Howdy how's it going? My name's Davy Chappy and it's time for round two of the Talk About Everything in Tasha's game. In this video I'll be covering every new subclass for the Fighter, the Monk, the Paladin, and the Ranger, as presented in Tasha's God to Everything. Of course, like the last video, any subclasses that were reprints of archetypes from previous books will just get an acknowledgement of where that archetype originated, and I'll point you to a video that I did on that book so that you can stay informed. As always, keep in mind that the majority of this is my opinion, so if you're only here to listen to me rant about the existence of the Ranger, oh boy, buckle up, but with that out of the way, let's begin. So, the Fighter gets a lot of updates besides subclasses, like five new fighting styles in the form of line fighting, shielding people from damage, learning a battlemaster technique because any day we don't steal from the battlemaster is a bad day, throwing weapons goodlier, and finally giving us unarmed fighting style rules that aren't wimp sauce. You're also given the option to swap out your fighting styles over a few levels, and about a half dozen battle maneuvers are added to your repertoire. Speaking of battle maneuvers, the last bit of the Fighter section gives us different builds for various styles of battlemaster combat, showing you what feats maneuvers and fighting styles you should take in order to properly play something like an archer or a bodyguard. They aren't new rules or anything, just a guide to help new players who are overwhelmed by all the fighter choices. But, you can ignore all of that if you're not playing a battlemaster, so let's talk about subclasses. The first Fighter subclass is the compromise that Wizards made regarding the Mystic, and it's one of three subclasses with the Psionic flavoring, giving it a gimmick fairly similar to the battlemaster. The Psy Warrior gets a pool of psychic dice that gets stronger over time, and can be used to shield allies, damage foes, and Yahtzee people around like you're using the Force. As you get stronger, you can use your psychic dice to jump higher, you can push people with more force power, and you can shield yourself from mind-affecting abilities, as well as shield your allies from pain-affecting abilities. And you can eventually learn the Telekinesis spell so that you can lift that X-weeing out of the swamp and fly off to rescue your friends. As it sounds, the Psy Warrior is very much a Jedi at heart, with a focus on protecting your allies and moving people along on the battlefield. Take these abilities, and may the Force be with you, always. The Roon Knight is one of my favorite concepts for the Fighter, as it throws away the concept of the Fighter needing to know magic in exchange for the Fighter making items to know magic. By etching legally distinct, giant runes into their weapons, Fighters gain a closer connection to the sons and daughters of Anom, gaining proficiency in Smith Tools, and a semester in Giant Studies. As well as the main gimmick of the Roon Knight, the ability to carve into an object of your choice a rune, unique to one of the six types of giants that will grant both out-of-combat skill benefits, as well as potentially invoke in-combat magical giant powers. The amount of runes that you can have active at once grows as you level up, and you even get your own power boost that makes you grow in size, deal more damage, and get swole like the Giants, who's magic you learned from.  You can invoke the power of your runes multiple times, and your giant form will eventually swell to such thickness that you become mega-huge and do even more damage.  Moving on to the Monk, the base class gets buffs across the board in an effort to get more people to play them, such as the opportunity to grow their monk weapons from beyond the simple weapon slash short sword limitations, so long as the new weapon isn't a heavy weapon or a super-special weird weapon. They also get one additional attack as a bonus action for free whenever they use their key on something else, which should help bridge the gap for people who say that the monk's damage output is poo-poo. On the topic of key, they can now spend two key points to heal off of their martial arts die, which isn't much, but it should help you in a pinch, and by level 5 the monk can spend 1-3 key points in order to add a plus-2 per point to their attacks, once again increasing the overall damage output of the monk. I don't have a problem with any of these features, and I'm glad that they're showing much love to the classes that need it the most. As for subclasses, the Way of the Mercy Monk follows the Way of the Plague Doctor by being an absolute lie, or maybe it's secretly telling the truth, since the act of mercy implies that you're choosing not to dole out violence upon your fellow man. And the Mercy Monk has violence in spades.  