I Don't Really Get Warlocks

[MaxWilson]

Without adequate short rests, which the class is balanced for, the Warlock pales in comparison to any other caster due to its few spell slots.

Unless you have so little combat that concentration economy and action economy, not spell slots, are the bottlenecks. E.g. with two rounds of combat per day or less, warlocks are fine.

[Tanarii]

Please, please ask the Warlock to cast Fireball (assuming they have it) in the mead hall! Hopefully the radius on Fireball is enough to hit everyone.

It's exciting when an AOE spell can hit many enemies at once.

Feylocks don't get Fireball.

Wow that's a lot of encounters! My group usually only gets one or two combats per session (average session length 5 hrs or so), mostly due to two players wanting long rp sessions and the group takes frequent breaks for the bathroom, smoking, etc.

You're a semi-regular in the 5e forums. I find it hard to believe you don't know this is the yardstick by which the default 5e adventuring day is measured. Whether your group plays with far less than the yardstick notwithstanding.

If a DM isn't running adventuring days by the standard (any) game assumes, then people have many options. A few off the top of my head:
- ask them to use the rest variants put in the DMG for exactly this purpose.
- ask them to let you retroactively swap to a different class. Personally I'd keep the same character (personality, race, etc), just swap classes. Clearly I was always a wizard, not a warlock!
- stop playing with a DM that clearly doesn't know what they're doing, because it's no fun.
- whatevs, don't care, I'm having fun anyway, so clearly the DM isn't doing anything wrong!

[Daithi]

Personally, the warlock is one of my favorite characters. Eldritch Blast is a great cantrip that can be spammed all day long, also pairs well with Hex and Agonizing Blast for more damage, it scales really well, and is outstanding for long range sniper attacks. Normally, I'd also multiclass with Sorcerer to quicken or twin Eldritch Blast which just results in a huge amount of damage as you're firing more bolts that all get doubled.

The Invocations are really good as well. I'm a fan of Eldritch Spear which plays into the Sniper character. Although I also like Mask of Many Faces which lets you play a Game of Thrones Arya Stark type character but with magic. Devil's Sight and Darkness is also a wicked combination and you don't have to screw your party over with it either if you're using it as a sniper to stay hidden as you spam EB from a distance. Fiendish Vigor is also really good at lower levels where it works almost like regeneration. The biggest problem is deciding on which ones to take and when.

On top of all of this, you get 2 spell slots and they replenish after a freaking short rest. You can also get a great familiar, which can be paired with Sorcerer's spell Dragon Breath. Or, you can get a spell book that is full of a ton of ritual spells. Or, you can go the hexblade route, which is my preference. Although, if UA is allowed a Raven Queen warlock is really really cool.

That's my 2 cents anyway.

[MaxWilson]

You're a semi-regular in the 5e forums. I find it hard to believe you don't know this is the yardstick by which the default 5e adventuring day is measured. Whether your group plays with far less than the yardstick notwithstanding.

It's actually pretty common to have more narratively-driven games with fewer combats per day. See poll results here: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthr...dventuring-day

This is fine. 5E doesn't care if you have short adventuring days; you're just not "supposed" to have super-long ones unless you are an experienced DM. (IMO you should definitely exceed the 5E recommended guidelines if your players are at all skilled, because the DMG guidelines are extremely easy, but the point is that having few combats in a day is fine and expected.)

See for example https://twitter.com/JeremyECrawford/...66625985609728

D&D doesn’t require a certain number of encounters per day.

The “Dungeon Master’s Guide” gives the number of encounters a typical group can face before tuckering out.

There’s no minimum.

[Tanarii]

There's no minimum in the same way that you don't have to do any push-ups in the morning. But you're not going to be challenged. And the classes certainly aren't (roughly) balanced around "one big encounter per day".

[Quoxis]

„Guh, why does the fighter class even exist? If you wanna do melee damage, be a gwm barbarian!“

[lperkins2]

So, I've dabbled a bit with rebalancing short-rest classes to let them keep up with long rest classes for campaigns which usually have only 1 or 2 combat encounters between rests. The trick is to achieve roughly the intended power levels without changing the feel of the class.

