D&D 5E Best warlock Invocation to go with agonizing blast?

My lore bard might do a L2 warlock dip. Looking for ideas

Bennett said:

My lore bard might do a L2 warlock dip. Looking for ideas

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For pure mechanical awesome: devil's sight - being able to see in magical darkness is incredibly useful and if your character doesn't already have darkvision then it's a no brainer.

Eldritch Sight for at-will detect magic is good and saves you a "spell known" slot. Same can be said for Armor of Shadows, Mask of Many Faces, Misty Visions.

I really like Beguiling Influence, but as a Lore Bard you already have a ton of skills, probably including these two.

Eldritch Spear and Repelling Blast add range or push power to your eldritch blasts which are situational, but nice.

Unless you have a compelling reason for needing DPR I'd ignore agonizing blast on a lord bard. Mask of many faces and something else would be my go to ones. Maybe take the actor feat with it. Campaigns vary obviously though.

There are a lot of options that would work. My pick would be either Repelling Blast (for the extra combat power) or Mask of Many Faces (for the synergy with bard skills and abilities), but you could make a case for any number of invocations.

Tell me why your considering the dip.

Bennett said:

My lore bard might do a L2 warlock dip. Looking for ideas

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You'll hear a lot about Devil's Sight, and for a human it's a pretty nifty Darkvision replacement, but unless your whole party is already full of heavy obscurement and darkness tricks I find there are better things to do with your invocation + concentration (e.g. Hypnotic Pattern). That is, if there's an Alert Shadow Monk, a Moon Druid using snake or elemental form for Blindsense, and a Skulker Rogue in your party, so that you're not spending your own concentration on Darkness but relying on the Shadow Monk's Darkness, then I'd go for Devil's Sight.

Otherwise, I find it useful to have at least one guy in the party with 600' range and Spell Sniper/Sharpshooter capability so that you're never outranged by hobgoblins/etc., which means you might look into Eldritch Spear. If someone has that covered already then Repelling Blast is my favorite no-concentration way of abusing enemies. Spike Growth + Repelling Blast is an amazing combo (+4d4 damage per hit PLUS making the enemy slog right back through that difficult terrain, taking another 4d4 damage on the way... 8d4 makes Hex's 1d6 look like chump change) and Wall of Fire is similar (+5d8 per hit). An awful lot of crowd control spells like Stinking Cloud get much better if you have an easy way to knock enemies back into them, and with Agonizing Repelling Blast you're not choosing between damage and control, you're getting both at the same time!

Infinite Disguise Self is fun in completely different, non-combat way. Did you ever see X-Men? Yeah, at-will Disguise Self is like being Mystique the Super Spy.

False Life at-will has a good reputation at low levels as being extremely useful. Me, I'd rather just take Inspiring Leader as a feat and benefit the whole party instead, but it's certainly something to consider. Ditto Armor of Shadows for at-will Mage Armor--I wouldn't do it myself, but it's quite popular.

Finally, One With Shadows as written is useless, but at my table I let warlock players use something mechanically identical to the Shadow Monk's Cloak of Shadows (i.e. you can move while cloaked, you just can't take actions) and my players seem to have lots of fun with it. See if there are any invocations like that that your DM is open to rewriting to make them work better.

Lots of good choices. My top 3 considerations would be repelling blast to increase combat utility a bit, devil sight as a darkvision replacement (good for stealthy bards), or an at-will SLA like misty visions.

I would point out that if a damaging bard is the goal, then you might go valor and rely on weapons, then use magical secrets at 10th bard level for shillelagh and eldritch blast. That gets you the agonizing eldritch blasts and a free bonus attack on top of the cantrip damage (battle magic 14th level) with the ability to focus on CHA plus better armor options. If you miss additional skill proficiencies you could take beguiling influence (could take it regardless for skills).

14 DEX covers a decent combat ability score in the meantime. It's a pretty decent damage build long term going with delayed benefits. Cutting words is nice but you'll find there is more than enough usefulness in bardic inspiration without it as long as you aren't running solo.

At-will silent image and bards go together like peanut butter and another food substance that pairs well with peanut butter.

Just curious are the level prerequisites class or character level. Levitate at will would be pretty snazzy IMO if character level.

Normally though id go thousand faces and misty image on a bard.

Ashrym said:

I would point out that if a damaging bard is the goal, then you might go valor and rely on weapons, then use magical secrets at 10th bard level for shillelagh and eldritch blast. That gets you the agonizing eldritch blasts and a free bonus attack on top of the cantrip damage (battle magic 14th level) with the ability to focus on CHA plus better armor options. If you miss additional skill proficiencies you could take beguiling influence (could take it regardless for skills).

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Ashrym has a point. One bonus action attack on top of Eldritch Blast may not sound like much, until you realize that it could be a bonus action Net attack (at disadvantage, because Nets pretty much always have disadvantage on something or other) which if it hits both denies the enemy of his next action and gives you advantage on all of your Eldritch Blasts. That's actually pretty sweet when you think about it, against anything non-Huge.