How many times in a story does the MC get pretty well worked over for a few days, and yet when we get to the climax they'll just lay back and shut their eyes for a few hours- if they're lucky- and suddenly they're bringing their A game to the final fight?
That's a good point actually, I watched John Wick 4 not too long ago, and I'm pretty sure by the end of that movie he had to just be a nice suit full of liquid and bone dust. But because he remembered how determined he was he just kept going, happens a lot in movies!
Former D&D Beyond Customer of six years: With the axing of piecemeal purchasing, lack of meaningful development, and toxic moderation the site isn't worth paying for anymore. I remain a free user only until my groups are done migrating from DDB, and if necessary D&D, after which I'm done. There are better systems owned by better companies out there.
I have unsubscribed from all topics and will not reply to messages. My homebrew is now 100% unsupported.
i haven't caught up to third season yet, but they say it's always darkest before the dawn light. and even still, failure has to be an option or else what was the point?
Failure is an option. That doesn't mean it should be encouraged, nor does it mean the DM should delight in it when it happens. Sometimes failing at something just plain ****in' sucks, and there's nothing for it but to endure the suck and move on.
regarding rules and the bending of them, doesn't your table have an interesting take on the intersection of herb kits and 5-minute short rests heals? :D
I know you're trying to call me out and tear me down. But you're actually illustrating my point. The rules for short rests blow in large part because they don't resemble what they're supposed to be. Sitting around and jacking off for an hour is not supposed to magically heal all of your injuries. Frankly our table hates the long rest Wolverine Super Regen, but Slow Natural Healing is too frustrating to utilize properly in DDB and 5e as a system breaks down and stops working without long rests so bleh. Either way, saying "cool, sit around and have a *********ion break for an hour to somehow mysteriously spend all your Hit Dice and be perfectly fine despite absolutely no medical aid whatsoever" doesn't make a lot of sense as a "healing" mechanic. But taking a few moments to use medical supplies and medical training, applying limited healing based on available medication/supplies? That scans. The Healer feat's mechanics fit the narrative for field medical aid, so we end up using the Healer feat quite a bit.
For tables that don't give a fat flying frog **** what the mechanics are/do and have a complete and utter dissociation between "Rules" and "Story", I imagine it makes no sense to (generally) dispense with short rests in favor of limited-resource combat healing. I can already hear it: "Why are you so stupid?! Just FLAVOR the short rest as using medical supplies! DUUUUHHH!!!" Except "short rests" DON'T use/consume medical supplies, and the "healing" they offer doesn't depend on availability of medical aid even if you use the dumb stupid "healer's kit dependency" variant healing rule. You just *** for an hour and suddenly you're better, with no threat whatsoever of your party-wide circlejerk being messed with because players revolt and mutiny the very microinstant the DM says "you guys are literally in the middle of an active volcano red dragon lair villain superfortress in the Valley of Dead Souls, do you honestly think now is a good time to spend an hour fapping?"
Not that any of this has anything to do with the thread, it's off topic even by the off topic. But if people are gonna call me out and tear me down, I'm gonna answer it.
...you aren't easy to have a conversation with. always with the bear mace.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
unhappy at the way in which we lost individual purchases for one-off subclasses, magic items, and monsters?
tell them you don't like features disappeared quietly in the night: providefeedback!
It's easy for DMs to say "don't be afraid to fail" - the DM's game doesn't ride on success the way the players' does. Failing to seduce the barmaid and earning a slap instead of a saucy night is one thing; failing at the last minute to stop something you've put months of real-life time and effort into trying to stop and watching your game world be irrevocably and horribly altered for the distinct worse can be emotionally devastating. Hell, look at the third season of Critical Role. The players failed to fully stop the Big Plan, and now the literal entirety of Exandria is potentially on the chopping block for being ruined/destroyed, including everything they accomplished in the first two campaigns. Failure can be story, but sometimes that story's too heavy to tell.
But that's the juiciest part. Stories of success provide escape from the hardships of everyday life. Stories of living through failure and loss temper the soul. All sweetness and no bitterness becomes stale. The greatest stories ever told, like Faust, Macbeth, and Odyssey, all have their doses of tragedy.
Used to be easier to have a conversation with me. Then I spent fourteen months getting repeatedly shot in the face while the rest of the fourm cheered, with every new document that drops leaving me the only person not howling for J-Craw's blood and demanding not just an unconditional return to the 2014 books, but a written apology from the dev team for daring to test new/altered rules during the playtest for a new revision of the core books, the immediate resignation/termination of everyone involved with writing the test documents, and swearing a legally-binding oath to never change anything about Fifth Edition the Perfect Golden Sunchild of All Modern Gaming ever again. Even in here I've been accused of some pretty heinous shit for wanting the option to play a warlock that isn't an overly-amorous oblivious moron after Wizards floated the option to do exactly that only to cruelly yank it out from under our feet, and that was before the Pact Magic/Short Rest thing came up again.
I am sick of it, Rum. I'm sick of this horrible place actively sabotaging the One D&D cycle as hard as it possibly can, pushing and pushing and pushing to make sure that we get another ten years of the exact same dogshit we already have. I've told them over and over and OVER AGAIN(!!!) that they're not losing their oh-so-precious 2014 books. They will get to keep their promising-but-deeply-flawed game, and the rest of us can work with the improved version. Instead, I'm just shot in the face again and told that letting anyone have better rules means EVERYONE is "forced" to comply with the better rules because "DDB will take my books away! DX" despite concrete proof that is not correct (did they take away Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes? Did they take away Volo's Guide to DM Headaches? Did they take away Lost Mine of Phandelver? No. You still have full and unfettered access to it if you already bought it, and if anyone in a campaign you're sharing content in has already bought it. So shut the **** up).
