Apply the changes below to the Warrior of Mercy subclass. Everything not listed is unchanged.
Level 3: Implements of Mercy (update)
Implements of Mercy. In addition, your connection to living ki gives you a bonus to your Intelligence (Herbalism Kit) checks. The bonus equals your Wisdom modifier (minimum of +1).
Level 6: Physician's Touch (update)
Empowered Harm. When you use the Hand of Harm feature, you can also change the damage type to Force.
Level 6: Creations of Mercy (new)
Your understanding of living beings’ fundamental energies allows you to craft Potions of Healing (any) and Potion of Vitality more easily. When you brew one of these potions using the crafting rules in the Dungeon Master’s Guide, the time required to craft the potion is halved. You can craft these potions even if you aren’t proficient with the Arcana skill.
Level 11: Selfless Touch (new)
When you use Hand of Harm on a creature, if the create is immune to the Poisoned condition, you can cause the creature to suffer from the Poisoned condition until the end of your next turn, regardless of the creature's immunity.
Level 11: Understanding of Mercy (new)
You gain Expertise in the Medicine skill proficiency.
Level 17: Hand of Ultimate Mercy (update)
In this feature, after “expend 5 Focus Points,” add: Alternatively, you can touch the corpse for 10 minutes, without taking any other action, in which case you do not expend Focus Points.
Level 17: Hand of Ultimate Healing and Harm (new)
Your Hand of Harm and Hand of Healing improve, as detailed below. Martial Arts Die. When you roll your Martial Arts die as part of your Hand of Harm or Hand of Healing, you can roll the die twice and use either roll. Hand of Healing. The list of conditions you can end with your Hand of Healing also includes Charmed and Frightened.
After watching Treantmonk’s commentary on Warrior of Mercy, I kept thinking about the “small friction points” he highlighted.
In our campaign, we just "cleared" the final boss room of Act 3, and I’ve played Rishishura as a Warrior of Mercy since level 3, and we are finally leveling up to 9.
I want to “revisit” that boss room conceptually with Rishishura—both narratively and mechanically—to see what felt right, what felt limited, and what a subtle rebalance would look like.
Level 3 — Implements of Mercy: Wisdom bonus to Herbalism Kit
Problem: Monks usually have low Intelligence (often 8), which makes Herbalism checks feel bad even with proficiency. Solution inspiration: Borrow the design pattern where Wisdom supports an Intelligence-based “lore/craft” check (a small, bounded expertise-style assist). Goal: Make Herbalism feel like a real part of Mercy’s identity without turning the Monk into an Intelligence character.
Level 6 — Empowered Hands: Necrotic or Force
Problem: Necrotic damage is commonly resisted (especially by undead and fiends). In campaigns featuring those creature types, Hand of Harm can become inconsistent or feel wasted. Design intent: Mercy should be able to “reach” targets beyond normal biology (living vs unliving, flesh vs constructed). Balance anchor: If the base Monk gains consistent access to Force damage by level 6, it’s reasonable that Mercy’s signature strike can also express that “universal” pressure—without becoming a large damage spike.
Level 6 — Creations of Mercy: Potion crafting support
Why add this: I wanted an actual upgrade path to Implements of Mercy beyond just “you have a kit.” Why potions: Potions of Healing are a natural extension of Mercy’s identity: practical, field-oriented, supportive, and grounded. Arcana bypass reasoning: Stronger potions often require Arcana in crafting frameworks. Mercy shouldn’t need to be “arcane-trained” to create healing work; this is ki + herbalism + practice.
Level 11 — Selfless Touch: Poisoned even vs immunity
Core intention: Physician’s Touch should feel consistent and reliable as the subclass’s signature “debilitation” rider. Problem: Poison immunity is common across many monster types, which can make this rider disappear too often. Desired result: The Mercy Monk’s “medical disruption” works as a ki-based condition, not strictly a toxin; it’s a technique that can still impose a momentary dysfunction even when the body is normally immune.
Level 11 — Understanding of Mercy: Expertise in Medicine
Medicine: Not frequently rolled in most campaigns, but when it matters, it’s satisfying to be excellent at it. It reinforces the “physician” identity. Intent: This is the “professional mastery” upgrade that completes Implements of Mercy’s identity.
Level 17 — Hand of Ultimate Mercy: Ritual option
Problem: After an intense fight, you can be out of Focus Points; that’s often exactly when you most want to restore someone. Solution: A slower, out-of-combat option (10 minutes) allow to use this feature when you actually need it. Design intent: Mercy shouldn’t be locked out of its capstone moment due to resource depletion at the worst narrative timing.
Level 17 — Hand of Ultimate Healing and Harm: Roll twice, choose either
Motivation: Compared to other subclasses, many level 17 features feel like larger, flashier payoffs—often boosting damage output significantly. Goal: Give Mercy a capstone that feels like true mastery without changing its identity into a damage subclass. Why this mechanic: It improves reliability and “mastery feel” rather than raw scaling. It meaningfully buffs Healing (which matches 2024’s healing emphasis and Mercy’s theme).
The stretcher’s footfalls had faded into the tunnel long ago.
Even the Ever-Tree grove—warm, quiet, forgiving—had begun to feel like a room that belonged to someone else’s work now. Rishisura stood where the staff had been planted, palm still resting on livingwood, and listened to his own breath until it stopped shaking.
Then he pulled the staff free.
Seamwarden rose beside him without sound. No question spoken, but the question was there anyway—hanging in the angle of their head, in the way their rune-marked chest faced the corridor.
