I think the initial reason for the Warlock redesign was out of a sense that some groups don't take short rests.
Or, at least, WotC says they think that's the case. I think every campaign I've played in, we've taken short rests pretty frequently, largely because it's a great way to heal up after a tough fight or two - something everyone can appreciate.
But Warlocks have also suffered from a perception that they just have a tiny number of spell slots, and some players are fairly precious with them. Again, in my experience playing a Warlock through Descent into Avernus (which went up through level 13 - I think we officially hit 14 after we finished, but I haven't touched the character since then) it was actually the fact that I could recharge my spell slots on a short rest that let me feel pretty liberal with them - I knew that I could toss out a Synaptic Static here and there and know that I'd get them back with relative ease, and that if I did run out, my souped-up Eldritch Blast with both Agonizing and Repelling Blast invocations would still let me be a pretty useful ranged damage dealer.
The truth is that, aside from a few tweaks, I'd be kind of ok with keeping Pact Magic more or less as it is. I like that Warlocks feel totally different than other spellcasters while still being a class focused on magic.
In fact, the redesign for the Warlock in One D&D makes them, I think, more akin to the Artillerist or Alchemist Artificer - half-casters that still rely on spellcasting as their primary combat function. And while I've considered playing an Artillerist, I think both subclasses feel hampered by the fact that they're half-casters, which is why I've tended to lean more on the Battle Smith and Armorer as my preferred subclasses - as "martial" subclasses, being half-casters doesn't feel like as much of a downside.
One of the things I really like about Pact Magic is the way that spells that it encourages you to pick spells that scale well with level. Armor of Agathys, for example, is (currently) a Warlock-exclusive spell that is so-so at 1st level, but gets significantly better as it is upcast, because the temporary hit points become more likely to last through multiple hits and the reflective damage it deals goes up as well.
Now, this hits a wall after 5th level spell slots. I think the reason why Warlocks swap over from Pact Magic to Mystic Arcanum is probably to keep things from getting totally out of hand - A, they don't want all your spells scaling up to 9th level, and B, they don't want you to have more 9th level spell slots (or 6th, 7th, or 8th) than other casters.
However, this also creates the impression that Warlocks can cast fewer spells than they can. If you simply look at the number of spell slots a Warlock has, it looks like they max out at 4, and some people might read this as if they can only cast four spells per day (and then only at level 17+). But by the time you're 17, you have 4 short-rest-recharging slots and effectively four other spell slots that can only be used to cast a specific spell as each of them.
Ok, so let's take a step back: Is the problem the short-rest recharge, or is it the lack of spell slots?
The One D&D Playtest has not eliminated all resource recharging on short rests. Fighters still get Action Surges back on a short rest. Monks still get Discipline Points back on a short rest. Druids still get Wild Shape back on short rests. Bards, after level 5, get Bardic Inspiration back on short rests. Clerics and Paladins still get one use of Channel Divinity back on short rests (which is as good as current Paladins ever got).
Now, you could argue that of all these classes, only the Monk has to take a short rest to get back its central, primary resource, and the Monk was given a new ability at level 7 to let them get the effects of a Short Rest after only a minute, once a day.
Still, it doesn't seem like it would be too game-breaking to give Warlocks something similar - indeed, their current capstone feature basically does that. If we had that come earlier and gave them a cooler capstone feature, it might solve this issue.
But I don't think that the problem they really want to solve is the short vs. long rest. I think it's the small number of spell slots.
Warlocks need to choose what they spend their spell slots on carefully. On my Wizard, I can easily just toss a 1st level spell slot at something like Feather Fall or Mage Armor or a quick Magic Missile, because I have a total (currently) of nine spell slots (four 1st level, three 2nd level, two 3rd level,) and because this is my lowest-level slot, it's the most expendable. But on a Warlock, I wouldn't want to do that unless I absolutely had to, because any leveled spell is going to cost me the chance to cast one of my most powerful spells.
Now, this is one of the challenges of the class - to spend a spell slot or not - but I also recognize that, due to the fact that the answer is usually "no," you can lose out on some of the interesting gameplay choices that, say, a Sorcerer has - at high levels at least, a Sorcerer is probably spending a spell slot on most turns in combat, and so they're making decisions on which ones to cast.
