Mystic changes

[Bannan_mantis]

I am thinking of playing a mystic and was mainly thinking of playing a order of the immortal mystic. I have heard a lot of talk about how mystic's are OP and I personally really liked the things a order of the immortal mystic can do but after reading it over it does seem a bit OP to me. My main question is what changes will help to fix mystic? I was thinking about maybe something to change the versatility of the mystic disciplines and maybe instead of gaining a large number of disciplines they instead make the few they have more powerful. That is one idea I had to make the mystic feel less overpowered, does anyone else have suggestions?

[clash]

Mystic is fine in practice. They don't have nearly the amount of versatility that people presume. Sure as a class they can do anything, but an actual single mystic character can really only do one or two things well. My only suggested fix is give the mystic spells verbal and material components. The rest is fine

[Grod_The_Giant]

Aside from a few individual effects that need some fine tuning, the main issue is that a Mystic can nova harder than anything this side of a Sorcadin. The ability to dump an entire day’s worth of casting into two or three rounds of combat is absolutely brutal—especially when you realize that they don't have a limit on "only one 1st+ level spell/turn," and that a huge number of their powers are bonus actions.

In my opinion, the single greatest balance "fix" would be to switch them to a short-rest caster, with about a third of the original point max. That puts a hard cap on how many points you can blow in a single encounter, and forces you to ration out your abilities more evenly over the day. You wind up looking kinda like a Warlock-- you can fire off ~2 full-power effects per short rest, or you can pace yourself with a larger number of more modest effects.

The Warlock parallel also suggests a fix for the other big issue with the Mystic-- at high levels, they start to stall out. You get a bit more endurance, a broader range of abilities, but nothing that compares to 6th-9th level spells. I'd like to see something along the lines of Mystic Arcana, with a small selection of high-power abilities usable 1/long rest, but that's a change that requires a lot more effort.

[theVoidWatches]

I agree with Grod, but will also note that a massive problem with the current edition of the Mystic is that pricing for their powers is not consistent. For example, there's a power that imposes disadvantage on an attack against you, costing 3 points - and there's another power which does the same thing, but also deals damage to the attack if they still hit, costing 2 points. Maybe their costs are balanced along with the other powers in the discipline, but it didn't seem that way to me - I played a Mystic from levels 7-14, and some of the disciplines were just obviously better than others. With that experience I also have to disagree with Clash - Mystic isn't fine in practice. My character was, in fact, able to do anything anyone else could do, as a single character.