Hello everyone, Thank you in advance for any input! My University club is putting on a PVP tournament / " Battle Royal" is hoping to get some input on some bills.
Rules for this treatment are: only official wizards of the Coast published material (no unearthed arcana) no multiclassing
Team build: Three level 8 characters stats: point buy Equipment: Starting equipment
My current idea is to run 3 Drow Half-Elf warlocks with devils site and spamming darkness. I'm assuming most of the teams will be running the Trinity of Malay fighter, caster and healer. First round hopefully we will get off all 3 darkness and hopefully it will provide cover. Second round drop caster.
What are the rules on spell components? Because some spells aren't covered by focus's and pouches. If you're going 3 warlocks repelling blast is a great tool to keep enemy melee fighters away from you. With 3 warlocks at level 8 you can push them back up to 60 feet, you can also use eldritch spear and spell sniper to upgrade it's range if you want to shoot enemies while keeping out of there range, lance of lethargy is also a great tool to keep enemies away as it reduces movement speed by 10 feet.
Evards black tentacles and hunger of hadar can be an extremely deadly combo, creating 20 feet of darkness, rough terrain and can even restrain opponents while doing potentially 10d6 damage a turn, and since it's magical darkness you can still see into it and shoot at them with eldritch blast. For extra damage throw a wall of fire on top of it, or to make it even harder to escape use stinking cloud. You can use 3 concentration spells at once, exploit this mercilessly.
Royals are battles of attrition and many players tend to use stealth to avoid damage until there enemies are exhausted, pact of the chain gets you access to a pseudodragon familiar which has 10 feet of blindvision and advantage on perception checks which can mitigate stealth. Tieflings also grant you a free use of darkness if you want save on precious spell slots.
Warlocks sound fun, but they are very limited on spell slots. If SCAG is allowed you could replace one warlock with a Bladesinging Wizard. If you can use the starting money for a Studded Leather armor you get a level 8 Wizard with an AC of 20. (12 St. Leather, 3 Dex, 5 Bladesong) And the option to use "Shield" and "Absorb Elements" if something hits you. "Greater Invisibilty" and "Blink" to be hard to target and of course "Fireball" and "Blight" for serious magic damage at range.
Warlocks surprisingly are great at late/end game, lower level of royals simply because of how versatile and powerful eldritch blast is. It can outrange any other class having an impressive 600 feet of range with eldritch spear and spell sniper.
It deals fairly good damage as well and has strong control with lance of lethargy and repelling blast, being able to push enemies up to 60 feet away if all the blasts hit and reducing a target speed by 30 feet, assuming an average speed this will reduce there speed to 0 and they can't even use dash to move as it doubles speed after modifiers are applied.
Familiars from pact of the chain are fairly strong too, allowing for great scouting potential as you can see through them and avenues for attack as you can use touch spells through them. Also some familiars like quasits can turn invisible at will for as long as they like until they attack or breaks it's concentration.
Warlocks surprisingly are great at late/end game, lower level of royals simply because of how versatile and powerful eldritch blast is. It can outrange any other class having an impressive 600 feet of range with eldritch spear and spell sniper.
It deals fairly good damage as well and has strong control with lance of lethargy and repelling blast, being able to push enemies up to 60 feet away if all the blasts hit and reducing a target speed by 30 feet, assuming an average speed this will reduce there speed to 0 and they can't even use dash to move as it doubles speed after modifiers are applied.
Familiars from pact of the chain are fairly strong too, allowing for great scouting potential as you can see through them and avenues for attack as you can use touch spells through them. Also some familiars like quasits can turn invisible at will for as long as they like until they attack or breaks it's concentration.
You are right if you are putting the Warlock against martial melee fighters. Things change when you put them against full spell casters, though.
Let's take the Bladesinger I proposed.
Since Bladesingers usually have a high Dex (+3), I'll assume the Bladesinger goes first. He starts 600 feet away from the warlock. His action is casting Mage Armor, his Bonus Action is activating Bladesong and he moves 40 ft towards the Warlock.
The Warlock casts his two Eldritch Blasts and has +8 to hit (5 Cha, 3 Prof). The Bladesinger right now has an AC of 21 and can boost that to 26 using "Shield" if the Blast would hit him. Which means the Warlock has a chance or roughly 15% per Blast to actually score a hit.
Let's say one of the Blasts hit. He pushes the Bladesinger back 10 feet to 570, and slows him by 10 feet, reducing movement to 30. The wizard casts "Dimension Door" and moves in, so now he's only 40 feet away, 70 if the warlock used his movement to back away.
