Warlock pacts as eldritch sniper and agonising blast/repelling blast
Variant Human, spell sniper feat
Sorceror sorcery points are used for distant spell
Eldritch blast with eldritch sniper is 300ft range
spell sniper lets you double the range of spells, making it 600ft range (with no disadvantage or penalty for anything up to 3/4 cover)
Distant spell doubles it again, making the range for eldritch blast at level 5 1.2 Miles
and you get two
so you deal, assuming CHA of 20, an average of 20 damage reliably from over a mile away each turn until you run out of points. Even after you run out, its a permanent range of 600ft base (with agonising blast, repelling blast reliably does 10 and pushes the target 20ft back)
combined with things like expeditious retreat and party members keeping aggro, you get to sit back, relax and eldritch blast
Choose any full-blood elf or the Reborn for your race.
You have Agonizing Eldritch Blast as your primary offensive spell, using your other Invocation as desired, further buffing your Eldritch Blast or gaining an unrelated boon. Once you have at least 2-levels in each class, every night you can chain 4 short rests after your long rest (which only takes 4 hours for Elves and Reborn), to have a few extra spell slots for the day. And when your character has reason to believe that a boss fight will happen the next day, that character can take the rest of the current day, and the whole 8-hour night to chain short rests to have a lot of extra spell slots for that next boss battle.
(When you skip a long rest, you have a DC10 Constitution Save, taking one level of Exhaustion on a failed save. So if you start with Sorcerer for the proficiency in Constitution, and you have a decent Constitution score, you should reasonably reliably be able to pass that save, having no penalties at all for your first night of Coffeelocking. However, if you decide to do it a second consecutive night, the DC rises to 15, so you're much more likely to take a level of Exhaustion... and once a level of Exhaustion is taken, I'd highly recommend taking the next long rest, because L2 Exhaustion is terrible, and you don't want to risk taking it on a DC20 save.)
The more Warlock levels you take, the more sorcery points you can generate and convert with each short rest, with your Sorcerer level setting limits on how high of levels you can create, and how many sorcery points you can hold at a time.
If you take the Celestial Warlock, or the Divine Soul Sorcerer, or the Quandrix or Witherbloom Student backgrounds, those give you access to healing magic, so you can use your extra spell slots to keep your party well healed after combat without limiting your combat capability.
Warlock pacts as eldritch sniper and agonising blast/repelling blast
Variant Human, spell sniper feat
Sorceror sorcery points are used for distant spell
Eldritch blast with eldritch sniper is 300ft range
spell sniper lets you double the range of spells, making it 600ft range (with no disadvantage or penalty for anything up to 3/4 cover)
Distant spell doubles it again, making the range for eldritch blast at level 5 1.2 Miles
and you get two
so you deal, assuming CHA of 20, an average of 20 damage reliably from over a mile away each turn until you run out of points. Even after you run out, its a permanent range of 600ft base (with agonising blast, repelling blast reliably does 10 and pushes the target 20ft back)
combined with things like expeditious retreat and party members keeping aggro, you get to sit back, relax and eldritch blast
thoughts?
A mile is 5,289 feet. 600ft x 2 is 1,200 feet, not 1.2 miles. So your Eldritch Blast is a bit under a quarter of a mile, which is still a really long distance.
And the Ranger's ability to remove Exhaustion on a short rest is a L10 feature, not a L1.
1.2 miles is a good range, until you get to the part of the campaign which is indoors, then you feel like maybe you specialised a little too much in long range attacks.
Don't forget that for your "average of 20 damage reliably" you still need to hit the target with an attack roll, and each does 1d10 damage, so even if both hit the average damage is only 11 not 20.
And Fayette's Coffeelock's endless sorcery points only works if your DM allows chaining several short rests each night (and a large number of DMs won't).
120 feet is more than enough in the vast majority of situations. I've played several warlocks over the years, and I've never needed more.
On the other hand, sorclock is in my opinion the most powerful multiclass. But using a feat, an eldritch invocation, and one of your 3 sorcery points (remember that a sorc 3 can only have a maximum of 3 at a time) to get an absurd 1.2 mile range seems wasteful to me. You can do much more interesting things with that multiclass.
D&D is not an MMO to be "won". Most DMs will not allow bullshit character cheese.
Most DMs in my experiance will allow it and some for example in adventurers league might not have a choice. As I DM I might allow it if the player could make a decent backstory leading to their multiclass and their might be conditions such as their Patron expecting future level progession to be to enhance their pact.
