Warlock/Rogue multiclass

[Tsugeta7]

I'll be starting a new campaign soon and I usually play ranged casters. I wanted to change and a warlock/rogue seemed very appealing to me. I was looking for some tips on how I could build and keep me from falling as little behind as i could.

Currently, I've been planning on going Fiend, Pact of the Blade Warlock lv5 right away for the Thirsting Blade invocation, as well as having Agonizing Blast and Armor of Shadows and swapping one of these to Devil's Sight. Then starting to level to rogue 3 for Assassin.
As for spells, I'd be taking Eldritch Blast, Minor Illusion, and Green-Flame Blade if we're using SCAG for cantrips. Hex, Hellish Rebuke, Mirror Image, Darkness, Misty Step, and Major Image as spells at level 5.

After that, I'd level Rogue up to 3, get the 2D6 sneak attack dmg, and Assassinate.

I'm not quite sure how sound this build would be, but it looks like a hell of a lot of fun. Any tips I could use to better this build? Thanks

[DracoKnight]

I'll be starting a new campaign soon and I usually play ranged casters. I wanted to change and a warlock/rogue seemed very appealing to me. I was looking for some tips on how I could build and keep me from falling as little behind as i could.

Currently, I've been planning on going Fiend, Pact of the Blade Warlock lv5 right away for the Thirsting Blade invocation, as well as having Agonizing Blast and Armor of Shadows and swapping one of these to Devil's Sight. Then starting to level to rogue 3 for Assassin.
As for spells, I'd be taking Eldritch Blast, Minor Illusion, and Green-Flame Blade if we're using SCAG for cantrips. Hex, Hellish Rebuke, Mirror Image, Darkness, Misty Step, and Major Image as spells at level 5.

After that, I'd level Rogue up to 3, get the 2D6 sneak attack dmg, and Assassinate.

I'm not quite sure how sound this build would be, but it looks like a hell of a lot of fun. Any tips I could use to better this build? Thanks

Thematically, I would start out Rogue. You're an assassin who got into a really tricky situation, and a fiend offered you a way out. It's a solid enough build, I enjoy playing it :smallsmile:

[Tsugeta7]

Thematically, I would start out Rogue. You're an assassin who got into a really tricky situation, and a fiend offered you a way out. It's a solid enough build, I enjoy playing it :smallsmile:

What would I level rogue to? Cuz if i just put it to 3, i dont get my ability modifier bonus until lv 7, and thirsting blade at 8

[Grod_The_Giant]

Between sneak attack and GFB, you should be alright offense-wise. At least one level of Rogue first also gets you more than twice as many proficiencies and Expertise, which would be really nice to have before magic starts to really kick in.

[Tsugeta7]

Between sneak attack and GFB, you should be alright offense-wise. At least one level of Rogue first also gets you more than twice as many proficiencies and Expertise, which would be really nice to have before magic starts to really kick in.

Assuming my DM allows us the use of SCAG spells, yea. In terms of defense early on warlock, id just use Armor of Shadows, then get studded leather or something when i swap it for devils sight. As well as the temp HP whenever i kill something from Dark One's Blessing

[DracoKnight]

What would I level rogue to? Cuz if i just put it to 3, i dont get my ability modifier bonus until lv 7, and thirsting blade at 8

If I remember correctly, I went Rogue 4, grabbed my feat (it was Mage slayer), and then got stuck in a tricky situation (I killed the previous Warlock of a demon lord) and the Demon Lord forced me into servitude for my 5th Character Level.

[DracoKnight]

Assuming my DM allows us the use of SCAG spells, yea. In terms of defense early on warlock, id just use Armor of Shadows, then get studded leather or something when i swap it for devils sight. As well as the temp HP whenever i kill something from Dark One's Blessing

Honestly, I would keep armor of shadows. It'll be better than pretty much any armor you'll have access to, other than +2 studded leather or spending a feat.