Rishisura nodded once.
They went back.
The passage toward the Loom felt different in reverse. Not because the stone had changed, but because his body had. The urgency of carrying Maeril had been a narrow tunnel inside his ribs; now the tunnel widened, and everything he had been holding at bay started to drift forward.
His hands still smelled faintly of resin and warmed cloth. His forearms ached where impacts had landed. Under his wraps, skin stung with the memory of heat—nothing lasting, nothing untreated, but enough to remind him he was not made of iron.
He kept walking anyway.
He kept the staff in his left hand. The right remained free, as if it needed to be free for something it hadn’t managed to do.
When the corridor opened again into the Loom’s threshold, the air pressed wrong.
The chamber was still a sphere, still a metal world built to swallow bodies and spit them out corrected—or broken. The grate beneath his feet took his weight with a hollow complaint. Above and around, the ribs of the mechanism curved like a cage. Embedded into the metal, crystalline lines ran in branching networks—veins of cut stone and arcane channel, fitted with obsessive craftsmanship.
It had been a washing-machine of elements when it was whole: the ring segments igniting one after another, the mythal pressure pushed through like a cycle, the room turning into a choke and a squeeze and a forced answer.
Now it was ruined.
But not dead.
Residual energy still moved through the crystalline “veins” in stutters—air tugging where it shouldn’t, heat breathing out of seams, damp coolness blooming then vanishing. It felt like a creature whose heartbeat had lost its rhythm but hadn’t stopped trying.
Rishisura stepped onto the grate and slowed. He let his heels settle. Let his toes feel the vibration.
In.
Out.
The metal was cold. The air wasn’t. The contradiction sat on his skin like a hand. He breathed again and let the chamber touch him back: pressure in the ears, a faint grit in the teeth, the taste of old lightning in the throat.
The elemental lines pulsed once—dull, uneven—and he felt it travel under his feet like a shiver down a spine.
He didn’t move fast. He moved like a man entering a sickroom.
Seamwarden followed at a respectful distance, their wooden steps quiet on the grate. Their runes caught the faint light and returned it softly, as if the chamber’s remnants recognized something familiar in them.
Rishisura reached the core.
It had been a crystalline heart once: a prism set into a housing of metal hinges and arcane joints, ringed by those “eyes” that had filled with color when the cycle began—ember, river-blue, grit-gold, storm-grey. He had heard it in the fight like a bell struck too hard. He had felt it in his bones.
Now it was cracked through, jagged, fractured. Parts of it had broken away, leaving raw, glittering edges like exposed teeth.
He lifted his right hand and touched it gently.
The surface was cold at first—then not cold, not warm either. Charged. Alive in a way that didn’t belong to blood or breath.
He felt the elemental eyes even in ruin: a faint heat behind one shard, a damp pull behind another, a weight that made the wrist feel heavier, an airy sting that made the skin prickle. They were still holding something of what they had been made to carry.
He thought, without trying to: Maeril will have uses for this.
Not as greed. Not as salvage for profit. As care. As continuity. She had poured herself into tools because tools lived longer than promises.
He gathered shards that were safe to gather—especially the fragments that had once served as eyes. He wrapped them in cloth from his kit, tucked them into a pouch, and felt their faint pressure against his palm as he sealed them away.
When he stood again, he realized he had been holding his breath.
He exhaled slowly and turned.
Seamwarden had stepped into his field of view.
They did not speak. They didn’t need to. Their presence was a question that didn’t accuse: What are you looking for here?
Rishisura answered anyway. His voice came out lower than usual, rough with fatigue he hadn’t been allowed to feel until now.
“This machine,” he said. He looked at the core, then down at his free hand. “It isn’t flesh.”
Seamwarden’s gaze followed his.
Rishisura opened his fingers, watching them as if seeing them for the first time. He focused—just enough. The familiar current answered. Darker under the skin, threading along the veins as if his blood had remembered another river.
The hand was ready to deliver what he delivered to living cruelty: the crippling current, the sickening truth, the stop-now-or-break feeling he used when mercy required it.
His veins darkened subtly. Not theatrically. Like a bruise rising.
“I couldn’t deliver Harm,” he said.
The words landed and stayed there.
He swallowed, and the swallow scraped. His stomach tightened as if it had learned, in the last day, that swallowing didn’t make things go down.
“I couldn’t transfer it,” he added. “I couldn’t… reach it. I couldn’t stop it from functioning.”
His eyes lifted to the core again, and he felt the old uselessness flare—hot and sour—because he could still see the moment where his hands had been full of power and it had meant nothing.
A short flash, uninvited:
Maeril on the grate. Her body thrown down, too still. The chamber deciding. Lightning—cold intelligence shaped like violence—rising and choosing her the way a blade chooses a throat.
He felt his stomach clamp. He swallowed hard enough that the sound carried in the empty sphere.
“I failed,” he said. Plain. “And it cost Maeril’s life.”
Silence answered him.
Then Seamwarden stepped closer and placed a hand against his shoulder.
Not squeezing. Not comforting. Just contact—steady, present, as if to remind him he was not alone in the room where that failure still lived.
Rishisura’s throat tightened again.
“If Thiarel hadn’t acted in time…” he began, and stopped, because he didn’t have to say the rest for it to loom. The shape of her ultimate absence had already been carved into him.