So far the Wizard used one 4th level spell and 2 1st level spells and is in reach of all his damage spells / cantrips while the Warlock cannot reduce the Wizard's movement to less than 30 feet, so they will maintain that distance unless one of them decides to use another short-range teleport. "Misty Step" comes to mind, but both can cast that and the Wizard has more slots.
The Warlock has to overcome the Bladesingers high AC, while the Wizard either targets the Lock's lower AC or one of the locks weak saves.
All in all I would still bet on the Wizard in this fight.
That is why I think having at least one full caster in the group would be a good idea, since the full casters in the enemy team don't have to ration their spell slots. They can simply burn them all for this fight, which means the have approx. 4 times more magical ammunition than the Warlocks.
Edit: also, being "Counterspelled" hurts a lot more if you only have two spells to cast.
Amusingly you can place an invisible familiar where they would teleport and then dimension gate fails and they take 4d6 damage. I did mention however that warlocks shine at late end game when most spell slots would be expended, battle royals are battles of attrition and there are other targets for his enemies to focus on. I would recommend he keeps away as far as possible from enemies and conserve his spell slots until late game. Once late game is reached and most of the spells slots are exhausted they're pretty much unbeatable as they'll outrange and outcontrol everyone. Having a dedicated caster to survive early/mid game can't hurt though.
Ah, I misunderstood the "late game" then. I thought you were talking about high level (= end game of character development), where the Warlocks have all their Invocations and 4 Blasts per round.
Which didn't make much sense since we're talking about level 8 characters...
The invisible familiar would be extremely lucky to end right in the spot where Dimension Door would land you, though. :D
But thank you for the reminder. If I ever end up in such a situation I'll be sure to move 5ft in any direction before teleporting.^^
The only thing I’m confused about is why you’d want to cast darkness three times the first round? As soon as you start casting other spells, your darkness becomes dispelled. It requires concentration to keep going. So, if you want that, use one to keep the darkness going and use the others to cast damaging attack spells.
Hello everyone, Thank you in advance for any input! My University club is Showboxjiofi.local.htmltplinklogin putting on a PVP tournament / " Battle Royal" is hoping to get some input on some bills.
Rules for this treatment are: only official wizards of the Coast published material (no unearthed arcana) no multiclassing
Team build: Three level 8 characters stats: point buy Equipment: Starting equipment
My current idea is to run 3 Drow Half-Elf warlocks with devils site and spamming darkness. I'm assuming most of the teams will be running the Trinity of Malay fighter, caster and healer. First round hopefully we will get off all 3 darkness and hopefully it will provide cover. Second round drop caster.
Familiars from pact of the chain are fairly strong too, allowing for great scouting potential as you can see through them and avenues for attack as you can use touch spells through them. Also some familiars like quasits can turn invisible at will for as long as they like until they attack or breaks it's concentration.
Hello everyone,
Thank you in advance for any input!
My University club is putting on a PVP tournament / " Battle Royal" is hoping to get some input on some bills.
Rules for this treatment are:
only official wizards of the Coast published material (no unearthed arcana)
no multiclassing
Team build:
Three level 8 characters
stats: point buy
Equipment: Starting equipment
My current idea is to run 3 Drow Half-Elf warlocks with devils site and spamming darkness. I'm assuming most of the teams will be running the Trinity of Malay fighter, caster and healer.
First round hopefully we will get off all 3 darkness and hopefully it will provide cover.
Second round drop caster.
I think for something this big, it's important to have a large scale map, including cover and such.
Things like foliage can really bring out some lesser abilities, like what I believe was called mask of the wild for wood elves. Just a tip.
Also known as CrafterB and DankMemer.
Here, have some homebrew classes! Subclasses to? Why not races. Feats, feats as well. I have a lot of magic items. Lastly I got monsters, fun, fun times.
What are the rules on spell components? Because some spells aren't covered by focus's and pouches. If you're going 3 warlocks repelling blast is a great tool to keep enemy melee fighters away from you. With 3 warlocks at level 8 you can push them back up to 60 feet, you can also use eldritch spear and spell sniper to upgrade it's range if you want to shoot enemies while keeping out of there range, lance of lethargy is also a great tool to keep enemies away as it reduces movement speed by 10 feet.
Evards black tentacles and hunger of hadar can be an extremely deadly combo, creating 20 feet of darkness, rough terrain and can even restrain opponents while doing potentially 10d6 damage a turn, and since it's magical darkness you can still see into it and shoot at them with eldritch blast. For extra damage throw a wall of fire on top of it, or to make it even harder to escape use stinking cloud. You can use 3 concentration spells at once, exploit this mercilessly.
