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As a Warlock you tend to have to focus on a 2-3 good tricks at early levels, but your patron selection can give you some variety. As has been pointed out, Hex + Eldritch Blast + Eldritch powerup invocations is a Warlock staple. Darkness + Devil's Sight is another good one (Devil's Sight is...

Hasn't monster customization usually been more in the DMG anyway? I don't have my books at hand but I don't recall Monster Manuals of the past being much more than lists of monsters. I certainly got the impression this time that the designers got a bit mired in the details of CR/XP/encounter...

Also, I don't know if they're done tweaking things yet, but at least for the fractional CR monsters it seems that adding CR isn't too terrible a way to gauge appropriateness. For example, with Orcs (CR 1/2), tossing two at a first level party is tough but not crazy (hard for a party of four)...

The way I plan to run things, Medicine (the skill) is about on par with History or Religion. None of them are widely applicable skills, and they may hardly ever even come up in some campaign styles. But they can be situationally very useful in noncombat exploration or social interactions. To...

Well, the baseline assumption in 5e seems to be for 1-2 short rests per day, with about 2 encounters between short rests. So if you make all those "cast X spell 1/day" invocations slotless, they might start to add up. At level 11, a warlock has 3 5th-level slots, 5 invocations, and their...

Not super scary on offense, maybe, but look at those defenses. AC 19, all saves good except Wis, resistances out the wazoo, and 82 hp. A level 5 party will have their hands full bringing this guy down, especially if they don't all have magic weapons yet, and over several rounds those...

I think you're misunderstanding the argument here. If the moondruid is powerful because she has infinite HP and 9th-level spells, then is the problem with the HP or the spells? And when considering how the moondruid does against monsters, it's not about whether the moondruid "wins" or not...

Yes, at level 11, your wolf companion has 44 hp, AC 17, and when you command it to attack it makes two attacks at +8 (probably with advantage) for 2d4+6 damage each, with a small chance of knocking the target prone. And you still get one attack yourself that turn. Your own attack, AC, and...

Even if it works (it's not absolutely clear to me that it does), infinite hp is usually not that great a combat ability. Being the perfect punching bag does not subdue the ancient dragon any faster, nor does it close that portal to the lower hells, nor does it stop the lich-king's ritual from...

What gives you advantage on the attack? I'm not seeing anything about that in the mount rules. AFAICT, nothing makes Rogues better riders than anybody else. Mounts get their own actions, and anyone riding a horse can have it move+disengage for ride-by attacks. Cunning Action gives the rogue...

Exactly, I think of the eldritch knight as something like 80/20 warrior/mage, while the bladelock is more like 30/70. Valor bards and war clerics seem to me like they might be closest to 50/50, maybe leaning a bit more toward mage, while paladins can go from 80%+ warrior to maybe 60/40 if they...

Just curious: how do people who dislike Guidance feel about the Help action? Because while it doesn't last as long, it's a totally spammable ability that grants advantage to every ability check ever. I mean, yes, Help stacks with Guidance. But if a constrained situation comes up where the...

What you describe is called "True Polymorph" now. It's a 9th-level spell.

I hadn't actually thought of using "unarmed" as a pact weapon for Lifedrinker. But given that a warlock has to give up two levels to get it, and that there's not much other advantage to using "unarmed" as your pact weapon, if this came up at my table I think I'd allow it. Seems kind of cool...

It's not the greatest option for Warlocks, but another multiclass possibility is a level or two in Monk. Unarmored Defense is useless, but with Martial Arts you can use a spear or quarterstaff as your pact weapon (attack 2H for 1d8+Dex) and tack on the unarmed 1d4+Dex as a bonus action. This...

It is pretty weak, but I think linking it to the healer's kit or hit point recovery isn't quite what the skill is meant to handle. Someone proficient with the healer's kit is an EMT. They know the tools, they know how to apply them, and can even mix stuff in an emergency. Someone proficient...

I just see it as more a consequence of the fact that no set of multiclassing rules is going to work well for every possible combination. So yeah, Fighter 15/Wizard 5 quite possibly will suck in 5E, and realizing this, the designers gave us the Eldritch Knight instead. Fighter 10/Wizard 10...

I'd think a Ranger using all their slots for spamming Hunter's Mark would be essentially "non-magical" as far as anyone in the game world would be concerned. The playtest had Primeval Awareness, too, which was another "barely magical" use for spell slots.

Rangers got "Hunter's Mark" as a lvl 1 spell in the playtest. This was a very useful but barely even mystical "spell". If you want a "spell-less" ranger you could do a lot worse than just spamming Hunter's Mark with all of your slots (just like a "spell-less" paladin can just burn slots for...

I think this will be it, short of houserules or DMG-inspired class hybridization. Want to be a non-casting Paladin? Just burn all your spell slots on smites. Done. A tiny lizard told me rangers might also have a way of burning spell slots, but we'll see what makes it into the PHB.