Oddly enough, that winds up modeling the characters in the recent Doctor Strange movie really well – spellcasters who still do a lot of punching. I’d feel better about that if I thought it were by design, but whatever.

Wouldn’t it be nice if War Magic somehow plugged into a mass-combat system?

Let’s not even begin on how multiclassing is ruined by the “wizard” level part and the fact that it takes level 14 to access it.

In every way, the War tradition is worse at being kinda tanky/defensive than abjuration or bladesinging. In every way it’s worse at being destructive than evocation.

That would make those setting books more useful.

Frankly I don’t much care for the setting books, though. I’d have liked those to be PDFs or PoD with the hardcovers being less adventure and much more non-adventure content (monsters, magic items, character builds, etc.).

There’s a theurge in a game I am a player in. The original character was a 4E invoker and the theurge was the closest we could manage.

As far as the nature domain Theurge goes, I personally really like the idea of a scholarly, intelligence-based nature-y magic user, as sort of a medieval fantasy natural philosopher, going around and writing long treatises on owlbear migration patterns and sticking pseudodragons in jars and whatnot.

Good point. That’s why I’d love to see some of these classes and races show up bundled with an adventure they are a great fit for or even a campaign book for Athas, Eberron, etc. I’d guess the book this fall will place whatever options make the cut nicely into the Realms, like we saw with sword coast.

But when the big book of player options comes out this fall (let’s call it the PHB2), players will want to try something new. This isn’t all bad, as our Human Bladesinger is working out well.

You don’t need a dozen of each thing in every campaign, but you might well need a different half-dozen for Nentir Vale than you need for Athas, and those might have minimal overlap with Al-Qadim, and so on. Trying to fit every race, class, subclass, magic item, monster, and spell into every setting is misguided.

I’m glad that Theurgy exists; it’s doing something that multiclassing accomplishes poorly. I am not sure War Magic completely justifies its existence.

I feel like a lot of these archetypes we have seen just aren’t needed. I don’t need to choose from more than a dozen cleric and paladin options. But that is my opinion.

I am happy they pushed the core + 1 idea when they launched Elemental Evil.