For warlock, this means giving them their full complement of top level slots, recharging on a long rest instead of a short rest. I actually use the spell point system to calculate the number of slots they should get, since that keeps them in line with the other classes better, but remember warlocks only get slots of the maximum level. At level 5, this gives 5 level 3 slots for the day (one fewer than they would have if they got their 2 short rests).

Do note that if you have the true 15 minute adventuring day, this won't help all that much, or rather, it will imbalance things in the other direction. A wizard at 5th level has 9 total spell slots, but only 2 at top level, so on the 3rd round of combat, the warlock will outstrip the wizard in pure alpha-strike power until round 7 or so. If your one big encounter is shorter than 7+ rounds, you probably want to only increase the number of slots by half, or there abouts.

Honestly, I don't know what WotC was thinking with including classes which recover resources on different schedules. Thematically, they're great, but mechanically, it constrains the kinds of adventuring days you can have, if you have a mixed party.

[ad_hoc]

You're assuming they get short rests. The OP says they usually do not, so a Warlock in this setting would not have that many spells per day. In this situation the Warlock does indeed lack spell power.

That's not a problem with the Warlock.

Of course a short rest class in a game without short rests will feel under powered.

In a regular game the Warlock has more concentrated spell power than a typical full caster. Rivaled only by the Sorcerer.

To say they are a half caster is ridiculous.

Wow that's a lot of encounters! My group usually only gets one or two combats per session (average session length 5 hrs or so), mostly due to two players wanting long rp sessions and the group takes frequent breaks for the bathroom, smoking, etc.

Per session and per long rest are different things.

[samcifer]

Feylocks don't get Fireball.

You're a semi-regular in the 5e forums. I find it hard to believe you don't know this is the yardstick by which the default 5e adventuring day is measured. Whether your group plays with far less than the yardstick notwithstanding.

If a DM isn't running adventuring days by the standard (any) game assumes, then people have many options. A few off the top of my head:
- ask them to use the rest variants put in the DMG for exactly this purpose.
- ask them to let you retroactively swap to a different class. Personally I'd keep the same character (personality, race, etc), just swap classes. Clearly I was always a wizard, not a warlock!
- stop playing with a DM that clearly doesn't know what they're doing, because it's no fun.
- whatevs, don't care, I'm having fun anyway, so clearly the DM isn't doing anything wrong!

I've only played 5e with my current group and our pace of play is rather odd. We only play homebrewed campaigns that are paced differently from official module and have an average of 1 or two battles per session t, which suffer from frequent breaks in mid-combat. There tend to be 5 pcs and the dm.

Actually, even when I played 4e, that was homebrewed campaigns as well. I've never once played any of the official module campaigns.

[qube]

I'm thinking right now just how handy a fireball or two would be. And grumbling at the situation we're in.

Fiendlocks have that. While feylocks don't, wizards who don't have fireball in their spellbook

Two spell slots for this huge encounter is not enough. I know some people will say Eldritch Blast makes up for it, but a Wizard can also take Toll the Dead for a realistic d12 cantrip.

(1) typically, a warlock's Eldritch blast doesn't do 1d10 damage. it does 1d10+CHA mod damage. Per Ray! (a.k.a. resulting in a 2d10+2*CHA mod at lvl 5). It also works on force opposite to necrotic - the latter of which has the problem of a significant amount of monsters (especially most of not all undead) have resistances if not immunity to.

IMHO, like monks, warlocks are usually the answer to a question no one was asking, but if you figure out how they can contribute, they can be a lot of fun.

beautifully said.

This might actually be a significant part of the problem- our DM usually does a lot of story, some intrigue, and one big encounter per session, usually with a long rest in between sessions.

yeah ... D&D 5E is balanced for, per long rest,

• 8 encounters
• 3 short rests
• ~20 rounds of combat

(edit: I see people claiming 6 encounters / 2 short rest ... I don't recall my sources - so I might be off, but the idea is still there)

When the wizard almost litterly is able to blast 4 times the amount of intended resources in an encounter ... of course they are going to look as though comming up short.

If it becomes a problem - this should be brought up with your DM. Because just like melee characters royally suck if the DM decides to only let you fight flying archers - the problem isn't the warlock, but how the character interacts with the encounters.

