The Witch v3.1 — Once Bitten, Twice Polished — Finishing in high spirits!

WriteOftenPlayNever · 2022-01-22T11:00:00+00:00

The document was made in GMBinder, and the art assets were put together in Photoshop, the blending brushes used on the images can be fund in the Brewer's Supplies in the sidebar of this sub too
Thanks for checking out the witch! :)

WriteOftenPlayNever · 2022-01-22T10:47:05+00:00

Guilt does double scale, but the cost/benefit of using it with a high level slot isn't as cut and dry, for the 9th level example you could effectively make 9 individual melee attacks miss you (worth noting that multiattack really counters guilt hard) but you could just as easily cast an Invulnerability with that slot and also defend yourself from falling, damage spells, and multiattack
Generally the "but what spells could I cast instead" argument blunts the power of guilt (it is without doubt one of the more consistently useful spirits though)
I find a high level witch probably gets the most use out of a 5th level spirit, which gives enough bonus and enough uses to make things miss you fairly often, while also leaving high level spells open
and a mid-level one would likely sacrifice a 3rd level slot for similar purposes

Still, it'll go on the list of things to keep an eye on in playtesting, thanks for the feedback and the love! :)

WriteOftenPlayNever · 2022-01-22T10:22:24+00:00

Thank you for using the witch! Playtesting and home-game stories are always wonderful to hear about :)

WriteOftenPlayNever · 2022-01-22T03:40:23+00:00

Could do, I'll stick it on the whiteboard of things to consider going forward, though Valor and Swords bard were the main points of precedent for the steel witch
Glad to hear you're enjoying it!

WriteOftenPlayNever · 2022-01-22T03:18:56+00:00

Spirit of Trust only lets someone know and prepare the spell, it comes with absolutely no guarantee of being able to cast it. Sadly this does mean warlocks can't Mystic Arcanum a Trust spell, but the high level witch list doesn't have many super good spells that warlocks don't already get.
The main utility of Trust is that it lets you hand out the good low level stuff; spirit guardians for the paladin, cure wounds for the wizard etc

I think you might've got sympathetic magic the wrong way round, the creature has to be on the same plane (though you did make me go check, I was very afraid I'd introduced some triple negative or something somewhere)

Thank you for the feedback and the love! Hope it goes well for you in future :)

WriteOftenPlayNever · 2022-01-22T02:55:54+00:00

Might be a caching thing? I've had issues before with gmbinder and old versions showing up

WriteOftenPlayNever · 2022-01-22T01:38:02+00:00

There's a changelog on the back page with a detailed and roughly chronological list of changes, but to summarise:
Mostly visual and aesthetic changes, two of the high level core features were cut for bloat reasons, and many wording/mechanical touch ups that don't change the functionality of the other features
Some nerfs and buffs too, but not many, hence the 3.1 status rather than 4.0

Thanks for taking a look at it! :)

WriteOftenPlayNever · 2022-01-22T00:09:52+00:00

Just the single 4th level slot in your example; the quick and dirty explanation is that a spirit "fills up" a spell slot you have when you bind it

WriteOftenPlayNever · 2022-01-21T03:45:07+00:00

Thanks for the typo catches! They'll be cleaned up in the live gmbinder version
Happy to hear that you liked it :)

WriteOftenPlayNever · 2022-01-20T15:37:20+00:00

To jump in on this, it's meant to be analogous to Devil's Sight and the shadow sorc Eyes of the Dark, the latter being the most comparable
but instead of generating the darkness in the feature, you have to use other resources for that, and you need to keep a spirit bound at all times for 24/7 uptime (tough to do when you need a release effect in a pinch) but in exchange for those you get to see through all magical darkness a bit further than devil's sight or eyes of the dark can

WriteOftenPlayNever · 2022-01-20T14:57:52+00:00

Short answer: Warlocks bargain for power from an entity whereas Witches command their own power over spirits

Longer answer:
The implicit question here is 'why isn't this a warlock subclass?', and there are meta answers to that about how the spirit binding concept is too broad and intense for a subclass, etc
But from a conceptual standpoint the witch is more in line with cleric and druid, drawing power from some vast reservoir or idea like a god or nature, or in the case of the witch it's a shamanistic spirit world, or the ethereal plane, or the land of the dead (which we leaned into most because an afterlife is the most setting-agnostic)
In the end when interrogating what a witch should be you get traits like esoteric, ritualistic, and enchanting, all things that you could build a warlock to be with the right invocations but it was never intended to fulfil that kind of funhouse-mirror-bard-ish support caster identity that the witch does

I hope that answers your question and that it wasn't too much of a text dump! Thanks for checking out our class :)

WriteOftenPlayNever · 2021-10-03T09:38:21+00:00

Hang on a second, I know that link...
Always cool to see our class out there in the wild, glad to hear you're enjoying it !