I used to think this community was a bold, refreshing change of pace from the usual gamer nonsense. This UA cycle has shown me otherwise. This place is just as awful as any MMO crowd. Worse, even - at least MMOs tend to be equal parts excited and insulted by any fresh new updates. This place wouldn't know "excitement" if it was given a video dissertation on the word. Everything is always unbearably horrible forever and the only solution is to burn it all down, and burn anyone who supports it even the slightest bit at the stake.
i hear you, yurei. it can be difficult to run into the same irritations, wack the same moles, time and time again. you bring the people fire and for that an eagle rips out your liver. well, if you feel like contributing again, I'll read it.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
unhappy at the way in which we lost individual purchases for one-off subclasses, magic items, and monsters?
tell them you don't like features disappeared quietly in the night: providefeedback!
Even in here I've been accused of some pretty heinous shit for wanting the option to play a warlock that isn't an overly-amorous oblivious moron after Wizards floated the option to do exactly that only to cruelly yank it out from under our feet, and that was before the Pact Magic/Short Rest thing came up again.
You're not alone in wanting that; it was one my favourite changes about the Warlock UA, and I suspect a lot of people here would like that brought back. But as with standardised sub-class levels they didn't give us a proper way to give feedback on that specific change. I mentioned liking it with regards to pact boons, since that's what they were tied to, but there was really no way to rate the access to a choice of spellcasting abilities and also appropriately rate each of the pact boons (which were all over the place).
It's what has me worried about the whole survey process, because it just doesn't seem designed to get useful feedback without digging into all the text responses, and I doubt many, if any, of those are being read properly. But decisions based primarily on the ratings are going to be flawed every time, because partially disliking something in its proposed form doesn't mean you preferred the way it was before, as that's not the question they asked.
I'm sick of this horrible place actively sabotaging the One D&D cycle as hard as it possibly can, pushing and pushing and pushing to make sure that we get another ten years of the exact same dogshit we already have.
D&D Beyond isn't the only source of feedback, and I highly doubt anyone really wants Warlock to remain exactly as it is in 5e.
Half-caster wasn't something I wanted, but that doesn't mean I don't want the pact magic/short rest problem fixed. There are other ways to do it, but again, how do we get them to do that? That said, I also wasn't overwhelmingly negative about the half-caster change. I could live with it if it ended up being the printed version, but it had major problems that needed fixing; mystic arcana was basically mandatory and other invocations terrible by comparison, it wasn't even remotely balanced. Not that I expect perfect balance in a UA, but it needs to have some effort at balance using the rules as intended (i.e- ignoring exploits and weird issues) if it's to be properly testable.
But because of the state in which it was presented, the half-caster warlock will have almost certainly seen overwhelming feedback that invocations were ruined, because lots of favourites disappeared and most of what was left was poor compared to taking mystic arcanum every chance you get. That didn't mean half-caster couldn't have been fixed, it just meant they shouldn't have sent it to playtest in a form that wasn't really possible to test usefully.
There are plenty of people interested in positive changes to Warlock, just ignore the people that aren't. We've weirdly faced the same thing with Monk with one particularly hostile user attacking anyone that suggested changes to Monk (another class with clear issues that need to be fixed for any new edition), but we ignored them and just kept coming up with ideas or discussing what was already out there. I wasn't at all happy with the Monk UA proposal (aside from some okay quality of life tweaks it was mostly nerfed and still had all the same problems), but the last thing I want is to stick with the 5e version with all of those problems remaining unfixed.
Former D&D Beyond Customer of six years: With the axing of piecemeal purchasing, lack of meaningful development, and toxic moderation the site isn't worth paying for anymore. I remain a free user only until my groups are done migrating from DDB, and if necessary D&D, after which I'm done. There are better systems owned by better companies out there.
I have unsubscribed from all topics and will not reply to messages. My homebrew is now 100% unsupported.
Even in here I've been accused of some pretty heinous shit for wanting the option to play a warlock that isn't an overly-amorous oblivious moron after Wizards floated the option to do exactly that only to cruelly yank it out from under our feet, and that was before the Pact Magic/Short Rest thing came up again.
You're not alone in wanting that; it was one my favourite changes about the Warlock UA, and I suspect a lot of people here would like that brought back. But as with standardised sub-class levels they didn't give us a proper way to give feedback on that specific change. I mentioned liking it with regards to pact boons, since that's what they were tied to, but there was really no way to rate the access to a choice of spellcasting abilities and also appropriately rate each of the pact boons (which were all over the place).
It's what has me worried about the whole survey process, because it just doesn't seem designed to get useful feedback without digging into all the text responses, and I doubt many, if any, of those are being read properly. But decisions based primarily on the ratings are going to be flawed every time, because partially disliking something in its proposed form doesn't mean you preferred the way it was before, as that's not the question they asked.
I'm sick of this horrible place actively sabotaging the One D&D cycle as hard as it possibly can, pushing and pushing and pushing to make sure that we get another ten years of the exact same dogshit we already have.
D&D Beyond isn't the only source of feedback, and I highly doubt anyone really wants Warlock to remain exactly as it is in 5e.
Half-caster wasn't something I wanted, but that doesn't mean I don't want the pact magic/short rest problem fixed. There are other ways to do it, but again, how do we get them to do that? That said, I also wasn't overwhelmingly negative about the half-caster change. I could live with it if it ended up being the printed version, but it had major problems that needed fixing; mystic arcana was basically mandatory and other invocations terrible by comparison, it wasn't even remotely balanced. Not that I expect perfect balance in a UA, but it needs to have some effort at balance using the rules as intended (i.e- ignoring exploits and weird issues) if it's to be properly testable.
But because of the state in which it was presented, the half-caster warlock will have almost certainly seen overwhelming feedback that invocations were ruined, because lots of favourites disappeared and most of what was left was poor compared to taking mystic arcanum every chance you get. That didn't mean half-caster couldn't have been fixed, it just meant they shouldn't have sent it to playtest in a form that wasn't really possible to test usefully.
