Arcana Unleashed Breakdown, Part Two

Welcome back, readers! This time out, I’m hitting the next three subclasses in Arcana Unleashed, the new mostly-player-facing book from WotC. The first three looked pretty solid, so let’s see how the next hold up!

Part One | Part Two

It’s really strange that a book about unleashing arcana has no new Sorcerer subclass. I am glad they include the other four Wizard subclasses that were in the 5.0 PH and missing from the 5.5 PH, but leaving Divine Soul (very, very popular among people I play with!), Lunar Sorcery, and Storm Sorcery without a 5.5 update and introducing nothing new for Sorcerers feels weird.

Vestige Patron

The Vestige Patron is one of those sort of niche concepts that has nonetheless shown up in 3.5e, 4e, and 5e. I’m not trying to dismiss it by calling it niche. I just don’t know that “my patron is a quasi-dead quasi-god” is one that everyone is clamoring to play, and it has little if any obvious footing in any published setting. The single paragraph of description is just insufficient here.

Vestige Companion at level 3 is the subclass’s most defining feature. You get a potent combat pet, in the form of a Small Celestial, Fiend, or Undead spirit. You can play this subclass without the Pact of the Chain in the same way you can play a 5.0 Hexblade without Pact of the Blade (and I’ve seen players do that), but I personally wouldn’t.
- Anyway, this gets you a procedural stat block, you can describe it however you like, and you can change its appearance and its Celestial/Fiendish/Undead nature as part of a Long Rest. You can resummon a dead Vestige Companion with 1 minute of work. It has the same action-economy logic as the Beast Master’s beast companion. (I think they should have gone the extra mile and included, at minimum, Elemental and Fey versions as well.)
- Each version gets a 1/Day ability: Undead curse the target to impose Disad on their attacks against you and the vestige, Fiends have a transposition teleport, and Celestials have a 2d8 + your Cha heal that also cleanses one instance of Blinded, Deafened, or Poisoned.
- It’s weird that it doesn’t get Incorporeal Movement (especially in Undead form), given its description.
- They’re never going to be able to take a pile of damage, at just 4 x your Warlock level Hit Points. It’s not until about level 4 that you’re confident they can take two non-critical hits. Their damage output is nice early on, but it scales almost not at all until level 14.
Vestige Spells approach the idea in a way I don’t think we’ve seen before: you get the domain spells of one of the domains from the 5.5 PH (Life, Light, Trickery, War). DMs that aren’t overly bound to D&D Beyond will undoubtedly expand that to other official domains. For that matter, I’m curious to see whether D&D Beyond handles it gracefully as written.
Vestige Power at level 6 recharges your Vestige Companion’s Divine Power Bonus Action whenever you finish a Short or Long Rest or use your Magical Cunning feature. While within 30 feet of it, you share its Resistance to damage types.
- This is an incredible feature for improving the utility of the Vestige Companion. If you pick the Life domain at level 3, I think this makes you very competitive with the Celestial warlock for healing—the Celestial warlock has the edge on burst healing, while the Vestige wins on sustained healing.
Vestige Recovery at level 10 helps the fragility of the Vestige Companion: once per Long Rest, when it falls to 0 Hit Points, it instead teleports and pops back to maximum Hit Points, if you use a Reaction and expend a Pact Magic slot.
- I gotta say, making you spend a Pact Magic slot to use a 1/Long Rest feature seems unnecessary. It reminds me unpleasantly of all the 5.0 Eldritch Invocations that are 1/Long Rest and cost a Pact Magic slot. (They could have fixed every single one of those by cutting the slot expenditure.)
Semblance of Life at level 14 finally turns your Vestige Companion into a true combat pet (…1/Long Rest) by turning it into the creature stat block from one of Summon Celestial, Summon Fiend, or Summon Undead, as if cast with a slot of half your Warlock level. It gets all of that summoned creature’s Hit Points as Temp HP, and it can still use its own Divine Power Bonus Action.
- This is really good, but I think that giving you no way to refresh it for a second use will prove to be an issue. It’s so fun and exciting that I’d probably want to give the player a way to expend their highest-level remaining Mystic Arcanum to refresh it. Otherwise players will save it for a bigger fight later, but wind up getting a Long Rest before that fight arrives.
- On a personal design note, I am very happy to see pet stat block substitution like this, which I sometimes call the Cringer-to-Battlecat transformation. If you get that reference, you might be old. We used a similar mechanic for the Coven of the Claw in Worlds Beyond Number’s Witch class, and I just love it.

What’s really funny about this this subclass to me is that it’s mechanically a lot like the Spirit Domain that I wrote for clerics for Seas of Vodari, intended to describe informal, syncretic faith traditions that are common in that setting. I remember worrying, when I wrote it, that players would use the freedom to describe the spirit companion for shenanigans, such as having it look like a Small version of otherwise recognizable entities. Someone else’s god, for instance.

So yeah, I feel things about this design, and I think the biggest one is that the 1/Long Rest limit on things chafes a bit.

