Why the heck did they take away the AoE damage fun from Warlocks in 5.5e?
A warlock without Shatter!?!?!??! WHAT?!?!?!?!
Hunger of Hadar is....boring. Can be useful, of course, but where's the UMPH?!?!
I don't really care about not having overlaps in caster options, sometimes you need all the casters to drop AoE spells which don't change the battlefield, but just do massive, raw damage (fireball, lightning bolt, etc). A sorcerer or wizard casting them instead isn't "better" - warlocks not having access to ALL of the possible spells to be cast doesn't make sense, in my opinion, given there are eldritch beings and feylords etc. giving access to the multiverse's spells. If Pact of the Tome allows you to access so many different classes magic, whyyyyyy would there be any gatekeeping for at least Sorcerer & Wizard spells (I can fully see blocking Druid, Paladin, Cleric, Artificer spells, but come on, anything Sorc or Wizard a warlock should have access to given we are essentially "cheating" as a warlock! XD)
No need to even reply to this; I'm just frustrated because I am the only spellcaster besides a cleric in my dnd group and we don't really have AoE to speak of right now and we *desperately* need it for some of these trash mobs in Tomb of Annihilation. Not having at least Shatter is kind of ridiculous! How can a Warlock feasibly *not* have access to it? Makes zero sense.
They decided attacking people is not very warlock, warlocks can only have a few crowd control spells and worthless spells. They had a bad spell list in 2014, they decided they needed to make it far worse in 2024.
Invest everything in Eldritch Blast. It can push you, pull you, pants you, steal your gold, do your taxes, and from half a mile away.
That is what I think is funny about this. They have eldritch blast and ways to enhance it to be a blaster. And then they wont give them any blasting spells. Blasting spells aren't even that great. But given how much they center around blasting via eldritch blast it makes no sense they don't have blasting spells. They should have a dozen unique blasting spells make them all force based so they read like enhancements to eldritch blast. Maybe let eldritch blast invocations add into them as well. And that is not even talking about the countless spells that fit the warlock as good or better than the classes that get them that they don't have access to. Like say bestow curse.
Yeah, not just single target blasting, either. What caster build is good without a big blaster aoe spell you can set off at least once or twice a session. *shakes fist* whatt the hecccck. The fact that Shatter is just no longer a warlock spell is *nuts*. Every Wizard AoE spell should be on the Warlock list. Every single spell from nearly every casting class should be an option (Like Pact of the Tome sort of opens the way to). The limitation is the small number they get and the Pact Slot limitations on how many times per short rest they can do anything more than cantrips. Warlocks hack magic, what's so wrong about them having the access to that?
I don't... fiendlocks get Burning Hands, Scorching Ray, Fireball, Wall of Fire and Insect Plague. If you want to be a blaster, pick the literal blaster subclass. You also get Synaptic Static, and also, eat my shorts, if you're a blastlock and you think Hunger of Hadar lacks oomph, then you just lack creativity. You mean that I can cast a spell once, then repelling blast all my enemies into the center of a 20-foot-radius sphere that they can't see in and can't escape from, all while it does 6d6 damage to them every turn, and that spell lacks oomph?
All that said, complaining that warlocks are bad blasters is like complaining that it's hard to dribble a football. You get, at most, four spell slots to play with in a fight. If you lob four fireballs, you'll be out of magic, and your party wizard/sorcerer will be lobbing bombs while you're sitting on your hands wondering why you wasted all your spell slots on instantaneous spells. The point of the warlock's spell pool is to provide a variety of concentration-based control abilities and/or magical striker options. An Eldritch Blast build should be looking for creative ways to chain the controlling power of repelling blasts with area effects, and using magic to keep enemies at arm's reach, and a Pact of the Blade build should be using their pact magic to protect themselves while they wade into the fray with smites galore. You can blast with a warlock - that's why the Fiend Patron exists. But that's also why all the Fiend subclass abilities are centered around keeping you alive, because they know you're forgoing all the utility and control spells that a warlock would usually depend on just to lob fireballs into crowds of mobs.
Instantaneous AoE spells were always a trap for Warlocks. That's why they got rid of them.
