Time to reveal my mind on the brand new Psion class in Wizard’s latest playtest material.
Well, I was not expecting a brand new class to land in our playtesting laps! But fresh off the back of 8 horror subclasses to playtest, and the upcoming update to the Artificer in Forge of the Artificer (2014’s only extra class outside of the Player’s Handbook) comes the Psion.
The Psion is a psionic spellcaster. Channelling spells through its mind and harnassing telepathic and telekinetic capabilities, they sit somewhere between a bard and a warlock in capabilities. They’re more focused on support casting than damage, like a bard. But like the eldritch invocations of a warlock, they have psionic disciplines, allowing for quite a flexible character build.
I’ve dug into the new UA to get a feel of what we can expect and how good the playtest class is.
If you want to check out the full playtest material, you can find it all here. You can also watch the full reveal video below:
What’s the Psion good at?
Spellcasting
The obvious one is spellcasting. Psions are full casters, so get spells all the way up to level 9. Obviously, this makes them superior to the likes of artificers, paladins and rangers in this department.
Part of the benefit of psionic spellcasting is the lack of verbal or material components required to cast spells. You’ll still need to use material components for expendable or costly materials.
What this mean is that Psions are great a subtle spellcasting, which is handy for stealth. It also means that their hands are free for other things. Unfortunately, normally those other things would be weapons and shields, which aren’t usually that useful for a Psion.
Psion spells tend to be more focused on causing effects and conditions than pure damage. Expect plenty of spells that can create illusions, provide utility, cause conditions and can gather information. You’ll also get the odd summon spell and a few damage spells (including those with an AoE), but these aren’t plentiful for the Psion.
Psionic disciplines
You can choose a few different psionic abilities that expend psionic dice to swing situations in your favour. This might include doing things like turning hits into misses (or misses into hits), gaining temporary hit points or improving ability checks.
It’s a decent set of abilities, though it does have some streamlining to do. Still, it allows for more flexible capabilities and improved odds of success on a reasonably regular basis.
Psionic modes
You can activate one of 2 psionic modes to enhance your attacks or defense. You’ll either get resistance to psychic damage or ignore resistances to psychic damage. It’ll also let you expend psionic dice to either reroll damage dice or top up a failed saving throw.
AoE damage dealing spells are the big winner for attack mode as any extra damage you cause is multiplied by the number of creatures hit. Fortunately, they’ve got the likes of shatter and telekinetic crush to take advantage of this.
Telepathy and telekinesis
Your telekinetic push has the potential to be one of the most powerful push powers in the game. It pushes by an amount equal to 5 x your psionic die roll (1d6 – 1d12 depending on your level). This means you’re pushing between 5-60ft. Even at level 1, this is an average of 15-20ft per use. Push weapon mastery will push 10ft for comparison (though doesn’t eat into your action economy or resources).
Telepathy is also quite handy outside of combat for some subtle utility and communication.
Interestingly, telepathic connection states you expend a psionic die, but telekinetic propel doesn’t! I think this is an oversight, but the idea of flinging enemies around with your bonus action every turn does feel quite fun!
What’s the Psion bad at?
Defence
Psions are all about brain over brawn. This means they only have a d6 for their hit dice. They also have no armor proficiency (though they do have mage armor on their spell list at least).
Attack
They’re especially poor at weapon attacks with proficiency in simple weapons only and just a single attack (though there is a subclass that gets more).
There’s also a bit of a lack of damage dealing cantrips and spells. You get mind sliver (which is low damage but a decent debuff) and true strike (which is quite decent). Telekinetic fling is basically a shorter ranged firebolt with a better damage type so is also decent.
But there’s no AoE cantrips like thunderclap or acid splash. And among your spells, there’s a lack of damage dealers too. No chromatic orb, magic missile or scorching ray.
However, you’re not left completely without options, and probably fair better than a bard in this department (if you exclude the use of magical secrets). You have the likes of shatter and synaptic static. You also have new/updated spells like telekinetic crush, Raulothim’s psychic lance and psychic scream.
You won’t be competing with a sorcerer or even a cleric on the damage dealing front. But unlike artificers, for example, you do still have some good damage dealing spells at least. And you have strength in other types of spellcasting.
Skills
They only get 2 skill proficiencies and no skill enhancements like jack of all trades or expertise like you might see on a bard, rogue or ranger.
Face skills
Related to this is a lack of charisma capabilities. Intelligence is their primary ability score with dexterity and constitution needed for some durability. This leaves little space for charisma. And charisma skills are challenging with only 2 skill proficiencies available, even if insight, intimidation and persuasion are available to choose from.
Its not impossible to be decent at face skills though. You could invest in charisma, and insight is good on an intelligence caster. You can also pick up the skilled feat for more proficiencies and there’s a psionic discipline called Devilish Tongue that lets you enhance influence checks you make.
Subclasses
The Psion comes packaged with 4 subclasses; the metamorph, psi warper, psykinetic and telepath.
Metamorph
The metamorph is sort of a healer/Gish subclass able to partially metamorph their body to develop great big organic weapons.
Flavour-wise, it’s very strong. Even the features are generally actually quite good. However, practically speaking, it has a major issue! How does it survive in melee combat?
Extended reach, increased damage and organic weapon attacks are all great. As is the ability to combine weapon attacks with cantrip attacks (using that extra attack you get) to substantially increase your damage output. Slightly better healing than average is also decent.
The main problem though is survivability! They don’t get any endurance buffs until level 10 and even at this point, they don’t go far enough compared to say, a valor bard (medium armor and shield proficiency, d8 hit dice etc) or a bladesinger (intelligence added to AC, improved constitution saving throws and expending spell slots for damage reduction). In fact, the bladesinger is the best comparison point with a similarly squishy core class, but they get most of their defensive features at level 3. And they’re better than what the metamorph gets at level 10.