[Grod_The_Giant]

Honestly, I would keep armor of shadows. It'll be better than pretty much any armor you'll have access to, other than +2 studded leather or spending a feat.
I wouldn't. It's a (rare) invocation slot for something that's only one point better than the light armor that the Warlock is already proficient in. As a general rule, a new capability-- say, Devil's Sight-- is superior to a 5% increase in some number. Armor of Shadows is fairly useless unless you're splashing Warlock 2-3 on an Abjuration Wizard, in which case it's borderline abusive. (Because you can infinitely refill Arcane Ward)

[DracoKnight]

I wouldn't. It's a (rare) invocation slot for something that's only one point better than the light armor that the Warlock is already proficient in. As a general rule, a new capability-- say, Devil's Sight-- is superior to a 5% increase in some number. Armor of Shadows is fairly useless unless you're splashing Warlock 2-3 on an Abjuration Wizard, in which case it's borderline abusive. (Because you can infinitely refill Arcane Ward)

Which is why I'll generally grab both Armor of Shadows and Devil's Sight for my first 2 invocations. I've been in enough situations where that single point of AC has saved my life. We can agree to disagree, though :smallsmile:

[Corran]

Several nice little tricks to a warlock/rogue build. Lets look at some of them.

1) First and foremost, darkness + devil's sight + cunning action hide. This allows you to attack with advantage when inside magical darkness, and you are attacked with disadvantage, but since you can use your bonus action to hide (and there comes a good stealth score into play, hence expertise in stealth) you will be untargetable most of the time (even most spells wont be able to affect you, AOE spells are an issue though). This requires constant movement, so booming blade might come in very handy, since most enemies will try to move out of the darkness (ofc the darkness moves with you, assuming you cast it on your sword or some other item on you). Even without the darkness element, booming blade combines well with cunning action disengage, so booming blade should be among your first picks imo.

2) Even if you didnt plan to go assassin, mask of many faces can help you a lot and add tons of fun to your roleplaying. And since you are going assassin, mask of many faces can go a long way as far as infiltration is concerned. I suggest you take that invocation asap, along with devil's sight. That opens up to things like mask of many faces + friends (cantrip), which can help a lot with obtaining information, among other things (eg, create hostility between NPCs). The actor feat can help a lot with your cha checks involved, and also allows you to take up the voice of the person you are impersonating. If you really want to emphasize on this roleplaying aspect, I would suggest this to be your first feat. Otherwise alertness and lucky are always helpful for assassins.

3) I would suggest you stop at rogue 3, and take a lot of warlock levels, as there are higher level warlock spells that are quite handy for assassins (emphasis on scrying and etherealness - etherealness is pure gold at the hands of an assassin). Also greater invisibility can replicate your darkness combo without hindering your party in any way, so there is that as well. One more tip, dark one's own luck is really useful to assassins, as it can apply on initiative checks!

4) Thirsting blade is not that essential (unless you are doing sth along the lines of my variant lock assassin that uses a greatsword and is str based - see the spoiler at the end of my post), as GFB and BB can carry you through the whole game. Imo aim for rogue2/warlock3 at level 5. That way you have most of the above tricks set up, and also you have access to some very useful second level spells (invisibility).

5) Hex lowers the enemy;s initiative, so it is important for your assassination attempts.



All in all, I find it to be a very interesting build, bad there is a drawback. It lacks in assassination damage. For that reason, I have a variant of this build, using a greatsword and with a couple of fighter levels. Give me a minute to find it and edit it.

Edit: There, found it in an old thread of mine. Have a look to see if it interests you.
We aim for

fighter (battlemaster) 3/ bladelock 5/ rogue (assassin) 3


In the first case, your best bet is to take the remaining levels as a warlock, or at least go up to warlock 13 and take a 4th level in rogue or fighter for a feat, though I think warlock 14 has more valuee in it. I like feylock for gr invisibility as an alternative to darkness, but fiendlock is arguably the better choice (extra points for how dark one's own luck works with assassinate regarding the enemy's initiative). Final build, fighter3 (BM)/ Fiendlock (blade) 14/ rogue (assassin) 3.

