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Magpie Barbarian is a hilarious concept and seems like a very strong class- being able to make that BA unarmed strike at all times (even if holding another weapon) leaves Berserker in absolute shambles, although Berserker isn’t very good anyways so that’s not a huge deal. The junk weaponry stuff is really entertaining and creative.
But the real meat of the class is level 6. One thing that I can’t stress enough is Utility, Utility, Utility! It’s everything about why Wizards are so gamebreaking and why default default fighters and barbs can end up feeling mediocre. Level 6 lets you apply a lot more strategy in combat, although I do note that the latter three Barbaric Exploits are much better than the others- Sapping Strike makes it hard for enemies to reposition effectively without using magic, Shielding Parry can shut down Fireballs and dragon breath completely (comboes very nicely with Danger Sense), and Terror Display may be legitimately overpowered- Fear Auras have massive potential to shut down encounters, and being able to pop one repeatedly if you’re good at securing kills can absolutely break a lot of encounters. All it needs for balance is that enemies who save against the aura become immune to future uses of the feature for that day.
Marauder and Junk Warrior are neat and fit the class, nothing more to say about them.
Purple Dragon v2, seems good.
Undying v2… The level 1 feature is pretty funny (and also destroys the game if you play with lingering injuries, but most DMs don’t do that) but not particularly powerful. Among the Dead, pretty good but it’s definitely carrying the subclass and doesn’t carry it that hard. Undying Nature is basically worthless (Protection from Poison is super easy to get at that point, and you don’t see that much elemental damage anyways, this thing could make you Poison Immune and I’d say it was pretty ‘meh’). Indestructible Life, meh. And then… Phylactery. Holy FUCK that is a strong capstone feature. The problem is that the rest of the class sucks, and reaching all the way up to level 14 with an otherwise weak class is a daunting prospect, to say the least.
Anyways, all told, 7.9/10 homebrew which I would be willing to allow at my table, good show sir!
I appreciate the detailed feedback!
About the barbarian, I should point out that a lot of its features (the extra unarmed strike, Sapping strike and Terror display) require a bonus action, making them only available on turn 2 after you Rage on your first turn, and also incompatible with one another. I also tried to balance the Exploits with specific requirements (such as Heavy weapons), opportunity cost (Sapping Strike and Terror Display requiring the player to forfeit the extra unarmed strike) or pure chance (Shielding parry requiring the player to have an improvised weapon during an enemy’s turn, which is not a guarantee as improvised weapons break very easily). I could see a Magpie causing a chain link reaction of killing someone, imposing fear on a group of enemies, and killing another one to keep everyone under check, so that’s going to be fixed for a future release.
As for the Undying… I totally agree with you, but on my defense, I was working with a pretty terrible base lol
I was striving to keep as much of the original flavour as possible, and also to preserve most of its features. Despite it being an improvement over the original, I can see how it’s still disappointing. Probably the best course of action would be to break down the Phylactery features and distribute them as the Undying levels up, replacing the original features, but I feared that doing so would mean creating a new subclass instead of improving on the original. I’m also a bit wary of giving too many good features to a full caster, honestly. I’ll keep tinkering with the idea until I find a satisfying middle ground.Thanks a lot for the feedback, you gave me a lot to think about.
No worries, I think that Magpie is generally very well-balanced and has a healthy level of power that can compete with Bear Totem. The only thing in Magpie that I would change is the Terror Display- the rest is all good in its’ current iteration.
Undying’s defence for it being like that is perfectly sensible, don’t worry. But the problem is that the original features may well be genuinely unsalvageable (or at least, fixing them would leave them unrecognisible). There’s a good reason Undead looks so different after all lol.
No problem, we homebrewers have to stick together~
I’ve updated the document! Undying now has a slow start, but picks up steam by level 10. With all the features combined, the undying should really become what the name suggests.
Update v1.2 (Feb 28th 2024)
- New name for the document.
- Added the Ashworm Dragoon subclass.