Yeah hunger of hadar, they will take 4d6 damage when cast as a 5th level spell at the start of their turn and then just walk out of it. And maybe one of them who is like dead center will be close enough they will easily be shoved back in. 20 foot radius and difficult terrain wont hold anyone, it will barely inconvenience them. On the bright side you might motivate them to dash so they lose their action. Not sure that is worth one of your limited slots, but maybe.
But yeah other classes can out blast them, they can also out do them with sustained spells, with utility spells, with buff spells, with pretty much all casting because full casters do that. That does not mean they should not have access at the default class level to blasting spells given they have the blasting cantrip, so blasting is in their M.O.
My thoughts on warlock vs the other "arcane casters" is a tome warlock can have more at will casting than any caster, more ritual spells than a sorcerer and better social capabilities than a wizard. Combat wise though the warlock is a bit more limited than other casters and other martials unless you have a significant number of encounters per "adventuring day"* rather than just 1 or 2. The biggest limiting factor for a warlock is they may very well have one of the worst spell caster spell list in the game and are heavily reliant on having a good patron list to make up for it.
*Adventuring day for the purposes of this post is the time spent between long rests, depending on your game this could be an actual days time an hour in game time or a week depending on how you want to run your short and long rests.
Yeah hunger of hadar, they will take 4d6 damage when cast as a 5th level spell at the start of their turn and then just walk out of it. And maybe one of them who is like dead center will be close enough they will easily be shoved back in. 20 foot radius and difficult terrain wont hold anyone, it will barely inconvenience them. On the bright side you might motivate them to dash so they lose their action. Not sure that is worth one of your limited slots, but maybe.
I can say awesome things in a dismissive tone too: Yeah, I could get a million dollars, but then I'd spend it all on food and housing for the poor, so money's garbage.
If I throw down a 5th-level Fireball on a group of five enemies, I do, on average, 35 damage to five enemies. Respectable, 175 total damage. If I throw down a Hunger of Hadar on that same group of five enemies, it's safe to assume I'll at least do 14 damage to each enemy, for 70 damage. Now, that's trash for the spell slot. But now all those creatures are trapped in a sphere of darkness, and they have no reason to intuit which way is out. Most common speed is 30-40ft, so assuming one enemy is on the edge of the sphere, if they pick the wrong direction, they could dash and still spend their whole movement trapped in the sphere. Assume at least one of them is a dum-dum, we're up to 77 total damage. Now, the rest of them escape. Maybe two of the enemies is near the edge of the sphere, they find their way out, they get to take their action as normal. The other two spend a Dash action to get out, so their turns are a bust, but hey, they're out of the spell, so no big deal, right?
Turn two rolls around, and I use Eldritch Blast to knock the two that dashed out back into the sphere. They're going to start their turn in the sphere, and that's another 14 damage to three guys, 42 more for 112 total damage. Respectable. Now, even if every enemy eventually manages to escape the sphere, and even if they manage to somehow stay more than 20 feet away from the sphere (so I can't Eldritch Blast them back into it), I've done 112 damage, and created an enormous zone of control. If anybody wanders within 20ft of the sphere, I blast them back inside, and we keep racking up damage. That's all, in my opinion, at least comparable to a Fireball
Except, uh-oh, we forgot that warlocks don't exist in a vacuum. I've got a barbarian in my party, and the first guy who gets out of the sphere gets Grappled and dragged back into the sphere. Heck, the barbarian has movement galore, he can grapple one dude, drag his ass over to another escapee, grapple them with his other hand, and drag them both back into the sphere, where they take 6d6 damage a turn until they manage to break free of the grapple. And my party's Druid, just to add insult to injury, throws an Entangle on the center of the sphere right after I cast the spell, so now half the people inside are Restrained and trapped in the sphere, taking continuous damage until they break the bindings with their full action, meaning they can't Dash to escape the sphere. Oh, and we have a bard who preps Dissonant Whispers to cast on the first one to pop out of the darkness, forcing them to immediately flee back into the globe, turning a first-level spell that normally does 3d6 damage into a first-level spell that suddenly does 9d6 damage. Hell, if I've got a druid in my party with 5th-level spells, they just cast Wall of Stone around the outside of the sphere, and I've suddenly got five enemies trapped inside a sphere dealing 6d6 damage a turn for ten full turns. Suddenly, with two fifth-level spells, I've dealt on average 210 damage to each enemy trapped inside my globe of slurping, impossibly-cold darkness, screaming and pounding on a wall that they can't see or escape.That is, for the record, triple the damage I'd deal casting two fifth-level Fireballs.
