Simulating the GOO-Lock with a More Forgiving Target

 So, I'm at a crossroads here:

After a series of "vs Death Knight" simulations, I realized that while it's a cool boss monsters, it's also a very unusual target for a 10th level character. In my post about my Staff-and-Board Eldritch Knight build, I instead used a Wyvern, which simplifies things by being a non-legendary creature with no damage resistance or immunities and also has an AC closer to the average monster that you'd be fighting at level 10.

But it bugs me that its AC is 14, rather than 15. Is that insane? It doesn't have to be a really clean number (15 being a multiple of 5) but my OCD brain wonders if we should instead use a "target dummy" with a 15 AC and +3 to all saves.

Given that I'm revisiting a build here but figuring out its best damage output against a more reasonable target, I want to make sure I'm using the most reasonable target, in part so that I can compare this with other builds in the future.

But maybe a Wyvern is fine.

Hey, we've already done one that uses a Wyvern.

Ok.

I think what we can expect here is that the build will do significantly better because of the lower AC. We focused primarily on Eldritch Blast and Summon Aberration, though there are some questions as to what concentration spell might be a better choice. While Warlocks get the most Summon spells after Wizards (I think they don't get Summon Construct, which I believe is just Wizard and Artificer) one frustrating thing is that, because of the scaling of Pact Magic, we're never casting them at an ideal spell level - upcasting from 4th to 5th level only winds up adding a total of two damage if both attacks hit, so on any other class, you'd basically never want to cast these at odd levels unless you were desperate for their utility.

A GOO-Lock isn't obligated to cast Summon Aberration over other Summon spells, at least until Create Thrall comes at level 14. But given that these spells have expensive material components and you get this one anyway, I'd assume that Great Old One Warlocks are going to tend toward the Aberration.

There are interesting questions as to which aberration is the ideal one to summon. Beholderkin are probably the safest, given that they use a ranged attack and can also fly to stay outside of foes' melee ranges (though a Wyvern could go after them). However, Slaadi do slightly more damage (it's Slashing, but that's less of a problem in 5.5 than it was in 5.0) and have a health-regeneration effect that makes them basically fresh if they survive a combat and you have another one within the hour. Unlike the Skeletal Spirit from Summon Undead, Beholderkin aren't penalized in HP, though. Finally, the Mind Flayer (formerly Star Spawn) actually have the highest damage potential because of Whispering Aura.

Now, against a Death Knight, I'd generally thought that we'd be too scared that our Mind Flayer would just be smacked down immediately. But against a Wyvern, they might last a little longer. For a summoned creature to get swatted down by an enemy is arguably also good for the party, because it means those attacks didn't come for you or your allies - it just means that our damage output goes down.

Cast at 5th level, our Mind Flayer would have 50 Hp and an AC of 16. A Wyvern has a +7 to hit and across its two attacks does 48 damage. So, yeah, two hits could potentially take our guy out, though the chance of hitting twice on a single turn is only 36%, meaning that it's more likely than not that the Mind Flayer can survive a turn with a Wyvern focusing it down (though not much more than that).

So, how much damage are we getting from Whispering Aura? Notably, we need to position our minion at least 10 feet away from our allies to avoid catching them in it (it's not an optional pulse of damage), though we could also hit a rider with it. If we assume we're taking General Feats at 4 and 8, we'll only have a 19 to Charisma, so our DC is 16. A Wyvern will fail on a 14 or lower, so that's 70% of the time. The aura does 7 damage on average, so it's 4.9 average damage per turn. That's not insignificant, actually.

If we do a Beholderkin, the damage of its attacks are the same, but we don't get that 4.9 per turn. The Slaad hits a little harder.

Ok, we've got to do this whole thing:

Beholder and Mind Flayer attacks each do 1d8+3+spell's level, which means 1d8+8, or 12.5 on average per hit. With a +8 to hit, they'll hit a Wyvern on a 6 or higher, so 75% of the time. So, 12.5x75% is 9.375, and 4.5x5% is .225, so we get 9.6 damage per attack, and with two attacks, that's 19.2 damage.

Thus, the Beholderkin gives us 19.2 damage per turn and the Mind Flayer gives us 24.1.

The Slaad does 1d10+3+spell's level, or 13.5 average, with 5.5 more on a crit. 13.5x75% is 10.125, 5.5x5% is .275, so we get 10.4 per attack and thus 20.8 per turn.

Clearly the Mind Flayer wins, but only if we can keep it alive.

    As a note: my Great Old One Warlock, the very first character I came up with for D&D, has a patron who's less gooey tentacles and slime, and more akin to The Board from Control (though I came up with the concept before I played that game). It is a massive stone tower that is constantly crumbling and collapsing, but never actually falls - the Shattering Tower of Oedom-Het - and seems to occupy some strange place either in the Far Realm or on the Astral Plane. The point, though, is that I'd flavor each of these aberrations as more like inorganic (think stone or concrete) forms that have strange spatial anomalies as part of their anatomy. The Mind Flayer, I think, would be a vaguely humanoid form made of grey stone with a head that seems like a 4th-dimensional vortex projected into 3rd dimensional space, constantly shuddering and convulsing and projecting a cacophonous noise into the heads of those around them. Nothing about this creature seems organic, except for the smooth way that the vaguely humanoid body moves.

