampires could have some sort of cult of familiars, but these I think would be more likely to be servants (familiars among them). An Umbral Lord, in my mind, is someone preaching apocalyptic visions. I think these could easily have some of your expanded cultist options, especially Death Cultists, working for them.

Likewise, I can see an Umbral Lord being more enmeshed with broader fantasy villains - they might count Liches among their allies (they might even be the lieutenant of a lich) and I could very much see them working alongside fiends of various stripes.

Indeed, the fact that Umbral Lords have access to Hunger of Hadar makes me feel like they could also be in league with Aberrations.

The art of the Umbral Lord shows a bald, female-presenting vampire in ostentatious clothes. I don't necessarily read that baldness as aligning her with the Nosferatu-aesthetic vampire (she does have eyebrows and lashes, for one thing). But I think you could very easily distinguish Umbral Lords in that way if you wished.

Again, it's perfectly reasonable to just run an Umbral Lord as a vampire who happens to also know some magic (indeed, Strahd is a powerful spellcaster at least in lore).

But to me, I sort of see the vampires in the Monster Manual as representing two "tracks" of vampirism.

The Vampire Spawn and classic Vampire are your staple Gothic Horror monsters, whose threats are terrifying and deadly, but limited in scope.

The Nightbringers and Umbral Lords, though, I see as the kind of vampires that can bring down nations and entire worlds, and whose ambitions are far grander than just getting some more victims to drain.

I re-wrote an adventure I had created for my original campaign earlier this year, and I decided that the distinction for Vampire Nightbringers was that these creatures originated in the Shadowfell, and perhaps aren't actually former mortals, but just born monsters (which helps justify their less pervasive vampire weaknesses).

Umbral Lords could be similar - being of a more ancient, quasi-demonic nature. Unlike Nightbringers, though, Umbral Lords do have the full swath of vampiric weaknesses, which suggests to me that the intent is simply for them to be vampires who have developed these magical powers.

Still, ironically, while the Umbral Lord is a higher-CR monster, I actually think the more natural use for them is to make them less of a horror-threat than a dark-fantasy villain. A classic vampire is going to stalk innocent people without a history of monster-hunting, while an Umbral Lord expects to go up against the world's champions. They might be a particularly cunning and deadly threat, but the genre implied by them is slightly less straight-horror in tone.

That being said, it's not that you can't use an Umbral Lord in a true horror-themed campaign. But I think that you're going to bleed a bit out of the standard gothic horror tropes. That aforementioned adventure does center around an Umbral Lord (when initially written he was going to be a Vampire Spellcaster with a second phase that became a huge homebrewed aberration as he transformed into a "blood god"). In this case, the villain is a millennia-old vampire (who predates even the technologically-advanced civilization that fell three thousands years prior to the campaign) who has been using a brainwashed decoy who is acting like a classic Dracula-like vampire (and is, in fact, just a mortal human) to throw people off his scent and ensnare those who would hunt him. This character, Baron Orszag (Orszag is just the Hungarian word for "Land," as in Magyarország, the Hungarian name for Hungary, which just means "Land of the Magyars," but it sounded cool and in tribute to both Bela Lugosi and my dad's country of origin, it felt right to use a lot of Hungarian words in this adventure) is in league with the campaign's big bad, the leader of a cult trying to use the power of the Far Realm to ascend to godhood.

Thus, while the adventure begins with pretty strict gothic horror tropes and vibes, gradually, the setting's cosmic horror and more advanced technology starts to play a bigger and bigger role.

The only shame of it is that in this entire vampire adventure, I don't actually use the standard Vampire stat block.

Again, I think that the Vampire proper is built for a horror tale. But that's always tough in D&D, because every player character is built to fight monsters. Horror as a genre is almost always about the heroes/victims recognizing that they're seriously outclassed by their foe, and they're forced to adapt and grow in order to stand a chance at surviving.

Now, you can have badass characters in a horror movie: Predator, for example, starts off in classic Schwarzenegger mode, with nigh-invincible soldiers outclassing the enemy soldiers/fighters they encounter. But the movie takes these classic 80s badasses (in an era when action heroes were sort of invulnerable) and then had something far, far deadlier start hunting them, suddenly dropping these tough warriors into the same role as the largely helpless teenagers hunted by Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, and Freddy Kreuger.