Royals are battles of attrition and many players tend to use stealth to avoid damage until there enemies are exhausted, pact of the chain gets you access to a pseudodragon familiar which has 10 feet of blindvision and advantage on perception checks which can mitigate stealth. Tieflings also grant you a free use of darkness if you want save on precious spell slots.
Warlocks sound fun, but they are very limited on spell slots. If SCAG is allowed you could replace one warlock with a Bladesinging Wizard. If you can use the starting money for a Studded Leather armor you get a level 8 Wizard with an AC of 20. (12 St. Leather, 3 Dex, 5 Bladesong) And the option to use "Shield" and "Absorb Elements" if something hits you. "Greater Invisibilty" and "Blink" to be hard to target and of course "Fireball" and "Blight" for serious magic damage at range.
Warlocks surprisingly are great at late/end game, lower level of royals simply because of how versatile and powerful eldritch blast is. It can outrange any other class having an impressive 600 feet of range with eldritch spear and spell sniper.
It deals fairly good damage as well and has strong control with lance of lethargy and repelling blast, being able to push enemies up to 60 feet away if all the blasts hit and reducing a target speed by 30 feet, assuming an average speed this will reduce there speed to 0 and they can't even use dash to move as it doubles speed after modifiers are applied.
Familiars from pact of the chain are fairly strong too, allowing for great scouting potential as you can see through them and avenues for attack as you can use touch spells through them. Also some familiars like quasits can turn invisible at will for as long as they like until they attack or breaks it's concentration.
You are right if you are putting the Warlock against martial melee fighters. Things change when you put them against full spell casters, though.
Let's take the Bladesinger I proposed.
Since Bladesingers usually have a high Dex (+3), I'll assume the Bladesinger goes first. He starts 600 feet away from the warlock. His action is casting Mage Armor, his Bonus Action is activating Bladesong and he moves 40 ft towards the Warlock.
The Warlock casts his two Eldritch Blasts and has +8 to hit (5 Cha, 3 Prof). The Bladesinger right now has an AC of 21 and can boost that to 26 using "Shield" if the Blast would hit him. Which means the Warlock has a chance or roughly 15% per Blast to actually score a hit.
Let's say one of the Blasts hit. He pushes the Bladesinger back 10 feet to 570, and slows him by 10 feet, reducing movement to 30. The wizard casts "Dimension Door" and moves in, so now he's only 40 feet away, 70 if the warlock used his movement to back away.
So far the Wizard used one 4th level spell and 2 1st level spells and is in reach of all his damage spells / cantrips while the Warlock cannot reduce the Wizard's movement to less than 30 feet, so they will maintain that distance unless one of them decides to use another short-range teleport. "Misty Step" comes to mind, but both can cast that and the Wizard has more slots.
The Warlock has to overcome the Bladesingers high AC, while the Wizard either targets the Lock's lower AC or one of the locks weak saves.
All in all I would still bet on the Wizard in this fight.
That is why I think having at least one full caster in the group would be a good idea, since the full casters in the enemy team don't have to ration their spell slots. They can simply burn them all for this fight, which means the have approx. 4 times more magical ammunition than the Warlocks.
Edit: also, being "Counterspelled" hurts a lot more if you only have two spells to cast.
Amusingly you can place an invisible familiar where they would teleport and then dimension gate fails and they take 4d6 damage. I did mention however that warlocks shine at late end game when most spell slots would be expended, battle royals are battles of attrition and there are other targets for his enemies to focus on. I would recommend he keeps away as far as possible from enemies and conserve his spell slots until late game. Once late game is reached and most of the spells slots are exhausted they're pretty much unbeatable as they'll outrange and outcontrol everyone. Having a dedicated caster to survive early/mid game can't hurt though.
Ah, I misunderstood the "late game" then. I thought you were talking about high level (= end game of character development), where the Warlocks have all their Invocations and 4 Blasts per round.
Which didn't make much sense since we're talking about level 8 characters...
The invisible familiar would be extremely lucky to end right in the spot where Dimension Door would land you, though. :D
But thank you for the reminder. If I ever end up in such a situation I'll be sure to move 5ft in any direction before teleporting.^^
The only thing I’m confused about is why you’d want to cast darkness three times the first round? As soon as you start casting other spells, your darkness becomes dispelled. It requires concentration to keep going. So, if you want that, use one to keep the darkness going and use the others to cast damaging attack spells.
Familiars from pact of the chain are fairly strong too, allowing for great scouting potential as you can see through them and avenues for attack as you can use touch spells through them. Also some familiars like quasits can turn invisible at will for as long as they like until they attack or breaks it's concentration.