D&D 5e Subclass Contest Chat Thread

[SleeplessWriter]

Just modified the shadow knight. I removed mark of darkness and its 'charges' and reworked the rest of the subclass to work without it. I bumped up the base uses of shadow soldiers a little bit to compensate, capping out at eight shadow soldiers a short rest at 20th level, but you have to expend two of these uses to summon a shadow giant. So at 20th level you can summon a comfortable fighting force of four shadow soldiers and two shadow giants that takes a total of four actions to summon, and occasionally a dragon may be thrown in too. keep in mind, those are four actions where your fighter is not making attacks himself, and most fights don't last very long so by the time you and all your summons are all attacking at once the battle may already be over, unless you want to expend all your resources on a single fight to get them all out in two turns.

I also added a little text on shadowtouched that lets you use the shadow soldiers as expendable scouts.

The main reason I don't think having so many summons is overpowered is because of the action economy being so tight. Compared to Animate Dead your summons are pretty needy since it takes a bonus action every turn to command the shadow soldiers but animate dead lets you give its minions an order and then you just have to sit back for however long it takes them to do it. And while the possibility of summoning them in advance is real, plenty of battles won't be expected and those first few actions will be occupied to get your army going.
You also have to remember that most of the time you won't summon the full army all at once in case you get in another fight before your next short rest.
If you still think it's a problem I could probably just reduce all the summons' duration to put more pressure on the shadow knight to save up resources.


Also, I have a few more theme ideas.
A Bard Did It: subclasses with unusual heritages. Draconic druids, fey monks, and fiendish barbarians.

Kneel, Peasants!: evil overlords galore. Bards that cow the masses with grand displays of power, wizards who summon forth dark hordes from their ominous tower, and rogues who rule an empire of assassins and spies in the shadows.