Fighter - Knight-Abjurer
Elite Guardmage, by PINDURSKI © Wizards of the Coast LLC
The Knight-Abjurer is a warrior who learns to supplement their already-impressive defenses with a range of abjuration spells. They're dabblers, but focused ones, intent on becoming indomitable spellswords.
This is the second half of my Eldritch Knight rework (see the first half here, the Knight-Invoker).
Design-Wise: Our core idea here is a 1/3-caster that only gets abjuration magic. In general, Knight-Abjurers very naturally lean towards tanky roles, but their offensive output doesn't lag too far behind. They get standard 1/3 casting (and the ability to use weapons or shields as spell focuses). Battle Ward is their key feature - a summonable ward that's generally good to soak 1-2 hits, and deals some retaliation damage against an attacker. That's combined with Arcane Bulwark, which lets the KA defend their friends. At 7th, Resonant Shielding gives a small offensive boost. At 10th, Stalwart Defender and Swift Spellcaster both come online and make it much more attractive to be using your abjuration spells mid-fight. Abjurer's Recovery gives you some extra spell slots at level 15, and Abjuration Expertise at 18 gives you and your allies a small defensive boost.
On Eldritch Knights: EK is a fine subclass, but it doesn't really function at all intuitively. For one, played optimally, it gets a really weird pattern - attacking at levels 1-2, cantrips at 3-4, attacking at 5-6, War Magic at 7-10, and back to attacking for 11-20. For another, a new player might assume that it does a great job blasting enemies with evocation spells - but they're almost always a worse choice than self-buffing and then relying on swords and cantrips. The problem's partly that they don't have any reason to cast spells before level 7, but also structural. With access to abjuration and evocation, EKs almost always want to focus on abjuration (or on the few spells they get to learn from any school they want). Evocation spells just scale really poorly if you don't have high Int, and even with a fighter's extra ASIs, they can't afford high Int. So my solution is to split them in two, creating a blaster-fighter in the Knight-Invoker and an abjuration warrior in the Knight-Abjurer.
As always, you're invited to come discuss and offer feedback on Discord!