Again, I think that a really strong way you could up the horror of a vampire in a D&D game is simply by making the players not the vampire's actual targets: again, if the players are the Van Helsings, tasked with protecting the Lucys and Minas (though perhaps with less 19th Century gender dynamics,) you can make it a lot scarier, because even though the Aasimar Barbarian is not too frightened of an attack that's dealing 1d4+4 piercing and 3d8 necrotic damage, just one of those is going to potentially spell doom for the person they're protecting.

Curse of Strahd, notably, has an NPC who needs protection from him: Irena Kolyana, the object of Strahd's obsession, is a Noble with 14 hit points. Now that 1d4+4 piercing and 3d8 necrotic is looking a hell of a lot deadlier.

But, if you wanted to go the Predator route - to have a monster that truly outclasses the badass adventurers that are your party, when do you first unleash a vampire on them?

A vampire outside of its lair is worth 10,000 xp (naturally we'd want to save the lair for a later, perhaps final encounter). If we assume 5 players, when can we have a high-difficulty encounter with that budget for them? That's 2000 xp per player, which should be a tough fight at level 8 (at which point the high-xp budget per player is 2,100).

But...

Look, I think that that's probably going to be a hard encounter. It might genuinely be quite tough. But I think even with the high-difficulty balance, it's going to be "a tough encounter" and not "a harrowing brush with death." Level 8, after all, is just two levels below the level where you fight Strahd, and while that's also meant to be tough, he's got various additional protections that make his fight last longer.

What I'm looking for, basically, is a level at which a Vampire can drop a party member in just a single round of attacks. We might hold off on actually biting them - while we want it to be scary, we don't necessarily want to perma-kill a PC (though check with your table and see if they're ok with that in a horror-themed game,) so we'll be talking mainly its two Grave Strike attacks. If we want to maximize damage while lessening the likelihood that our PC is slain and rises as a vampire spawn, we can actually do the full multiattack but weave the bite in between the two grave strikes.

Grave Strikes deal 1d8+4 bludgeoning and 2d6 Necrotic damage, and grapple the target. So, that's an average of 15 damage per hit. Two of those do 30. The bite is a Con save, with a save for none, and deals 1d4+4 piercing and 3d8 necrotic, or an average of 19.

If we assume +2s to Con with most characters (+3 is also quite doable,) and average HP on level up, then a d6 character has 8, 14, 20, 26, and then 32 HP at levels 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, respectively. A d8 character has 10, 17, 24, 31, and then 38. A d10 character has 12, 20, 28, 36, and then 44. And a Barbarian (who is more likely to skew toward +3 Con, but we'll stick with this) will have 14, 23, 32, 41, and then 50 by level 5.

Now, of course, the average damage the vampire actually deals is going to be lower, because while they have a quite-healthy +9 to hit and the save versus the bite is 17, even low-level characters might avoid this damage.

Still, I'd probably say level 3 is the lowest the party should be before you pull this on them. If you want to really guard against vamping a PC right at the start, use the bonus action charm person to get the bite off before you do the grave strikes - a willing creature can be a target of their bite. So, bite the 3rd level Sorcerer, and there's at least a chance they'll survive.

Truthfully, though, I think a first encounter with a vampire seems like a reasonable cliffhanger upon which you can get the party up to tier 2 - surviving against one of these monsters would be enough to get them to up their game, and that 4 to 5 jump is a pretty huge one in terms of player power.

I do think you could scare a party that's level 5 or even 6 with a vampire encounter, but I think a tier 1 encounter is the last point at which it will just seem truly impossible for the party to defeat them.

And this first encounter should have something that gets them out of it - have it happen shortly before dawn, so the vampire needs to flee, or perhaps some knowledgable NPC will break a dam or otherwise send flowing water to, again, force the vampire away. Maybe there's some other in-story reason for them to not just kill the party.

Probably the best option here is for this to occur during a seemingly safe downtime period - the party is in a safe town, maybe feeling free to go off on their own to shop for equipment or errands or just RP-ing going off to drink or otherwise unwind.

For a target, the key thing, I think, is to go for someone who will be charmed. Clerics, Druids, Paladins, Warlocks, and Wizards have Wisdom saving throw proficiencies, and of course Rangers and Monks likely have a high Wisdom as well, so targeting an Artificer, Barbarian, Fighter, Monk, Rogue, or Sorcerer is your best bet if you want them to fail the save against Charm Person. (Remember also that Elves, Goblinoids, as well as Gnomes and Satyrs are going to have advantage on their save versus the effect).