Quick and dirty solution - I'd double the amount of spellslots the warlock gets (4 instead of 2).

[ciarannihill]

In practice it is bounded invisibility. You're not going to spend literally 100% of the time invisible any more than a cleric is literally going to keep Guidance up 24 hours a day--but unlike Guidance, Invisibility lasts for an hour. It's not unreasonable to expect a DM to let you cast Invisibility IV on yourself and two other PCs every hour or so for the duration of e.g. a 10-12 hour recon mission in a hobgoblin war camp. At some point you'll get tired and start making mistakes.

So, when I say "you can afford to keep Invisibility up ALL THE TIME," that doesn't mean you actually WILL keep it up all the time. But if it were a matter of life and death you could keep it up much longer than anyone else could.

Oh, no I got that, I just meant I thought the quote from @Callak_Remier was in response to that part of your initial post, as opposed to the part about hit-and-run tactics. Quote stacks get a bit finicky.
As for the rest of your post, I think you're spot on with the recommendations.

For what it's worth, it's perfectly fine to have encounters/adventuring days where a specific character doesn't necessarily shine, although I do recommend changing it up so that all characters get their moments of glory (though that's not always in the cards depending on player actions).


From a tactical perspective, I would try to use the environment to my advantage, try to find a bottleneck to make the numbers you're up against less meaningful or, since it's a Giant's lair, see if there are areas (like stairs or furniture or imperfections in stonework given the size they might be proportionate to the party) that would make it easy to run and hide, use guerilla tactics to whittle down the foes until you can either escape or take them on directly. If you can find a bottleneck, the Warlock casting Darkness to allow stealthing away can enable the guerilla tactics.

Or you can try to de-escalate again. Make concessions to the giant, try to take down a large foe quickly and intimidate the rabble, or just focus on escape.

Thankfully this is DnD and not a videogame, you haven't saved before a boss fight way under leveled to beat it without the ability to leave and grind. You have theoretically infinite solutions so long as you think them through and roll well enough.

[rbstr]

I've only played 5e with my current group and our pace of play is rather odd. We only play homebrewed campaigns that are paced differently from official module and have an average of 1 or two battles per session t, which suffer from frequent breaks in mid-combat. There tend to be 5 pcs and the dm.

Actually, even when I played 4e, that was homebrewed campaigns as well. I've never once played any of the official module campaigns.

It really doesn't have anything to do with being on official module or not. Class' resources are balanced around ~2 short rests per long rest. That's just how it is.

The DM is free to do whatever the heck they want...but it's not the Warlocks' fault there's one combat a day. It's on the DM of the one-combat per day campaign to actually understand the system a bit and do gritty resting or just warn you not to take a short-rest based class. And if he doesn't recognize that you as a player should inform him. There are tons of ways to fix this: Fix the encounter pacing, change to gritty rests, just give the warlock regular spell slots, change to a different class.

[Tanarii]

I've only played 5e with my current group and our pace of play is rather odd. We only play homebrewed campaigns that are paced differently from official module and have an average of 1 or two battles per session t, which suffer from frequent breaks in mid-combat. There tend to be 5 pcs and the dm.

For sure. My point was I've seen you post of the forums enough it's surprising to me that you wouldn't be aware that's not the recommended balance point for 5e combat / resource draining encounters.

I mean, the DMG tells us so. The text is wrong because if you look at the preceding tables it's 6-8 Medium (not Hard) encounters. But it says "Assuming typical adventuring conditions and average luck, most adventuring parties can handle about six to eight medium or hard encounters in a day. If the adventure has more easy encounters, the adventurers can get through more. If it has more deadly encounters, they can handle fewer." (DMG p84)

Note that "can handle" is not the same as: 'must always have'. Which is what JCs tweet was saying, there isn't a required minimum. But it does tell us the built-in (rough) design balance point for capabilities.

