 Howdy how's it going? My name's Davy Chappy and wow, the unearthed archonists have been cranking out lately. Good Hustle Wizards, but as has become an inevitability, wherever there is a new UA, there must always be a critic ready to disambiguate all the complications from seeing a new thing for the first time. So, without further ado, without any distractions, let's just jump BEHOLD! The last ad of November, giving you once more a look into the world of spending your money for the sake of nerdarchy and their Kickstarter out of the box encounters for 5th edition. Yes, with the power of late pledges, you too could spend money past the expiration point and teach your parents that physical responsibility is learned, not inherited. But what's more impressive than that, teaching your parents how to play Dungeons and Dragons, a task only made easier by getting your hands on a handy helper book that'll take the anxieties of making your own encounters and close the book on them. And through the same pledge manager, you can get yourself a ticket to Nerdarchy, the convention where you'll be able to meet a whole bevy of your favorite D&D YouTubers. So, sell that second appendix and put your money down on out of the box encounters for 5th edition. Made for Nerds, by Nerds. But without a way, let's begin. So, first up on this cavalcade of mind fluffery is the Psychic Warrior, a man who puts his brain before his brawn so that he can stab you in the brain with his brawn. As a Psychic Warrior, you'll start out by being able to augment your fighting power with psychic abilities, giving you the choice on each long rest to either do additional psychic damage or use your reaction to reduce damage around you, with a minor buff to these abilities at level 10. You also get an invisible mage hand, and as you gain levels you can use the force to push or pull people while also dealing psychic damage. You can spend a single attack to create a half cover strength bubble around you that lasts for 1 minute and comes back on a short rest. You can further enhance your attacks by dealing additional psychic damage, knocking someone prone and giving them disadvantage on attacks, and your last ability turns you into a psychic powerhouse, giving you an extreme buff for 1 minute that heals you each turn, lets you move faster, and lets you easily get up from prone. Now, overall, this subclass has a lot going for it. The initial defense buff is weird because it is SUPER powerful in the early game and makes me wonder why anyone would ever take the offense buff, and reducing damage never really stops being very very useful, it just becomes less very very useful as time goes on. The free mage hand is nice, the force push and pull makes me want to exclusively wield a sunsword with the subclass, the mind shield thing is fine since half cover isn't really too powerful and window strength saves actually come up. The agonizing strikes are far too powerful for my liking, but it's less of the ability itself and more that you can just do it 5 times before they tell you to stop. And the psychic dreadnought is DUMMY THICK. Overall, this subclass has wonky balancing issues, but nothing that I think needs to be completely stripped or reworked. Moving on to the next stabby subclass, the soul knife takes all the edge hidden and locked away in the inner recesses of your mind and unleashes them, focusing and folding them over each other infinitely until it forms the ultimate manifestation of edge, a knife. As a soul knife, you gain what amounts to a throwable psychic short sword that returns to you when you lose it, and you can choose a psychic benefit just like the warrior when you finish a long rest. These benefits are 30 feet of telepathic communication, a movement speed of 5 feet, or increasing your hit point maximum by both your level and your intelligence mod. I wonder which one you'll choose. After these features, the soul knife gets the ability to force each creature they hit with their knives to make a wisdom saving throw or else be feared until the start of the soul knife's next turn, and there is absolutely no limit on how many times you can do this. And your next ability effectively gives you the invisibility spell, and your last ability lets you swipe your blade through someone's mind like it was a credit card from up to 30 feet away to both stun as well as deal massive damage to them. So the hit point increase is silly when compared to the other abilities you have to choose from, but it's not busted just in and of itself. In fact, I'd say that the telepathy power is more alluring in the early game, but that health increase will just get tastier as the story goes on. That movement speed increase though is really not that interesting when you put it into the context that you can already dash as a bonus action. However, that fear ability is not so any way you slice it. If it goes off, you can say goodbye to that enemy for a good turn or two, and again, there isn't a limit to how many times it can be