This is an opportunity for you to send a message to the players: to announce a new villain. I honestly think that the ideal is that the vampire drops the target without turning them into a vampire (make sure the Bite comes early in their attacks) and then, either the party finds them, or better yet, a Commoner NPC does. Commoners now get a single skill proficiency, so you can make that Medicine - just a good Samaritan comes across the character as they're bleeding out, who can stabilize them (maybe they have a reason to be carrying around a Healer's Kit to ensure that they make the check, or you could just fudge it). (And that Commoner can now be an NPC ally who needs to be protected.)

Horror works really well with a slow build - the big reveal of the monster can be momentarily terrifying, but it's also something of a release. You no longer have to check every shadow when the monster is already plainly in view.

You can also describe the charm spell as a kind of intoxicating effect - maybe the PC doesn't even get a good look at the vampire before they're attacked.

Again, as powerful as a standard vampire is, I just don't see an Umbral Lord stalking the streets for their next meal, so I'd really play them more as the leader of some dark organization with far-reaching plots. In this case, having them show up as a hostile NPC early on could work (or even pretending to be a not-so-hostile NPC) but we're probably not doing the "the Fighter is bleeding out in an alley" first meeting with them.

Cinnamon Dragon and the Action Economy

 I know it's only in UA at this point, and with the massive swath of other subclasses (and even a full class) that have gone through testing in the last year with no announced corresponding book release, it could be a very long time before we actually see an official printing of the Warrior of Intoxication, the recent revision of the Way of the Drunken Master monk subclass.

As I mentioned before, I have a deep affection for the Drunken Master, as it was the subclass for the Monk I played in Adventurer's League. Drunken Master, as a subclass, is conceptually great, but mechanically a bit underpowered, and this revision potentially makes it a lot better.

Of course, it's helped by the fact that the Monk got significantly better in the 2024 revision to D&D.

What intend to focus on, here, though, is the math behind the Cinnamon Dragon brew option you get at 6th level. If there's one critique I have of the UA subclass, it's that I think this brew outshines basically every other option by quite a lot. But I wanted to get a sense of how to optimally use it.

To remind those who don't have the UA out to look at, you can pick one of the subclass's brews at the end of each short or long rest (if you have Brewer's Supplies - DMs, don't take this Monk's Brewer's Supplies away). You then can drink that brew over the course of a minute to get its benefits for 1 hour. You can also invest 1 Focus Point when you finish the rest to make it last 8 hours instead.

(This is a design that I think could lead to some feel-bad situations. I might have it both faster to drink and just last 8 hours by default.)

I'd say that unless you have a very clearly-delineated day of adventure ahead of you, you should probably invest the FP to make it more likely you'll have this always-active, and then drink it the moment you're in any sort of environment with any danger whatsoever (possibly just have it right away).

Now, the Brew I'd go by default is Cinnamon Dragon. This allows you to, as a Magic Action, exhale a cone of toxic flames in a 30-foot cone. Each creature within makes a Dex save. On a failure, they take fire damage equal to four rolls of your Martial Arts die and are poisoned, and on a success, they take have damage only.

As a note, this is better in most ways than the Elements Monk's elemental burst, dealing more damage and being more FP-efficient (in fact, it costs none if you only have the 1-hour version). It is a cone, rather than a sphere, which makes it trickier to place, but you can still get a lot of foes in the area.

The real question, though, is when to use it.

My guess is that it'll always be worth it if you can get two enemies within the cone, assuming they're not immune or resistant to fire damage (this is going to be basically worthless if you're on the Elemental Plane of Fire or in the Nine Hells).

But could this be good even in single-target situations? When would it be worth it to use this instead of taking the Attack action. Notably, thanks to the 2024 revisions, our bonus action attack and Flurry of Blows are now fully independent of what we do with our action - we can even do them before our action. So what we are sacrificing here to spit our flaming brew is just the two attacks we get with our normal attack action.

Naturally, it's hard to model exactly how often a foe will fail their saving throws, because ability scores vary much more than ACs, and saving throw proficiencies can make that even more out of whack.

If we just assume hits and failures, and look at the raw damage, a level 6 Monk with +4 to Dexterity is going to hit for 1d8+4 on each attack, or 8.5 on average. They make two attacks, so the potential there is 17.