Conjurer of Cheap Tricks

The 5.0 School of Conjuration is my favorite school that I’ve never seen used at the table. Let’s see how this one holds up.

Benign Transposition has moved down to level 3, and now you have a number of uses per Long Rest equal to your Int modifier, rather than once per Short or Long Rest but also resetting when you cast a Conjuration spell.
- I really like paying you for casting spells from your School, so I’m sorry to see that go away here.
- Other than that, Benign Transposition is a pretty good core playstyle gimmick to help keep you from getting swarmed by opponents.
- The feature that got cut, Minor Conjuration, was always challenging to use well—it’s one of those features that pays for extreme creativity, but does nothing if you don’t have a pretty killer idea on the spot.
Conjuration Savant no longer reduces the gold or time cost of adding Conjuration spells to your spellbook, but gives you some free Conjuration spells in your spellbook immediately, plus one each time you gain a new level of spells. It’s fine.
Distant Transposition extends your Benign Transposition range to 60 feet, and adds back in the ability to expend spell slots (level 3+) to refresh a use of Benign Transposition. It’s fine, doesn’t push you toward using Conjuration spells, but whatever.
Durable Summons has moved from level 14 to level 6, and grants your summoned or created creatures Temp HP equal to twice your Wizard level rather than a flat 30 Temp HP. Additionally, while it has Temp HP from this feature, it has Resistance to every damage type except Force, Necrotic, Psychic, and Radiant.
- Well, first thing, that’s a ton of extra staying power for combat pets. It’s also the first feature of this subclass that says with its whole chest “you use combat pets.”
- Doesn’t work on Summons that aren’t from Conjuration, such as Summon Undead.
Focused Conjuration at level 10 rewords the 5.0 version of the feature, with no change in net effect. For people who care about such things, it’s a good touchstone for how to express the same idea in fewer words.
- Which is a thing I do not try to do in these blog posts.
- …obviously.
Splintered Summons at level 14 lets you functionally twin-cast the Conjuration spells that summon creatures with procedural stat blocks—the same Summon spells that the rest of this subclass mainly cares about. They have half their normal Hit Points, but… as long as you wanted them for their limited-use features or their action economy, you’re golden. You can do this 1/Long Rest, or expend a level 5+ slot to refresh it.
- Huge fan of this feature, even if it’s a lot of bookkeeping for the already bookkeeping-heavy late-game wizard.

Overall, this Conjurer subclass looks great to me. I can’t really complain about the Summon-forward gameplay taking a while to come online; that’s literally just where the spells are, level-wise.

Enchanter (There are some who call me… Tim)

For a lot of 5.0, Enchantment and Necromancy were competing for the bottom spot in my personal ranking of wizard schools. Neither of them had enough spells at mid-to-high level, and Enchantment leaned very hard on the Charmed condition—one of the most common immunities in monster stat blocks. (We’ll talk about my issues with Necromancy in a moment.) Then I played a level 20 Enchantment wizard as part of a past-life sequence in a game, and I saw that it came online and really cooked thanks to its level 10 Split Enchantment feature. The absence of usage limit does a lot of work there. (Also, Psychic Scream and Power Word Stun meant we one-shotted some top-level encounters. But I digress.)

Enchanting Conversationalist covers for the fact that the Enchanter should be good at the Influence action, but Wizard is an Int class, not a Cha class. So it grants proficiency in one of Deception, Intimidation, or Persuasion (I would recommend add Performance to this list!), and lets you add your Int modifier to checks with that skill (I would recommend “any of these skills you’re proficient with,” but that’s me).
- Huge fan of this feature all the same.
Enchantment Savant changed in exactly the same way as Conjuration Savant.
Hypnotic Presence is a rename of Hypnotic Gaze. The big change is that you don’t have to keep using your action to sustain the Charmed (+Incapacitated) condition, and you can move 10 feet away from them rather than 5. Big change to the usage frequency, too: in 5.0 it’s one use per target per Long Rest, versus a number of total uses equal to your Int modifier per Long Rest.
- All of these changes improve the usefulness of this feature a lot, and it’s probably enough that depending on the Charmed condition isn’t a disaster. Also this feature is a lot better than Charm Person, since it’s not Humanoid-only.
Split Enchantment moved from level 10 down to level 6 and got, on one hand, clarified in its intended effect, and on the other, steeply reduced the number of spells it applies to and reduced the frequency of its use.
- It looks to me like they cut this feature off at the knees, and unnecessarily.
Instinctive Charm moved from level 6 up to level 10 and got meaningfully better in several ways.
- You don’t decide to use it until the attack hits, as opposed to when the attack is declared.
- Creatures that are immune to the Charmed condition aren’t explicitly immune to this, though I can imagine someone arguing the point.
- You (the Enchanter) and not the target now decide who the target attacks if multiple creatures are closest. This is a big one if you’re using this against a melee attacker.
- You can now refresh the use of this feature by casting any Enchantment spell with a spell slot.
- So… improved on basically every vector. Nice.
Alter Memories at level 14 has no apparent changes. It remains completely dependent on the Enchantment spells that impose the Charmed condition.
- I would strongly recommend giving Enchanters some kind of Arcana or Insight check to sense whether a creature they can see has Immunity to the Charmed condition, so that they don’t waste a ton of spells on non-starters.