Having said that the build is a one trick pony and not a problem mechanically for a DM.
There will be occassions that the party is out in the open and sees a group of what appear to be humanoids 1/4 of a mile away where it is obvious that they are enemies and the Sorlock can set off an eldritch blast or two before they find (full) cover, they may or not heal up before the party approach.
More often combat will be in a confined area where you can't see anything mre than 60-100 feet away and all that investment in being able ot shoot at huge distances is useless.
There are a lot of theory crafted builds based on things like maximum possible speed or highest possble AC or longest possible attack range, if used in a published adventure it will occasionally be very useful and might even result in an encounter becoming trivial but the majority of the time the character will be much weaker than one which is more well rounded to be able to cope with a range of different scenarios. In a homebrew Campaign the DM decides how often the one trick pony's trick is useful. If they make every combat in an open plain with no cover in daylight then the Sorlock will excel, if they decide to direct the players to a dungeon at level 5 which they don't leave until they defeat the Boss at level 15 then the Sorlock built around being able to attack from 1200ft will be regretting his options.
This is fine because unless your setting is an absolutely flat, featureless plain it's very rare to actually have 1.2 miles of clear line of sight. This build is defeated by a tree.
But if my player really wanted to do this, fine. They can stay up in a tower/crow's nest/whatever and pick off the reinforcements coming in while the rest of the party fights the actual encounter. If they expected to kill everything before it could come in range, well that's not going to happen because there's four other people at the table who would like to at least occasionally participate in combat.
Ultimately being a sniper is going to be pretty lonely in what is supposed to be a team game. So even if you're doing it right with a DM supporting your vision, you're basically playing by yourself and alienating yourself from the rest of the party. Seems more suited for a solo campaign.
Also, I've said it before about coffeelocks - your patron is not going to like the idea of you taking the power the granted you (with very specific rules and mechanics governing how you can use it) and converting it into your own to do with as you please. That's going to have consequences in my game. And no chaining short rests. They are an hour minimum but can certainly last longer. A short rest doesn't end until you're doing something else - and if you go talk to one NPC and try to short rest again I'm just going to say no.
As an aside, I've seen tables where this would not be allowed, since at that stage in character creation you do not meet the prerequisite for the feat. Check with the GM.
More generally, yes, you are correct, archery is broken in 5E. Whether an actual archer with a bow or a caster with eldritch blast. Or perhaps it is more correct to say that archery is broken in real life? :-)
Archers and slingers were the backbone of armies for thousands of years, and in the last couple of centuries the firearm rules the battlefield. The issue from a game standpoint is, archery duels are a bit boring at the table.
Also, I've said it before about coffeelocks - your patron is not going to like the idea of you taking the power the granted you (with very specific rules and mechanics governing how you can use it) and converting it into your own to do with as you please. That's going to have consequences in my game. And no chaining short rests. They are an hour minimum but can certainly last longer. A short rest doesn't end until you're doing something else - and if you go talk to one NPC and try to short rest again I'm just going to say no.
Obviously each DM runs his table as he sees fit. However, it's very easy to narratively justify that your sorcerer levels are, in fact, gifts from your patron.
The rest problem is another story. As the DM you have many ways to prevent a player from turning an LR into 8 SR. But the most practical is to simply talk to your player. I've run into players twice who wanted to do that, and spoke to them as soon as I saw their build. One of them didn't want to play my game, which I thought was perfect. He had no place in my game, and the game was not for him. The other player got it, and played sorclock differently (and is still one of the most powerful multiclasses in the game).
Choose any full-blood elf or the Reborn for your race.
You have Agonizing Eldritch Blast as your primary offensive spell, using your other Invocation as desired, further buffing your Eldritch Blast or gaining an unrelated boon. Once you have at least 2-levels in each class, every night you can chain 4 short rests after your long rest (which only takes 4 hours for Elves and Reborn), to have a few extra spell slots for the day. And when your character has reason to believe that a boss fight will happen the next day, that character can take the rest of the current day, and the whole 8-hour night to chain short rests to have a lot of extra spell slots for that next boss battle.
(When you skip a long rest, you have a DC10 Constitution Save, taking one level of Exhaustion on a failed save. So if you start with Sorcerer for the proficiency in Constitution, and you have a decent Constitution score, you should reasonably reliably be able to pass that save, having no penalties at all for your first night of Coffeelocking. However, if you decide to do it a second consecutive night, the DC rises to 15, so you're much more likely to take a level of Exhaustion... and once a level of Exhaustion is taken, I'd highly recommend taking the next long rest, because L2 Exhaustion is terrible, and you don't want to risk taking it on a DC20 save.)