Four rolls of our martial arts die, or 4d8, is an average of 18 damage. So we are truly ahead, even against a single foe.

If we get to level 11, when our martial arts die goes up to d10s, and if we've gotten our Dexterity to 20, that means our attack action is giving us two attacks that each do 1d10+5, or 10.5 on average, for a total of 21. But four rolls of our d10 now is 22 average damage.

Then, at 17, when we've got d12s, our two attacks are going to be doing 1d12+5, or 11.5 each, for a total of 23, while our fire damage is 4d12, or 26.

Now, sure, I'd hope that by this point we had gotten our hands on some Wraps of Unarmed Prowess. By level 17, it wouldn't be absurd for us to have +3 versions. So now, we're rolling 1d12+8 per hit, or 14.5, giving us an overall damage of 29 (we'll also be hitting more often because of the Wraps).

But, of course, damage numbers aren't the whole story. If you only hit half the time, you're doing only half the damage (well, a little bit more because of crits).

So, let's imagine a scenario:

Let's say you're fighting some kind of undercity crime boss. A Bandit Crime Lord, to be precise. This feels like the kind of antagonist that Jackie Chan would fight. And at CR 11, they'd be a pretty serious foe for a 6th level character to encounter.

Our Monk, we'll assume, has started off with a 17 in Dex and 16 in Wisdom, taking something like the Grappler feat at level 4 to bring Dex up to 18. Thus, at 6, they have a +7 to hit, and the DC on their abilities (including the brew) is 14.

The Crime Lord has an AC of 17, and their Dex save bonus is +9 (quite hefty, and their best save by far).

On attacks, thus, we're hitting on a roll of 10 or higher, or a 55% chance (and as usual, a 5% chance to crit). The Crime Lord will succeed on a saving throw against the fire on a roll of 5 or higher (80% chance). (By picking this foe, we've certainly skewed things toward attacks, but let's follow through).

So, each attack is going to do 8.5x55%, or 4.675, plus 4.5x5%, or .225, for a total of 4.9. We get two attacks, so that's 9.8 average damage.

Our fire breath is doing 4d8, or 18 damage, or half as much on a success. Thus, 20% of the time, we're doing 18, and 80% of the time, we're doing 9. 18x20% is 3.6, and 9x80% is 7.2, giving us an average damage of 10.8.

Hot Damn!

Yes, it appears that even against a very dex-y foe, the fact that it's a save-for-half effect means that we're still beating the damage of our attacks in a single-target situation. Now, if that guy has a bunch of minions we can catch as well, we're doing absurdly higher damage.

In other words, what I'd suggest for players of this subclass is to always use the Cinnamon Dragon breath in place of attacks with only exceptions for when you A: are facing foes that are resistant or immune to fire or B: can't avoid hitting allies or innocent bystanders in your cone (or if your DM would rule that you set the building on fire, though the feature does not mention igniting flammable objects).

And that's even before we take into account that this will poison foes!

Boy, I really hope they don't nerf this.

Noble Genie: To Splendor or Not to Splendor

 The Oath of Noble Genies Paladin is among the strongest subclasses in Heroes of the Forgotten Realms, and quite possibly the strongest Paladin subclass in 2024 D&D (maybe even all of 5E).

One of the intriguing notions about the subclass is Genie's Splendor, a passive feature that effectively gives you Unarmored Defense, using Charisma in addition to Dexterity to determine your AC.

Paladins generally favor Strength - indeed, officially you need a 13 or more in Strength to multiclass into or out of Paladin. But aside from the Barbarian (who loses their rage bonus if their attacks aren't made with Strength,) any melee build in D&D can go for Dexterity instead by focusing on finesse weapons.

While this will typically come at a slight cost in terms of Armor Class, as without epic boons, feats, or magic items, Medium and Light armor values cap at 17, while Heavy Armor can get you to 18, Genie's Splendor, with the right stat spread, can actually get you beyond what a suit of plate can get you - with +5 to Dex and +3 to Cha (something you can achieve as early as level 8 with point buy/standard array stats) you can get an 18 AC, and this is, in my experience, usually around the level that a character can first afford to buy a set of plate armor. But if you push these stats and cap out your Charisma as well, you can get an AC of 20, which doesn't count wearing a shield.

You will, however, struggle a little to keep up in damage for a couple reasons, which we're going to get into.