Seamwarden remained motionless for a long moment. Their stillness was not emptiness. It was the kind of pause that meant they were listening—not only to words, but to the chamber’s remaining pulse, to Rishisura’s breath, to the staff’s quiet hum in his left hand.
Then they spoke, softly.
“There is no separate self.”
The sentence didn’t land like a lesson. It landed like a description.
Rishisura looked at them, eyes narrowed slightly, not in refusal—trying to understand where the words were pointing.
Seamwarden’s gaze shifted, taking in the sphere. The grate. The ribs. The crystalline veins. The cracked core.
“This machine,” they said, and their voice was almost a whisper, “is part of the Sanctum.”
They lifted one hand, palm open, indicating the embedded crystal channels that ran through the metal like blood vessels.
“Part of Moonglade. Part of the Wealdath. Part of the mythal’s wound.”
Rishisura felt the truth of it in his feet: the way the chamber’s pressure connected to tunnels beyond, to valves and filters and conduits that bled surges into inner planes like arcane plumbing. He had walked those passages. He had felt the sanctum thinking.
Seamwarden continued, careful, as if stepping around something fragile.
“It is a continuation of Elmanesse craft,” they said. “Knowledge. Culture. Magic. A continuation of their existence.”
Rishisura’s mouth tightened. He wanted to reject it—wanted to say it tried to kill her—but he couldn’t deny what he had felt: this place had been built to protect the forest from mythal decay, to bleed the overflow into safer channels. It had been designed by hands that loved Wealdath enough to build beneath it.
Seamwarden stepped back half a pace and moved their hands before them, as if observing invisible threads.
“I am Suldusk child,” they said, simply. “Continuation of druidic knowledge. Living magic. Love.”
Their eyes returned to him.
“And you,” they added, “stand here. You choose. You act. You are continuation, too.”
Rishisura’s breath caught, small and involuntary.
Seamwarden reached toward the staff. Their fingers touched livingwood near his grip—not taking it, just joining him where the bond lived. The runes on their palm faintly echoed the staff’s internal warding, as if two languages recognized shared roots.
“The staff,” Seamwarden said. “Maeril made it.”
Rishisura’s fingers tightened.
“The grove changed it,” Seamwarden continued. “You changed it.”
Their gaze dropped to his hand on the wood. Their smile was small, genuine.
“It is part of you,” they said. “And you are part of it.”
Rishisura felt it then—not as theory. As pressure in the chest. As warmth at the throat.
Through the staff’s living grain, something like Maeril’s presence rose—her stubbornness, her brightness, her fierce local love. A memory of her hands carving wards into wood. Her voice insisting he eat, rest, laugh. Her body on the grate. Her breath returning.
Seamwarden’s voice softened further.
“She is part of you,” they said. “You are part of her.”
The words didn’t remove guilt. They didn’t absolve him. They did something stranger: they made the guilt less isolated. Less like a private prison. More like a knot in a larger fabric that could, with work, be untied.
Seamwarden released the staff.
They walked to the cracked core, placed both hands against it, and then—without hesitation—pressed their face briefly to the cold crystal, as if listening with cheek and jaw the way a person listened at a door.
Their voice was nearly inaudible when they spoke again.
“It is still alive,” they said.
Rishisura watched them, and the chamber seemed to breathe once—uneven, weak, but present.
“Everything is,” Seamwarden added. “We are one being.”
Then, as conclusion, a quiet return:
“There is no separate self.”
Something in Rishisura’s chest loosened, and he didn’t understand it with language at first. He understood it with posture: shoulders lowering, jaw unclenching, breath finding more room.
Emotion rose from his gut to his throat like heat.
He blinked and found his eyes wet. Not sobbing. Not breaking. Just the body acknowledging.
He leaned the Living Staff of Two Hearts carefully against the broken core. The livingwood rested there like an offered hand.
Then he pressed his palms together and bowed.
Not to Seamwarden. Not to the machine. Not to the story of what had happened.
He bowed to continuation.
To the Suldusk hands that built a sanctum to hold overflow so the forest could live. To Elmanesse minds that shaped arcane plumbing into something that could endure. To a grove that had once pulled him back from death and braided him into living wood. To Maeril, whose love expressed itself as craft and wards and stubborn care.
He held the bow long enough that it became real, not symbolic.
When he rose, he stepped back into the center of the chamber.
His feet found the grate’s geometry. His breath slowed.
He lowered his shoulders. Bent his knees. Let the staff come back into his left hand—grounded, familiar—and left the right free.
He did not perform. He prepared.
In.
Out.
In.
Out.
He released a short shout on the next exhale—not for intimidation, not for rage. A clean sound that cut through the sphere’s emptiness and returned as a ring off metal and crystal.
The grate trembled under his step when he moved forward.
Not because he stomped. Because he placed himself fully—weight aligned, intention direct, body refusing to split from the ground beneath it.
He let his mind brush the memory of the Negative Energy plane—Hopeless, drained color, hunger that wasn’t hunger but absence. The feeling of life-force being pulled at like thread. The discipline it had taken not to disappear.
The dark current answered again, pulsing under his skin. The familiar shroud rose in his veins.
He struck the air.
Not to deliver that current.
To empower the strike with force.
The phrase formed in his mind as he did it—clean, exact—because it mattered what he was doing differently now. The strike snapped out, fist cutting through stale air, and the chamber answered: a resonant shiver through the metal grid, a faint sympathetic hum in the crystalline veins.
The dark current didn’t spill outward like poison seeking flesh.
It rode inside the strike like pressure.
Like weight.
