Level
1st
Casting Time
1 Action
Range/Area
60 ft.
Components
V, S
Duration
Instantaneous
School
Necromancy
Attack/Save
Ranged
Damage/Effect
Poison
You shoot a greenish ray at a creature within range. Make a ranged spell attack against the target. On a hit, the target takes 2d8 Poison damage and has the Poisoned condition until the end of your next turn.
Using a Higher-Level Spell Slot. The damage increases by 1d8 for each spell slot level above 1.
No more CON save to avoid being Poisoned. They're just automatically Poisoned if you hit them now. Nice.
So the 2024 Great Old One Warlock who uses the 3rd level Psychic Spells feature and somehow has this as a Warlock spell can essentially inflict 2d8 Psychic damage and the poisoned condition? Interesting.
Tiefling Warlock is pretty amazing build. You can go for the Infernal Tiefling and get hellish rebuke/Darkness for the darkness shenanigans and high damage vs people who hit you (with armor of Agathys+Rebuke). Abyssal gets Ray of Sickness and Hold Person, spells that are amazing when they work. Cthonic gets false life and buffed ray of enfeeblement, which is great for bladelocks!
Yeah that would be cool, but sadly it's not on the Warlock spell list.
Worth noting this doesn't add an ability modifier to the damage. This means that Firebolt does more damage than this by level 5. So you pretty much are expensing a spell slot for a small amount of damage and one turn of poisoning. Not sure it's really worth it to have this prepared after level 3.
Disease my beloved <3