Share Your Thoughts On My Warlock Houserules

[mellored]

The house rules I used.

1: Twice per day, you can spend an action to take a short rest. This applies to everyone and fixes the short rest issue for all.

2: Medium armor, shields, lifedrinker, and thirsting blade free for pact blade.
I like the idea of giving them shillelagh, but not for 2-handed weapons. They do fine with polearm master + great weapon master + buffs.

3: All spell invocations are just added to the warlock spell list. Except polymorph and conjure elementals, those are free casts 1/day.

 

[CapnZapp]

I don't have any useful comments atm, but it is very nicely presented and looks well thought out.

Agreed

 

[CapnZapp]

Houserule Goals:

• Make Patron choice have a stronger influence on a character's play style.
  
• Make Blade Pact viable without outright requiring multiclassing.
  
• Fix the Invocation spell options.
  
• Slightly reduce reliance on short rests, to address the problem of Warlocks being either OP spell spammers or boring cantrip users depending on the frequency of what ultimately should be a story-focused mechanic (when and how often the party can take a rest).

First, I note you are using the FONT and COLOR tags. Please consider not doing that. By hardcoding black text, your post becomes invisible to readers using some themes. By changing the font, you mess with some browsers' ability to render the text well in all sizes.

As for feedback: a job well done!

I do think you probably could scale back a little. Let's see what you're proposing and what really would be essential in order to still meet your goals.

Adding Patron spells to spells known. Hmmm. I would have thought the Sorcerer was the class in most need of more spells known. The Warlock has issues, but is really too-few known spells one of them?

Adding one (or two) long rest spell slots reserved for Patron spells - I like it. It's not much of a power boost, and it does ensure the Warlock will cast the occasional Patron-themed spell.

Removing the burn-slot req of invocations. Yes. A no-brainer. Completely agree.

Bladelock using Charisma. This alone helps with the MAD a lot. I don't think you need to hand out medium armor proficiency on top of this. With Cha attacks, you can afford a higher Dex, and light armor combined with a Dex 20 gets you a very nice AC.

Extra Attack at 6th level. I agree, this would make it that much harder to justify going Fighter (since now you only gain something after 11 fighter levels, which means giving up pretty much your entire spellcaster career). While not really making the bladelock much stronger, since it wasn't like he couldn't get extra attack thru multiclassing anyway.

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In the end, I feel you would get most of the way with a slightly more lean set of changes:

* Longrest Patron spell slot (two at L11)
* Invocation spells doesn't burn slots
* Charisma for blade melee attack and damage
* Extra attack at 6th level (presumably offered as an alternative to your L6 Otherworldly Patron Boon?*)

I'd consider keeping just these four at first, and only adding the more fanciful options if this still doesn't get you close to where you feel you need to be.

*) if your intent is to grant Extra Attack for free, I'd suggest handing it out at level 7 instead. Sure it's late, but it's also an "empty" level in the Warlock table. It should still fulfil its purpose: namely to give players pause before giving up on the Warlock chassi for Fighter levels.

 

[neogod22]

Hi,



I'm not offended.

The big difference is that an action really matters during a combat. Just turning short rest abilities into 3x abilities makes it much easier to unload everything in a single combat. Spending an action to refresh is expensive: Refresh or Eldritch Blast? Combats are usually short enough that this matters.

The cost encourages players to rest between combats... but the option allows them to push on when necessary.


The issue that I have is that short vs long rest abilities are, in theory, balanced around two short rests per adventuring day.

This ideal is rarely actually achieved. Sometimes, the PCs are permitted to take short rests whenever they like. More often, the PCs are discouraged from taking short rests, either for dramatic tension or by "well, if you rest then the NPCs get to regroup too" or various other 'subtle' and 'realistic' reasons. In either kind of game, the balance point is not achieved. Without explicitly putting effort into balancing long and short rests, which is effort taken away from other aspects of creating and running a game, a GM is very unlikely to achieve 2 short rests on average per long rest.

My variant makes it easy for a GM to achieve the proper balance without any effort. The GM does not have to worry about taking rests unrealistically, or disrupting the flow of action. And different players can catch breath at their own pace: The Warlock might not need to refresh his spells but the Druid might need to change shape. (Forcing a shared short rest on both either messes with one character or inserts too many short rests into a day.)



In practice, players often do not get that choice. (Also, short rests are currently either inconsequential "and then an hour passes" or very consequential "ok, you sit on your asses while the world moves on without you; next time you'll think hard before taking a short rest in the middle of an epic day.")