As far as features go, the Way of the Mercy gains the hands of healing and harm. Two features that, you guessed it, either heal people or reach into their chest and collar ma them. As you grow stronger, so do your hands, as you apply secondary benefits to those whom you heal by curing them of elements that they may have, or you can further betray your Hippocratic Oath by going out of your way to poison people who you touch with your harmful hands. By level 11, you can replace all of your flurry of blows with healing strikes instead, but you can only replace one attack with your harming strikes because there needs to be some way to keep this madman down.   Anyway, the other option for you non-psychopaths is the Way of the Astral Self, a monk subclass designed for your aging aunt that relies on unlocking one's chakras so that they may inhabit their truer inner self, an astral form. The cool thing about your astral form is that it could look like anything because it's meant to represent who you are on the inside, so it could be metaphorical by summoning a knight's armor, or it could be literal by summoning a blood and guts monster that pulls people in with its flesh tubes. Regardless of what you paint it as, summoning your astral form unleashes a small blast of force energy around you, and then, for ten minutes, you get a second pair of arms for a maximum high-five potential that will use your wisdom modifier instead of your strengthened X, and they'll give you a slightly longer range. After that, you'll learn to summon the head of your astral form, giving you magical dark vision, advantage on insight, and intimidation checks, and you can communicate directly into the mind of anyone within range of your spirit helmet. You'll also eventually start deflecting elemental damage, punch more often due to your many-armed advantage, and finally, you'll unleash the full power of your astral self, summoning your entire body to both protect you and unleash a full aura of attacks on your enemy. The way of the astral self is a strange case because it would seem to give the monk more freedom with the ability scores it chooses to buff, but you still need decks for your AC or else you're gonna fall over, so swapping it out for wisdom isn't actually going to change much.  So really, all you're getting early on is the longer range, followed by dark vision at 6th level. What I'm getting at is that this subclass isn't a deal-breaker as far as combat is concerned, and you should take it if you really want to enjoy the roleplay aspects of your monk more than anything else. But the class best built for roleplay is none other than the Paladin, which gets slight buffs in the way of new spells, three new fighting spells in the form of blind fighting, deflecting damage from your enemies, and my favorite, finally gaining access to cantrips from the cleric spell list. They can also now use their channel divinity to regain spell slots, and they can swap out their fighting styles over a few levels. Overall, I love that Paladins finally get cantrips, and the other buffs are just icing on the delete button cake. The Paladin also gets two new subclasses. The Oath of Glory, which originated in Thero, so you can check out my rundown on it in that video, and the Oath of the Watchers, a knighthood of extra-planer border patrol officers that really put the beat in beatcups. Taking the Oath of the Watchers heightens your channel divinity, granting it the additional options of giving your allies advantage against mental saving throws, or using a modified version of Turn Undead that instead turns away any beings not of this material realm. Your 7th level aura adds your proficiency bonus to all of your allies' initiative roles, and, like the other auras, it extends to 30 feet near the end of your Paladin's lifespan.  The Oath of the Watchers has a very specific niche, and it hits that niche hard. If you are a being that does not belong in this world, go home. Your family is waiting. I am watching. Finally, we come to the Ranger. The class that, inarguably, needs the most buffs to its base class out of all of them, and I dare say that that's half the reason why buffs are being handed out in the first place. So it pains me to say that there are still a couple of things that get to me. Firstly, almost all of the new features given to this class are replacements of old features, which isn't a very bad thing. Most of the new features are just straight up better than the old ones, but I feel like they sort of missed the mark on capturing the spirit of what those abilities were.  The straight buffs that they get are new spells, new fighting styles in the form of druid cantrips, blind fighting, or thrown weapon fighting, and they get a spellcasting focus if they really want one. As for main features, the new deft explorer feature gives you expertise and two new languages, plus more as you level up, including a faster movement speed, a swimming slash climbing speed, and a pseudo-second wind. It does get rid of natural explorer so you no longer understand how trees work, but natural explorer was really situational anyway, at least now you have something that you can actually use when the trees are not aligned. They also get a replacement for favored enemy, which was another almost useless ability combat-wise, but I do wish that it at least would have stayed for the role-play benefits. I'll get into the feature that replaces it in a second. There is also a new primeval awareness called primal awareness that gives you a bunch of spells that can each be cast once for free.  