Blood Pact Warlock

[Zephirus]

I was wondering about the warlock. The source material says that forgin a pact with your patron comes at a steep price. However, I don't see this price anywhere. The terrible toll to your mind and body is pure fluff.
So I wondered what could be made to play the pact's price. Enter blood spell invocation.

Invocation: Blood Spell
Requeriments: lvl3
Tome Pact

By tapping on your inner reserves of vitality, you can refresh your arcane power.
At will, as a normal action you sacrifice a number of HP and refresh a spent spell slot. The spell slot is not refreshed at it nominal level, but according to the number of hit points you sacrificed and can be refreshed at most at it's nominal level.
For instance, Iramrag is a lvl6 drow warlock. He has 2 spent lvl3 pact slots. He spent 5HP to recover one of his slots. The refreshed slot is now a lvl2 slot. He could have spent 7HP to recover those slots as lvl3 slots, but not 11HP to recover those slots as lvl5 slots.



Sacrificed HP
Slot Level


3
1


5
2


7
3


9
4


11
5




The HP sacrificed this way cannot be restored by any means until you take a short rest, when you can be healed by up to half your warlock level by any means available to you or when you take a long rest when you recover all sacrificed HP along with damage from other sources.

Discussion

Do you miss 3.5 Hellfire Warlock? He is returned, but this time Naberius is not watching his back.
You need an action to use this ability. That is so that the warlock do not outdamages the Sorcerer or the Wizard. He can cast more should he decided to go nova, but must pause for one round between castings unless he multiclassed in sorcerer and is using quicken metamagic.
A crazy warlock/sorcerer can use this to convert his life into sorcery, but unless he put some levels into Warlock, the ratio of the conversion will suffer. With only 3 levels of warlock the ratio is 3HP/1SP , about 1hit dice worh of HP for a SP, and the best he will get is at lvl10 when the ratio falls to about 2/1. Regardless, he will be even more squishy if he does so.
A paladin/warlock with this pact will see more mileage on his smites. The player will also want to boost his paladin side for HP.
On other hand, I can now some warlocks multiclassing into barbarian for extra HP.

[Oerlaf]

Warlock spell slots are all the same levels

[Zephirus]

Warlock spell slots are all the same levels

Yes, they are. But say, you have two lvl3 spent warlock spell slot. You use this invocation and sacrifices 5HP. That spell slot is refreshed, but only as a Lvl2 slot. You now have one spent lvl3 slot, and one unspent lvl2 slot. Later, you decide to refresh that lvl3 slot and sacrifices 7Hp.
Now you have one lvl2 slot and one lvl3 slot. That is the idea. Convert your life into magic.

[Vogie]

I understand the desire for the "life tap" ability, a la the WoW Warlock, but the warlock is balanced around only having limited spell slots. This would crack that right open, and that's even ignoring the patrons and invocations that can make this "free" through temp HP and healing.

I could see you have something like the Arcane Archer's Ever-Ready Shot -


Cruel Bargain
If you roll initiative and have no spell slots remaining, you may regain one spell slot. If you do, you sacrifice HP equal to twice the level of the regained spell slot, plus one (for example, a fourth level spell slot can be regained at the cost of 9 health).

[Mortis_Elrod]

I understand the desire for the "life tap" ability, a la the WoW Warlock, but the warlock is balanced around only having limited spell slots. This would crack that right open, and that's even ignoring the patrons and invocations that can make this "free" through temp HP and healing.

I could see you have something like the Arcane Archer's Ever-Ready Shot -

isnt the whole capstone for the Warlock about recovering spell slots? wouldn't any recovery just spit that in the face?

[Vogie]

isnt the whole capstone for the Warlock about recovering spell slots? wouldn't any recovery just spit that in the face?

It's true, but it's tapping into the fact that Warlocks are both invocation-poor AND spell slot poor early on, being tied to short rests. Being able to trade one for the other would be only useful at early levels, at which time the warlock would also have the least amount of health.

I also tied it to rolling initiative, so that it isn't really recovery in the traditional sense. It basically only makes sure that a warlock that is attacked between an encounter and their short rest will have at least one spell slot.

It's not a "great" invocation, which really says more about the Arcane Archer than it does about the warlock.

[Gorgo]

The HP numbers you've suggested strike me as too low, in that they enable trading of a low-level cure wounds spell for a much higher level warlock spell. When upcast to second level, cure wounds will heal an expected 9+ability modifier points of damage, which is very likely to be more than the 11 HP a warlock would have to sacrifice to regain a fifth-level spell slot. At high caster level (and thus expected stat bonus), even a first level cure wounds is likely to be enough to counteract the 9 HP cost to regain a 4th-level slot.

[Paeleus]

I've seen and played a Homebrew invocation that cost 5 × pact magic spell slot level off your maximum HP. We agreed that the spell slot created has to be of the spell slot level of which your Warlock level has access to.

Can't remember where I saw it tho... Figures.