Hello adventurers! Welcome to my spellbook and thank you so much for checking out the third episode of our half-elf subrace series. Today we’re going to be going over the high half-elf. Which is kind of a weird name when i think about it and i feel like it’s kind of like an inside joke.
The high half-elf was a first introduced in the sword coast adventurers guide and is kind of the flip side to the drow half-elf in a lot of ways which is pretty cool. Overall they’re okay i haven’t seen a lot of people play them to be quite honest. Although it’s kind of a missed role play opportunity as far as i can tell and it does make logical sense in most game worlds that high elves and humans would interact on a fairly regular basis i’d imagine.
So it is a little strange but maybe it’s because of their mechanical elements that a lot of people choose not to play them or maybe people just don’t consider them overly interesting. Now let’s move on to the half-elf traits.
Traits
As with virtually all of the half-elf variants currently out. This trait requires that you lose access to versatility or sacrifice in a sense i guess. Whether or not you think it’s worth it you know that’s up to you, if you still wannt to keep it but you want the flavor that comes from being a different sub race it might be worth talking with your dungeon master about it and seeing if they can swing it that way.
In terms of what the high half-elf gets: You can actually pick between two things either the high elf weapon training which gets you a proficiency with long swords, short swords, shortbows and longbows or their cantrip option which is any cantrip from the wizard spell list and of course there’s quite a few because it’s the wizard and in that case intelligence is your spellcasting ability modifier.
It is a strange choice because it’s not obvious to me. How these traits are worth forgoing versatility. However you know maybe to the right bill that might make sense but i don’t know i’ll leave that for you guys to talk about in the comment section. Once again i haven’t seen a lot of people play this. So i don’t really know how it stacks up relative to the other subraces in terms of actual gameplay. So you know it, i can’t speak all that much on it. In any case let’s move on to my personal thoughts.
Thoughts
I think that the high half-elf could lead to some really interesting role-play opportunities and with certain backgrounds it could be really fun. However if you’re looking at raw mechanical aspects i just feel like it’s not the best subrace. To be honest i feel like just the half-elf as is a little bit better in most scenarios.
However, i mean if you have a particular build in mind like maybe a legolas type build then this might work or like the child of legless i guess because he’s an elf so. I don’t know how you want to make that work but let’s say you need the longbow for whatever reason and you don’t have access to it. This would be probably the esiest way of getting access to it but i don’t know it is one of those things where it kind of comes down to personal preference.
Conclusion
That being said guys! Happy adventuring everyone and i hope you all have a great day. If you have any cool stories, thoughts, comments, questions or any other feedback please let me know down beneath in the comment section and i will really appreciate it.