Class Analysis: Warlock

 Ok, I'm doing a couple things differently. The Barbarian post was far longer than anticipated, and I also felt like I landed on fewer actually suggestions for how the class could move forward.

The Warlock is one of my favorite classes in D&D, but it's also one that has some issues. Many of these issues stem from what I think are false assumptions on what a Warlock should be.

Let's address the main issue, which is the other "W" class. Much as everyone in fantasy has different ways of distinguishing ogres and trolls, the various Wizards, Witches, Sorcerers, Warlocks, Arcanists, Magicians, etc. that show up tend to have very different distinctions. I was a particular fan of the conclusion that Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes landed on in Falcon and the Winter Soldier: that a Wizard was a Sorcerer with a hat (hence why Doctor Strange is the latter, and not the former). Of course, the irony is that by D&D terms, Doctor Strange is very clearly a Wizard, whereas Scarlet Witch is quite clearly a Sorcerer. (Moon Knight, while his powers seem much more "brawler" based, is more or less a Warlock, with Khonshu as his patron).

Anyway, the image I often have for a Warlock is a character who, like a wizard, delves into ancient and obscure tomes of magic. The distinction is that the Warlock is the one who goes into the dark, forbidden magics.

The thing is, in D&D terms, classes have to have a pretty strong distinction both in flavor and mechanics. A "dark wizard" is still a Wizard. Instead, D&D defines Warlocks around the idea that their powers are granted to them by a patron.

Most patrons are evil or at least skew toward the evil side of things, but this isn't a hard and fast rule. Player characters could easily have a good-aligned Archfey, Celestial, Genies, or Fathomless patron, and you can even stretch Undying/Undead, Great Old One, and Hexblade to be more benign.

I think the strongest aspect of the class is that idea of the patron. Your power is a gift that was consciously granted, and the nature of that power is transactional, rather than something born of, say, faith in a deity. The patrons are also a little different than deities - they're powerful, surely, but not divine, and thus potentially could appear as NPCs or even villains to be fought.

Likewise, due to the transactional nature, the player character does not need to share an alignment with its patron (I don't think you necessarily have to share your alignment with your deity if you're a cleric, to be fair, but I think the general assumption is that that's the default).

But even though the classic warlock story is that they seek out power, reach out to this magical patron, and then make a deal to secure that power, it actually doesn't have to work just like that. A pact might be made not for an individual, but for a group, such as a family who all inherit warlock powers because an ancestor made a deal back in the day.

There's also an open question as to whether the deal is done, and the power is not something the patron can take back, or if the deal is still ongoing, and requires the warlock to do certain things (even things at odds with the party's goals) to fulfill their pact.

This latter concept carries a ton of story potential (for instance, Fjord's story in Critical Role's second campaign) but the former option allows other storytelling options.

The concept of the Warlock obviously brings to mind the Faust story, in which Doctor Faust sells his soul to Mephistopheles for power, but none of it is worth it given that he's now doomed to hell for all of eternity. D&D's less absolutist concept of the multiverse of course makes that a little more complex (the warlock might think they have a chance of actually rising in the ranks of hell) but also, given the many potential patrons, means that the deal could take on all manner of form. Even a classical Fiend Warlock whose patron is a devil (which could even be Mephistopheles, who is canonically one of the most powerful archdevils in the Nine Hells) the deal doesn't necessarily need to be one that damns the player (though I think any fiendish patron is going to want some kind of evil done to give the warlock their power).

Anyway, one place where there's a disconnect with that concept of Warlocks as the "dark wizard" is that their spellcasting ability is charisma, rather than intelligence. As such, this is not (inherently) a character who has memorized all manner of dark and forbidden magic, but instead someone who's channeling their patron's power by force of will. I do think Charisma makes sense in a way because the Warlock attained their power through a pact that probably took some chutzpah to negotiate, but my general sense of charisma as a spellcasting stat is that it's the stat you use when your magic is not so much calculated and attuned but is more done through intuition, leaning into the magic based on the way it "feels." In other words, there's a kind of emotional investment made. Bards make a performance that stirs hearts, Paladins commit to a kind of confident righteousness, and Sorcerers let their inner power flow through them. Warlocks, in this way, are very much like Sorcerers, except rather than the power being theirs innately, it's one that has been invested in them.

Indeed, I think that on many levels the Sorcerer is the more similar class to the Warlock, in terms of flavor. Really, the only difference is that the Sorcerer is channeling some raw power while the Warlock is getting it from a sentient source.

Still, I think a lot of players want the warlock to be more of a scholar and knowledge-seeker, and thus base their spellcasting on intelligence. Given how scarce the ability to improve your ability scores is in 5th edition, it's unlikely that a warlock character will get high intelligence, which can feel kind of off.

Let's talk about Eldritch Blast.

Technically, a Warlock could totally ignore Eldritch Blast. And there is some theorycrafting I've heard about that suggests the Warlock is better off using a Pact weapon crossbow. I haven't seen that math, but I'm a little skeptical.

