Bloodrager v0.7! (Patreon)

Woooo! Finally time for a full-on Bloodrager revision! And this one's got some juicy changes.

The Changelog

Added the Celestial Bloodline

Added the Discipline of the Mystic

Buffed Blood Trance uses by 1 at lower levels

Rescaled Sorcerous Swordplay

Added Brutal Spellcasting option to Sorcerous Swordplay

Adjusted Ravager's Mighty Cleave and Bombardier's Quick Fling to integrate with Sorcerous Swordplay

Reworked Born Ready (and added it to features table, where it was missing)

I'll go into a bit more depth about all of these. The Celestial Bloodline isn't a big surprise to anybody - it's for divinely-blessed warriors, with the blood of angels in their veins. It gets a healing feature (that charges up through combat), some nifty cleric spells, a blinding-light defense, wings, and a transformation capstone that buffs all its other features. The Mystic Discipline is a bit odder - it's for bloodragers who want to double down on magical attacks, hurling energy bolts in place of making weapon attacks. They don't have quite as much offensive punch as some other disciplines, but make up for it with tremendous versatility - they can empower their arcane blasts in various ways, fight at various ranges, and get some nifty utility (the only discipline, in fact, to grant any spells).

For the base-class changes: The Blood Trance buff is small, but gives 1st-level bloodragers a little more juice, so they can feel more like the badasses they are. Sorcerous Swordplay gets a significant change - I rescaled it from a fairly fiddly resource pool, which builds up through the day and partially resets sometimes, to a much more straightforward pile of charges. While its prior mechanics were great at getting precisely the numbers and pacing I wanted, it was a lot fiddlier than most 5E resources, and was a lot to manage on top of your blood trances, spell slots, and any resources your subclass features might use. So Sorcerous Swordplay gets a much simpler resource pool. It also winds up getting a significant buff - the advantage and disadvantage options are effectively cheaper now. It also gets Brutal Spellcasting, a way to expend Sorcerous Swordplay uses to upcast your spells. One consistent thing I've observed in testing and feedback is that bloodragers tend to be a little too martial - players can feel like their spells just aren't competitive enough, and so this is the first of a few changes to try and amp up spellcasting and make it a more natural part of the class's loop. The Ravager and Bombardier changes are both pretty small, just reworking their features that relied on their own resources to instead hook into Sorcerous Swordplay. And Born Ready gets a major buff, changing from a tiny quality-of-life feature into something that makes a tier 4 bloodrager a legit powerhouse, burning through their resources like nobody's business.

I'll be paying close attention to how these changes land - bloodragers so far have been testing a bit on the weak side, so I think I've got a fair amount of room to buff before they get out of hand. Let me know what you think!