So, turning Warlocks into half-casters does sort of address these issues - you have more spell slots over the course of a day (a level 9 Warlock would have nine spell slots, which a current Warlock wouldn't even get if they had two short rests over the course of a day). To balance that, though, these spell slots are not as high of a level - the current Warlock gets 5th level spell slots at level 9, whereas the playtest one would have four 1st level slots, three 2nd level slots, and two 3rd level slots.
And that means that it's down to you whether you would prefer having more spell slots, or more powerful spell slots.
As you can probably tell by all the posts I've made about this, I prefer the latter.
And I think a big part of that is about staying true to the fantasy of the Warlock.
Setting aside the Artificer (which I love, but I also sympathize with some of the critiques to it,) the other half-casters in the game are the Paladin and the Ranger. Both of these are, at their heart, "Martial" classes. The Paladin, in nearly every RPG version of it I've ever seen, is a heavily-armored melee combatant who has some magical power, but only uses it to supplement their martial ability - they're a hybrid. The Ranger is also all about its weapon attacks - most classically shooting with a bow - and the magic is almost less being some magical spellcaster than just having a deep and thorough understanding of nature and a heightened ability to track - thing Aragorn knowing how to do some rudimentary healing when Frodo gets stabbed with the Morgul blade or when he is able to piece together exactly what happened with Merry and Pippin at the site of the massacre of the orcs in a way that no one else could.
But a Warlock, lorewise, has typically been grouped with Wizards and Sorcerers as people who are pushing the boundaries of arcane magic, delving into the deepest secrets and channeling the most powerful forces. To put it another way, "I didn't sell my soul to be a half-caster!"
Granted, the playtest version does include a way for Warlocks to keep pace with other spellcasters in terms of the most powerful spells they can learn, through Mystic Arcanum.
Setting aside the fact that these now eat into your Eldritch Invocations, Mystic Arcanum creates some other weird problems.
The first is that Mystic Arcanum, as before, doesn't actually give you a spell slot to cast the spells with, but only lets you cast it at base level once per day. As a result, you can never upcast the spells you learn with Mystic Arcanum, and you can never upcast spells to 6th or higher level (this is particularly sad for the excellent Tasha's Summon spells, most of which the Warlock does get access to).
These were already issues with the old version. But the new version adds a weird wrinkle - that you have a really awkward spell progression.
Consider this:
At 11th level, you can pick up a Mystic Arcanum that teaches you a 6th level spell. For the sake of argument, we'll pick up Summon Fiend (one of those Tasha's spells). If we want to upcast Summon Undead to 4th level, though, we need to wait to get a 4th level spell slot. In the current version, we can do that at level 7, like any other full caster. But in the new version, we have to wait until level 13 to do so.
These spells scale in the same way, increasing damage but more importantly doing more attacks with every two spell levels. And as a result, the new Warlock will be able to cast a 6th level Summon Fiend before they can cast a 4th level Summon Undead.
That seems just wrong.
(I've also previously pointed out that Warlock players will be strongly encouraged to swap out the Mystic Arcanum spells frequently as they level up - you might pick up Fireball at level 5, but at level 9 you don't need Mystic Arcanum for it anymore, and you'll instead prefer to use that invocation on a 5th level spell.)
Ok, so where do we go from here?
Here are my proposals:
First, bring back Pact Magic. Short rest recharges, smaller number of scaling spell slots that go up every two levels until you're level 9 and the slots are level 5.
Next, give us something akin to Eldritch Master - letting us get our spell slots back without resting once a day - but far earlier, such as level 7, like the new Monks get their equivalent.
Next, maybe give us like one more spell slot. Actually, I think two at a time is good for tier 1 (and bumping it up at level 1) and then maybe raising it with each tier as before, but of course ahead by one - so you get a third at level 5, a fourth at level 11, and a fifth at level 17.
Finally, have Mystic Arcanum a full class feature rather than Invocation, as it was in 2014, but also make it so that we now get a spell slot of the given level with which to cast the single spell we learn, but have these spell slots only recharge on a long rest. So, at higher levels, we can choose to upcast spells past 5, but with spell slots that are a more limited resource.
The fear with the Warlock is that giving them too much of the full caster benefits would require nerfing some of their unique features. But I suspect that these changes wouldn't be enough to make them overpowered, but would possibly allay the qualms that people have about the class.
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