Like inevitability.
Rishisura breathed again, and the next strike was cleaner. The next step more aligned. The next exhale steadier. He wasn’t inventing. He was translating.
He thought of his master on Celestia—stone steps, cold air, endless repetitions until the body learned the truth without argument. Ascension. Descent. Kicks until the hips stopped lying. Punches until the shoulders stopped taking credit. Breath until the mind stopped flinching.
He whispered, barely audible in the sphere.
“There is no separate self.”
Then he forced his mind—gently but firmly—back to the Loom fight. Not the whole chaos. One moment: his technique failing to carry into metal and crystal. His Harm stranded inside flesh-only assumptions. The machine continuing because it did not “feel” what he could deliver.
He let that failure become instruction instead of punishment.
“I will weave all being’s existence into the Hands of Harm,” he said.
His voice did not sound grand. It sounded like a vow made to work.
“I will improve the Warrior of Mercy’s form,” he added. “Its foundation. The teaching will continue.”
Then he moved.
He launched into bare-fist training—not wild, not flailing. Tight, economical sequences. Feet gliding across the grate in measured arcs. Hips turning like hinges. Shoulders relaxed until the moment of impact, then released again.
Each strike had an exhale. Each shift had a breath. Each correction happened without self-congratulation.
The “force” was not fireworks. It was resonance.
Metal answering alignment.
Air compressing and then releasing.
The chamber’s ribs vibrating faintly as if being reminded of their own structure.
The dark current pulsed inside his veins, disciplined. Present. No hunger. No cruelty. Just a current he had chosen to use with purpose.
He repeated.
Corrected.
Repeated again.
Until the sequence ended with him facing the core.
He stood still for a heartbeat and listened.
The cracked prism still held a dying pulse. The crystalline veins still carried stuttering color—weak, uneven, but there.
He remembered the staff strike from the fight: the way the core had rung like a gong hit too hard, the bell-tone that had traveled through his bones.
Now he saw it differently.
Not a target.
A heart.
A pulse that had been made to protect, twisted into danger by corruption and overflow and decay.
He lifted his hand.
Not a fist this time. A finger strike—precise, aligned, minimal. The kind of motion that looked small until you understood what it carried.
He stepped in on a steady breath.
And struck the crystal.
In that moment, the dark current that usually crippled living cruelty did not look for lungs or blood or nerves. It didn’t try to rot anything.
It became pressure—raw, disciplined, undeniable— carried through the strike the way a bell carries sound through metal.
He felt it.
Not metaphorically. In his fingertip, in his wrist, in the bones of his forearm: the core’s internal hinges, the arcane weave braided into it, the elemental flow lines struggling to maintain pattern.
For a breath, the machine felt like a body.
Not flesh. Not separate.
A structure of will and craft and living continuity.
His strike did not “kill” it.
It corrected it.
The remaining flow faltered. The crystalline veins misfired—colors flashing out of sequence, a last spasm of ember and river-blue and storm-grey. The embedded channels dimmed. The core’s eyes lost coordination, and the chamber’s pressure eased in a long exhale, as if something had finally stopped trying to clench.
Rishisura held the contact for one heartbeat longer, then withdrew.
He exhaled.
Not in triumph.
In understanding.
Across the chamber, Seamwarden bowed. One palm pressed forward, the gesture simple and ancient.
“There is no separate self,” they whispered.
The elemental veins pulsed color one last time—broken but strangely beautiful—illumination traveling through the metal’s crystal “blood” and washing faint light over Rishisura’s face and Seamwarden’s rune-marked wood.
The machine’s destruction did not feel like an ending.
It felt like a continuation— a new quiet, a new possibility, a form refined through pain.
Rishisura lowered his stance into something slow and fluid, not a dance, not a display—breath made visible, weight sinking, spine long. His hands hovered in front of him, relaxed, and the veins beneath his skin pulsed with that dark current—now braided with the felt pressure of the world around him.
Not separate.
Not alone.
One living organism, even here, even in metal and crystal, even in grief.
So you took an already powerful subclass, and just made it stronger? You basically just remove anything that might have reigned in the power level. That would be a No from me.
Not every feature will work in every situation. That is true of every single class and subclass power in the game. It’s done by design. It allows other characters, who might have just the right feature, to shine. It also forces people to think of alternate strategies for their characters. You need to make decisions about what you can do, and manage your resources; those are a huge part of the game. You don’t get to be good at everything all the time. There’s got to be give and take.
Thank you for this feedback by the way. I'll keep it in mind as we actually playtest my "revision". I guess the "least" powerful option would be to create a half-feat that allow to bypass the Poisoned immunity proficiency bonus per Long Rest (and replace one of my feat).
Level 13: Envenom Weapons, from the Assassin, grants extra poison damage and ignore the poison immunity. So I guess I need to raise the level for the "ignore poison immunity".
Every table is different, I guess. DM also might regret it later :)
That being said, we’re usually just two or three players—sometimes four.
“It also forces people to think of alternate strategies for their characters.” That’s… I very rarely find anything more useful to do than punch stuff, or try to keep the enemies from killing the wizard. But our campaign is narrative-heavy, so it’s not like I’m fighting all the time.
“Power” is very… variable in TTRPGs. More powerful PCs usually mean more powerful enemies, too.
And about: “So you took an already powerful subclass”—have you played one, or had one at any of your tables? I’m just curious where that opinion is coming from.
Apply the changes below to the Warrior of Mercy subclass. Everything not listed is unchanged.