The problem of this build is that it takes some time to flourish. My personal advice is to aim for rogue 2/ warlock 3 asap, but you have to either start or throw an early fighter level for medium armor proficiency. Thus being fighter1/rogue2/warlock3 at level 6 (edit: Start as fighter for medium armor and con save prof). The you take 2 more warlock levels for extra extra attack and 1 more rogue level for assassinate, the order is completely up to you, and it depends on if you want to improve your assassination or your fighting during normal encounters first, putting you at fighter1/rogue3/warlock5 at level 9. Then you take 2 more fightr levels, so you have finally the majority of the tricks you can hope for, being a fighter3/warlock5/rogue3 at level 11. Then finish up as a warlock.

Feats.
At this point you only have 1 ASI/feat from warlock 4, which you will take according to my suggested progression at characer level 6 or 7. GWM is a must, but so are feats like alert and lucky. Actor is also a very cool feat for an assassin with your talents, though you might just not have enough room for it. Between these feats and more that I didnt mention, and pumping your ability scores, I would suggest starting vhuman for this much all needed feat, rather than halforc for some minor cool racial features. You need that feat man, you need all the feats you can get. And since warlock 2 offsets the biggest drawbacks of humans in regard to being an assassin (lack of darkvision), we are cool. My starting stats would be (with the racial increases): STR 16, DEX 14, CON 12, INT 8, WIS 10, CHA 13 with 2 more points remaining. I would invest those 1 of my two remaining points to pump con to 13 if I pwas planning on taking the resilient feat, alternatively I would put those 2 points in either int or wis, if I planned on taking the actor feat, or most commonly, I would put those 2 points to charisma and be done with it. Yeah, with alert, lucky and GWM, and assuming vhuman, you only have room for one more feat/ASI, it is tough to spend it on a feat like actor in good consciense, however funny that might be. Resilient could be a good choice for a feat taken at hight level, in which case resilient con is what you have to plan for, as it will also raise your hp and help with some other stuff as well. Or just pump your str to 18 as your last feat. Too many feats that are useful, so little room.


The trouble with almost all multiclassed assassin builds, is that contrary to a pure assassin rogue, they stay behind the power curve for a long part of their careers. This build is marginally excluded from this category, though there is an uneven distribution of power level-wise, meaning that there are still those very big levels that you have to hit in order to be good at what you are supposed to do, and those levels come a bit later than expected.

The truth is, that as assassination goes, there are builds with better damage output, and as far as usefulness in things besides assassination goes, there are other assassin builds that are more powerful. What I personaly like about this particular assassin build, in regards to other assassin builds, is that it gets an easy and painless access to the scrying spell, and that funny enough it is the only assassin build that uses a heavy weapon (greatsword), as opposed yo the other dex-oriented assassin builds.

Would I call it a one-trick pony? Probably yes, but the trick would be that it uses GWM very efficiently, especially when darkness is on. There is some worrying lack of synergy and some overlap or rather antithesis in regard to the functionality of this build, but oh well...

[Gtdead]

If you had to do it, lvl 5 warlock is the optimal time to mc if you are concerned about dpr because of how sneak attack scales with extra attacks. I'd wait for 6 to get Luck.
From a dpr standpoint you will benefit more if you MC into rogue permanently. The only "trick" you can do is grab a lvl of monk and persuade your DM that martial arts make quarterstaff a finesse weapon, so you can use pam and sneak attack with it, although that's very munchkiny and too much of a headache.

If it was just for flavor, I'd just go Rogue 1/Warlock 19. You don't get anything if you go for more. Cunning action can be fun, but if you want to use hex, it complicates action economy too much. If you use darkness then it's pointless really, you already generate advantage. You will be able to disengage but that's it.