There are plenty of people interested in positive changes to Warlock, just ignore the people that aren't. We've weirdly faced the same thing with Monk with one particularly hostile user attacking anyone that suggested changes to Monk (another class with clear issues that need to be fixed for any new edition), but we ignored them and just kept coming up with ideas or discussing what was already out there. I wasn't at all happy with the Monk UA proposal (aside from some okay quality of life tweaks it was mostly nerfed and still had all the same problems), but the last thing I want is to stick with the 5e version with all of those problems remaining unfixed.
I'll admit I didn't like the half-caster Warlock, but that didn't mean that I felt everything about the UA5 warlockmwas bad. The subclass adding the spells to the known list rather than the class list I felt was an awesome change, as was giving the free subclass list casting once per day - I even asked them to expand that as part of my survey feedback. I also liked combining the "must haves" associated with any pact boon and making the while thing take just one invocation choice was another potentially incredible change, but I did feel they could have done without the ritual casting nerf for Tomelocks.
Even if they keep Pact Magic as is, expanding the free subclass castings might very well be a decent "patch" to fill the void without causing the balance issues they are afraid of by increasing pact slots.
Even in here I've been accused of some pretty heinous shit for wanting the option to play a warlock that isn't an overly-amorous oblivious moron after Wizards floated the option to do exactly that only to cruelly yank it out from under our feet, and that was before the Pact Magic/Short Rest thing came up again.
You're not alone in wanting that; it was one my favourite changes about the Warlock UA, and I suspect a lot of people here would like that brought back. But as with standardised sub-class levels they didn't give us a proper way to give feedback on that specific change. I mentioned liking it with regards to pact boons, since that's what they were tied to, but there was really no way to rate the access to a choice of spellcasting abilities and also appropriately rate each of the pact boons (which were all over the place).
It's what has me worried about the whole survey process, because it just doesn't seem designed to get useful feedback without digging into all the text responses, and I doubt many, if any, of those are being read properly. But decisions based primarily on the ratings are going to be flawed every time, because partially disliking something in its proposed form doesn't mean you preferred the way it was before, as that's not the question they asked.
I'm sick of this horrible place actively sabotaging the One D&D cycle as hard as it possibly can, pushing and pushing and pushing to make sure that we get another ten years of the exact same dogshit we already have.
D&D Beyond isn't the only source of feedback, and I highly doubt anyone really wants Warlock to remain exactly as it is in 5e.
Half-caster wasn't something I wanted, but that doesn't mean I don't want the pact magic/short rest problem fixed. There are other ways to do it, but again, how do we get them to do that? That said, I also wasn't overwhelmingly negative about the half-caster change. I could live with it if it ended up being the printed version, but it had major problems that needed fixing; mystic arcana was basically mandatory and other invocations terrible by comparison, it wasn't even remotely balanced. Not that I expect perfect balance in a UA, but it needs to have some effort at balance using the rules as intended (i.e- ignoring exploits and weird issues) if it's to be properly testable.
But because of the state in which it was presented, the half-caster warlock will have almost certainly seen overwhelming feedback that invocations were ruined, because lots of favourites disappeared and most of what was left was poor compared to taking mystic arcanum every chance you get. That didn't mean half-caster couldn't have been fixed, it just meant they shouldn't have sent it to playtest in a form that wasn't really possible to test usefully.
There are plenty of people interested in positive changes to Warlock, just ignore the people that aren't. We've weirdly faced the same thing with Monk with one particularly hostile user attacking anyone that suggested changes to Monk (another class with clear issues that need to be fixed for any new edition), but we ignored them and just kept coming up with ideas or discussing what was already out there. I wasn't at all happy with the Monk UA proposal (aside from some okay quality of life tweaks it was mostly nerfed and still had all the same problems), but the last thing I want is to stick with the 5e version with all of those problems remaining unfixed.
I'll admit I didn't like the half-caster Warlock, but that didn't mean that I felt everything about the UA5 warlockmwas bad. The subclass adding the spells to the known list rather than the class list I felt was an awesome change, as was giving the free subclass list casting once per day - I even asked them to expand that as part of my survey feedback. I also liked combining the "must haves" associated with any pact boon and making the while thing take just one invocation choice was another potentially incredible change, but I did feel they could have done without the ritual casting nerf for Tomelocks.
Even if they keep Pact Magic as is, expanding the free subclass castings might very well be a decent "patch" to fill the void without causing the balance issues they are afraid of by increasing pact slots.
Whoa now, if you want change and its not exactly what other people want you are just a change hating troll who wants to destroy 1D&D.
They already kept the extra know spells, which I agree was definitely a positive change. Not sure they need free casts if they can refine the quick refresh feature; Feylocks already are getting a bunch of extra casts of Fey Step, for example.
I wonder what a good Magic Cunning rate would be. 1/day isn't enough imho. Maybe.... refresh 1 slot after a minute, a number of times equal to your Proficency bonus per day? Once per short rest feels like its just 3 pact slots with extra steps.
I wonder what a good Magic Cunning rate would be. 1/day isn't enough imho. Maybe.... refresh 1 slot after a minute, a number of times equal to your Proficency bonus per day? Once per short rest feels like its just 3 pact slots with extra steps.
I've said before, maybe look at something like the Cleric progression on Channel Divinity. Two uses at level 6 is pretty good, and once you get into tier 3 you start getting Mystic Arcanum and another spell slot to reduce the pressure. Or maybe pull the 3rd one back to something like 14.
Edit addendum: I doubt they'll tie it to PB; they found with CD that connecting something like that to PB makes dips scale too well even without further levels.
But that's the juiciest part. Stories of success provide escape from the hardships of everyday life. Stories of living through failure and loss temper the soul. All sweetness and no bitterness becomes stale. The greatest stories ever told, like Faust, Macbeth, and Odyssey, all have their doses of tragedy.
