Originally Posted by Saito Hikari
I am really intrigued to see what they do with Bard. The homebrew subclasses from Solasta have all been varied and interesting so far.
Erm, have they? The new ones that came out alongside the Lost Valley DLC might be (I am yet to play it, so I have to look into them, but I remember seeing Hoodlum and finding it unimpressive), but as for the original ones, well...

Fighter: Mountaineer is a monster that barely gets hit and shoves everything that can be shoved with ease, while Spellblade is basically a worse (much worse, practically useless) Eldritch Knight. Yes, you can cast spells with an equipped weapon/shield. And? You can't combine attacks and cantrips, you don't have most of what actually made Eldritch Knight a somewhat tempting option to pick.

Paladin: again, we have the Oath of the Motherland as the absolute winner here with free fire resistance to the whole party (making the penultimate quarter or so of the game far less obnoxious as far as fights go) and a powerful channel divinity, while the Oath of Tirmar gets... a language proficiency and a very mediocre channel. Soraks aren't really much of a threat apart from the rebalanced final battle.

Wizard: now these are actually more or less decent. Well, +1 spell level to most Evocation spells for the Storm Arcanist and the pseudo-Overchannel they get is, again, looking a lot more appealing than other things, but the Greenmage's free archery fighting style (bye, cantrips!) and druidic spells were a treat too before the actual druid class was added. And Loremaster had good utility, although there weren't nearly as many Arcana/History checks in the game for such a character to really shine (the main issue with the game as a whole is how barren its non-combat content is).

Cleric: Sun Domain, again, reduces Soraks and everything else darkness-related to a joke (advantage on Sacred Flame and a blinding Radiant damage channel). Whereas Law domain that I picked for my cleric on my first playthrough didn't really do anything as both of its powers didn't seem to actually ever trigger. The spell choices for the domains were also often questionable.

I could go on, but that'll bloat the post to oblivion. Point is, out of the two (three for the wizard, bunch for the cleric) homebrew subclasses everyone gets, you often get an overpowered one and a lame one, and picking the lame one is often detrimental because you don't get any role-playing value out of that choice. If an oath of Tirmar paladin had, say, special interactions with Beric Sunblaze or something, that would have been interesting, but otherwise many of them are dead weight.