I'm no Authority, so if you don't like the variant, don't use it. But I think it is an improvement.

Anyway,

Ken

The problem with your solution is, warlocks are not the only class that recharges on a short rest. About half of magic classes can feet get something back, and just about all of the non magic classes recharge, so short rests are important. Sure there are some situations where time may not permit more than one or any at all, but like all character classes, that's where resource management comes into play. Warlocks are essentially cantrip casters. Your "catch your breath" system sounds like the warlock level 20 ability, except you're allowing more uses which makes it overpowered, especially if no other class gets it. If every class gets it, then it makes short rests useless. It sounds like you're trying to reinvent the wheel.

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[neogod22]

I think Pact of the Blade only needs one thing. Just add an invocation that allows them to add the CHA modifier to their armor class. That's it.

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[Justin Fike]

The problem is that your rules don't just change how the Warlock plays. They vastly increase the Warlock's power. If you don't think they are underpowered to begin with, then you must agree that your rules are making them overpowered.

To me it seems like less a question of the Warlock being underpowered, and more an issue of there being a very limited slice of workable options amongst all of the interesting choices they supposedly get to make. You can make a strong, capable Warlock, but once you do it will look a lot like someone else's Warlock. Choosing to, for example, pick less optimal options for RP or other reasons makes your character...well, less optimal. The changes I put together are all attempts to address that by giving Warlocks options to play with some of the less powerful spell or class options without falling behind an "optimized" Warlock.

But again, it's entirely a preference thing. Changes made at one table don't affect another, so as long as all the players are happy I'd say it's all good.

 

[Immoralkickass]

My DM has given me an extra spell slot for my warlock, and i really love it. Its a simple yet effective solution, because i feel that 2 spell slots is too few, but 3 spell slots is just fine.

 

[ad_hoc]

To me it seems like less a question of the Warlock being underpowered, and more an issue of there being a very limited slice of workable options amongst all of the interesting choices they supposedly get to make. You can make a strong, capable Warlock, but once you do it will look a lot like someone else's Warlock. Choosing to, for example, pick less optimal options for RP or other reasons makes your character...well, less optimal. The changes I put together are all attempts to address that by giving Warlocks options to play with some of the less powerful spell or class options without falling behind an "optimized" Warlock.

My point is that your changes don't actually do what you are saying they do here.

You are saying that you are giving them more breadth of choices, but what you are actually doing is increasing their power.

I also don't agree that they have a limited slice of workable options. Warlocks actually have a ton of options many of those being good.

It might be a good idea to look at what you see as good and bad options. One huge mistake I think a lot of people make is to use Hex too much. I think it is mediocre at best for the Warlock.

My DM has given me an extra spell slot for my warlock, and i really love it. Its a simple yet effective solution, because i feel that 2 spell slots is too few, but 3 spell slots is just fine.

This is grossly overpowered.

An average of 9 3rd level spells/long rest at 5th level is absurd. Plus you've got invocations, patron, and pact powers.

 

[Krelraz]

I can't speak to the Blade lock parts but I like the idea of the spell changes. They may be a tad too powerful though.

I didn't even realize that they still had to prepare the Patron spells, I assumed they were free like literally everyone else.

This is similar to some ideas I've been tossing around for spells. I would really want a warlock to be able to make themselves a better spellcaster.

*"All Patron spells are automatically prepared." Exactly as you have done.

*"All 7 of the spells that appear in invocations are added to the spell list." Those invocations are now gone. Everytime I read through those invocations I wonder why that spell wasn't on the list in the first place given their flavor.

*New invocation: "Lesser Arcanum- You can cast one of your patron spells of appropriate level without using a spell slot. You can't do so again until you finish a long rest." I think this builds on the class feature you get later, provides a spell slot, but also limits it. This is what you had as baseline but I thought it was too good. Make them spend an invocation for it.

 

[Immoralkickass]

This is grossly overpowered.

An average of 9 3rd level spells/long rest at 5th level is absurd. Plus you've got invocations, patron, and pact powers.

You are grossly overstating the power of a warlock. No matter how many spells they know, they are still severely limited by the number of spell slots. Invocations are great, but the ones worth a damn cost spell slots, and are usually once per day, so its not that absurd.
Patron powers? Everyone has their archtype powers. Same goes for Pact powers.
The fact is, warlocks are far from being in the overpowered tier. They don't even scale well into high level, with Mystic Arcanum being so limited and all. You are over exaggerating.