Again, we'll need to work to keep this thing alive, but we can actually calculate what the damage output would be with each of the options now.

Now, we're going to focus on Eldritch Blast as our primary source of damage (well, from us). At this level it's just two beams.

Real quick, though: I just wanted to see how True Strike compares. If we were to put our various invocations (including Agonizing Blast) on True Strike rather than Eldritch Blast, and we used a Light Crossbow (probably the most reasonable weapon for someone who only gets Simple Weapon proficiency if we're not going Pact of the Blade), at this level True Strike would hit for 1d8+1d6+4+4 (we're double-dipping on Charisma because True Strike already gets it). I think we can already tell that Eldritch Blast would do better, though, because if we combine both beams, that's 1d10+4+1d10+4.

So yeah, we're good.

Now, we need to consider Clairvoyant Combatant.

I skipped this on the Death Knight because it seemed very unlikely we could get it. But against a Wyvern, who has no legendary resistances, I think it's not unreasonable that we'd get this pretty useful feature to work.

We do need to get within 30 feet to activate it, but if it does work, we can open up as far as 4 miles (unlikely we will). However, we get just one free use per rest, after which we need to expend a Pact Slot to try again. I think this means we should probably assume we won't be trying it again if it fails - we'd rather keep the other slot in case we need to re-summon our minion or try something else.

It's a Wisdom save, so like the Mind Flayer's Whispering Aura, there's a 70% chance that it'll work, giving us advantage on our attacks. (The Mind Flayer won't benefit from this, so we don't need to change the math above).

Thus, we have advantage on our attacks 70% of the time, and not on 30% of the time.

Without advantage, we have a 75% chance to hit (just like our minion). Our hits will be 1d10+4, or 9.5 on average, with an extra 5.5 on a crit. 9.5x75% is 7.125, and (as we figured out earlier with the Slaad) 5.5x5% is .275, so that's 7.4 per Eldritch Blast, or 14.8 total at this level. However, the no-advantage roll is only 30% of the time, so that's really 4.44.

With advantage, that hit chance becomes 93.75%, and the crit chance is 9.75%. So, 9.5x93.75% is about 8.9, and 5.5x9.75% is about .54, so this is about 9.4 per EB and thus 18.8 total. This happens 70% of the time, so it's really 13.16.

Thus, our Eldritch Blasts do an average of 17.6 damage per round.

If we get our Aberration out before initiative is rolled, that will let us get that full damage each round, but I would guess that we'd typically have to wait a round.

So, we have three potential projections of damage-per-round based on our aberration choice.

With a Beholderkin, we do 36.8 damage per round (after the first if we didn't pre-cast).

With a Slaad, we do 38.4.

With a Mind Flayer, we do 41.7.

    So, there are fewer moving parts here than there are in my Eldritch Knight build, which did quite a lot more (especially if we assumed we could get their reaction strike), and I wonder if there are areas where I could tune up the build.

    Level 10 is a bit of a rough breakpoint for a Warlock, as they get a giant boost at level 11 with the progression of Eldritch Blast and the potential to pick up a more powerful spell (Summon Fiend, for example, will out-damage any of these 5th level Summon Aberration spells). In AoE situations, there's a good chance that Hunger of Hadar might be a better use of our spell slots and concentration, depending on how many targets it can get to.

But I'm not sure really how to boost the damage output here without using A: magic items or B: some weird multiclass build where we're not even sure we're a Warlock anymore (though Aberrant Sorcery is a pretty thematic thing to combine with this, even if there's a little overlap - but quickening Eldritch Blast can be pretty powerful). Apart from needing to close in for Clairvoyant Combatant, the lower damage of a pure-ranged strategy (using the Beholderkin) will allow us to stay a lot safer in combat.

Also, there are some fight-specific shenanigans we can get up to - if the wyverns have riders, maybe we can Repelling Blast them off their mounts?

We could get a fair amount of near-guaranteed damage by using Repelling Blast to shove them into a Hunger of Hadar - the Cold damage that the spell deals has no saving throw, so I'd put its upcasting scaling into that rather than the Acid. A Wyvern has a fly speed of 80 feet, though, so it might be hard to keep them in there, but against melee combatants with the standard 30 foot walking speed will have a harder time. Using Devil's Sight should, I think, let you see into it.

(Actually, unexpected rules nuance here: Darkvision doesn't actually prohibit seeing in magical darkness - it's the Darkness spell that says that. Hunger of Hadar explicitly says that no light inside the darkness can illuminate it, and that creatures fully within it are blinded, but technically nothing says that someone with Darkvision can't see into it from the outside. Devil's Sight, notably, is not Darkvision, but it does say you can see normally in darkness that is nonmagical or magical, so either should work here).