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View Full Version : D&D 5e/Next HELP! New ideas/balancing suggestions for a Hemomancer class



AgentMaineSIGMA
2019-02-28, 06:53 PM
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TENNYtnjDckIv2YTKJZomlBSkP08R_CKnYx97il0_-I/edit?usp=sharing

This one has been a bit of a pain. As a request from a friend, I promised to write a hemomancer class. I've worked out a good deal of the class's mechanics: unique features for hemomancy a la Warlock invocations and three fairly unique subclasses. For some more in depth summaries, feel free to check the spoiler tags.

My idea here was that hemomancy is too broad of a field in fiction to have all your abilities set in stone. Following a similar progression to a Warlock's Eldritch Invocations, these give you unique class abilities, such as blood whips, blood bending like from "Avatar: the Last Airbender", healing, and more. There are also some subclass-specific options to make sure you can enhance your subclass features, again like Warlocks with their pacts.
This is the martial subclass of the hemomancer. You make weapons out of your blood and are quite adept at using them. I have concerns over this archetype being both underpowered and overpowered. My fears of it being underpowered are that your abilities are very baseline with fairly little room for growth, making weapons and getting basic combat abilities. My fears for being overpowered stem from the 10th level ability, which lets you destroy magic weapons in attunement and add their properties to your blood weapons. If you have a magic weapon that's better than your blood weapons, you never have a reason to make a blood weapon, but if you can break them down, you have incredible versatility.
This was the actual origin of the class. A spell caster who uses their own blood as a magical implement. You follow the ranger spell progression (what with choosing subclasses at level 2), using wizard spells. Your big class feature, beyond spell casting, is your blood glyphs, a unique metamagic-esque deal. Outside of balancing the runes, this one feels pretty good.
This one is fairly self explanatory. You're a vampire. You get bites, bloodlust, limited polymorph abilities, and some summons. Probably a bit unbalanced, but feels thematically solid and tweak-ible.
So, with that out of the way, my biggest issue (currently) is coming up with features for the base class. While I have those concerns about balancing subclass features and the sanguine arts, the base class is very barebones beyond the sanguine arts. If you have any balancing suggestions, ideas for the base class, or advice in general, please comment below. Thank you!

KittenMagician
2019-03-01, 10:14 PM
for more things at different levels. you dont really have much in the way of out of combat abilities. maybe you can use blood for tracking. also some of your sanguine arts are a little weak or cost too much. if you are using hit dice for your abilities i would suggest looking at the UA Mystic class for how they use psi points. the blood art that allows you to cast the glyph spell which is restricted to the caster subclass is really similar to their blood glyph ability. also the blood forrger ability to destroy weapons you are attuned to doesnt really give options or explain what happens when you want to unattune to the weapon.

i like the bassis for this class but it definitely still needs some work. i would look at class features that provide benefit when outside of combat from other classes to get some ideas.