SolitonMan
Explorer
Cool to see this thread again, I'd forgotten it since posting last year.
In that time the warlock I've been running in a Shackled City game has advanced to level 16 (DARK invocations, yes!!). He's hardly what I'd call optimized from a combat perspective - Swimming the Styx and Call of the Beast (from Complete Mage) are a couple of the least invocations he's acquired. But because of the invocation choices I made for him, he's versatile in surprising ways. Like a couple sessions ago, there was an incident in which the town was being wracked by earthquakes, and volcanic fissures were opening in the area. The session was pretty cool, the party had to run around town, trying to evacuate the citizens and dealing with all sorts of different types of encounters during the process. We had to rescue folks from a burning building, and others who had stumbled into a lava breakthrough that lead to them being unable to move for fear of the ground crumbling beneath them and dropping them into molten lava. In both of those cases, Hellrime Blast helped with the heat. Flee the Scene helped move people out of the lava zone and burning buildings.
Another encounter in this session involved a stampeding group of animals, driven to panic by the shaking town. Using Call of the Beast and a wand of charm animal I was able to speak to the animals, calm them, and guide them to safety.
I've been running this warlock character since level one, and I'm still finding new ways to creatively use his abilities that surprise me sometimes. I cannot argue with the analysis of raw damaging power versus spellcasters, because it's spot on. But in the breadth of the game, I haven't found a warlock to be any less fun than any other class I've played.
In that time the warlock I've been running in a Shackled City game has advanced to level 16 (DARK invocations, yes!!). He's hardly what I'd call optimized from a combat perspective - Swimming the Styx and Call of the Beast (from Complete Mage) are a couple of the least invocations he's acquired. But because of the invocation choices I made for him, he's versatile in surprising ways. Like a couple sessions ago, there was an incident in which the town was being wracked by earthquakes, and volcanic fissures were opening in the area. The session was pretty cool, the party had to run around town, trying to evacuate the citizens and dealing with all sorts of different types of encounters during the process. We had to rescue folks from a burning building, and others who had stumbled into a lava breakthrough that lead to them being unable to move for fear of the ground crumbling beneath them and dropping them into molten lava. In both of those cases, Hellrime Blast helped with the heat. Flee the Scene helped move people out of the lava zone and burning buildings.
Another encounter in this session involved a stampeding group of animals, driven to panic by the shaking town. Using Call of the Beast and a wand of charm animal I was able to speak to the animals, calm them, and guide them to safety.
I've been running this warlock character since level one, and I'm still finding new ways to creatively use his abilities that surprise me sometimes. I cannot argue with the analysis of raw damaging power versus spellcasters, because it's spot on. But in the breadth of the game, I haven't found a warlock to be any less fun than any other class I've played.