Warlocks demonstrate, probably more than any other class, the importance of playing in a group. Almost every spell, ability, or feature of the warlock that people say is "weak" simply require a team to make them work. Their spell list is largely comprised of support and DoT spells that, on their own, are trash. But a fifth-level Witch Bolt coupled with a teammate who can lock down the target's movement can deal 15d12 damage to a single target. Hunger of Hadar coupled with a little tactical play by your allies can be devastating, and Hex is more than just a damage augmenter - you can cripple a guard's Insight and Perception checks, you can make it functionally impossible to escape a grapple, you can help the party bard win a debate against a rival. Couple this with the fact that every support spell they cast is upcast with no downside, and you've got a character who can just Charm Person the aforementioned five enemies and skip combat altogether.
Warlocks rule. If you're struggling with the class, then you're playing it wrong.
Turn two rolls around, and I use Eldritch Blast to knock the two that dashed out back into the sphere...
Again you are so far ahead of me i am just so confused by what you are saying. The only way to use Eldritch Blast to move them is to also have the invocation repelling blast. But that only works for "push the creature up to 10 feet straight away from you." So if they are 20 feet outside, how do they get pushed in 20 Feet? Also, because it is straight away from the warlock, what if they are pushed and the angle is wrong? How do you get them back into the spell area?
During combat in D&D, we typically get 3-5 rounds of combat before the encounter is over unless it's a bigger encounter where some of those DoT spells can really rack up mileage and where the volume of enemies/importance of crowd control & such become super duper important. While the aforementioned plan you laid out is no doubt a solid tactical play; a lot of factors need to be in place to make that even feasible or normal. Not to mention, it revolves around everyone deciding to spend their turns and resources to maximize the potential of the Hunger of Hadar, perhaps even at the expense of overall party efficiency, as the Barbarian no doubt could take one of them down to bloodied or further with both of their attacks being used to smash instead of grapple.
To not have at *least* Shatter as a spell anymore is a little stupid - especially when not everyone wants to be a Fiend subclass warlock and I want to have my choice of flavor. We aren't talking about out-of-combat utility at all. And I never said I didn't like warlocks at all. I *love* this class. It's great! The lack of AoE spells by default for all warlocks in the 2024 PHB is just plain silly.
Crux of the question in the title.
/rant
Why the heck did they take away the AoE damage fun from Warlocks in 5.5e?
A warlock without Shatter!?!?!??! WHAT?!?!?!?!
Hunger of Hadar is....boring. Can be useful, of course, but where's the UMPH?!?!
I don't really care about not having overlaps in caster options, sometimes you need all the casters to drop AoE spells which don't change the battlefield, but just do massive, raw damage (fireball, lightning bolt, etc). A sorcerer or wizard casting them instead isn't "better" - warlocks not having access to ALL of the possible spells to be cast doesn't make sense, in my opinion, given there are eldritch beings and feylords etc. giving access to the multiverse's spells. If Pact of the Tome allows you to access so many different classes magic, whyyyyyy would there be any gatekeeping for at least Sorcerer & Wizard spells (I can fully see blocking Druid, Paladin, Cleric, Artificer spells, but come on, anything Sorc or Wizard a warlock should have access to given we are essentially "cheating" as a warlock! XD)
No need to even reply to this; I'm just frustrated because I am the only spellcaster besides a cleric in my dnd group and we don't really have AoE to speak of right now and we *desperately* need it for some of these trash mobs in Tomb of Annihilation. Not having at least Shatter is kind of ridiculous! How can a Warlock feasibly *not* have access to it? Makes zero sense.
./endrant
They decided attacking people is not very warlock, warlocks can only have a few crowd control spells and worthless spells. They had a bad spell list in 2014, they decided they needed to make it far worse in 2024.
Invest everything in Eldritch Blast. It can push you, pull you, pants you, steal your gold, do your taxes, and from half a mile away.
That is what I think is funny about this. They have eldritch blast and ways to enhance it to be a blaster. And then they wont give them any blasting spells. Blasting spells aren't even that great. But given how much they center around blasting via eldritch blast it makes no sense they don't have blasting spells. They should have a dozen unique blasting spells make them all force based so they read like enhancements to eldritch blast. Maybe let eldritch blast invocations add into them as well. And that is not even talking about the countless spells that fit the warlock as good or better than the classes that get them that they don't have access to. Like say bestow curse.
