D&D 5E (2014) Why play a pact blade warlock?

[Dannyalcatraz]

Why play a Blade Pact Warlock?

The Polelocke - Level 5 Human Warlock:
-Blade Pact: Form a Glaive/Halberd/Pike (congrats, you're proficient with it)
-War Caster Feat (Human Variant): Adv on Conc Checks, Cast while Wielding Weapons, Replace an opportunity attack with a spell that targets a single creature.
-Polearm Master Feat (Level 4): Can use the haft as a 1d4 melee weapon as a bonus action, enemies who enter your reach grant an opportunity attack.
-Invocations: Agonizing Blast (Cha to Eldritch Blast); Repelling Blast (Eldritch Blast knocks target 10 feet away); Thirsting Blade (two attacks);


Now you have a character with reach attacks who can also hit with the Haft of his Polearm for a 1d4 weapon damage melee attack (nothing says that attack doesn't get your strength bonus).

And now for the juicy part, when someone enters your reach (in addition to leaving your reach) you get to make an Opportunity Attack against them. With Warcaster you can instead cast a spell that takes a single action - which will likely be Eldritch Blast (this is a Reach weapon, so when he enters your range he isn't within 5 feet of you, so no disadvantage). So you get to hit him up to twice for 1d10+Cha and potentially knock him back 20 feet away from you. The enemy is now hurting, up to 25 feet away, and may not be able to even get to you without using his action to dash. And this isn't even on your turn.

Technically you can do this from level 4, but only with 1 Blast/Attack. And it just gets better at higher levels. Once you get Thirsting Blade to add your Cha to your pact weapon's damage that means that you're attacking 2x for 1d10+cha+str and 1x for 1d4+cha+str in addition to having devastating opportunity attacks.

Pick whatever Patron you wish, they all give you additional decent options for your opportunity attack spell. Fiend is nice for the extra staying power it's features provide and it gives you some much needed AoE options with your spells.

To answer the OP: at level 5 you can get an invocation that gives you Extra Attack, and at level 12 or so yo get another invocation that lets you add charisma to damage.

Here's a simple damage breakdown at level 15, assuming +4 str and +4 Cha:

Greatsword blade lock: (2d6+8)x2=30 average damage on a hit, not counting crits.
Eldritch Blast (with agonizing invocation): 3d10+4=20.5 average damage on a hit
(28.5 if you add charisma three times, which seems unlikely.)

So the blade lock does more damage on a hit. The blaster can get invocations to do half damage on a miss, which raises his DPR probably ahead of the blade lock, but then the blade lock can take great weapon master to knock it out of the park. Plus, as others have said, you get disadvantage casting ranged spells into melee.

One thing I think 4Ed got absolutely right- or at least, substantially improved- was Warlocks. The Warlock I played was a dwarf Starlock who wound up in combat quite frequently. I loved playing that character.

If/when our group tries 5th*, I may have to revisit the class with all that in mind.











* I plan on buying the initial core 3 books, but who knows if anyone will run it or want to play it

 

[Mouseferatu]

I plan on playing a blade-pact warlock because I love the image and already have a cool character backstory/idea.

Seriously, I get the whole "Don't cripple the character" thing, but there's a vast range between "crippled" and "optimized."

And "good enough" falls far earlier on the continuum than "optimized."

If you want to optimize, go for it. Have a blast. But by now you really shouldn't be so surprised that other people don't play that way.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

So much yes to that.

 

[Herobizkit]

Bard has been and always will be my favorite character class...

Then 4e put out Hexblade, and now my Bard class has a waifu.

The exact moment I read that Pact Blade was a thing in 5e, my junk became... er, I was thrilled.

Now I'm already debating on Half-Elf Bard/Pact Blade Warlock multi-classing and I still don't have 100% of the facts.

Why?

Because I lurve all of those things, and the 3.5 Bard/Warlock only got to what I wanted around level 10. And it's looking like multi-classing is more like making a hybrid over one level this/one level that. And I can't even handle it.

GLEEEEEEEEE.