The more Warlock levels you take, the more sorcery points you can generate and convert with each short rest, with your Sorcerer level setting limits on how high of levels you can create, and how many sorcery points you can hold at a time.
If you take the Celestial Warlock, or the Divine Soul Sorcerer, or the Quandrix or Witherbloom Student backgrounds, those give you access to healing magic, so you can use your extra spell slots to keep your party well healed after combat without limiting your combat capability.
Warlock pacts as eldritch sniper and agonising blast/repelling blast
Variant Human, spell sniper feat
Sorceror sorcery points are used for distant spell
Eldritch blast with eldritch sniper is 300ft range
spell sniper lets you double the range of spells, making it 600ft range (with no disadvantage or penalty for anything up to 3/4 cover)
Distant spell doubles it again, making the range for eldritch blast at level 5 1.2 Miles
and you get two
so you deal, assuming CHA of 20, an average of 20 damage reliably from over a mile away each turn until you run out of points. Even after you run out, its a permanent range of 600ft base (with agonising blast, repelling blast reliably does 10 and pushes the target 20ft back)
combined with things like expeditious retreat and party members keeping aggro, you get to sit back, relax and eldritch blast
thoughts?
A mile is 5,289 feet. 600ft x 2 is 1,200 feet, not 1.2 miles. So your Eldritch Blast is a bit under a quarter of a mile, which is still a really long distance.
And the Ranger's ability to remove Exhaustion on a short rest is a L10 feature, not a L1.
Ah, the curse of using the metric system. I'm too used to metres and kilometres. Still, that's pretty good!
1.2 miles is a good range, until you get to the part of the campaign which is indoors, then you feel like maybe you specialised a little too much in long range attacks.
Don't forget that for your "average of 20 damage reliably" you still need to hit the target with an attack roll, and each does 1d10 damage, so even if both hit the average damage is only 11 not 20.
And Fayette's Coffeelock's endless sorcery points only works if your DM allows chaining several short rests each night (and a large number of DMs won't).
agonising blast gives +CHA modifier which in theory a +5 to dmg
I didn't even think of coffelocking tbh, though fair enough
I remember trying this with a Warlock (no Sorcerer Multiclass), just with Eldritch Spear and Spell Sniper. I never once got to use it... I never knew reliably that a creature was an enemy at 600 ft away. I eventually swapped Eldritch Spear for something else, and I was still able to largely stay out of melee combat and just snipe stuff with Eldritch Blast. I never wanted to be too far away, though, just in case I needed to cast some other spells. I think this is one of those things that's almost more useful for the DM so they can use it to set up sniper encounters or something like that.
General Feat (Prerequisite: Level 4+, Spellcasting or Pact Magic Feature)
….
Increased Range. When you cast a spell that has a range of at least 10 feet and requires you to make an attack roll, you can increase the spell’s range by 60 feet.
Sorcerer:
Distant Spell
Cost: 1 Sorcery Point
When you cast a spell that has a range of at least 5 feet, you can spend 1 Sorcery Point to double the spell’s range. Or when you cast a spell that has a range of Touch, you can spend 1 Sorcery Point to make the spell’s range 30 feet.
Warlock:
Eldritch Spear
Prerequisite: Level 2+ Warlock, a Warlock Cantrip That Deals Damage
Choose one of your known Warlock cantrips that deals damage and has a range of 10+ feet. When you cast that spell, its range increases by a number of feet equal to 30 times your Warlock level.
Summary:
So now you need Warlock 2/Sorcerer 4 to get the Spell Sniper Feat, and you only add 60’ for Spell Sniper, 60’ for Eldritch Spear (30’ x 2 Warlock levels) to the 120’ default range for Eldritch Blast for a total of 240’ before doubling it with Distant Spell to 480’
Req: Warlock level 2, sorcerer level 3
Warlock pacts as eldritch sniper and agonising blast/repelling blast
Variant Human, spell sniper feat
Sorceror sorcery points are used for distant spell
Eldritch blast with eldritch sniper is 300ft range
spell sniper lets you double the range of spells, making it 600ft range (with no disadvantage or penalty for anything up to 3/4 cover)
Distant spell doubles it again, making the range for eldritch blast at level 5 1.2 Miles
and you get two
so you deal, assuming CHA of 20, an average of 20 damage reliably from over a mile away each turn until you run out of points. Even after you run out, its a permanent range of 600ft base (with agonising blast, repelling blast reliably does 10 and pushes the target 20ft back)
combined with things like expeditious retreat and party members keeping aggro, you get to sit back, relax and eldritch blast
thoughts?
