The core abilities of this build are:
- Devil's sight - Allows you to see normally in magical and non-magical darkness up to 120ft.
- Darkness - A level 2 spell that spreads magical darkness in a 15ft radius, blinding most creatures including those with darkvision.
The strategy:
- Cast the darkness spell on a piece of your equipment so that you can move in and out of battle, minimizing the blinding effect to your allies.
- Focusing on ranged attacks work best to keep you mobile and keeping the enemy just within the darkness radius (like eldritch blast).
The weaknesses:
- Ineffective against creatures that are not effected by being blind or that can see in magical darkness (oozes, devils, etc.)
- Can potentially blind your allies, which could make them somewhat annoyed with your strategies. Minimize this as much as possible - a powerful character is even more powerful when his/her party is on their side.
This simple character idea can be combined with other ideas as well to make it even more powerful. Even multiclassing can be a powerful option for this class, although you lose the potential level increase of darkness - making it more and more vulnerable to being dispelled by light spells as you level in other classes that are not spellcasting classes. Taking a melee route is possible for more potential damage output (with multiple attacks) at the risk of being less mobile and blinding allies.
Powerful additions to this build:
- Way of the Shadow monk - with a Warlock 3/ Monk 6 build you have a melee Darkness Warlock with ability to use ki as an alternative way of casting darkness (being able to cast it up to 5 times per short rest), and gives you the ability to use darkness in more inventive ways thanks to the ability to teleport within areas of darkness (including your own)
- Mobile feat - particularly for melee builds, allowing more movement and being less hindered by difficult terrain to get into the fight, deal your damage and leaving.
Thematically, it can be an interesting character as well. Following a patron that is themed in darkness or shadows can be quite fun and could potentially fit any of the three patron choices in the Player's Handbook.
Thank you for reading, and please leave a comment - are there more powerful additions to the build that I am missing? do you like this build? do you think it's viable in an actual D&D campaign?
This is a pretty good combo, a little MAD, but it does let you drop strength and focus on dex. If you go 8 monk/12 warlock you can pick up all the stat boosts and evasion from monk to help deal with AOE. Pick up the warcaster feat to help with concentration checks, and use the warlock cast darkness if you are dealing with someone who might be able to dispel or cast daylight.. monk darkness is pretty weak against counters. If you hit warlock 12 you can take life drinker, which when combined with max dex/chr gives you +10 damage on your 2 weapon attacks and up to 4 attacks a round (flurry of blows) with a high likelyhood for an additional AOO all at advantage against opponents that can't see in magical darkness.
ReplyDeleteIn SCAG there is an easy to miss half-elf drow variant that include darkness as a racial ability (among some other nice spells). Nice way to pick up darkness without missing out on other abilities or spells and a great race choice for any warlock with the charisma bonus. This variant doesn't have the sunlight sensitivity that makes the regular drow a poor choice in many campaign setting. Also given the mixed race people may or may not know of your heritage by looks which is normally a social hinderance.
ReplyDeleteGood catch! thanks for sharing that!
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