Giving warlocks a power bump

[golem1972]

This may belong in a different topic.

Not to long ago, my gaming group made a houae rule to help out the fighters in our party. Basically, an attack and a full attack took the same action. So, you could take a move action and still full attack.

We've been thinking about turning eldritch blast from a standard action to an attack action. This would allow warlocks to get iterative attacks at higher level as well as use feats like rapid shot and twf.

Comments?

[MeeposFire]

It would make standard blasting a much better option which would be nice and would compete very well with standard glaive and claws use.

[Re'ozul]

The one problem that poses would be that unless you limit the iterative attacks to just the standard unmodified blast, you suddenly have the problem of any enemy being confronted with 3 saves in one round later on. For stuff like nauseating blast that can be pretty harsh.

[MeeposFire]

If that is a concern you could just make it 1 save per round for the effect (per target) and allow only 1 essence and shape per round (not per shot).

Remember warlocks already do this with eldritch glaive so it is not really new (except the at range part of course).

[The Glyphstone]

It's true Glaivelocks can force multiple saves/round, but they also can't do that from 250ft. away if they want.

Maybe to avoid hosing essences altogether but not getting the triple-save hit, striking one opponent multiple times with a save-based essence could increase the save DC?

[FMArthur]

It's not like doing more damage changes their role at all. Warlocks don't even struggle to deal good damage when they have things like Hellfire Warlock, Eldritch Claws and Eldritch Glaive to use.

I just integrate Hellfire Blast and some Hellfire mitigation into the base class since they are basically manditory anyway: at even levels I give them +1d6 Hellfire Blast and +1 free daily Hellfire Blast, and Hellfire Con damage is restored at rest. It just means their better blasting can come online sooner.

You don't have to perfomr experiments on the action economy to give the Warlock extra damage. Just give him extra damage. :smallconfused:

[Retech]

+1 to increasing save DC

Treat it as being poisoned repeatedly by the same poison, each increasing the DC of the original poisoning by 2, but not increasing its effects. Meeting DC would stop all of the negative effects of missing the save.

[NecroRick]

One alternative is to loosen the restrictions on feats that can be applied to eldritch blast.

All you need to do is treat the list in Complete Arcane as a list of _examples_ rather than the definitive list of _the only_ feats that apply.

Next expand (or do away with) the ranged attack keyword so that the blast and weapon-like spells qualify for those kinds of feats.

Then just say that when the words "arrows" appears in feats (e.g. Manyshot), that it is just fluff, not a keyword, and allow _anything_ that requires a hit-roll that isn't melee to qualify. (Why Manyshot is specific to arrows I do not know)

The 'bad side effect' of this is that you might get blaster wizards firing off multiple rays in a single round. Of course, that requires feats...

[mootoall]

Perhaps make the essence/shaped blasts SLAs, so they take standard actions to use?

[KingofMadCows]

You could increase the damage of eldritch blasts and make it so that applying eldritch shapes and essences reduces the damage.

So you could have the warlock gain 1d6 eldrtich blast damage every level and make it so that applying a lesser eldritch shape or essence reduces the damage by 1d6, greater shape or essence reduces damage by 2d6, and dark shape or essence by 3d6, least shapes and essences would still be free.