D&D 5E Fixing Eldritch Blast

[Jefe Bergenstein]

It's the most powerful cantrip in the game. I would like to see an invocation that can make it an optional melee spell attack, like an Eldritch Sword.

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It would need to provide some sort of other benefit. Or just be baked into Pact of the Blade. Otherwise you have bladelocks with yet more taxes to be able to do the same/less damage in melee as the standard EB ranged blaster.

 

[rgoodbb]

Guidance is also one of the most underpowered cantrips in the game how could we augment it?
-Take away concentration and make it a bonus action?

Vicious Mockery too. It's only a piffly d4. Utter trap.
- make it a close burst 2? No hang on wrong addition.

None of these poor babies stand up to the might of Tr............

 

[Yunru]

None of these poor babies stand up to the might of Tr............

Trace on?

 

[rgoodbb]

Trace on?

Is the correct answer!

 

[mellored]

Eldritch Blast is wildly overpowered, given that it matches and exceeds the powers of archery (same damage plus the force push; also Devil's Sight for permanent advantage).

Only the fact feats can be applied to archery but not EB saves archers from going obsolete.

Please don't allow your improvements to stack with a multiclassed Warlock.

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Using darkness + devil's sight means your not using other spells, like fireball.

Also, archery is dex based, with all those advantages.

Also, magic weapons.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Vicious Mockery too. It's only a piffly d4. Utter trap.
- make it a close burst 2? No hang on wrong addition.

Vicious Mockery is in fact pretty bad. It would be more worthwhile if it gave the enemy disadvantage on a full round of attacks instead of just a single one. As it is, spending an action to inflict negligible damage maybe (if it fails the save) decrease an enemy's damage output by about 1/6 (say, halving the chance to hit of one out of a Troll's three attacks) is just terrible. Even with a troll's terrible Wisdom save, your Cha 20 level 9 AC 14 bard is doing 4.50 DPR to the troll, and reducing the damage it does back to him by 7%. (Troll's DPR against AC 14 is 21.53, decreases to 19.78 when it has disadvantage on the bite attack, which happens 85% of the time when it fails its -1 Wisdom save (needs 18 or higher on d20).) So basically it does nothing.

Vicious Mockery is pretty terrible.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Using darkness + devil's sight means your not using other spells, like fireball.

Also, archery is dex based, with all those advantages.

Also, magic weapons.

One of the biggest advantages of actual weapons is that they can be poisoned. An archer going up against a deadly threat can (and IME often does) poison his weapons: drow sleep poison, purple worm venom, or something in between. The DMG errata made poison worse in some ways (melee weapons only get one hit instead of a full round's worth of attacks) but for archers they are a pure win: you still get to poison three arrows per dose of poison, and now they stay poisoned indefinitely instead of for only one minute. (Unless the DM rules otherwise, of course.) Now you can have a "special quiver" of arrows from which you pull a Purple Worm Poisoned Arrow whenever you need it.

And whenever you meet a Purple Worm, you beat it unconscious in melee, cast Protection From Poison on the party Nature expert, and proceed to milk that puppy for all it's worth. :-D

(This BTW is yet another great example of why you can't solve the 5MWD problem just by controlling the pace of resting. 5MWD is a DMing problem, about DMs failing to provide a living world with meaningful passage of time.)

 

[rgoodbb]

Vicious Mockery is in fact pretty bad. It would be more worthwhile if it gave the enemy disadvantage on a full round of attacks instead of just a single one. As it is, spending an action to inflict negligible damage maybe (if it fails the save) decrease an enemy's damage output by about 1/6 (say, halving the chance to hit of one out of a Troll's three attacks) is just terrible. Even with a troll's terrible Wisdom save, your Cha 20 level 9 AC 14 bard is doing 4.50 DPR to the troll, and reducing the damage it does back to him by 7%. (Troll's DPR against AC 14 is 21.53, decreases to 19.78 when it has disadvantage on the bite attack, which happens 85% of the time when it fails its -1 Wisdom save (needs 18 or higher on d20).) So basically it does nothing.

Vicious Mockery is pretty terrible.

Thanks for the maths. I will always leave the maths for someone else, but I think it seems OK at the lower levels especially as Bards get no other combat cantrip bar thunderclap which is kind of too dangerous to use up close.

so.......Close burst 2 it actually is then?

 

[Yunru]

The DMG errata made poison worse in some ways (melee weapons only get one hit instead of a full round's worth of attacks)

That is strange, especially given it only shafts melee builds.

 

[Helldritch]

Nothing compels a caster to take an offensive cantrip.

Cantrips per se are also a way to emphasize that a character is indeed a caster. Back when a 1st level caster got 1 spell per day it was hard to give them the flavor of being a magic practitioner without them squandering their meager number of spells. Cantrips allowed a wizard to demonstrate that ability without wasting spell slots in a weaker yet still unmistakably magical form.

Right on that one. But you have to remember that a wizard was a not a full fledge wizard until name level, that is level 11 (in 1ed.). All levels from 1 to 10 were considered apprentice levels. The samething was applying to all other classes. Paladins were considered true paladins at level 9, and all other classes had their name level at some point or the other (usualy by the 8th or 9th).

Now, with 5ed but also from 3e we are considered full fledge wizards, paladin, cleric etc.. from the start. So cantrips are kinda of necessary to give the feel of a "magic weilding" class. Unfortunately, cantrips are way to weak in their current form. Only EB is strong. And only with the proper invocations.