Choose any full-blood elf or the Reborn for your race.
You have Agonizing Eldritch Blast as your primary offensive spell, using your other Invocation as desired, further buffing your Eldritch Blast or gaining an unrelated boon. Once you have at least 2-levels in each class, every night you can chain 4 short rests after your long rest (which only takes 4 hours for Elves and Reborn), to have a few extra spell slots for the day. And when your character has reason to believe that a boss fight will happen the next day, that character can take the rest of the current day, and the whole 8-hour night to chain short rests to have a lot of extra spell slots for that next boss battle.
(When you skip a long rest, you have a DC10 Constitution Save, taking one level of Exhaustion on a failed save. So if you start with Sorcerer for the proficiency in Constitution, and you have a decent Constitution score, you should reasonably reliably be able to pass that save, having no penalties at all for your first night of Coffeelocking. However, if you decide to do it a second consecutive night, the DC rises to 15, so you're much more likely to take a level of Exhaustion... and once a level of Exhaustion is taken, I'd highly recommend taking the next long rest, because L2 Exhaustion is terrible, and you don't want to risk taking it on a DC20 save.)
The more Warlock levels you take, the more sorcery points you can generate and convert with each short rest, with your Sorcerer level setting limits on how high of levels you can create, and how many sorcery points you can hold at a time.
If you take the Celestial Warlock, or the Divine Soul Sorcerer, or the Quandrix or Witherbloom Student backgrounds, those give you access to healing magic, so you can use your extra spell slots to keep your party well healed after combat without limiting your combat capability.
A mile is 5,289 feet. 600ft x 2 is 1,200 feet, not 1.2 miles. So your Eldritch Blast is a bit under a quarter of a mile, which is still a really long distance.
And the Ranger's ability to remove Exhaustion on a short rest is a L10 feature, not a L1.
1.2 miles is a good range, until you get to the part of the campaign which is indoors, then you feel like maybe you specialised a little too much in long range attacks.
Don't forget that for your "average of 20 damage reliably" you still need to hit the target with an attack roll, and each does 1d10 damage, so even if both hit the average damage is only 11 not 20.
And Fayette's Coffeelock's endless sorcery points only works if your DM allows chaining several short rests each night (and a large number of DMs won't).
120 feet is more than enough in the vast majority of situations. I've played several warlocks over the years, and I've never needed more.
On the other hand, sorclock is in my opinion the most powerful multiclass. But using a feat, an eldritch invocation, and one of your 3 sorcery points (remember that a sorc 3 can only have a maximum of 3 at a time) to get an absurd 1.2 mile range seems wasteful to me. You can do much more interesting things with that multiclass.
Feels like you'd need the 6th level Eagle Totem feature for Barbarians to be able to see the target you're trying EB.
D&D is not an MMO to be "won". Most DMs will not allow bullshit character cheese.
[REDACTED]
Most DMs in my experiance will allow it and some for example in adventurers league might not have a choice. As I DM I might allow it if the player could make a decent backstory leading to their multiclass and their might be conditions such as their Patron expecting future level progession to be to enhance their pact.
Having said that the build is a one trick pony and not a problem mechanically for a DM.
There will be occassions that the party is out in the open and sees a group of what appear to be humanoids 1/4 of a mile away where it is obvious that they are enemies and the Sorlock can set off an eldritch blast or two before they find (full) cover, they may or not heal up before the party approach.
More often combat will be in a confined area where you can't see anything mre than 60-100 feet away and all that investment in being able ot shoot at huge distances is useless.
There are a lot of theory crafted builds based on things like maximum possible speed or highest possble AC or longest possible attack range, if used in a published adventure it will occasionally be very useful and might even result in an encounter becoming trivial but the majority of the time the character will be much weaker than one which is more well rounded to be able to cope with a range of different scenarios. In a homebrew Campaign the DM decides how often the one trick pony's trick is useful. If they make every combat in an open plain with no cover in daylight then the Sorlock will excel, if they decide to direct the players to a dungeon at level 5 which they don't leave until they defeat the Boss at level 15 then the Sorlock built around being able to attack from 1200ft will be regretting his options.