Plus the DMG then goes on to provide two rest variants, which tell you what they're good for. And Gritty rest is for time out of the dungeon, with fewer combats and more social/intrigue:

GRITTY REALISM
This variant uses a short rest of 8 hours and a long rest of 7 days. This puts the brakes on the campaign, requiring the players to carefully judge the benefits and drawbacks of combat. Characters can't afford to engage in too many battles in a row. and all adventuring requires careful planning.
This approach encourages the characters to spend time out of the dungeon. It's a good option for campaigns that emphasize intrigue, politics, and interactions among other PCs, and in which combat is rare or something to be avoided rather rhan rushed into. (DMG p267)

So if someone has a DM only running a big (Deadly difficulty) encounter every in-game day or two, and it bothers them because of the effect on balance, step one is to ask the DM if she can please consider the variant rule specifically designed for it.

[MaxWilson]

It really doesn't have anything to do with being on official module or not. Class' resources are balanced around ~2 short rests per long rest. That's just how it is.

The DM is free to do whatever the heck they want...but it's not the Warlocks' fault there's one combat a day. It's on the DM of the one-combat per day campaign to actually understand the system a bit and do gritty resting or just warn you not to take a short-rest based class. And if he doesn't recognize that you as a player should inform him. There are tons of ways to fix this: Fix the encounter pacing, change to gritty rests, just give the warlock regular spell slots, change to a different class.

Typically it is the players' fault if they're not taking enough breaks. A really bad DM will just make encounters appear out of thin air to attack you, but you shouldn't play with bad DMs. Play with DMs who let you be proactive, which can sometimes include holing up in a dungeon room somewhere (or inside a Rope Trick extradimensional space) to catch your breath.

In a dungeon crawl, it isn't the DM's fault if players choose to kick down the next door before they're recovered from the previous one.

In a game with lots of intrigue and roleplaying and only one or two fights per session, there should be plenty of chances to rest. Just ask your DM, "Hey, we've been sitting around in this parlour for more than an hour doing nothing but planning what tuxedos we'll wear to the ball. That's pretty non-strenuous activity. Can I claim short rest benefits and get my spell slots back?"

For sure. My point was I've seen you post of the forums enough it's surprising to me that you wouldn't be aware that's not the recommended balance point for 5e combat / resource draining encounters.

I mean, the DMG tells us so. The text is wrong because if you look at the preceding tables it's 6-8 Medium (not Hard) encounters.

If you do the math it's typically more like 5 Medium encounters, if you assume an "average" Medium encounter halfway between Medium and Hard. E.g. four 1st level PCs have a daily XP budget of 1200 XP, and since the average Medium encounter is 250 XP (halfway between 200 XP/Medium and 300 XP/Hard) you can fit in 4.8 Medium encounters per day on average without going over budget. If you deliberately made them the easiest possible Medium encounters (200 XP) you could fit as many as six though.

Or you could fit in two or three Deadly encounters, which is a lot more challenging and has higher dramatic stakes. IMO that's more fun, but the DMG does recommend spreading them out so the players could get in a short rest between Deadly combats. E.g. you save the farmer and her family from three orcs (600 adjusted XP) by killing the orcs, but it turns out there are three more of them who went out on a scouting mission and are expected back within an hour or two, and you have to deal with them too or they will kill the farmer's family for revenge.

[samcifer]

The real issue is that two of the players are rather outgoing and assertive people while the rest of us are more passive in personality. Because of this, those two players tend to both dominate every rp encounter as well as make them last longer. The rest of us don't end up doing much rp-ing and I often only feel relevant as a player curing combats. plus that's the only time we get xp, so the more combats we can get, the better. Sadly it's hard to get to them much of the time. :(

[MaxWilson]

The real issue is that two of the players are rather outgoing and assertive people while the rest of us are more passive in personality. Because of this, those two players tend to both dominate every rp encounter as well as make them last longer. The rest of us don't end up doing much rp-ing and I often only feel relevant as a player curing combats. plus that's the only time we get xp, so the more combats we can get, the better. Sadly it's hard to get to them much of the time. :(

That's too bad. If it were up to you, would you rather

(A) Have ways to get XP outside of combat through roleplaying, or

(B) Have more combats?

[The Aboleth]

Personally, I feel like it should largely be the party's responsibility to tell me when they'd like to rest. DMs have enough on their plate as-is, they shouldn't also have to ask the party "Do you want to take a rest?" after an encounter. YMMV, though.