Just in case you've never looked at this class: Eldritch Blast is basically the same as Firebolt, except it's actually totally different and I think might be strictly better. From level 1-4, they're basically the same except Eldritch Blast does force damage rather than fire damage. Almost nothing has vulnerability to force, but more importantly, almost nothing has immunity or even resistance to force damage. Thus, with the exception of Helmed Horror-style constructs, Eldritch Blast will always damage your foes.

But the much bigger benefit happens when you hit 5th level. Like most cantrips, EB gets improved when you hit each new tier of play (at levels 5, 11, and 17). However, unlike most damage cantrips, which just do an extra die of damage with each upgrade, Eldritch Blast instead has you make multiple eldritch blast attacks.

Notably, these are made sequentially, so you can choose a new target after each EB. If you've got a target that's low on health, you might try to hit it, and depending on if it's gone down or not, you can choose to hit it with your second blast or move on to a new target.

What really makes EB's multiple blasts great is various warlock spells and abilities that trigger on each hit. Agonizing Blast (which adds your Charisma modifier to EB's damage - almost as if you were attacking with a charisma-scaling weapon,) Hex (which adds a d6 of necrotic damage on the hexed target each time you hit it) and Repelling Blast (which lets you push a target back 10 feet if you hit it with Eldritch Blast) all trigger each time you hit the target, so you can have these go off multiple times a turn.

I hear people complain when a Warlock just casts Eldritch Blast turn after turn, but I think the reason is that they're thinking of this cantrip the way that you might think about a Wizard's Fire Bolt - Fire Bolt is meant to be a filler when you don't have more interesting things to do or you're trying to conserve resources. A Fire Bolt is a "boring" turn for a Wizard, because it's taking the place of bigger effects.

But Eldritch Blast shouldn't be compared to Fire Bolt. It should be compared with the fighter's sword. Martial classes spend most turns just attacking their foes with their chosen weapon, but the various ways they can finesse those weapon attacks make the class interesting. Warlocks, the way they work mechanically now, is like that. They have other spells they can cast, but these are better thought of as magical maneuvers they pull off between their standard magical blasting.

Now, the question is: is that design satisfying?

Personally, I've enjoyed playing a Warlock. Indeed, despite their relative paucity of spell slots, you can still pull off some cool things (in fact, the introduction of Mystic Arcanum, which has a lot of weird feeling to it, actually opens you up to spend more rounds in a climactic battle casting big spells).

Assuming we don't want to just throw the table over, we can suggest a few tweaks and changes while also reframing the way we think about the Warlock.

First off, I heard a suggestion at one point that Warlocks be given spell slots equal to their proficiency bonus. This would mean getting a few more in most cases - other than levels 2-4, you'd get one or two more slots in the rest of the levels. Now, might that be too much? Sure, but we're talking about trying out something a bit more liberal.

To me, a much more exciting and welcome change would be to change how the patrons' expanded spell lists work. More and more classes as new books have been published have gotten access to additional spells based on their subclass. The Cleric, Paladin, and Artificer have always gotten additional spells that don't count against their prepared spells each day. Now, we've seen a lot of new Ranger and Druid subclasses get bonus spells, as well as the most recent Sorcerer subclasses (these latter ones even being flexible and changeable on level-up).

So I think that it would be a simple and welcome change to just make all the expanded spell options for warlock patrons into just "bonus spells," which you'd learn and have it not count against the spells you know. As it works currently, Warlocks learn 15 1st-5th-level spells and one of each 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th level spell. The Mystic Arcanum four did put them ahead of Sorcerers, but now, with the Aberrant Mind and Clockwork Souls' bonus spells, those subclasses each get 10 more. I don't think it would break the game to treat the expanded spell lists in a similar manner.

Now, that said, Warlocks do get Eldritch Invocations, which I think wind up being some of the coolest and most unique aspects of the class. In a lot of ways, I think these are where you could emphasize the idea that warlocks get forbidden knowledge and techniques - things that aren't even spells (though they might allow them to cast spells).

Here, my recommendation isn't so much to change how these work as to introduce some random tables to show how these could be represented. On my original Great Old One warlock, I imagined each eldritch invocation would manifest as a different physical change in his body. Devil's Sight would turn his eyes (or maybe just his scleras) black, with wheeling stars visible in them, while Agonizing Blast would leave his hands looking cracked like the stone rubble he called forth to shoot as his eldritch blasts (his patron is either a perpetually-collapsing stone tower or an entity that resides within it).

But I think you could do this in other ways. Perhaps your pact object - a familiar, weapon, tome, or talisman - gets new marks, glyphs, or images on it that represent your various invocations. Maybe you get new tattoos that appear on your body to represent them.

I'm not going to belabor a point I've made time and time again, but I think rolling some of the Hexblade's amazing enablements for Pact of the Blade into the pact itself would do a few things I think would be quite favorable: the first being that other warlocks would not feel they were handicapping themselves by taking a non-Hexblade patron, and the second being that getting that feature would require a bit more investment into the warlock class.

I think Warlocks are often a class players "dip" into, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but I think perhaps the class needs some really appealing benefits in higher levels to encourage people to stick with the class. I don't know precisely what that would be, but I hope that's something they're considering for 2024.