*NOTE*

Yes, Mystic Mark does cast the spell. That does make it better. It’s still clunky as all hell and there are cleaner ways to accomplish this effect, but it is better than initially presented.

When the Pugilist came out, my DM ran an "oops! All pugilists!" One shot that was a free for all tavern brawl (level 5). It was actually a ton of fun!

You can always opt to fail a saving throw. This means that, when you take damage while Concentrating on a spell, you can choose to FAIL the Concentration saving throw to gain the Temporary HP. This would come after the initial damage, so it is limited in its use, and even in the ideal situation (you have a spell you WANT to lose Concentration for), it's questionable. But it is possible.

Without the context of the spells if people haven’t checked those out themselves yet, it gets real crazy. It’s equivalent to reading Paladin without knowing about Smites I feel like. It’s really strong! 👀

Praise the 3 kobolds that programmed this class into DNDB, its borked and just doesn't have access to some feats that require them to have the spellcasting feature.

Edit: They fixed it

8:01 releasing the spell does actually cast the spell stored. It lets you have an Action (or BA) spell stored for up to 1 hour when you can then cast it using a Bonus Action, basically.

There are some subtle play style incentives built into this class that I really like. If I choose to play a lot of Aegis, I have to develop a repertoire of damage dealing spells so I can have lots of possibilities to get resistance, which then also incentivizes me to rely more on casting than attack. If I choose to rely on enspell, I can just select force damage, which means my spell list is free to pack with support and utility spells to protect myself while engaging in melee combat.

Like I always say, there will always be space for a class that plays with combining melee and magic actions into one. Most official gishes just get the option to melee attack and then do something magic. The way this class stores spells to get benefits and then releases them to actually cast them, shortening the casting time, is really cool.

I also like how the dev tried making new features instead of copying the already quite oversaturated vanilla gish features.

I still personally prefer Laserllama's Magus and how PF2e handles theirs.

This class seemed to design to play as straight class only. All spell casters would definitely consider dipping 1 or 2 levels into this for the con prof and concentration save buff

Classes like this remind me why DnD keeps things simple. If you looked at the core classes, new spells are treated as a class feature. I assume that decision was made to prevent redundancy among spellcasters. This class feels like they wanted something new at every level and this isn't including subclass features.

11:06 Having a reskinned wizard ability feels like typical design these days. So many class features that were once unique start appearing everywhere. I'm surprised they didn't give it misty step at the same time.

I think that the biggest problem with this class is that it makes for an even better 1st-level dip for the Wizard than Artificer. I don't think we need another buff to wizards.

Under 24 rules you can choose to fail a safe without rolling... Soooo if you dont want to use your concentration spell anyway anymore, then you are able to drop the concentration and gain the benefit of the temp hitpoints.

6:02 This feature wouldn't apply to other con effects since it is limited to concentration saves. It is still really good though.

I prefer laserllama's Magus, it's A LOT simpler. And it's free, so can't go wrong with that.

Level 11's Enspell should let you add the spell's damage to the melee strike. Make it like the Magus from Pathfinder 1, which is the template they used here.

6:00 its specifically Concentration, not Constitution

Yo we heard you like spellcasting in your martial class, so we put spell slot recovery in your spell slot recovery and spell cast in your spell cast so you can cast spells while you hit enemies and cast spells and recover spell slots - ITS A GISH CLASS ITS A SPELL CASTING MARTIAL CLASS DO YOU GET IT?! DO YOU SEE THE SLOTS YOU CAN RECOVER AND SPELLS YOU CAN CAST?!?!

I hate being this person when it comes to discussing TTRPGs as a whole, but when it comes to the very specific character fantasy that this class tries to achieve, I feel like it falls short despite being very strong in everything else.

Putting aside having multiple features which are quite redundant with each other, I feel like this lacks the whole thing of combining spells with attacks that was brought up in discussion over at the AMA the writer behind this class mentioned. You can't actually combine levelled spells into your attacks, only cantrips, and even then, you can only do so at level 5 or higher for Mystic Mark and the other features tied to it if you want to count dealing 1d6 extra damage on one or two attacks each turn at level 11 as imbuing weapons with spells.

As a point of comparison, Magus in Pathfinder 2e at level 1 has a feature called "Spellstrike", which allows you to perform a weapon attack and a spell as part of the same two actions (Which, given Pathfinder 2e uses a 3-action system, and most spells use 2 actions, it's basically like a DnD 5.5e main action). This could allow you some very fun stuff such as doing simple stuff like a high damage dealing spell being used in melee, a debuffing spell being used as part of an attack, and even at later levels allowing you to use line spells like Lightning Bolt to propel you forward crazy distances as part of an attack. That's not to mention Magus has access of up to 9th level magic, as well as the entire Arcane spell list (The one shared between Wizards and other arcane spellcaster classes of the game), and in the recent remaster they've also gained a lot more spells slots than they had on release. Hell, there's a lot of very flavorful features as well, such as the option of fusing spell staves into a weapon to be able to use spellstrikes with spells from the staff.

But in any case, when it comes to DnD 5.5e, I'd honestly wouldn't really play this over an Eldritch Knight, Arcane Trickster, Bladesinger, Hexblade, or any other gish we've already got at hand. I can't really see the appeal of this class, when we've seen it done before multiple times with way clearer structure and balance.

I actually bought an earlier version of this class for 5E some years ago, I went and checked it to compare it to this version, and the new one definitely seems more complex. The new base class has more features, but also even the features common to both versions are a lot wordier in the new version and can do more things