I have made a revised version of the Warlock class to fix some of the issues I have with it (and I have seen echoed by others on this very forum somewhat often). My house rules while simple in concept required a re-write of several sections, so I have just restated the class.
My goals with the revised version are as follows-
1. Make Pact of the Blade a viable melee combatant without having to resort to multi classing and constrained Invocation choices. This involved swapping the Pact and Patron choice, so you choose your Pact (now called a Fraternity) at 1st level and eventually choose a special Patron at 3rd level.
2. Reduce the dependency on Eldritch Blast, so that you can choose from more cantrips.
3. Make spellcasting a little more flexible (not a lot).
4. Change the flavor a bit so it's present more that Warlocks deal with many types of outsiders for their powers, but build a non-exclusive bond of patronage over time.
5. Expand the number of patrons and special familiars you can choose from. (In development)
Comments and feedback welcome.
Hehe seems like everyone is getting into the Warlock game! (myself included).
Alright lets see what we have gotten. I have some feedback on specific points. In general, I like a lot of what you are doing. My main critique is in areas I called "forced flavor". It feels you are trying to force the player to roleplay, when instead you want the class to simply be cool enough that good roleplayers will. I'll note that when I see it.
The other general note...its too wordy. We want to really trim this baby down where we can.
Lets go to work:
Fraternities: Right now I feel the Shadow and Steel fraternities have decent "straight up" power. Chain has some neat things that a good player can make use of (the ability to send a familiar out, see through it, and then talk to people has awesome flavor potential), but it doesn't have the raw power the other two do.
(Steel) Eldritch Weapon: This is a really really fancy way of saying....your weapons do force damage and can be any weapon you want. I would literally just change it to this:
When you summon your fraternal weapons, you can remold them to become any melee weapon you wish. In addition, you may encircle them with eldritch energy, allowing the weapons to deal force damage instead of their normal damage.
(Steel) Superior Eldritch Weapon: The problem with these abilities, is they are really powerful in some games, and completely useless in others. Personally, I would just give them a bonus to attack and damage. If a DM wants to give them a magic weapon on top of that...that is their purview, not yours.
Beg, Borrow, or Steal: This is where the forced flavor starts to come in. Its a neat idea, and has great flavor, but its also very wordy, and adds I think some unnecessary mechanics. I would polish this up, like:
During a short rest, you commune with otherwordly agents for secret knowledge. You may add 1 Warlock spell (including patron bonus spells) to your lists of spells known. This spell must be one you are capable of casting. After a long rest, you lose this spell. You can use this ability once per long rest.
The flavor is left to the player and DM. If they want to make it a fun bargaining session, they can. But again, you don't need to push that into the mechanics.
Madness: This ability, with all due respect, should be tossed out the window. Feel free to throw in some flavor notes at the beginning of the class description about how many warlocks are "off". Feel free to make one of those tables WOTC likes with a list of "oddities" that a player may want to have fun with. But there is no reason to force mechanics here. Some players will go 150% gungho with madness flavor, and others won't touch it with a 10 foot pole. And that is perfectly fine, let people play it the way they want.
Strike Thy Foes: Are they still able to attack the same target with all of the attacks? If so the description isn't quite clear, I got the impression you were forced to split your attacks.
The Final Invocation: A cool ability, the thing about magic jars and stuff is great. However, I would remove the Resurrection restrictions. Again...forced flavor. Some players want to be able to resurrect easy peesy...just let them. I could easily see some DM do a cool flavor thing where the party has to go to the patron's realm to get the soul back...but they don't need you to force that in for them.
One side note, you really did a great job describing warlocks as "brave", "fearless", "go where no one else would dare to tread". Would it make sense to give them a bonus vs fear somewhere? Right now they aren't particularly good at fear saves.