I don't think anybody here is advocating "no bitterness/tragedy"; that's a strawman.
What started this tangent was "failure is more interesting than success" as an absolute aphorism. Both failure and success can be banal, anticlimactic, unfun, and harmful to the narrative they take place in; neither is inherently more or less virtuous than the other. It's the same mindset that leads people to believe that caring about their characters' mechanical optimization means they care less about roleplay.
I've said before, maybe look at something like the Cleric progression on Channel Divinity. Two uses at level 6 is pretty good, and once you get into tier 3 you start getting Mystic Arcanum and another spell slot to reduce the pressure. Or maybe pull the 3rd one back to something like 14.
Edit addendum: I doubt they'll tie it to PB; they found with CD that connecting something like that to PB makes dips scale too well even without further levels.
Channel Divinity is in no way as powerful as recovering a pact slot (much less more than one), so the latter should definitely not have the same number of uses as the former.
I've said before, maybe look at something like the Cleric progression on Channel Divinity. Two uses at level 6 is pretty good, and once you get into tier 3 you start getting Mystic Arcanum and another spell slot to reduce the pressure. Or maybe pull the 3rd one back to something like 14.
Edit addendum: I doubt they'll tie it to PB; they found with CD that connecting something like that to PB makes dips scale too well even without further levels.
Channel Divinity is in no way as powerful as recovering a pact slot (much less more than one), so the latter should definitely not have the same number of uses as the former.
Eh, CD's recover on a short rest as well, at least for Clerics. I'm not saying a 1 to 1 copy of the progression is the best solution, but progressively gaining more uses is a model to look at. The general consensus I've seen is that a single additional refresh is too little; if they want the first extension to be meaningful they need to put it in the first half of tier 2. Otherwise you'll get a lot of people complaining that it won't come online early enough to make a difference.
1. Flexible casting only benefits multiclass. It has nothing to with style of play, and you don’t have to dump Int just because your Warlock is a Cha caster. Dumping Int is a personal choice.
2. Half caster Warlock only benefited Blade Warlocks. It took spell power away from all other types of Warlocks making them even more Eldritch Blast dependent.
3. UA7 Warlock is also very BladeLock focused and isn’t great for anyone who doesn’t want that invocation. If you take all the Pact Boon invocations UA7 warlock is very versatile, and relatively speaking it’s good, but in no form caster focused and making some of the best invocations unavailable because they can be taken used with ritual casting is bad.
4. We as a whole community will never get the Warlock we want, because the community as a whole is very divided on what the Warlock should be. What a lot of people here want is the flavor a Warlock brings to the table, but they dislike the mechanical design of the Warlock. This could be handled by creating a level 1 Faustian Bargain Feat. Then it’s not just playing a Wizard who you role play as having made a deal with the devil for power and knowledge it’s actually backed by a mechanical feat. This allows players who do prefer the mechanical difference to other casters warlock offers to still exist while appeasing those who want the Deal with the Devil RP aspects supported by whatever mechanical class they prefer.
5. Blade Lock shouldn’t be getting a 3rd attack at 11th, nor should it be allowed to be dipped for Cha attacks with weapons and all masteries. Multiple people have posted ways to fix that.
Channel Divinity is in no way as powerful as recovering a pact slot (much less more than one), so the latter should definitely not have the same number of uses as the former.
That depends a lot on the channel divinities you're looking at.
A Life Domain cleric's Preserve Life channel divinity competes very strongly with healing spells at every level, because it scales by Cleric level, and so do your uses of Channel Divinity. If we assume 9th-level so we can compare to mass cure wounds, that spell can heal around 111 hit-points total (assuming +5 spellcasting modifier and average rolling to give 18.5 per target for six targets), by comparison the Life Cleric can restore 90 hit-points (45 each using both channel divinity uses) divided however you like among any number of targets in range (instead of a maximum of 6 getting the same amount). Granted it's limited to restoring no more than half a target's maximum, but healing to top up a character is usually a waste of time, or better handled with a prayer of healing or such out of combat.
Point being, it's hard to say the channel divinity is really any weaker than a pact slot would be, especially when divinities can be equivalent to a higher level spell than pact slots top out at. There are certainly some weak channel divinity options, but there are some that compete very well with a similar spell.
Magic items seem to consider them somewhat equivalent if you compare an amulet of the devout to a rod of the pact keeper, which each let you gain one back once per long rest.
The recovery shouldn't be too many, but I'd say they're roughly equivalent IMO, or at least can be (if divinities were balanced better).
Former D&D Beyond Customer of six years: With the axing of piecemeal purchasing, lack of meaningful development, and toxic moderation the site isn't worth paying for anymore. I remain a free user only until my groups are done migrating from DDB, and if necessary D&D, after which I'm done. There are better systems owned by better companies out there.
I have unsubscribed from all topics and will not reply to messages. My homebrew is now 100% unsupported.
Eh, CD's recover on a short rest as well, at least for Clerics.
Yeah but it's still much weaker. The slot recovery function (HDP) is limited in use per LR, not SR, and it tops out at a 3rd-level slot per use rather than 5th. Arcane Recovery/Natural Recovery are limited by LR too, and Wild Resurgence is even weaker than that.
1. Flexible casting only benefits multiclass. It has nothing to with style of play, and you don’t have to dump Int just because your Warlock is a Cha caster. Dumping Int is a personal choice.
2. Half caster Warlock only benefited Blade Warlocks. It took spell power away from all other types of Warlocks making them even more Eldritch Blast dependent.
3. UA7 Warlock is also very BladeLock focused and isn’t great for anyone who doesn’t want that invocation. If you take all the Pact Boon invocations UA7 warlock is very versatile, and relatively speaking it’s good, but in no form caster focused and making some of the best invocations unavailable because they can be taken used with ritual casting is bad.