If your DM isn't willing to give you short rests, perhaps they would be amicable to giving the Warlock an extra spell slot or two? That might balance things out a bit (maybe not--this is just an on-the-fly suggestion, but I don't see 1 more slot, especially if you house-rule it to be a lower-level slot, being too OP at first glance).

Or, you can talk to your DM and see if you can handwave the Warlock as taking a short rest while the rest of the party are doing things like exploring or doing social encounters. I've done this in my games before, as the Warlock player isn't much for RP interactions anyway (they have a speech disability in real life), so whenever the other players are doing their thing I just let the Warlock short rest "off panel" and that solves things pretty well.

Again, YMMV with these suggestions.

[JakOfAllTirades]

Typically it is the players' fault if they're not taking enough breaks. A really bad DM will just make encounters appear out of thin air to attack you, but you shouldn't play with bad DMs. Play with DMs who let you be proactive, which can sometimes include holing up in a dungeon room somewhere (or inside a Rope Trick extradimensional space) to catch your breath.

In a dungeon crawl, it isn't the DM's fault if players choose to kick down the next door before they're recovered from the previous one.

In a game with lots of intrigue and roleplaying and only one or two fights per session, there should be plenty of chances to rest. Just ask your DM, "Hey, we've been sitting around in this parlour for more than an hour doing nothing but planning what tuxedos we'll wear to the ball. That's pretty non-strenuous activity. Can I claim short rest benefits and get my spell slots back?"

The bolded text above is spot-on. However, for a mixed party of long-rest v. short-rest classes, it's often up to the Warlock (or whoever recovers on short rests) to put their foot down and tell everyone else, That's it guys we're stopping here for a bit. If the rest of the party has any sense they'll agree; a Warlock without any spell slots is no help to them, after all. Not to mention any patron features that recharge on a short rest. (Quite a few, depending on the patron.)

And they might even get used to spending their own hit dice to heal instead of using spells and potions. Seriously, if they're not in the habit of taking short rests, how are they handling healing? This entire "no short rest" concept sounds wasteful AF from a healing standpoint.

[Tanarii]

Btw samcifer I looked back and my original response to you was rudely phrased. Sorry.

[Pex]

The game is roughly balanced around 3 Deadly, 6 Medium, 4 Hard or 12 easy encounters, with two short rests, per adventuring day. If your DM isn't giving an opportunity for that, then they are going to cause balance issues. And they should have told you before you picked which characters you wanted to play.

Often a DM can't say how many encounters per day there will be on average because he doesn't know himself. It might be more predictable if running a module, but there are variables he can't account for, such as how long real world time one combat takes or how long out of combat roleplaying and investigation takes. Pacing changes for what happens in a game session and what happens in a game day. If there is a problem it can only be noticed as the game sessions happen. Not just for the warlock the DM needs to find the right pacing of how often a short rest happens as his particular campaign progresses. It's good for the rules to advise, but in practice campaigns often don't follow the recommended pacing by their own natural development.

[tieren]

I second Tanaril's suggestion to use the gritty realism variant.

You can keep your same playstyle per session (lots of rp with one big fight) and make managing long rest resources more important (because they would only recharge once a week).

For the OP's particular situation, I would cast Hunger of Hadar to block off the mead hall from the rest of the fight (the thing is 20 feet in radius, thats 40 feet in diameter), and then using repelling blast to knock as many things as you can into it.

A wizard could do something similar with sleet storm in terms of area denial, but it wouldn't do damage and he'd have no way of knocking things back into it without using more leveled spells (thunderwave maybe?).

[Daithi]

Just thought I'd mention that there are two options to the short rest problem.

1) Multiclass as a sorcerer and convert spell slots to sorcerery points so they can be used later in the day for your big encounter. Note: this is not the coffeelock as it is expected you will be using the spells and they will be lost on a long rest.

2) Get a Ring of Spell Storing. If the DM doesn't normally have a lot of encounters then this would allow the Warlock to save a few spells for when they're needed later during the big encounter.

Although, I think the Warlock is a great character regardless.