Oh, also the Beastmaster gets a new primal companion option that repairs most of what was wrong with the class in the first place, so yay Beastmaster. Now bringing it back, we come to favored foe, the real issue. Like I said before, favored foe replaces favored enemy, a semi-flavorful but ultimately useless ability that nobody remembered having anyway. But it was replaced with favored foe, a power that behaves very similarly to Hunter's Mark, except instead of costing a spell slot, you can just do it in amount of times equal to your proficiency modifier. In exchange for that buff, it does less damage, it doesn't transfer to other enemies, and it only deals the extra damage once per turn. It presumably exists in order for the ranger to put out more damage while also saving on spell slots, and it effectively does that. That is not the problem. The problem is that like Hunter's Mark, this spell requires concentration, making it one of the only non-spell abilities that requires you to concentrate on it, on the class that famously cannot cast most of its abilities due to the overbearance of a single concentration spell. Yes, you do save on spell slots, but you're still not using most of them because either Hunter's Mark or favored foe will end up being your fallback. It's not a bad ability because it doesn't do damage, it's bad because you're still forced into a rigid pattern of marking people and then hitting them forever, instead of using anything else that might be better but would take your concentration, because then you won't be doing damage. Especially considering all of the other limitations on favored foe, there is no need for it to be a concentration ability.  Say that it can't be used at the same time as Hunter's Mark and boom, the ranger is saved. Everything else is good. You honestly don't even need to replace any of the features, you can just add the new ones on, but don't let the concentration thing be the feature that stops you. We are this close to greatness. Okay, rant over. The first, last subclass is the one that was made specifically to offend me, the Faye Wanderer Ranger. Acting as a charismatic counterbalance to the traditional nature boy, the Faye Wanderer operates by getting benefits indicative of their Faye heritage, such as proficiency in either deception, performance, or persuasion, and they can add their wisdom modifier to any charisma check. They also easily resist mind effects and can know you, anyone who tries. They can summon Faye creatures to aid them in battle, and eventually they can even teleport around the battlefield and bring friends with them when they do it. The Faye Wanderer doesn't really have a role for itself. It seems just built to throw all of the stereotypical Faye features at you, like charms and teleports, and then just call it a day. If that's your cup of tea, then this is the subclass for you, but understand that I will think less of you for it. And finally, we come to a subclass that I am actually playing in one of my own campaigns, the Swarmkeeper Ranger. The Swarmkeeper notices areas that are woefully underpopulated by bees and comes to the conclusion that a large influx of bees ought to put a stop to that. Technically, your swarm doesn't have to be bees. It can be anything, wasps, butterflies, my character uses snow, and a creative fan on my Twitch streams brought up that it can even be a swarm of angry toddlers with you as the underpaid babysitter. Regardless of what shape it takes, the swarm will provide benefits in combat by way of dealing additional damage, pushing people away from you, or moving you away as a weird form of a five-foot step. You also learn the Mage Handcantrip and it takes the form of your swarm, so you could point at something and tell Georgie to go get it for you. As your bond between swarm and keeper grows, your swarm will lift you up so that you can hover for no particular reason. Your swarm's combat abilities will increase to do more damage, knock people over when they push them, and shield you from harm when they surround you and move you. Finally, your bond will become so supernatural that you'll be able to meld within the mass of your swarm, and one with it to teleport away to somewhere nearby. The Swarm Keeper is a really cool subclass for me, because as I've shown, the swarm can really be anything, which provides ample opportunity for you to make it your own.  Buuuut that'll about do it! I hope you enjoyed this video, if you should leave a like, comment, subscribe, ring the bell, check out all my social media in the description below, and maybe support me on Patreon so that I can continue reading all the subclasses in Tosh's handbook without wasting a single breath. But yeah, Davy out.