4. We as a whole community will never get the Warlock we want, because the community as a whole is very divided on what the Warlock should be. What a lot of people here want is the flavor a Warlock brings to the table, but they dislike the mechanical design of the Warlock. This could be handled by creating a level 1 Faustian Bargain Feat. Then it’s not just playing a Wizard who you role play as having made a deal with the devil for power and knowledge it’s actually backed by a mechanical feat. This allows players who do prefer the mechanical difference to other casters warlock offers to still exist while appeasing those who want the Deal with the Devil RP aspects supported by whatever mechanical class they prefer.
5. Blade Lock shouldn’t be getting a 3rd attack at 11th, nor should it be allowed to be dipped for Cha attacks with weapons and all masteries. Multiple people have posted ways to fix that.
I agree with #4 (minus the Faustian Feat thing) and #5.
Respectfully, #1 is utter nonsense. Choosing Int or Cha would matter even on a single-classed Warlock, and it's absolutely a decision with playstyle ramifications. Being the face vs. the sage are clear character concepts that people bring to the table. And telling people "well you can have still be a high Int character even if you're Cha-focused!" is frankly patronizing; you can be a high-Int Barbarian or a high-Cha monk too, that doesn't mean you're not fighting the entire system not to mention common sense to achieve it.
#2 and #3 I'm not interested in relitigating - for good or ill, half-caster Warlock is dead. Our energy is best spent on making the "full-caster" Warlock as good as it could be.
3. UA7 Warlock is also very BladeLock focused and isn’t great for anyone who doesn’t want that invocation. If you take all the Pact Boon invocations UA7 warlock is very versatile, and relatively speaking it’s good, but in no form caster focused and making some of the best invocations unavailable because they can be taken used with ritual casting is bad.
Ummm... What. I have no idea where you're getting that idea from... wait, no, I do have an idea. This is from that crappy Treantmonk video, isn't it? This is pretty far from a "warlock fact."
5. Blade Lock shouldn’t be getting a 3rd attack at 11th, nor should it be allowed to be dipped for Cha attacks with weapons and all masteries. Multiple people have posted ways to fix that.
Eh, I mean, a second Extra Attack plus Lifedrinker is the equivalent of getting both the Paladin's and Fighter's level 11 bump, so that's admittedly a bit much, but the rest? Not a very big deal. Plus, there's a lot of flaws with the blade warlock you're massively glossing over. The lack of feats, the poor defenses that make being melee VERY dangerous, that Masteries generally aren't worth past getting one. Lets not even get into how Invocation hungry it is.
1. Flexible casting only benefits multiclass. It has nothing to with style of play, and you don’t have to dump Int just because your Warlock is a Cha caster. Dumping Int is a personal choice.
You know what I think is a super cool character concept that only really works, mechanically, on the warlock chassis? A Constantine-esque occultist that's devoted to hunting esoteric secrets beyond mortal ken - not necessarily Magical Knowledge, but secrets. They have an array of esoteric tricks, powers, and abilities even masters of magick can't properly replicate because you need to have Seen Shit and learned Things to gain the knowledge to do these things. Armed with Pacts, contacts, and knowledge of the hidden world, the occultist sets out to Adventure.
You know what you absolutely cannot play by the 2014 rules? That character I just outlined above. Because warlocks are required to be as horny as bards, and forbidden from being smarter than barbarians. They only just BARELY gain access to Arcana or Investigation, nor do they have consistent access to Religion so they can Know Things about gods, demons, and god-demons. Nope. ALL Warlocks are required to take Deception and Intimidation, and they are mechanically locked into making Intelligence their lowest score and Wisdom their second-lowest score, if they're not making both those numbers an 8 because Point Buy.
Want to be a canny, highly intelligent occultist who gets by in the world by learning, knowing, and using Secrets? Noooooooooooope. You're gonna be a rude lying oblivious moron horndog and like it. Period.
2. Half caster Warlock only benefited Blade Warlocks. It took spell power away from all other types of Warlocks making them even more Eldritch Blast dependent.
Let's be clear - the Mystic Arcanum changes are what "took away spell power" from non-Blade warlocks. Trading Pact Magic for half-casting is mostly a matter of kind, not degree - you trade an extremely small number of more intense spells for a much more reasonable number of lower-level casts. It's different casting, but it's not really worse casting. The Mystic Arcanum-as-Invocations bit was a noble experiment but didn't work as well as Wizards was thinking it would.
3. UA7 Warlock is also very BladeLock focused and isn’t great for anyone who doesn’t want that invocation. If you take all the Pact Boon invocations UA7 warlock is very versatile, and relatively speaking it’s good, but in no form caster focused and making some of the best invocations unavailable because they can be taken used with ritual casting is bad.
Pact Boons as Invocations is a really interesting idea. That we're not going to keep because literally anything that makes Blade Pact even the slightest, tiniest bit better instantly earns the horrifying nerdrage of a roaring Mongol horde. Blade Pact is simply not allowed to be good/playable, because then paladin does Blade Pact things and everyone screams.
4. We as a whole community will never get the Warlock we want, because the community as a whole is very divided on what the Warlock should be. What a lot of people here want is the flavor a Warlock brings to the table, but they dislike the mechanical design of the Warlock. This could be handled by creating a level 1 Faustian Bargain Feat. Then it’s not just playing a Wizard who you role play as having made a deal with the devil for power and knowledge it’s actually backed by a mechanical feat. This allows players who do prefer the mechanical difference to other casters warlock offers to still exist while appeasing those who want the Deal with the Devil RP aspects supported by whatever mechanical class they prefer.
I want my clever, canny occultist. A wizard with a "Devil's Bargain" feat doesn't come remotely close. I HAVE a wizard saddled by an Archdevil's game; her name is Rho, the "boon" she got from the Gamemaster's Game was the Epic Boon of Immortality, and if she ever dies her soul is forfeit on the spot so even though she's "immortal" she's no more difficult to kill than any other wizard and if she dies she cannot be revived.