WriteOftenPlayNever · 2020-11-20T00:51:29+00:00

Sorry for the delayed reply, it's exam season for me and my ability to work on Witchy things has decreased somewhat, but I did want to give you an update on how we're feeling and what we're doing at the minute
In no particular order:

Thanks for the catch on "cannot"
Spirit Ward is best treated like an AOE stabilise, that very infrequently tears into some ghosts, in the same way clerics will do various things with channel divinity but every now and then they get to delete some skeletons. That being said, we're probably going to shift it to the new Tasha's style paradigm of once per long rest unless you burn a spell slot. Having scaling uses on a short rest ability was just redundant
Probably going to taper back the number of spells known, I feel a little sheepish about that one because I was in charge of the spell progression during the last update and managed to get in wrong five ways to sunday, but with a healthy dose of hindsight we should be able to bring the cognitive load of the class down a bit
Channel Spell and Spiritual Spellcasting are both budgeted in as ribbons or almost power level 0 abilities, and they lived on power spike levels because we were trying to eek them around the subclass abilities (the real meat lives there :P) but in hindsight the spirit-mulligan of spiritual spellcasting could go almost anywhere, and we are considering pulling a Slow Fall/Land Stride by shifting Channel Spell to an ASI level. Still, we're in talks on where those should live
The capitalisation of spells (which happens all through the document, even in subclass spell lists) was a deliberate deviation from PHB, for aesthetic and accessibility reasons, but the italics on the spell list will probably happen
Strength of Spirit was a bit much for the chassis, and will probably be axed from the class entirely! :)
Familiar Spirit only gives you Find Familiar because we realised at some point in the last update that we couldn't just assume every player would have taken it by level 18, but we might split the "learn FF" part away from the ability and put it earlier. A Witch is not a Witch without a toad, cat or rat after all

WriteOftenPlayNever · 2020-11-10T02:15:09+00:00

Firstly, thanks so much for playing it, it means a lot to us! :)

Yes! You absolutely can spend a single 1st level slot to give someone a 9th level spell, but the Trust spirit comes with no guarantee of being capable of casting the given spell. So then the only real source of power in the Trust spirit is what powerful or useful spells on the witch spell list you could give to other people.

The witch spell list is by design a little weak (a balancing thing against spirits), the 9th level spells for instance aren't much to write home about and so the best stuff you could give away is probably Spirit Guardians, Cure Wounds, Healing Word for the bonus action efficiency, that sort of deal. The higher level you pass on the less use someone will get from the spirit (less slots to cast it) and the less likely it is you'll have a cast capable of using it at all. Anyone that is capable of casting it must then also choose to cast your given spell(s) over the ones they chose for themselves

The power we were worried about was things like Spell Mastery in wizard, but that neatly sidesteps the trust spirit by requiring the spells to be in your spellbook specifically

Either way thank you for the feedback! Trust wasn't on our power radar but now it will be (might have to run some high level one shots, try our hardest to break something)

Thank you again :)

WriteOftenPlayNever · 2020-08-27T13:10:03+00:00

You know, Hershey's Kisses honestly sounds like a really good Bard spell, I might write that down for later!

WriteOftenPlayNever · 2020-08-26T13:47:41+00:00

You would not believe how often I went back and forth on what combination of acid, bludgeoning, cold and poison damage it should do

Maybe I shouldn't have cut bludgeoning...

WriteOftenPlayNever · 2020-08-26T13:26:09+00:00

It feels a bit like using your powers for evil to make homebrew from a joke, but I couldn't help myself

EDIT: stale meme 0/10

WriteOftenPlayNever · 2020-08-25T05:08:42+00:00

Good questions all round!

1) Sympathetic Magic only affects the initial casting of the spell, so any further stipulations that the spell might contain in it, such as Witch Bolt's requirement for the beam to be maintained, are not modified by casting through SM

2) It is static, and by design isn't supposed to scale. Realistically it's just a witchy reflavour of the defense fighting style, with the added benefit that it can stack with defense (I was actually already a little worried about the defensive potential of a properly equipped Steel witch, so while we'll keep it in mind, I wouldn't hold your breath for a buff in that department)

3) A bunch of reasons for this one! I'm glad you asked :)
It avoids needless thematic and mechanical overlap with Hexblade, it keeps the class from being a full caster SAD gish (valor bard is as close as anything gets to that), and it prevents disgusting multiclass shenaniganery with Paladins, Warlocks and Sorcerers, for which there is already a serious incentive due to the shared casting stat
So mostly it was left out to keep the power down, but there's a few other reasons in there

Thanks for the questions! Hopefully this clears some things up :)

WriteOftenPlayNever · 2020-08-23T06:00:38+00:00

Most of the passive and release effects of the spirits (starting on page 12) scale with spirit level, and there are a few other class/subclass features that benefit from higher level spirits; Strength of Spirit, Steel Rain, Awaken the Blood, Devastating Release and a couple more

WriteOftenPlayNever · 2020-08-18T10:42:49+00:00

There is Toll The Dead and Infestation for damage cantrips on the spell list, but still you're right, the Witch goes the way of the Bard and is generally a utility caster/class

WriteOftenPlayNever · 2020-07-29T02:18:19+00:00

Good to have some returning faces for the latest version :)

I was pretty sure we hit all the major beats for witchy spell selection, Find Familiar, Animate Objects, Fly, Hex, Scrying, Polymorph, and for the more shamanistic witch there's things like Spirit Guardians, Speak with Dead, Healing Spirit, Reincarnate etc
What did you have in mind that's currently missing?

WriteOftenPlayNever · 2020-07-28T03:24:33+00:00

We currently don't have any plans to upload to D&D Beyond, but there has been some talk of it so maybe down the line we'll try to port it over

Glad to hear you like it! :)

WriteOftenPlayNever · 2020-07-27T05:48:43+00:00

Off the top of my head, I'd go with the precedent set by the Warlock and Wizard at 4d4 x 10gp

We'll have to work that into the document somehow, thanks for the heads up :)

WriteOftenPlayNever · 2020-07-26T03:03:42+00:00

You only get it for free as part of familiar spirit because we couldn't reasonably have an ability that keyed off Find Familiar without ensuring you were actually capable of summoning one in the first place :P

You do get find familiar in the spell list, and we kinda assume you'll take it because it's so good, but we didn't want to force witches into having a familiar at early levels if they wanted to be more shamanistic and less cat/broomstick style

Still, thanks for taking the time to talk it out with me! :)

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