Also assassination is a poor talent that people in most forums tend to overestimate with these crazy action surge/smite/rage/gwm/mark/assassination builds that are supposed to do 700 dpr, but if you actually consider the hit chance, they are more likely to do 50. It's just going to delay your higher level spells and invocations (+cha to damage is a good one). Getting it may let you kill someone with EB at the first round (since using it with melee is both less likely to happen and less dpr), but consider the actual damage here.

a lvl 5 eb + hex will add 11+7=18 extra damage
a lvl 11 eb + hex will add 16.5+10.5= 27 extra damage

At lvl 11 you will do 69 damage with that combo and it isn't guaranteed that it will happen.
Even if it happens, it's once per fight.

You can grab 3 lvls of sorcerer and instead quicken an EB once per fight.

It will do 66.22 average dpr with crit chance factored in.
And you don't have to cast hex, you can just go straight to darkness.
Also you can do it whenever you feel like. It doesn't have to be a surprise round.

In fact sorcerer will give you a lot of stuff.
Passive mage armor as a bonus, a couple of cantrips and a few more low level slots to use your low level spells if you want.
You can grab lightning lure and twin it to pull 2 enemies in your darkness for guaranteed GFBs.
You can also get Enchance Ability to become a bit better at skills (although it won't be as good as expertise)


1) First and foremost, darkness + devil's sight + cunning action hide. This allows you to attack with advantage when inside magical darkness,
You don't need to hide inside darkness to get advantage, anyone that can't see through your darkness (99% of the mm?), has the blinded condition.

From errata
"Vision and Light (p. 183). A heavily
obscured area doesn’t blind you, but you
are effectively blinded when you try to see
something obscured by it"

[Corran]

You don't need to hide inside darkness to get advantage, anyone that can't see through your darkness (99% of the mm?), has the blinded condition.

From errata
"Vision and Light (p. 183). A heavily
obscured area doesn’t blind you, but you
are effectively blinded when you try to see
something obscured by it"
You dont hide to get advantage, you hide so that the enemies will have to guess your location, instead of just knowing where you are and attacking you with disadvantage.

[Gtdead]

I actually hadn't thought of it, good catch, but darkness is already cheesy, I wonder how a DM will respond to this ;p

[Corran]

I actually hadn't thought of it, good catch, but darkness is already cheesy, I wonder how a DM will respond to this ;p
It isnt that bad. I mean, it can seem broken if you are using this to solo multiple weak opponents and getting out of it without a scratch, but there are ways to counter this. Magic aside, readying an attack, or readying a grapple can hurt a lot, so does losing concentration, which is not all that difficult for it to happen. But the most probable scenario is that the enemies will just ignore you and swing at your teammates, as the fight between your allies and the enemies carries out almost normaly. All in all, this trick sacrifices offense (concentrating on darkness instead of spamming hexed EBs) for some extra survivability (which is very fragile against any AOE attack). But the main balancing factor here, is that it can upset a lot of your allies (such as barbs or rogues who have their own way of getting advantage and rely on it - as inside darkness every additional advantage/disadvanatage cancels out because of the ones already in place due to the darkness effect. Or even if you have an ally that relies heavily on OAs, as they are out of the window too. Or an ally that relies on spells that require of him to see the target, as specified in the description of most spells that target saves.).

[bid]

Currently, I've been planning on going Fiend, Pact of the Blade Warlock lv5 right away for the Thirsting Blade invocation, as well as having Agonizing Blast and Armor of Shadows and swapping one of these to Devil's Sight. Then starting to level to rogue 3 for Assassin.
As for spells, I'd be taking Eldritch Blast, Minor Illusion, and Green-Flame Blade
GFB doesn't work well with thirsting blade.
- TWF is about as good as GFB until level 5
- TWF/TB is 20% better than two-target GFB until level 11
- TWF/TB is just as good as two-target GFB until level 17
- TWF/TB/LD is just as good as two-target GFB afterward

If you go rogue 1 / bladelock 5, that's a single level where GFB is useful.