I want a warlock that's allowed to have an Intelligence score above 8 and that's able to cast more than one spell per ******* week. Does that really seem like such an impossible ask?
5. Blade Lock shouldn’t be getting a 3rd attack at 11th, nor should it be allowed to be dipped for Cha attacks with weapons and all masteries. Multiple people have posted ways to fix that.
Blade Pact is not allowed to actually do its job and be useful/good, yep. People have in fact posted multiple times with multiple ways in which Blade Pact can be "tweaked" back to being a useless pointless noob trap option anyone with a clue doesn't touch with a ten-foot pole.
And we just got off that half-caster vs full-caster thing too. So tired of that coming up. And I thought that we were generally agreed that flexible stat between INT and CHA was a good thing. Le Sigh.
I don't think there was ever true agreement, really. I know I just got tired of being accused of trying to run everyone else's tables and characters because I felt a class who is explicitly defined by a deal made by one means or another generally fits CHA more than INT, and that classes should have boundaries and fixed points rather than being "just do whatever".
And don't @ me over this, I have no interest in rehashing the same argument yet again. As I said, I'm tired of going over it.
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That's a good point actually, I watched John Wick 4 not too long ago, and I'm pretty sure by the end of that movie he had to just be a nice suit full of liquid and bone dust. But because he remembered how determined he was he just kept going, happens a lot in movies!
Former D&D Beyond Customer of six years: With the axing of piecemeal purchasing, lack of meaningful development, and toxic moderation the site isn't worth paying for anymore. I remain a free user only until my groups are done migrating from DDB, and if necessary D&D, after which I'm done. There are better systems owned by better companies out there.
I have unsubscribed from all topics and will not reply to messages. My homebrew is now 100% unsupported.
...you aren't easy to have a conversation with. always with the bear mace.
unhappy at the way in which we lost individual purchases for one-off subclasses, magic items, and monsters?
tell them you don't like features disappeared quietly in the night: provide feedback!
But that's the juiciest part. Stories of success provide escape from the hardships of everyday life. Stories of living through failure and loss temper the soul. All sweetness and no bitterness becomes stale. The greatest stories ever told, like Faust, Macbeth, and Odyssey, all have their doses of tragedy.
Used to be easier to have a conversation with me. Then I spent fourteen months getting repeatedly shot in the face while the rest of the fourm cheered, with every new document that drops leaving me the only person not howling for J-Craw's blood and demanding not just an unconditional return to the 2014 books, but a written apology from the dev team for daring to test new/altered rules during the playtest for a new revision of the core books, the immediate resignation/termination of everyone involved with writing the test documents, and swearing a legally-binding oath to never change anything about Fifth Edition the Perfect Golden Sunchild of All Modern Gaming ever again. Even in here I've been accused of some pretty heinous shit for wanting the option to play a warlock that isn't an overly-amorous oblivious moron after Wizards floated the option to do exactly that only to cruelly yank it out from under our feet, and that was before the Pact Magic/Short Rest thing came up again.
I am sick of it, Rum. I'm sick of this horrible place actively sabotaging the One D&D cycle as hard as it possibly can, pushing and pushing and pushing to make sure that we get another ten years of the exact same dogshit we already have. I've told them over and over and OVER AGAIN(!!!) that they're not losing their oh-so-precious 2014 books. They will get to keep their promising-but-deeply-flawed game, and the rest of us can work with the improved version. Instead, I'm just shot in the face again and told that letting anyone have better rules means EVERYONE is "forced" to comply with the better rules because "DDB will take my books away! DX" despite concrete proof that is not correct (did they take away Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes? Did they take away Volo's Guide to DM Headaches? Did they take away Lost Mine of Phandelver? No. You still have full and unfettered access to it if you already bought it, and if anyone in a campaign you're sharing content in has already bought it. So shut the **** up).
I used to think this community was a bold, refreshing change of pace from the usual gamer nonsense. This UA cycle has shown me otherwise. This place is just as awful as any MMO crowd. Worse, even - at least MMOs tend to be equal parts excited and insulted by any fresh new updates. This place wouldn't know "excitement" if it was given a video dissertation on the word. Everything is always unbearably horrible forever and the only solution is to burn it all down, and burn anyone who supports it even the slightest bit at the stake.
**** this place.
Please do not contact or message me.
i hear you, yurei. it can be difficult to run into the same irritations, wack the same moles, time and time again. you bring the people fire and for that an eagle rips out your liver. well, if you feel like contributing again, I'll read it.
unhappy at the way in which we lost individual purchases for one-off subclasses, magic items, and monsters?
tell them you don't like features disappeared quietly in the night: provide feedback!
You're not alone in wanting that; it was one my favourite changes about the Warlock UA, and I suspect a lot of people here would like that brought back. But as with standardised sub-class levels they didn't give us a proper way to give feedback on that specific change. I mentioned liking it with regards to pact boons, since that's what they were tied to, but there was really no way to rate the access to a choice of spellcasting abilities and also appropriately rate each of the pact boons (which were all over the place).
It's what has me worried about the whole survey process, because it just doesn't seem designed to get useful feedback without digging into all the text responses, and I doubt many, if any, of those are being read properly. But decisions based primarily on the ratings are going to be flawed every time, because partially disliking something in its proposed form doesn't mean you preferred the way it was before, as that's not the question they asked.
D&D Beyond isn't the only source of feedback, and I highly doubt anyone really wants Warlock to remain exactly as it is in 5e.