Yeah, not just single target blasting, either. What caster build is good without a big blaster aoe spell you can set off at least once or twice a session. *shakes fist* whatt the hecccck. The fact that Shatter is just no longer a warlock spell is *nuts*. Every Wizard AoE spell should be on the Warlock list. Every single spell from nearly every casting class should be an option (Like Pact of the Tome sort of opens the way to). The limitation is the small number they get and the Pact Slot limitations on how many times per short rest they can do anything more than cantrips. Warlocks hack magic, what's so wrong about them having the access to that?
I don't... fiendlocks get Burning Hands, Scorching Ray, Fireball, Wall of Fire and Insect Plague. If you want to be a blaster, pick the literal blaster subclass. You also get Synaptic Static, and also, eat my shorts, if you're a blastlock and you think Hunger of Hadar lacks oomph, then you just lack creativity. You mean that I can cast a spell once, then repelling blast all my enemies into the center of a 20-foot-radius sphere that they can't see in and can't escape from, all while it does 6d6 damage to them every turn, and that spell lacks oomph?
All that said, complaining that warlocks are bad blasters is like complaining that it's hard to dribble a football. You get, at most, four spell slots to play with in a fight. If you lob four fireballs, you'll be out of magic, and your party wizard/sorcerer will be lobbing bombs while you're sitting on your hands wondering why you wasted all your spell slots on instantaneous spells. The point of the warlock's spell pool is to provide a variety of concentration-based control abilities and/or magical striker options. An Eldritch Blast build should be looking for creative ways to chain the controlling power of repelling blasts with area effects, and using magic to keep enemies at arm's reach, and a Pact of the Blade build should be using their pact magic to protect themselves while they wade into the fray with smites galore. You can blast with a warlock - that's why the Fiend Patron exists. But that's also why all the Fiend subclass abilities are centered around keeping you alive, because they know you're forgoing all the utility and control spells that a warlock would usually depend on just to lob fireballs into crowds of mobs.
Instantaneous AoE spells were always a trap for Warlocks. That's why they got rid of them.
Yeah hunger of hadar, they will take 4d6 damage when cast as a 5th level spell at the start of their turn and then just walk out of it. And maybe one of them who is like dead center will be close enough they will easily be shoved back in. 20 foot radius and difficult terrain wont hold anyone, it will barely inconvenience them. On the bright side you might motivate them to dash so they lose their action. Not sure that is worth one of your limited slots, but maybe.
But yeah other classes can out blast them, they can also out do them with sustained spells, with utility spells, with buff spells, with pretty much all casting because full casters do that. That does not mean they should not have access at the default class level to blasting spells given they have the blasting cantrip, so blasting is in their M.O.
My thoughts on warlock vs the other "arcane casters" is a tome warlock can have more at will casting than any caster, more ritual spells than a sorcerer and better social capabilities than a wizard. Combat wise though the warlock is a bit more limited than other casters and other martials unless you have a significant number of encounters per "adventuring day"* rather than just 1 or 2. The biggest limiting factor for a warlock is they may very well have one of the worst spell caster spell list in the game and are heavily reliant on having a good patron list to make up for it.
*Adventuring day for the purposes of this post is the time spent between long rests, depending on your game this could be an actual days time an hour in game time or a week depending on how you want to run your short and long rests.
I can say awesome things in a dismissive tone too: Yeah, I could get a million dollars, but then I'd spend it all on food and housing for the poor, so money's garbage.
If I throw down a 5th-level Fireball on a group of five enemies, I do, on average, 35 damage to five enemies. Respectable, 175 total damage. If I throw down a Hunger of Hadar on that same group of five enemies, it's safe to assume I'll at least do 14 damage to each enemy, for 70 damage. Now, that's trash for the spell slot. But now all those creatures are trapped in a sphere of darkness, and they have no reason to intuit which way is out. Most common speed is 30-40ft, so assuming one enemy is on the edge of the sphere, if they pick the wrong direction, they could dash and still spend their whole movement trapped in the sphere. Assume at least one of them is a dum-dum, we're up to 77 total damage. Now, the rest of them escape. Maybe two of the enemies is near the edge of the sphere, they find their way out, they get to take their action as normal. The other two spend a Dash action to get out, so their turns are a bust, but hey, they're out of the spell, so no big deal, right?