Level 3: Implements of Mercy (update)
Implements of Mercy. In addition, your connection to living ki gives you a bonus to your Intelligence (Herbalism Kit) checks. The bonus equals your Wisdom modifier (minimum of +1).
Level 6: Physician's Touch (update)
Empowered Harm. When you use the Hand of Harm feature, you can also change the damage type to Force.
Level 6: Creations of Mercy (new)
Your understanding of living beings’ fundamental energies allows you to craft Potions of Healing (any) and Potion of Vitality more easily. When you brew one of these potions using the crafting rules in the Dungeon Master’s Guide, the time required to craft the potion is halved. You can craft these potions even if you aren’t proficient with the Arcana skill.
Level 11: Selfless Touch (new)
When you use Hand of Harm on a creature, if the create is immune to the Poisoned condition, you can cause the creature to suffer from the Poisoned condition until the end of your next turn, regardless of the creature's immunity.
Level 11: Understanding of Mercy (new)
You gain Expertise in the Medicine skill proficiency.
Level 17: Hand of Ultimate Mercy (update)
In this feature, after “expend 5 Focus Points,” add: Alternatively, you can touch the corpse for 10 minutes, without taking any other action, in which case you do not expend Focus Points.
Level 17: Hand of Ultimate Healing and Harm (new)
Your Hand of Harm and Hand of Healing improve, as detailed below.
Martial Arts Die. When you roll your Martial Arts die as part of your Hand of Harm or Hand of Healing, you can roll the die twice and use either roll.
Hand of Healing. The list of conditions you can end with your Hand of Healing also includes Charmed and Frightened.
Context / Why I’m doing this
After watching Treantmonk’s commentary on Warrior of Mercy, I kept thinking about the “small friction points” he highlighted.
In our campaign, we just "cleared" the final boss room of Act 3, and I’ve played Rishishura as a Warrior of Mercy since level 3, and we are finally leveling up to 9.
I want to “revisit” that boss room conceptually with Rishishura—both narratively and mechanically—to see what felt right, what felt limited, and what a subtle rebalance would look like.
Level 3 — Implements of Mercy: Wisdom bonus to Herbalism Kit
Problem: Monks usually have low Intelligence (often 8), which makes Herbalism checks feel bad even with proficiency.
Solution inspiration: Borrow the design pattern where Wisdom supports an Intelligence-based “lore/craft” check (a small, bounded expertise-style assist).
Goal: Make Herbalism feel like a real part of Mercy’s identity without turning the Monk into an Intelligence character.
Level 6 — Empowered Hands: Necrotic or Force
Problem: Necrotic damage is commonly resisted (especially by undead and fiends). In campaigns featuring those creature types, Hand of Harm can become inconsistent or feel wasted.
Design intent: Mercy should be able to “reach” targets beyond normal biology (living vs unliving, flesh vs constructed).
Balance anchor: If the base Monk gains consistent access to Force damage by level 6, it’s reasonable that Mercy’s signature strike can also express that “universal” pressure—without becoming a large damage spike.
Level 6 — Creations of Mercy: Potion crafting support
Why add this: I wanted an actual upgrade path to Implements of Mercy beyond just “you have a kit.”
Why potions: Potions of Healing are a natural extension of Mercy’s identity: practical, field-oriented, supportive, and grounded.
Arcana bypass reasoning: Stronger potions often require Arcana in crafting frameworks. Mercy shouldn’t need to be “arcane-trained” to create healing work; this is ki + herbalism + practice.
Level 11 — Selfless Touch: Poisoned even vs immunity
Core intention: Physician’s Touch should feel consistent and reliable as the subclass’s signature “debilitation” rider.
Problem: Poison immunity is common across many monster types, which can make this rider disappear too often.
Desired result: The Mercy Monk’s “medical disruption” works as a ki-based condition, not strictly a toxin; it’s a technique that can still impose a momentary dysfunction even when the body is normally immune.
Level 11 — Understanding of Mercy: Expertise in Medicine
Medicine: Not frequently rolled in most campaigns, but when it matters, it’s satisfying to be excellent at it. It reinforces the “physician” identity.
Intent: This is the “professional mastery” upgrade that completes Implements of Mercy’s identity.
Level 17 — Hand of Ultimate Mercy: Ritual option
Problem: After an intense fight, you can be out of Focus Points; that’s often exactly when you most want to restore someone.
Solution: A slower, out-of-combat option (10 minutes) allow to use this feature when you actually need it.
Design intent: Mercy shouldn’t be locked out of its capstone moment due to resource depletion at the worst narrative timing.
Level 17 — Hand of Ultimate Healing and Harm: Roll twice, choose either
Motivation: Compared to other subclasses, many level 17 features feel like larger, flashier payoffs—often boosting damage output significantly.
Goal: Give Mercy a capstone that feels like true mastery without changing its identity into a damage subclass.
Why this mechanic: It improves reliability and “mastery feel” rather than raw scaling. It meaningfully buffs Healing (which matches 2024’s healing emphasis and Mercy’s theme).
The stretcher’s footfalls had faded into the tunnel long ago.
Even the Ever-Tree grove—warm, quiet, forgiving—had begun to feel like a room that belonged to someone else’s work now. Rishisura stood where the staff had been planted, palm still resting on livingwood, and listened to his own breath until it stopped shaking.
Then he pulled the staff free.
Seamwarden rose beside him without sound. No question spoken, but the question was there anyway—hanging in the angle of their head, in the way their rune-marked chest faced the corridor.
