pbd said:
Has anyone had the chance to guage the warlock in play yet?
I am intrigued by the class, it seems to be quite a split from the standard spellcaster. I am interested in trying it myself, but haven't yet had the chance and am wondering about any possible rules issues/fixes that have come up.
I know there have been several threads on the class ( iahve definately een perusing them); think of this as a summary and play test discussion.
Rules discussions/stories please!
Thanks,
pbd
Yea, we've played with it. The warlock was awesomely powerful. In specific, he was using Bewitching Blast (will save or confused one roung) and the essence which allows you to chain attack multiple targets with your blast. The DC on that goes up with the warlocks level... We were playing at around level 12, so the warlock was hitting three people with 6d6 blasts each, and confusing each one (as the DC for that save was very high). It was... devastating. He could blast and dimension door out, leaving behind a major image... and quicken invisibility to add to the confusion.
We've since nerfed it some... I think it was too soon really, a knee jerk reaction. I'd've wanted to see more to determine that it was really overpowered as it was. But I do agree that the first encounter was completely overwhelming. (The campain was set up so that the player attacked the other characters before later joining them... well, magically altered so as to become one of the players that had died and wanted a new character.) A monk or equivelant took the warlock by surprise and grappled him to submission. That really IS a major weakness of the class. Other arcane casters too, of course, but the warlock needs somatic components to DD out.
The proposed (and accepted) nerfs were
1) The DD ability can't take you to places the character couldn't walk/run to, and only to places that can be seen by the warlock.
2) The flight ability was not allowed... it wasn't allowed to begin with either.
3) Only one eldritch blast effect may be used at a given time. Either a shapeint one or an "essence" one, not both. (It's written so that you could use one shape and one essence to boost the power.)
And, while I think that some of that may be a little extreme or overreacting... That's mostly because I'd want to see more of the class as written before altering it. Even with these nerfs, the warlock character is clearly at the top of the power spectrum of the player characters. And these are some pretty high powered PC's.