Half-caster wasn't something I wanted, but that doesn't mean I don't want the pact magic/short rest problem fixed. There are other ways to do it, but again, how do we get them to do that? That said, I also wasn't overwhelmingly negative about the half-caster change. I could live with it if it ended up being the printed version, but it had major problems that needed fixing; mystic arcana was basically mandatory and other invocations terrible by comparison, it wasn't even remotely balanced. Not that I expect perfect balance in a UA, but it needs to have some effort at balance using the rules as intended (i.e- ignoring exploits and weird issues) if it's to be properly testable.
But because of the state in which it was presented, the half-caster warlock will have almost certainly seen overwhelming feedback that invocations were ruined, because lots of favourites disappeared and most of what was left was poor compared to taking mystic arcanum every chance you get. That didn't mean half-caster couldn't have been fixed, it just meant they shouldn't have sent it to playtest in a form that wasn't really possible to test usefully.
There are plenty of people interested in positive changes to Warlock, just ignore the people that aren't. We've weirdly faced the same thing with Monk with one particularly hostile user attacking anyone that suggested changes to Monk (another class with clear issues that need to be fixed for any new edition), but we ignored them and just kept coming up with ideas or discussing what was already out there. I wasn't at all happy with the Monk UA proposal (aside from some okay quality of life tweaks it was mostly nerfed and still had all the same problems), but the last thing I want is to stick with the 5e version with all of those problems remaining unfixed.
Former D&D Beyond Customer of six years: With the axing of piecemeal purchasing, lack of meaningful development, and toxic moderation the site isn't worth paying for anymore. I remain a free user only until my groups are done migrating from DDB, and if necessary D&D, after which I'm done. There are better systems owned by better companies out there.
I have unsubscribed from all topics and will not reply to messages. My homebrew is now 100% unsupported.
I'll admit I didn't like the half-caster Warlock, but that didn't mean that I felt everything about the UA5 warlockmwas bad. The subclass adding the spells to the known list rather than the class list I felt was an awesome change, as was giving the free subclass list casting once per day - I even asked them to expand that as part of my survey feedback. I also liked combining the "must haves" associated with any pact boon and making the while thing take just one invocation choice was another potentially incredible change, but I did feel they could have done without the ritual casting nerf for Tomelocks.
Even if they keep Pact Magic as is, expanding the free subclass castings might very well be a decent "patch" to fill the void without causing the balance issues they are afraid of by increasing pact slots.
Whoa now, if you want change and its not exactly what other people want you are just a change hating troll who wants to destroy 1D&D.
They already kept the extra know spells, which I agree was definitely a positive change. Not sure they need free casts if they can refine the quick refresh feature; Feylocks already are getting a bunch of extra casts of Fey Step, for example.
I wonder what a good Magic Cunning rate would be. 1/day isn't enough imho. Maybe.... refresh 1 slot after a minute, a number of times equal to your Proficency bonus per day? Once per short rest feels like its just 3 pact slots with extra steps.
I've said before, maybe look at something like the Cleric progression on Channel Divinity. Two uses at level 6 is pretty good, and once you get into tier 3 you start getting Mystic Arcanum and another spell slot to reduce the pressure. Or maybe pull the 3rd one back to something like 14.
Edit addendum: I doubt they'll tie it to PB; they found with CD that connecting something like that to PB makes dips scale too well even without further levels.
I don't think anybody here is advocating "no bitterness/tragedy"; that's a strawman.
What started this tangent was "failure is more interesting than success" as an absolute aphorism. Both failure and success can be banal, anticlimactic, unfun, and harmful to the narrative they take place in; neither is inherently more or less virtuous than the other. It's the same mindset that leads people to believe that caring about their characters' mechanical optimization means they care less about roleplay.
Channel Divinity is in no way as powerful as recovering a pact slot (much less more than one), so the latter should definitely not have the same number of uses as the former.
Eh, CD's recover on a short rest as well, at least for Clerics. I'm not saying a 1 to 1 copy of the progression is the best solution, but progressively gaining more uses is a model to look at. The general consensus I've seen is that a single additional refresh is too little; if they want the first extension to be meaningful they need to put it in the first half of tier 2. Otherwise you'll get a lot of people complaining that it won't come online early enough to make a difference.
The Warlock truths.
1. Flexible casting only benefits multiclass. It has nothing to with style of play, and you don’t have to dump Int just because your Warlock is a Cha caster. Dumping Int is a personal choice.
2. Half caster Warlock only benefited Blade Warlocks. It took spell power away from all other types of Warlocks making them even more Eldritch Blast dependent.
3. UA7 Warlock is also very BladeLock focused and isn’t great for anyone who doesn’t want that invocation. If you take all the Pact Boon invocations UA7 warlock is very versatile, and relatively speaking it’s good, but in no form caster focused and making some of the best invocations unavailable because they can be taken used with ritual casting is bad.
4. We as a whole community will never get the Warlock we want, because the community as a whole is very divided on what the Warlock should be. What a lot of people here want is the flavor a Warlock brings to the table, but they dislike the mechanical design of the Warlock. This could be handled by creating a level 1 Faustian Bargain Feat. Then it’s not just playing a Wizard who you role play as having made a deal with the devil for power and knowledge it’s actually backed by a mechanical feat. This allows players who do prefer the mechanical difference to other casters warlock offers to still exist while appeasing those who want the Deal with the Devil RP aspects supported by whatever mechanical class they prefer.
5. Blade Lock shouldn’t be getting a 3rd attack at 11th, nor should it be allowed to be dipped for Cha attacks with weapons and all masteries. Multiple people have posted ways to fix that.
That depends a lot on the channel divinities you're looking at.
A Life Domain cleric's Preserve Life channel divinity competes very strongly with healing spells at every level, because it scales by Cleric level, and so do your uses of Channel Divinity. If we assume 9th-level so we can compare to mass cure wounds, that spell can heal around 111 hit-points total (assuming +5 spellcasting modifier and average rolling to give 18.5 per target for six targets), by comparison the Life Cleric can restore 90 hit-points (45 each using both channel divinity uses) divided however you like among any number of targets in range (instead of a maximum of 6 getting the same amount). Granted it's limited to restoring no more than half a target's maximum, but healing to top up a character is usually a waste of time, or better handled with a prayer of healing or such out of combat.