This is fine because unless your setting is an absolutely flat, featureless plain it's very rare to actually have 1.2 miles of clear line of sight. This build is defeated by a tree.
But if my player really wanted to do this, fine. They can stay up in a tower/crow's nest/whatever and pick off the reinforcements coming in while the rest of the party fights the actual encounter. If they expected to kill everything before it could come in range, well that's not going to happen because there's four other people at the table who would like to at least occasionally participate in combat.
Ultimately being a sniper is going to be pretty lonely in what is supposed to be a team game. So even if you're doing it right with a DM supporting your vision, you're basically playing by yourself and alienating yourself from the rest of the party. Seems more suited for a solo campaign.
Also, I've said it before about coffeelocks - your patron is not going to like the idea of you taking the power the granted you (with very specific rules and mechanics governing how you can use it) and converting it into your own to do with as you please. That's going to have consequences in my game. And no chaining short rests. They are an hour minimum but can certainly last longer. A short rest doesn't end until you're doing something else - and if you go talk to one NPC and try to short rest again I'm just going to say no.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
As an aside, I've seen tables where this would not be allowed, since at that stage in character creation you do not meet the prerequisite for the feat. Check with the GM.
More generally, yes, you are correct, archery is broken in 5E. Whether an actual archer with a bow or a caster with eldritch blast. Or perhaps it is more correct to say that archery is broken in real life? :-)
Archers and slingers were the backbone of armies for thousands of years, and in the last couple of centuries the firearm rules the battlefield. The issue from a game standpoint is, archery duels are a bit boring at the table.
Obviously each DM runs his table as he sees fit. However, it's very easy to narratively justify that your sorcerer levels are, in fact, gifts from your patron.
The rest problem is another story. As the DM you have many ways to prevent a player from turning an LR into 8 SR. But the most practical is to simply talk to your player. I've run into players twice who wanted to do that, and spoke to them as soon as I saw their build. One of them didn't want to play my game, which I thought was perfect. He had no place in my game, and the game was not for him. The other player got it, and played sorclock differently (and is still one of the most powerful multiclasses in the game).
Ah, the curse of using the metric system. I'm too used to metres and kilometres. Still, that's pretty good!
Didnt think abt coffelocking but yeah it would be
agonising blast gives +CHA modifier which in theory a +5 to dmg
I didn't even think of coffelocking tbh, though fair enough
or observant feat
Just to note I created this for fun, not practical use, trying to see how far you could get in theory, I wouldn't play it in an actual campaign
I remember trying this with a Warlock (no Sorcerer Multiclass), just with Eldritch Spear and Spell Sniper. I never once got to use it... I never knew reliably that a creature was an enemy at 600 ft away. I eventually swapped Eldritch Spear for something else, and I was still able to largely stay out of melee combat and just snipe stuff with Eldritch Blast. I never wanted to be too far away, though, just in case I needed to cast some other spells. I think this is one of those things that's almost more useful for the DM so they can use it to set up sniper encounters or something like that.
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2024 Rules:
Feat, Spell Sniper (excerpt);
Spell Sniper
General Feat (Prerequisite: Level 4+, Spellcasting or Pact Magic Feature)
….
Increased Range. When you cast a spell that has a range of at least 10 feet and requires you to make an attack roll, you can increase the spell’s range by 60 feet.
Sorcerer:
Distant Spell
Cost: 1 Sorcery Point
When you cast a spell that has a range of at least 5 feet, you can spend 1 Sorcery Point to double the spell’s range. Or when you cast a spell that has a range of Touch, you can spend 1 Sorcery Point to make the spell’s range 30 feet.
Warlock:
Eldritch Spear
Prerequisite: Level 2+ Warlock, a Warlock Cantrip That Deals Damage
Choose one of your known Warlock cantrips that deals damage and has a range of 10+ feet. When you cast that spell, its range increases by a number of feet equal to 30 times your Warlock level.
Summary:
So now you need Warlock 2/Sorcerer 4 to get the Spell Sniper Feat, and you only add 60’ for Spell Sniper, 60’ for Eldritch Spear (30’ x 2 Warlock levels) to the 120’ default range for Eldritch Blast for a total of 240’ before doubling it with Distant Spell to 480’
Ah yes, the human Howitzer. Make the melee enemies run a mike before they can attack you, probably with exhaustion.