Rishisura nodded once.
They went back.
The passage toward the Loom felt different in reverse. Not because the stone had changed, but because his body had. The urgency of carrying Maeril had been a narrow tunnel inside his ribs; now the tunnel widened, and everything he had been holding at bay started to drift forward.
His hands still smelled faintly of resin and warmed cloth. His forearms ached where impacts had landed. Under his wraps, skin stung with the memory of heat—nothing lasting, nothing untreated, but enough to remind him he was not made of iron.
He kept walking anyway.
He kept the staff in his left hand. The right remained free, as if it needed to be free for something it hadn’t managed to do.
When the corridor opened again into the Loom’s threshold, the air pressed wrong.
The chamber was still a sphere, still a metal world built to swallow bodies and spit them out corrected—or broken. The grate beneath his feet took his weight with a hollow complaint. Above and around, the ribs of the mechanism curved like a cage. Embedded into the metal, crystalline lines ran in branching networks—veins of cut stone and arcane channel, fitted with obsessive craftsmanship.
It had been a washing-machine of elements when it was whole: the ring segments igniting one after another, the mythal pressure pushed through like a cycle, the room turning into a choke and a squeeze and a forced answer.
Now it was ruined.
But not dead.
Residual energy still moved through the crystalline “veins” in stutters—air tugging where it shouldn’t, heat breathing out of seams, damp coolness blooming then vanishing. It felt like a creature whose heartbeat had lost its rhythm but hadn’t stopped trying.
Rishisura stepped onto the grate and slowed. He let his heels settle. Let his toes feel the vibration.
In.
Out.
The metal was cold. The air wasn’t. The contradiction sat on his skin like a hand. He breathed again and let the chamber touch him back: pressure in the ears, a faint grit in the teeth, the taste of old lightning in the throat.
The elemental lines pulsed once—dull, uneven—and he felt it travel under his feet like a shiver down a spine.
He didn’t move fast. He moved like a man entering a sickroom.
Seamwarden followed at a respectful distance, their wooden steps quiet on the grate. Their runes caught the faint light and returned it softly, as if the chamber’s remnants recognized something familiar in them.
Rishisura reached the core.
It had been a crystalline heart once: a prism set into a housing of metal hinges and arcane joints, ringed by those “eyes” that had filled with color when the cycle began—ember, river-blue, grit-gold, storm-grey. He had heard it in the fight like a bell struck too hard. He had felt it in his bones.
Now it was cracked through, jagged, fractured. Parts of it had broken away, leaving raw, glittering edges like exposed teeth.
He lifted his right hand and touched it gently.
The surface was cold at first—then not cold, not warm either. Charged. Alive in a way that didn’t belong to blood or breath.
He felt the elemental eyes even in ruin: a faint heat behind one shard, a damp pull behind another, a weight that made the wrist feel heavier, an airy sting that made the skin prickle. They were still holding something of what they had been made to carry.
He thought, without trying to: Maeril will have uses for this.
Not as greed. Not as salvage for profit. As care. As continuity. She had poured herself into tools because tools lived longer than promises.
He gathered shards that were safe to gather—especially the fragments that had once served as eyes. He wrapped them in cloth from his kit, tucked them into a pouch, and felt their faint pressure against his palm as he sealed them away.
When he stood again, he realized he had been holding his breath.
He exhaled slowly and turned.
Seamwarden had stepped into his field of view.
They did not speak. They didn’t need to. Their presence was a question that didn’t accuse: What are you looking for here?
Rishisura answered anyway. His voice came out lower than usual, rough with fatigue he hadn’t been allowed to feel until now.
“This machine,” he said. He looked at the core, then down at his free hand. “It isn’t flesh.”
Seamwarden’s gaze followed his.
Rishisura opened his fingers, watching them as if seeing them for the first time. He focused—just enough. The familiar current answered. Darker under the skin, threading along the veins as if his blood had remembered another river.
The hand was ready to deliver what he delivered to living cruelty: the crippling current, the sickening truth, the stop-now-or-break feeling he used when mercy required it.
His veins darkened subtly. Not theatrically. Like a bruise rising.
“I couldn’t deliver Harm,” he said.
The words landed and stayed there.
He swallowed, and the swallow scraped. His stomach tightened as if it had learned, in the last day, that swallowing didn’t make things go down.
“I couldn’t transfer it,” he added. “I couldn’t… reach it. I couldn’t stop it from functioning.”
His eyes lifted to the core again, and he felt the old uselessness flare—hot and sour—because he could still see the moment where his hands had been full of power and it had meant nothing.
A short flash, uninvited:
Maeril on the grate. Her body thrown down, too still. The chamber deciding. Lightning—cold intelligence shaped like violence—rising and choosing her the way a blade chooses a throat.
He felt his stomach clamp. He swallowed hard enough that the sound carried in the empty sphere.
“I failed,” he said. Plain. “And it cost Maeril’s life.”
Silence answered him.
Then Seamwarden stepped closer and placed a hand against his shoulder.
Not squeezing. Not comforting. Just contact—steady, present, as if to remind him he was not alone in the room where that failure still lived.
Rishisura’s throat tightened again.
“If Thiarel hadn’t acted in time…” he began, and stopped, because he didn’t have to say the rest for it to loom. The shape of her ultimate absence had already been carved into him.