Point being, it's hard to say the channel divinity is really any weaker than a pact slot would be, especially when divinities can be equivalent to a higher level spell than pact slots top out at. There are certainly some weak channel divinity options, but there are some that compete very well with a similar spell.
Magic items seem to consider them somewhat equivalent if you compare an amulet of the devout to a rod of the pact keeper, which each let you gain one back once per long rest.
The recovery shouldn't be too many, but I'd say they're roughly equivalent IMO, or at least can be (if divinities were balanced better).
Former D&D Beyond Customer of six years: With the axing of piecemeal purchasing, lack of meaningful development, and toxic moderation the site isn't worth paying for anymore. I remain a free user only until my groups are done migrating from DDB, and if necessary D&D, after which I'm done. There are better systems owned by better companies out there.
I have unsubscribed from all topics and will not reply to messages. My homebrew is now 100% unsupported.
Yeah but it's still much weaker. The slot recovery function (HDP) is limited in use per LR, not SR, and it tops out at a 3rd-level slot per use rather than 5th. Arcane Recovery/Natural Recovery are limited by LR too, and Wild Resurgence is even weaker than that.
I agree with #4 (minus the Faustian Feat thing) and #5.
Respectfully, #1 is utter nonsense. Choosing Int or Cha would matter even on a single-classed Warlock, and it's absolutely a decision with playstyle ramifications. Being the face vs. the sage are clear character concepts that people bring to the table. And telling people "well you can have still be a high Int character even if you're Cha-focused!" is frankly patronizing; you can be a high-Int Barbarian or a high-Cha monk too, that doesn't mean you're not fighting the entire system not to mention common sense to achieve it.
#2 and #3 I'm not interested in relitigating - for good or ill, half-caster Warlock is dead. Our energy is best spent on making the "full-caster" Warlock as good as it could be.
Ummm... What. I have no idea where you're getting that idea from... wait, no, I do have an idea. This is from that crappy Treantmonk video, isn't it? This is pretty far from a "warlock fact."
Eh, I mean, a second Extra Attack plus Lifedrinker is the equivalent of getting both the Paladin's and Fighter's level 11 bump, so that's admittedly a bit much, but the rest? Not a very big deal. Plus, there's a lot of flaws with the blade warlock you're massively glossing over. The lack of feats, the poor defenses that make being melee VERY dangerous, that Masteries generally aren't worth past getting one. Lets not even get into how Invocation hungry it is.
You know what I think is a super cool character concept that only really works, mechanically, on the warlock chassis? A Constantine-esque occultist that's devoted to hunting esoteric secrets beyond mortal ken - not necessarily Magical Knowledge, but secrets. They have an array of esoteric tricks, powers, and abilities even masters of magick can't properly replicate because you need to have Seen Shit and learned Things to gain the knowledge to do these things. Armed with Pacts, contacts, and knowledge of the hidden world, the occultist sets out to Adventure.
You know what you absolutely cannot play by the 2014 rules? That character I just outlined above. Because warlocks are required to be as horny as bards, and forbidden from being smarter than barbarians. They only just BARELY gain access to Arcana or Investigation, nor do they have consistent access to Religion so they can Know Things about gods, demons, and god-demons. Nope. ALL Warlocks are required to take Deception and Intimidation, and they are mechanically locked into making Intelligence their lowest score and Wisdom their second-lowest score, if they're not making both those numbers an 8 because Point Buy.
Want to be a canny, highly intelligent occultist who gets by in the world by learning, knowing, and using Secrets? Noooooooooooope. You're gonna be a rude lying oblivious moron horndog and like it. Period.
Let's be clear - the Mystic Arcanum changes are what "took away spell power" from non-Blade warlocks. Trading Pact Magic for half-casting is mostly a matter of kind, not degree - you trade an extremely small number of more intense spells for a much more reasonable number of lower-level casts. It's different casting, but it's not really worse casting. The Mystic Arcanum-as-Invocations bit was a noble experiment but didn't work as well as Wizards was thinking it would.
Pact Boons as Invocations is a really interesting idea. That we're not going to keep because literally anything that makes Blade Pact even the slightest, tiniest bit better instantly earns the horrifying nerdrage of a roaring Mongol horde. Blade Pact is simply not allowed to be good/playable, because then paladin does Blade Pact things and everyone screams.
I want my clever, canny occultist. A wizard with a "Devil's Bargain" feat doesn't come remotely close. I HAVE a wizard saddled by an Archdevil's game; her name is Rho, the "boon" she got from the Gamemaster's Game was the Epic Boon of Immortality, and if she ever dies her soul is forfeit on the spot so even though she's "immortal" she's no more difficult to kill than any other wizard and if she dies she cannot be revived.
I want a warlock that's allowed to have an Intelligence score above 8 and that's able to cast more than one spell per ******* week. Does that really seem like such an impossible ask?
Blade Pact is not allowed to actually do its job and be useful/good, yep. People have in fact posted multiple times with multiple ways in which Blade Pact can be "tweaked" back to being a useless pointless noob trap option anyone with a clue doesn't touch with a ten-foot pole.
Please do not contact or message me.
And we just got off that half-caster vs full-caster thing too. So tired of that coming up. And I thought that we were generally agreed that flexible stat between INT and CHA was a good thing. Le Sigh.
I don't think there was ever true agreement, really. I know I just got tired of being accused of trying to run everyone else's tables and characters because I felt a class who is explicitly defined by a deal made by one means or another generally fits CHA more than INT, and that classes should have boundaries and fixed points rather than being "just do whatever".
And don't @ me over this, I have no interest in rehashing the same argument yet again. As I said, I'm tired of going over it.