Overall, the Enchanter is better, but still feels hard to use well in a lot of campaigns—again, just because Immunity to the Charmed condition is one of the most common Immunities in the Monster Manual, and from what I can tell it hasn’t gotten less common in 5.5 than it is in 5.0.

Necromancer

I’d usually end the post at three subclasses, but I mentioned my issues with the 5.0 School of Necromancy earlier so I want to go ahead and cover that now. I wrote about some of these issues nine years ago (that is… alarming to realize), and while WotC released more necromancy spells, they weren’t low enough in level or high enough in damage to solve the Grim Harvest problem, to say nothing of the subclass’s other problems. Also some of those spells are just… not very good. Looking at you, Eyebite. Let’s see what 5.5 has to say.

Necromancy Savant, again, is changed the same way as in the other Wizard subclasses.
Necromancy Spellbook replaces Grim Harvest at level 3. It grants:
- Resistance to Necrotic damage.
- Your Familiar can be a Skeleton or Zombie. That scaling is nonexistent, but it’s a good combat pet for a couple of levels. (It gets boosted by later features, which helps… some.)
- Undead Vitality lets you direct some Hit Point-restoring necrotic energy at a nearby Undead whenever you cast a Necromancy spell, equal to the spell slot level + your Wizard level. It does at least take awhile for this to be more Hit Points than your Familiar has.
- Overall, a lot better already, though I think in many settings even having an Undead under your control like this all the time is going to be a big social problem. It’s interesting that only Necromancers are described as learning things from their spellbooks, rather than learning things from the world and writing them down in their spellbooks—big, big Fistandantilus energy. I like it, but it also means I want a parallel Necromancer for, you know, literally any other concept of what Necromancers are like.
Grave Power at level 6 is in addition to Undead Thralls. It has two components: Grave Resilience reduces your Exhaustion level by 1 every time you use Arcane Recovery (you arguably no longer need to sleep!), and Overwhelming Necrosis means your Necrotic damage from Wizard spells and features ignores Resistance to Necrotic. That’s incredibly useful as a PC: Immunity to Necrotic is quite rare, while Resistance to Necrotic is reasonably common.
Undead Thralls still adds Animate Dead to your spellbook and gives you one extra Skeleton or Zombie when you cast it. It still grants Undead that you create or summon additional Hit Points, but the total is calculated differently (about the same at level 6, but a lower cap later on). Finally, your Undead add your Int modifier as Necrotic damage they deal on a hit, instead of your Proficiency Bonus.
- The additional Hit Points matter for making Undead Vitality matter more. The additional damage… is only helpful if they can land a hit. Sorry, Skeleton and Zombie, your attack bonus has no scaling. Still better for most of the game than +PB, and that damage boost is great for Summon Undead.
Harvest Undead at level 10 has a lot more to offer in gameplay than Inured to Undeath, though I liked the theme of Inured to Undeath a lot. Basically, you can sacrifice Undead that are under your control to regain Hit Points equal to your Wizard level when you drop to 0.
- This finally gives you a solid reason to create a lot of Skeletons and Zombies with upcasting Animate Dead, because they’re certainly not useful as combatants by level 10. Honestly not good even at level 6… including with the other benefits of that feature.
Death’s Master at level 14 gives you two more things:
- Bolster Undead lets you give Temp HP equal to your Wizard level to Undead you have created or summoned as a Bonus Action, 1/Long Rest.
- Extinguish Undead lets you explode one Undead as it falls to 0 Hit Points, dealing damage equal to its unexpended Hit Dice to creatures within 10 ft of it that fail a Dex save, and they can’t take Reactions until the start of their next turn. You can do this to Undead not under your control, but it costs a Reaction and a level 5+ spell slot.
  - Which is reasonable, because the high-level Undead that you don’t control might have a lot of Hit Dice. Using the creature’s Hit Dice is an absolutely bonkers idea to me, though triggering this usefully without also endangering your friends will be quite rare.

And that’s the Necromancer. I think it’s a lot better but I think it also still has problems, centered on how Animate Dead makes Undead that aren’t very useful, while Summon Undead takes Concentration and is one-at-a-time. They essentially become hooks for later subclass features that can also get caught in your opponents’ AoEs. It’s a vision of a wizardly necromancer, but I can’t help but feel like they’ve taken a lot of bites from apple of creepy necromantic subclasses, and the Wizard version is in the middle of the pack.

And that brings me to the end of this post. One subclass to go, then we move on to Backgrounds and Feats.

Brandes Stoddard

Harbinger of Doom