D&D 5E Unearthed Arcana: New Sublasses

Three new subclasses:
• Circle of Spores Druid,
• Brute Fighter,
• School of Invention Wizard

It's hard to keep up with these :) Not that I am complaining; free content from WotC is awesome. I glanced over the Brute Fighter and thought it was pretty good, a solid option for a certain kind of campaign. I like the thought of having more non-magical class options for low-magic campaigns.

In general, I like that WotC seems to be making class options that support a particular character concept that isn't quite realized yet, and at the same time doesn't outshine the PHB class options (usually). Occasionally they open new doors that should have already been open, like the Hexblade patron making Pact of the Blade shine brighter (makes dual-wielding blade warlocks work, for example).

Since Xanathar's was the fastest selling D&D book of all time, I imagine that we'll see lots more of these options!

I agree with you, Len, and I really like the fact that WotC is actually having this conversation with the players.

On first skim I feel like the Brute is definitely filling a long-empty niche. Whenever I wanted to play a brutish combatant I always fell back on the Barbarian class and often it didn't feel quite right.

Circle of Spores looks interesting. It would be loads of RP fun to pair one of these druids up with a Long Death Monk!

I've said before that I lament the fact that D&D still doesn't have a true inventor/mechanic/engineer class. For me the various Artificer variants (as a wizard subclass and as a full class with its own subclasses) don't quite cut it, though the full-class version comes close. Sadly, this new Inventor subclass still isn't it.

Just reading Circle of Spores thoroughly now.

Halo of Spores (2nd): Trade your reaction for a bit of damage, seems okay. I suppose you can do it while Wild Shaped too. It's a little more flexible than the usual pattern of "Add x bonus (usually an attribute score or proficiency score) to the damage of your attack" since you can do it regardless of whether you attack and regardless of who you attack, but at the cost of your reaction.

Symbiotic Entity (2nd): Oh I see, now we can turn up the heat on our Halo of Spores, as well as get a little damage soak and bonus damage on our melee attacks. Takes your action, but you could do it before combat.

When you're 20th level and can Wild Shape unlimited times whenever you want, you can use this as a permanent Damage Reduction 60 I guess.

Fungal Infestation (6th): Hmm, I'm not a big fan of killing things as an ability trigger. I can just see the arguments now: "Hey man, you stole my kill! I was totally gonna zombify him!" But it's okay.

Spreading Spores (10th): So if this works with Symbiotic Entity, then you are doing 18 damage a round to the targets in a 10 foot cube, no saving throw or roll to hit. And, you can do this while Wild Shaped or Raging (if Barbarian multiclass) and you can do it unlimited number of times. And you can change its location with a bonus action. And the things that die become your Zombies.

Would the 1 hp Zombies just die if they woke up in the Spreading Spore zone? Probably. Hmm, not sure what I think about that.

Fungal Body (14th): Gross, get some cream for that, man! This is feature is okay I guess. The crit negation is really good for PvP!
Totally. I'd like to see a Myconid Circle of Spores druid and a Warforged Way of the Long Death monk.

I really like any feature that lets me use my reaction. But more often than not the very specific trigger makes the feature highly situational. In this case though, if I'm reading it right, there's no trigger at all!
Same. I play a Naga Long Death Monk in @naatkinson's PotA game and I've been having a tough time trying to score the death blow without forcing it too much.
...both competing for the killing blow. :-P