As a note: if you plan on a sword-and-board build, there's practically no difference. A strength-based Paladin wielding a Longsword is going to do the same damage (before getting into the intricacies of weapon masteries) as a dex-based one with a Rapier (actually, a Strength paladin can also use a Rapier just as well).

But if you want to maximize your damage output, going Dex is going to mean leaving Great Weapon Master and all the big two-handed melee weapons on the table.

Generally, a character that is going with finesse weapons and wants to maximize damage output will want to go with a dual-wielding set-up. The best weapons for this are a shortsword in your "main" hand and a scimitar in your off-hand (though I believe the order in which you attack with these doesn't necessarily matter - I'd still use the Shortsword for the main attacks because of its Vex property). Each does a d6, and the Scimitar's Nick property (I believe it's the highest-damage Nick weapon) means that your "off-hand" attack (or, to be more precise, the extra attack granted by the light property) is made as part of your attack action, rather than your bonus action.

Nick is crucial here, because it frees up our bonus action for Divine Smite, which is extra-powerful as a Genie Warlock.

However, one challenge you might encounter is that Dual Wielding builds tend to benefit from the Dual Wielder feat, a feat whose wording can be misinterpreted, but here's the power it holds: If you make an attack with a light weapon, you can make an attack as a bonus action using another one-handed weapon.

Unlike the old version, which was there to let you dual-wield non-light weapons, this version instead grants you another attack: because your bonus action is no longer required to make that extra attack with your bonus action, your bonus action is now freed up to do... another attack. Note that this one will not inherit the Two Weapon Fighting feat, so it will only be the damage die and any extra damage from being a magic weapon or other effects.

Now, about a year ago, when the 2024 PHB came out, I did an analysis of dual-wielding builds, and while the Paladin benefits a lot from them once you get Radiant Strikes at level 11, I believe that Great Weapon Master still outperforms it.

One of the reasons why Paladins in particular might shy away from the Dual Wielder feat is that we need our bonus action to cast Divine Smite, and so each turn we're going to be torn between making that extra attack or using this spell. A Fighter, by contrast, is only using their bonus action if they need to Second Wind (which is only occasional).

Still, that bonus action attack does benefit from Radiant Strikes.

If I recall my math (which I'm slightly hesitant to recreate here) the dual-wielding build is not terribly far behind, but we should also bear this in mind:

In order to actually out-class the AC of a heavy-armor build, we're going to need to fully commit to pumping these stats. That likely means skipping some other general feats in favor of ASIs.

If we assume we're starting off with a 17 Dex and 16 Cha (doable with Point Buy/Standard Array) we can certainly pick up a general feat at level 4 to bump up Dexterity (Dual Wielder can do this, but Defensive Duelist and Mage Slayer are both strong options). However, this means that if we want to cap out both Dex and Charisma, we'll need to take ASIs at 8, 12, and 16 (while a buff overall to D&D characters, getting an Epic Boon at level 19 means we're less likely to choose a simple ASI at that level for our final feat).

In other words, I think the subclass certainly allows for an unarmored build, but it might lag slightly behind a standard strength/plate build if you're trying to maximize damage output.

That said, there are advantages to being unarmored: for one, you'll always have a decent AC, even while you're sleeping. You will also be more likely to succeed on stealth checks (and you'll have the Dex to support it.)

Another option we naturally must consider is multiclassing, particularly with Warlock. You will need to have a 13 Strength to do so, which does spread us out (making it tough to get even a +2 to Con). This will allow you to go Pact of the Blade (and probably Genie Patron for subclass, right?) to attack with Charisma. While we'll still want a decent Dexterity, we can now focus on maxing out our Charisma first, which will help with both our weapons and our AC (practically doing everything Dexterity had been doing). Indeed, if we did this, we wouldn't even be limited to finesse weapons, as we could just as easily get a Greatsword pact blade that is using our Charisma for attacks. We'd also qualify for fantastic feats like Great Weapon Master because we're already required to have a 13 in Strength anyway.

But this will also delay some of our power progression. It's the kind of build that looks great at level, like 7, but will be a bit awkward at first - do you use a crappy Strength while you head straight for Extra Attack, or do you delay that and Aura of Protection for your Pact of the Blade?

You'll also still probably want some Dexterity, as you're still relying on it for your AC.

All in all, I think the route I'd take is just straight Paladin unarmored. It's just a cool vibe.