 

[Uskglass]

Hard to say without reading the class. As an hypothesis it could be that blade warlocks are actually supposed to be more effective at distance, but if forced into melee they can still hold their ground.
Eldritch Fighters may work the other way around possibly.
Again, all just speculation at this stage.

 

[pemerton]

Why play a pact blade warlock? Easy, because someone has a vision of their character being a pact blade warlock.

Believe it or not, a lot of people play a character based on an archetype in their head

Hey that's me! My concept is inspired by Elric, and I envision a doomed hero whose powers seem more like curses, wielding a hungry blade for a demon benefactor he both serves and despises.

Not everyone is an optimizer. Some people have no problem playing a Tier 3 class in a party of Tier 1s.

even if sub optimal there are some concepts that appeal to folks so much they will be played no matter how much the number crunchers decry their stats.

I don't feel that these answers really address the question in the OP. They treat the question literally when clearly the "why play" phrasing is a rhetorical flourish.

No doubt there are many players who choose based on flavour text without regard to mechanical capability. But for almost all those players, there desire to choose based on flavour would not be hurt if the mechanical capability of the class also satisfied the sorts of constraints the OP has in mind.

When you look through the 5e classes and spells (both in Basic and as leaked on the Finally thread), it seems fairly clear the designers have paid quite a lot of attention to the "maths" of the system. Presumably, they intend the Pact Blade warlock to be similarly mathematically adequate in its design. It's possible that they've got it wrong, but I think the replies from [MENTION=3850]Samurai[/MENTION], [MENTION=6778148]Dastion[/MENTION] and [MENTION=54843]ZombieRoboNinja[/MENTION] do a reasonable job of actually answering the OP, by pointing out the design features of the Pact Blade warlock, within the broader parameters of the game, that underpin its mechanical adequacy by the OP's lights.

 

[Evenglare]

I don't feel that these answers really address the question in the OP. They treat the question literally when clearly the "why play" phrasing is a rhetorical flourish.

No that's BS, you can't just pick and choose which responses you like because it does or doesn't answer the question you "intended", if the OP intended for a mechanical question he should have phrased his question better. The answers me and several others gave were clear answers to why a person would play a blade pact warlock. Just because we feel that mechanics don't matter that makes our answers lesser than those who provide mechanical answers??? It's nice to know that our roleplaying centric take of the game is some how inferior to a person's mechanical take on the game.

 

[pemerton]

you can't just pick and choose which responses you like because it does or doesn't answer the question you "intended", if the OP intended for a mechanical question he should have phrased his question better.

I'm not sure if you're agreeing with me or disagreeing about what the OP had in mind in asking the question. Maybe you really did think that it had never occurred to the OP that some people make build choices without regard to mechanical effectiveness. But I think it was fairly obvious what sort of considerations the OP had in mind.

It's nice to know that our roleplaying centric take of the game is some how inferior to a person's mechanical take on the game.

Who said it's inferior? I just said that it's not a very helpful reply to a question which is obviously premised upon considerations of mechanical parity across PC builds.

 

[ppaladin123]

To answer the OP: at level 5 you can get an invocation that gives you Extra Attack, and at level 12 or so yo get another invocation that lets you add charisma to damage.

Here's a simple damage breakdown at level 15, assuming +4 str and +4 Cha:

Greatsword blade lock: (2d6+8)x2=30 average damage on a hit, not counting crits.
Eldritch Blast (with agonizing invocation): 3d10+4=20.5 average damage on a hit
(28.5 if you add charisma three times, which seems unlikely.)

So the blade lock does more damage on a hit. The blaster can get invocations to do half damage on a miss, which raises his DPR probably ahead of the blade lock, but then the blade lock can take great weapon master to knock it out of the park. Plus, as others have said, you get disadvantage casting ranged spells into melee.

The worry I have there is that warlocks have light amor proficiency only. So if you pump up your strength and charisma like that, you'll have no dexterity and will be very easy to hit in melee. You can hellp this slightly with the mage armor invocation but even there you'll want to have a reasonable dexterity score. So think this sort of build would be tough to balance (dead warlock produce no DPR).

 

[Wormwood]

[edit: taking down the snark level and getting the hell out of this thread. My apologies.]