It’s not all bad for the metamorph in this regard. A ranged build is perfectly viable with a ranged organic weapon and cantrips and spells. You also have extended reach and speed making hit and run tactics a little more viable. This also works for touch spells, though notably, I didn’t notice any touch damage spells on the spell list (though I may have missed something here).
Psi warper
The psi warper is a manipulator of space and a master teleporter. Unlike the cartographer, which felt like it lacked some usefulness in its design, the psi warper feels considerably more useful in what it can do.
I really like the regularity at which you can teleport (though those psionic energy dice may get depleted quite quickly). And the fact you can combine this with cantrip casting while freeing up your action is quite strong. I do think I’d have liked to see more free uses of misty step (maybe it could be recovered every short rest for instance).
Warp propel is also great as it means your telekinetic propel isn’t just limited to pushing away from you, and you have more reliable distance to it as well. This means you can reposition enemies in the places you want more easily like next to your barbarian, in a spell effect or off a cliff edge.
Duplicitous target is a fun and slightly whacky way to stay safe (at the expense of allies) and mass teleportation is just very useful for the whole party.
Overall, I feel like this is a fun and well-executed subclass, and I’ve not really seen much else like it around.
Psykinetic
Psykinetic Psions are telekinetic masters. They can summon barriers of force and use psionic powers to batter their enemies and other obstacles with incredible force.
The psykinetic is heavily reliant on their psionic dice (or psionic mode which is also a limited resource). In fact, all of their features can only be used by expending psionic dice other than their psykinetic spells (which use spells slots which is another limited resource).
To some extent, this does make sense as telekinesis is the use of your psionic powers, but once these are depleted, you’re just a bog standard Psion.
These features do tend to be quite good at least, but also a little limited in scope in quite a few cases. They all revolve around performing some spell or psionic ability, potentially pushing you down the route of attack mode over defense and telekinetic crush rather than other spells. What this can mean is that if there isn’t an opportunity to use these features, then the features do nothing. You can’t always blast a large telekinetic crush and you are likely keeping away from danger, making shield and it’s extra effects less useful to you.
That’s not to say that these effects are bad; they’re actually quite good. But they can be a bit situational too.
You do have flight though, which is always useful, especially for safety. And additional effects for your telekinetic propel which include aiding an ally by increasing their speed (which wasn’t a tactic I’d thought of before, but using telekinetic propel to launch your barbarian into combat could be hugely fun and useful).
Despite my criticism, I actually really like a lot of what the psykinetic can do and conceptually it’s nearly really great, but having a bit more capabilities outside of your expendable resources would be useful.
Telepath
Telepaths are all about the magic of the mind. That could be telepathic communication, the bolstering of the mind or even psychic attacks.
The telepath is quite defensively minded with lots of mind bolstering effects and protection from saving throws. They’re also there to aid the attack rolls and ability checks of allies.
its not all about defence though. They’re not the most potent attackers, but they do have boosts to their cantrip damage and an enhanced confusion spell.
My big issue with the telepath though, is just how confusing their telepathy is. You’ve got to cross-reference the core class telepathy feature with the telepath’s, and then telepathic bolstering introduces what seems to be a second form of telepathy. You’ve then got rolls to determine range, duration and number of creatures affected. And this is quite essential to ensuring you can aid your allies.
For me, this is all a bit too complex. Give me a 30 or 60ft range and I can bolster my allies with a psionic energy dice and I think that would be fine and not overpowered. You’ve already got quite a challenging situation with balancing resources for psionic energy dice, I don’t think we need to worry too much about ranges and number of creatures affected and so on within this ability.
It’s also a shame that one of the features is tied to confusion. Sadly, it’s a kind of an inferior hypnotic pattern (which costs one less spell level). At least the enhancement makes it more reliable, but it’s rare to have a higher level spell be inferior to a lower level counterpart.
Theres definitely some potential here, but it needs some streamlining and refinement.
How good is the Psion?
It’s not perfect, but it’s not bad either. We have to keep in mind that this is playtest material, so this is not the final product. It’s also a place where the designers trial new ideas.
I do like the flavour of the class, and am excited to actually see the possibility of a new class to play with. I think the subclasses are particularly interesting conceptually.
I’ve seen a lot said about whether the Psion should be a typical spellcaster or have a separate psionics system for their spells. I see it both ways. The way they’ve worked it is more streamlined and easier to balance, but I get the critiques that it feels like a missed opportunity to make a unique system for something outside of the martial/caster duology.
Ultimately, I think they’ve tried to accomplish this by giving them psionic disciplines. And I think between this, psionic mode and the subclass features, there’s enough psionic flavour to distinguish the Psion from other classes.
But, there’s some fine tuning to do here. Psionic mode needs to be a bit more impactful (like the sorcerer’s innate sorcery). I also think there either needs to be more psionic dice, more ways to recover them or more that can be done when psionic dice have been depleted. There’s currently a lot of demands on resources when a lot of what makes the Psion unique is tied behind these resources.
I think there’s a bit of work needed still on the subclasses too. I like the flavour of the metamorph, but it feels problematic sending them into melee as defenceless as they are. The telepath needs some streamlining with their telepathy features. I also think the psykinetic needs a little more to do other than the specific spells it’s pushed towards. Individually, the features feel good for their specific moments, but there’s no benefits outside of using expendable resources and very particular spells.
Ultimately, I think the Psion is an exciting prospect and I’m keen to see how this one evolves following the feedback. It’s got some work to do, but the foundations feel promising.
What do you think of the new Psion class? Let me know in the comments below.
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