Seamwarden remained motionless for a long moment. Their stillness was not emptiness. It was the kind of pause that meant they were listening—not only to words, but to the chamber’s remaining pulse, to Rishisura’s breath, to the staff’s quiet hum in his left hand.
Then they spoke, softly.
“There is no separate self.”
The sentence didn’t land like a lesson. It landed like a description.
Rishisura looked at them, eyes narrowed slightly, not in refusal—trying to understand where the words were pointing.
Seamwarden’s gaze shifted, taking in the sphere. The grate. The ribs. The crystalline veins. The cracked core.
“This machine,” they said, and their voice was almost a whisper, “is part of the Sanctum.”
They lifted one hand, palm open, indicating the embedded crystal channels that ran through the metal like blood vessels.
“Part of Moonglade. Part of the Wealdath. Part of the mythal’s wound.”
Rishisura felt the truth of it in his feet: the way the chamber’s pressure connected to tunnels beyond, to valves and filters and conduits that bled surges into inner planes like arcane plumbing. He had walked those passages. He had felt the sanctum thinking.
Seamwarden continued, careful, as if stepping around something fragile.
“It is a continuation of Elmanesse craft,” they said. “Knowledge. Culture. Magic. A continuation of their existence.”
Rishisura’s mouth tightened. He wanted to reject it—wanted to say it tried to kill her—but he couldn’t deny what he had felt: this place had been built to protect the forest from mythal decay, to bleed the overflow into safer channels. It had been designed by hands that loved Wealdath enough to build beneath it.
Seamwarden stepped back half a pace and moved their hands before them, as if observing invisible threads.
“I am Suldusk child,” they said, simply. “Continuation of druidic knowledge. Living magic. Love.”
Their eyes returned to him.
“And you,” they added, “stand here. You choose. You act. You are continuation, too.”
Rishisura’s breath caught, small and involuntary.
Seamwarden reached toward the staff. Their fingers touched livingwood near his grip—not taking it, just joining him where the bond lived. The runes on their palm faintly echoed the staff’s internal warding, as if two languages recognized shared roots.
“The staff,” Seamwarden said. “Maeril made it.”
Rishisura’s fingers tightened.
“The grove changed it,” Seamwarden continued. “You changed it.”
Their gaze dropped to his hand on the wood. Their smile was small, genuine.
“It is part of you,” they said. “And you are part of it.”
Rishisura felt it then—not as theory. As pressure in the chest. As warmth at the throat.
Through the staff’s living grain, something like Maeril’s presence rose—her stubbornness, her brightness, her fierce local love. A memory of her hands carving wards into wood. Her voice insisting he eat, rest, laugh. Her body on the grate. Her breath returning.
Seamwarden’s voice softened further.
“She is part of you,” they said. “You are part of her.”
The words didn’t remove guilt. They didn’t absolve him. They did something stranger: they made the guilt less isolated. Less like a private prison. More like a knot in a larger fabric that could, with work, be untied.
Seamwarden released the staff.
They walked to the cracked core, placed both hands against it, and then—without hesitation—pressed their face briefly to the cold crystal, as if listening with cheek and jaw the way a person listened at a door.
Their voice was nearly inaudible when they spoke again.
“It is still alive,” they said.
Rishisura watched them, and the chamber seemed to breathe once—uneven, weak, but present.
“Everything is,” Seamwarden added. “We are one being.”
Then, as conclusion, a quiet return:
“There is no separate self.”
Something in Rishisura’s chest loosened, and he didn’t understand it with language at first. He understood it with posture: shoulders lowering, jaw unclenching, breath finding more room.
Emotion rose from his gut to his throat like heat.
He blinked and found his eyes wet. Not sobbing. Not breaking. Just the body acknowledging.
He leaned the Living Staff of Two Hearts carefully against the broken core. The livingwood rested there like an offered hand.
Then he pressed his palms together and bowed.
Not to Seamwarden. Not to the machine. Not to the story of what had happened.
He bowed to continuation.
To the Suldusk hands that built a sanctum to hold overflow so the forest could live. To Elmanesse minds that shaped arcane plumbing into something that could endure. To a grove that had once pulled him back from death and braided him into living wood. To Maeril, whose love expressed itself as craft and wards and stubborn care.
He held the bow long enough that it became real, not symbolic.
When he rose, he stepped back into the center of the chamber.
His feet found the grate’s geometry. His breath slowed.
He lowered his shoulders. Bent his knees. Let the staff come back into his left hand—grounded, familiar—and left the right free.
He did not perform. He prepared.
In.
Out.
In.
Out.
He released a short shout on the next exhale—not for intimidation, not for rage. A clean sound that cut through the sphere’s emptiness and returned as a ring off metal and crystal.
The grate trembled under his step when he moved forward.
Not because he stomped. Because he placed himself fully—weight aligned, intention direct, body refusing to split from the ground beneath it.
He let his mind brush the memory of the Negative Energy plane—Hopeless, drained color, hunger that wasn’t hunger but absence. The feeling of life-force being pulled at like thread. The discipline it had taken not to disappear.
The dark current answered again, pulsing under his skin. The familiar shroud rose in his veins.
He struck the air.
Not to deliver that current.
To empower the strike with force.
The phrase formed in his mind as he did it—clean, exact—because it mattered what he was doing differently now. The strike snapped out, fist cutting through stale air, and the chamber answered: a resonant shiver through the metal grid, a faint sympathetic hum in the crystalline veins.
The dark current didn’t spill outward like poison seeking flesh.
It rode inside the strike like pressure.
Like weight.
Like inevitability.