Turn two rolls around, and I use Eldritch Blast to knock the two that dashed out back into the sphere. They're going to start their turn in the sphere, and that's another 14 damage to three guys, 42 more for 112 total damage. Respectable. Now, even if every enemy eventually manages to escape the sphere, and even if they manage to somehow stay more than 20 feet away from the sphere (so I can't Eldritch Blast them back into it), I've done 112 damage, and created an enormous zone of control. If anybody wanders within 20ft of the sphere, I blast them back inside, and we keep racking up damage. That's all, in my opinion, at least comparable to a Fireball
Except, uh-oh, we forgot that warlocks don't exist in a vacuum. I've got a barbarian in my party, and the first guy who gets out of the sphere gets Grappled and dragged back into the sphere. Heck, the barbarian has movement galore, he can grapple one dude, drag his ass over to another escapee, grapple them with his other hand, and drag them both back into the sphere, where they take 6d6 damage a turn until they manage to break free of the grapple. And my party's Druid, just to add insult to injury, throws an Entangle on the center of the sphere right after I cast the spell, so now half the people inside are Restrained and trapped in the sphere, taking continuous damage until they break the bindings with their full action, meaning they can't Dash to escape the sphere. Oh, and we have a bard who preps Dissonant Whispers to cast on the first one to pop out of the darkness, forcing them to immediately flee back into the globe, turning a first-level spell that normally does 3d6 damage into a first-level spell that suddenly does 9d6 damage. Hell, if I've got a druid in my party with 5th-level spells, they just cast Wall of Stone around the outside of the sphere, and I've suddenly got five enemies trapped inside a sphere dealing 6d6 damage a turn for ten full turns. Suddenly, with two fifth-level spells, I've dealt on average 210 damage to each enemy trapped inside my globe of slurping, impossibly-cold darkness, screaming and pounding on a wall that they can't see or escape. That is, for the record, triple the damage I'd deal casting two fifth-level Fireballs.
Warlocks demonstrate, probably more than any other class, the importance of playing in a group. Almost every spell, ability, or feature of the warlock that people say is "weak" simply require a team to make them work. Their spell list is largely comprised of support and DoT spells that, on their own, are trash. But a fifth-level Witch Bolt coupled with a teammate who can lock down the target's movement can deal 15d12 damage to a single target. Hunger of Hadar coupled with a little tactical play by your allies can be devastating, and Hex is more than just a damage augmenter - you can cripple a guard's Insight and Perception checks, you can make it functionally impossible to escape a grapple, you can help the party bard win a debate against a rival. Couple this with the fact that every support spell they cast is upcast with no downside, and you've got a character who can just Charm Person the aforementioned five enemies and skip combat altogether.
Warlocks rule. If you're struggling with the class, then you're playing it wrong.
Turn two rolls around, and I use Eldritch Blast to knock the two that dashed out back into the sphere...
Again you are so far ahead of me i am just so confused by what you are saying. The only way to use Eldritch Blast to move them is to also have the invocation repelling blast. But that only works for "push the creature up to 10 feet straight away from you." So if they are 20 feet outside, how do they get pushed in 20 Feet? Also, because it is straight away from the warlock, what if they are pushed and the angle is wrong? How do you get them back into the spell area?
During combat in D&D, we typically get 3-5 rounds of combat before the encounter is over unless it's a bigger encounter where some of those DoT spells can really rack up mileage and where the volume of enemies/importance of crowd control & such become super duper important. While the aforementioned plan you laid out is no doubt a solid tactical play; a lot of factors need to be in place to make that even feasible or normal. Not to mention, it revolves around everyone deciding to spend their turns and resources to maximize the potential of the Hunger of Hadar, perhaps even at the expense of overall party efficiency, as the Barbarian no doubt could take one of them down to bloodied or further with both of their attacks being used to smash instead of grapple.
To not have at *least* Shatter as a spell anymore is a little stupid - especially when not everyone wants to be a Fiend subclass warlock and I want to have my choice of flavor. We aren't talking about out-of-combat utility at all. And I never said I didn't like warlocks at all. I *love* this class. It's great! The lack of AoE spells by default for all warlocks in the 2024 PHB is just plain silly.