used, only that a creature that makes a save doesn't have to worry about it any more. If it were a limited use ability, I could understand, but just being able to go around stabbing people and then whispering Mandalorian spoilers into their ear is, it's just not okay. The invisibility is fine, especially when you consider that by the time you get it, spellcasters will have already had it for a while, and the insane damage is a little annoying that it stuns, but honestly by that point you'll be level 17 and all the important people will have legendary saves, so it's really just a bit of damage that doesn't even proc sneak attack. But the last subclass of this UA seems to take the psionic and turn it into a wizard subclass, a practice that has historically been very well received. As a practitioner of the psionic tradition, you get your own personal psionic focus, an item of personal significance that can be anything from a crystal skull to a lucky coin to the seventh season of the office, and you can use this spell focus to reroll ones on psychic or force damage spells as well as bring it back to you if it ever gets lost. Your other initial ability gives you a free cantrip that's been modified via the use of your psychic power, giving you either an invisible mage hand, a silent message, or a friend that DOESN'T cause people to hate you afterwards. As your training continues, you will quickly develop a thought form, which turns you into a fourth dimensional thought being that is resistant to mundane and psychic attacks, and you get to cast magic without requiring any components besides the ones that cost money. Past that, you can innately cast dominate person, telekinesis, and scrying without needing any material component at all. You can add your intelligence modifier to psychic and force damage, and you can walk through walls, disappear, and fly whenever you go into your thought form. Okay, you can't disappear, but I wanted to make the joke, sue me. As seems to be the case with these subclasses, the choice between features that you make at the beginning is so lopsided that it is giving me scoliosis. What's the point of having a slightly better message or a mage hand when you can have a permanent advantage on everyone you talk to forever? Eat your heart out, Enchanter. Besides that, the almighty thought form is just a free barbarian rage, but it's better because it lasts for 10 minutes and you're a spellcaster, so your spells are buff too. This is going to be annoying for some DMs as they realize that the one singular weakness that a wizard has is that they're easy to kill if you actually get on top of one. Wizards traditionally have a lot of spells that do a lot of damage, and they can pull a lot of tricks to either keep you away or just get away if you manage to reach them, but there's just something dirty about giving them a feature that effectively invalidates their one weakness in the first place. If you want an unstoppable wizard, here you go. Overall, I think that these subclasses are close to being balanced, but some of these features are going to either need to be tweaked or completely replaced if they want to pull back on this pervasive power creep that we've been seeing a lot of recently. But in an added bonus round, this article also introduces a bunch of new psionic spells and two new feats, so I'm going to really quickly go over them the only way I know how, with an arbitrary and ultimately meaningless ranking system. Uh, this time the rankings are based on balance and not the power of the abilities, so please keep that in mind as we jump into it. Ego Whip. A total cripple, you just better hope that they're not dumb. Id Insinuation. You completely incapacitate someone as a first level spell and you do damage to them, pick a lane, or raise the spell level. Intellect Fortress. Protection from saving throws. Nice. Mental Barrier. A level 2 spell that acts as a quick save against mental saves. I actually really like this. Mind Sliver. I love cantrips that do a thing and then also do damage. Mind Thrust. I don't like the fact that I'm ranking the power of your thrust, but considering what it does, I'd say that you're knocking other people senseless too. Psionic Blast. An alternative to the classic fireball and lightning bolt spells, you can now hit people with the vast globe. Psychic Crush. A pretty great mind crush ability. There's not much to say about it. Thought Shield. I like that this spell is balanced more around when you need it than trying to be the next big major important spell. Telekinetic. It's redundant for these subclasses, but it's still great for everybody else. Telepathic. It's redundant for these subclasses, but it's still great for everybody else. Buuuut that'll about do it. I hope you enjoyed this video. Leave a like, comment, subscribe, ring that bell to induce hypnotic signals that will unlock my big brain potential, and maybe support me on Patreon so that I can afford enough weed to unlock my maximum thought. But yeah, Davy out.