Rishisura breathed again, and the next strike was cleaner. The next step more aligned. The next exhale steadier. He wasn’t inventing. He was translating.
He thought of his master on Celestia—stone steps, cold air, endless repetitions until the body learned the truth without argument. Ascension. Descent. Kicks until the hips stopped lying. Punches until the shoulders stopped taking credit. Breath until the mind stopped flinching.
He whispered, barely audible in the sphere.
“There is no separate self.”
Then he forced his mind—gently but firmly—back to the Loom fight. Not the whole chaos. One moment: his technique failing to carry into metal and crystal. His Harm stranded inside flesh-only assumptions. The machine continuing because it did not “feel” what he could deliver.
He let that failure become instruction instead of punishment.
“I will weave all being’s existence into the Hands of Harm,” he said.
His voice did not sound grand. It sounded like a vow made to work.
“I will improve the Warrior of Mercy’s form,” he added. “Its foundation. The teaching will continue.”
Then he moved.
He launched into bare-fist training—not wild, not flailing. Tight, economical sequences. Feet gliding across the grate in measured arcs. Hips turning like hinges. Shoulders relaxed until the moment of impact, then released again.
Each strike had an exhale. Each shift had a breath. Each correction happened without self-congratulation.
The “force” was not fireworks. It was resonance.
Metal answering alignment.
Air compressing and then releasing.
The chamber’s ribs vibrating faintly as if being reminded of their own structure.
The dark current pulsed inside his veins, disciplined. Present. No hunger. No cruelty. Just a current he had chosen to use with purpose.
He repeated.
Corrected.
Repeated again.
Until the sequence ended with him facing the core.
He stood still for a heartbeat and listened.
The cracked prism still held a dying pulse. The crystalline veins still carried stuttering color—weak, uneven, but there.
He remembered the staff strike from the fight: the way the core had rung like a gong hit too hard, the bell-tone that had traveled through his bones.
Now he saw it differently.
Not a target.
A heart.
A pulse that had been made to protect, twisted into danger by corruption and overflow and decay.
He lifted his hand.
Not a fist this time. A finger strike—precise, aligned, minimal. The kind of motion that looked small until you understood what it carried.
He stepped in on a steady breath.
And struck the crystal.
In that moment, the dark current that usually crippled living cruelty did not look for lungs or blood or nerves. It didn’t try to rot anything.
It became pressure—raw, disciplined, undeniable— carried through the strike the way a bell carries sound through metal.
He felt it.
Not metaphorically. In his fingertip, in his wrist, in the bones of his forearm: the core’s internal hinges, the arcane weave braided into it, the elemental flow lines struggling to maintain pattern.
For a breath, the machine felt like a body.
Not flesh. Not separate.
A structure of will and craft and living continuity.
His strike did not “kill” it.
It corrected it.
The remaining flow faltered. The crystalline veins misfired—colors flashing out of sequence, a last spasm of ember and river-blue and storm-grey. The embedded channels dimmed. The core’s eyes lost coordination, and the chamber’s pressure eased in a long exhale, as if something had finally stopped trying to clench.
Rishisura held the contact for one heartbeat longer, then withdrew.
He exhaled.
Not in triumph.
In understanding.
Across the chamber, Seamwarden bowed. One palm pressed forward, the gesture simple and ancient.
“There is no separate self,” they whispered.
The elemental veins pulsed color one last time—broken but strangely beautiful—illumination traveling through the metal’s crystal “blood” and washing faint light over Rishisura’s face and Seamwarden’s rune-marked wood.
The machine’s destruction did not feel like an ending.
It felt like a continuation— a new quiet, a new possibility, a form refined through pain.
Rishisura lowered his stance into something slow and fluid, not a dance, not a display—breath made visible, weight sinking, spine long. His hands hovered in front of him, relaxed, and the veins beneath his skin pulsed with that dark current—now braided with the felt pressure of the world around him.
Not separate.
Not alone.
One living organism, even here, even in metal and crystal, even in grief.
He breathed.
And the sphere, at last, grew still.
So you took an already powerful subclass, and just made it stronger? You basically just remove anything that might have reigned in the power level. That would be a No from me.
Not every feature will work in every situation. That is true of every single class and subclass power in the game. It’s done by design. It allows other characters, who might have just the right feature, to shine. It also forces people to think of alternate strategies for their characters. You need to make decisions about what you can do, and manage your resources; those are a huge part of the game. You don’t get to be good at everything all the time. There’s got to be give and take.
Totally makes sense, and I agree.
Thank you for this feedback by the way. I'll keep it in mind as we actually playtest my "revision". I guess the "least" powerful option would be to create a half-feat that allow to bypass the Poisoned immunity proficiency bonus per Long Rest (and replace one of my feat).
Level 13: Envenom Weapons, from the Assassin, grants extra poison damage and ignore the poison immunity. So I guess I need to raise the level for the "ignore poison immunity".
Every table is different, I guess. DM also might regret it later :)
That being said, we’re usually just two or three players—sometimes four.
“It also forces people to think of alternate strategies for their characters.” That’s… I very rarely find anything more useful to do than punch stuff, or try to keep the enemies from killing the wizard. But our campaign is narrative-heavy, so it’s not like I’m fighting all the time.
“Power” is very… variable in TTRPGs. More powerful PCs usually mean more powerful enemies, too.
And about: “So you took an already powerful subclass”—have you played one, or had one at any of your tables? I’m just curious where that opinion is coming from.