[tieren]

I know you shouldn't count on magic items, but a rod of the pact keeper will give you an extra slot to play with too.

Also on the OP, other slot could be used to cast blink (fey lock list) and give him a 50/50 shot at not being hittable between turns.

If I see a caster with a big aoe area denial damaging spell, popping in and out of reality and using force blasts to knock enemies back into the dark void, I have trouble seeing where a wizard would be much more magical.

I personally played a feylock illusionist I really loved, at low levels when wizards are hoarding their spell slots I was using the misty visions invocation to drop silent images at will all day long, dozens of 1st level slots a wizard just would never be able to spare. I certainly felt a lot more magical than the guy dropping fire bolts with a slot left after his mage armor worried he might need shield.

[lperkins2]

And they might even get used to spending their own hit dice to heal instead of using spells and potions. Seriously, if they're not in the habit of taking short rests, how are they handling healing? This entire "no short rest" concept sounds wasteful AF from a healing standpoint.

Well, except if they're novaing, they may well not hardly need any healing. That's the way it usually went in my party when we got into rocket tag, the enemies could one-shot a PC, so we did everything possible to avoid getting hit.

[Sinon]

It's best to not think of Warlocks in the same vein of the rest of the casters... They're closer to a Paladin, Ranger, or a fighter archetype - like a Battlemaster Fighter or Arcane archer - than a wizard. Only instead of rolling to shoot a bow or stab with a sword, they're using Eldritch Blast, with the occasional augment of other spells. Unless they're Bladepact, then they're almost definitely shooting and stabbing.

This.

Though the warlock has considerable casting power, and in no way should they be thought of as a half-caster, they tactically shouldn't be thought of as a full caster either.

Over the course of a typical day, they can keep pace with a frugal wizard, but until very high levels, they don't ever have his potential cast spell after spell after spell in a single combat.

But that's not a flaw. If you want to pound nails in, grab a hammer; don't complain about the ineffectiveness of a screwdriver.

In the initial scenario, your wizard would benefit from casting a nice fireball, but not before splitting up some of the bad guys with a wall or keeping the minions out of the battle with something like hypnotic pattern. That will allow the warlock to cast a spell on something that improves their tactical ability, like darknesss or fly, and focus fire on the same opponent as the paladin to take him out fast, or use invocations like repelling blast to group those still in the fight together for the wizard's fireball to scorch as many people as possible.

[JakOfAllTirades]

Well, except if they're novaing, they may well not hardly need any healing. That's the way it usually went in my party when we got into rocket tag, the enemies could one-shot a PC, so we did everything possible to avoid getting hit.

Good point. I've played with groups who did that and it's a viable strategy as long as it works.. The thing is, it doesn't always go according to plan.

[MrStabby]

Warlocks are fine. All you need to do is to persuade your enemies to attack you in equal sized batches and giving you time to get a bit of a breather in between them. As long as you can do this you are fine.

Otherwise yeah, they kind of suck. Not terrible actually, but not great. The lack of flexibility is really painful. No joy from getting great value from a low level spell. No joy from casting levelled spells turn after turn. The need to hold back everything because if you expend anything, then you will be seriously lacking in punch for the big encounter.

This isn't so bad on other classes but a lot of people pick up the Warlock expecting a full caster.

[lperkins2]

Good point. I've played with groups who did that and it's a viable strategy as long as it works.. The thing is, it doesn't always go according to plan.

Right. Thing is we were well into rocket-tag territory, so it not going to plan was more likely to involve revivify than short rest hit dice use (the DM basically gave several of the monsters an auto-crit worth of bonus damage dice, which on an actual crit would outright kill any of the PCs).

[samcifer]

Btw samcifer I looked back and my original response to you was rudely phrased. Sorry.

Thank you for the apology. Much appreciated and no worries. :)

[samcifer]

That's too bad. If it were up to you, would you rather

(A) Have ways to get XP outside of combat through roleplaying, or

(B) Have more combats?

I'd say at least give one third xp from completing a social encounter that we would have gotten from a combat enounter of the same level. That way we'd be motivated to fight without becoming murder hobos while feeling that we gained something from a non-combat encounter.