Thursday, October 21, 2021

5.5 Wishlist: Warlocks

 Conceptually, I love the Warlock. It inherently creates a story for your character - what did you do to contact your patron (or did they contact you?) What were the terms of your pact? Is the deal complete, or do you have further responsibilities?

Mechanically, Warlocks are pretty unique. I do think that on the surface, a lot of players might be disappointed to find that Warlocks don't have the same versatility as a Wizard. You might expect that the deal you made gives you deep and broad knowledge on how to use magic, but the gameplay focus on one very good cantrip and a lot of features that aren't really spells might feel like it's missing the class fantasy.

One thing I would highly recommend is that you can "re-skin" the wizard as a warlock. You can play your wizard as if you made a dark deal (or not even dark - not every patron is scary and evil) with your patron to unlock the secrets of magic, and then you can basically treat your spellbook as something that your patron gave to you - to go farther, you could even flavor your "research" and other additions to your spellbook as things that your patron has granted to you.

But mechanically, I want to talk about the Warlock as it is.

In terms of tactical gameplay, I think the Warlocks is basically the magical recreation of a martial class. If you think of Eldritch Blast as a weapon (which it looks a lot like if you get Agonizing Blast,) you can basically compare it to a Fighter who uses a heavy crossbow as their main attack - only that you get your four attacks per turn three levels earlier.

The rest of the class is sort of supplemental to that, but if you set aside the desire to be a super-versatile spellcaster like a Wizard or Sorcerer (and honestly, given the small number of spells they learn, I don't even know that we can really call Sorcerers super-versatile) what you wind up with is a very strong damage-dealer that has a ton of powerful abilities on top of that.

Still, we're not here to laud every aspect of the current design - we're here to see what could be improved.

Another thing to bear in mind here is that the intent is not solely to make the classes more powerful. The intent is to improve gameplay, and just making every class a lot stronger could potentially make the game less fun when every encounter is a pushover.

But, we've got to look at what could be improved with the Warlock.

First and foremost, I want to address the big old elephant in the room: the Hexblade.

The Hexblade is simultaneously very powerful mechanically and very odd flavorfully.

The official story is that your patron is a sentient weapon. While it bears some connection to the Shadowfell (maybe specifically the Raven Queen,) that connection is only implied. Unlike the other patrons, the driving theme of a Hexblade's mechanics are, well, a mechanical focus on melee combat.

In two prominent actual-play streams, we've seen the Hexblade at best tangentially connect with the true patron and in other cases not even remotely. Fjord in Critical Role's campaign 2 did at least have a connection to a magical weapon, but the actual patron would fit much better with the Great Old One, or even closer, the Fathomless (which didn't exist yet when the campaign started.) Really, the "blade" element of the pact was really the pact boon. In Dimension 20's the Unsleeping City, Sofia, the drunken master monk, multiclasses into Warlock and gets a hexblade patron, though the patron itself is a sort of avatar of all bodega cats, which I'd say makes more sense as a Fey patron. (I haven't seen the second Unsleeping City season, but I also understand that their pure Hexblade warlock character actually has a pact with a devil, which pretty clearly means it should be a Fiend patron, unless there are other plot elements I'm unaware of.)

The point is, the flavor of the Hexblade is so oddly specific that no one seems to want to actually use it, while its mechanics are so strong that people will ignore the flavor in order to take the subclass.

I would like to see the Hexblade's mechanics broken up like a big company violating antitrust laws. Hexblade's Curse is fine, but the existence of Hex Warrior - with your hex weapon (allowing you to use charisma for weapon attacks and damage rolls) and the addition of medium armor proficiency and shield proficiency - is just too good.

The Pact of the Blade is there to let any warlock wield a weapon and use it in place of cantrips like eldritch blast. But at this point, anyone who actually wants to play that way would basically be a fool not to go with the Hexblade.

So, the first thing I'd do is make any summoned weapons with Pact of the Blade get those Hex Weapon features, regardless of your patron. Next, I'd make the ability to get medium armor and shields an eldritch invocation - perhaps one that requires Pact of the Blade.

This would certainly have consequences. It would make it a little less convenient to do a multiclass dip into Warlock on, say, your paladin. But I think it would also make other Blade Pact playstyles much more viable.

Next, I think you could revisit expanded spell lists. For most classes, if a subclass grants new spells, you simply get them always. I think that this should apply to Warlocks as well. Generally, having a bunch of spells available isn't really game-breaking as long as you're limited by spell slots.

I think I'd also have all Warlocks automatically learn Eldritch Blast. Not having it seems like a trap.

Now, what about those spell slots?

I'm a little torn here. On one hand, I'd love to get more spell slots to work with as a warlock. But I also think that they serve as an important limitation. Having just one at level 1 sucks, but that pain fades fairly quickly. I might look into seeing if you could get 3 at tier 2, 4 at tier 3, and 5 at tier 4 and see if that didn't make them too powerful.

A part of me also feels like perhaps Mystic Arcanum could work a little differently. I get the desire/need to keep them from refreshing on a short rest - two 9th level spells per day would be a bit much. But I think it would be cool to let you learn multiples at each level and swap them out - maybe you can only "prepare" one per day of each level.

Now, in terms of subclasses:

I think that the options in the PHB are a great baseline for Otherworldly Patrons in terms of flavor. Naturally, the Fiend makes a ton of sense as the sort of classic Faustian Warlock patron. I do wonder if perhaps they could even make separate subclasses for devils and demons, though, which could be interesting - taking the basics of the current Fiend patron and making it specifically a Devil.

Mechanically, I think that all of the PHB sublcasses suffer a bit from overcautious conservatism on the part of the designers. The Great Old One, which is my favorite patron flavor-wise, suffers tremendously from a number of supremely underwhelming features. What does Entropic Ward even have to do with ancient alien monstrosities? And Create Thrall is cool but profoundly situational.

I'd like to see the Great Old One get a full redesign around cosmic horror tropes - perhaps something like an aura that causes foes fear and maybe psychic damage. We did, of course, see similar ideas at work with the Aberrant Mind sorcerer, but I think that we could deal more in hidden knowledge and madness than the Aberrant Mind's focus on body horror.

Of the three originals, I think that the Fiend probably holds up the best, but each subclass in there could use at least a new coat of paint (though seriously, give me a totally redesigned Great Old One warlock.)

There might be some eldritch invocations from later books that might be good to work into the new PHB, but I think that the overall mechanic of invocations should 100% be kept - it's one of the things that makes Warlocks so cool (if you've never taken Repelling Blast, I highly recommend it - potentially multiple pushbacks per turn that have no save against them are very, very good. I neutralized a Glabrezu in one turn by knocking it into the River Styx.)

Now, regarding pact boons. I don't know if the Talisman boon from Tasha's has been terribly popular - it seems a bit underpowered. Pact Boons might be fine the way they are - less a powerful feature in their own right than something of a scaffold on which to build more powerful abilities (such as the various eldritch invocations that require one of the boons).

One thing I'd like to see the book talk a bit about is the nature of the Patron-Warlock relationship. This can take many forms, but maybe some discussion of the nature of how that power is granted could be interesting.

Anyway, I don't know if I'm going to do this sort of post for every class, but I thought I'd start here.

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