Sorlock, AL

[DarkJo87]

I am playing DnD Adventure League, and i wanna know if i can make a Sorlock in AL?

If I can, can you guide me into making one? I am actually level4. So with what I have read, I should begin taking 2levels of warlock, then only sorcerer levels?

I would also need everything else about the making of the Sorlock (stats, skills, background, etc.)

Thanks for your help!

[Rukelnikov]

I am playing DnD Adventure League, and i wanna know if i can make a Sorlock in AL?

If I can, can you guide me into making one? I am actually level4. So with what I have read, I should begin taking 2levels of warlock, then only sorcerer levels?

I would also need everything else about the making of the Sorlock (stats, skills, background, etc.)

Thanks for your help!

Yeah the basic is pretty simple, 2lvl of Lock, for Eldritch Blast with Agonizing Blast, you also get some other goodies to choose from.

And then just work your way to 20 by casting spells and quickening Eldritch Blasts.

From there it can get increasingly more complex (and cheesy if you plan to go coffee mode).

The best part about the Sorlock, is that its base efficiency is SO good, that its doesnt force as much fluff into your character as most builds do. You can go any pact, any bloodline and it will always work.

I played a Lock7(GOO)/Sorc9(Storm), nothing close to optimized, level distribution alone is far from it, but it still never felt behind.

[Keravath]

Sorlocks are easy. However, do not expect to use the “coffeelock” idea in AL.

Anyway, there are lots of ways to build a sorlocks.

Suggestions: hexblade warlock for armor and weapon proficiencies as well as hex warrior (won’t be used much) and hexblades curse.

1 start vhuman hexblade warlock and take resilient constitution. 14 dex, 14 con, 16 cha .. use medium armor+shield

2 warlock level 2 - take agonizing blast - can also take devils sight for seeing in complete darkness - in my opinion necessary if you go divine soul sorcerer .. optional if you go shadow sorcerer since they get 120’darkvision as a class feature.

3 sorcerer level 1 .. popular choices are shadow sorcerer which works thematically with hexblade or divine soul which gives you some healing options which can be extremely useful in AL since you never know who will be playing and having at least one character with healing word is very useful.

4+ sorcerer levels


If you want more spellcasting you can go warlock 3 for pact of the time at some point. (This gets you level 1 and 2 rituals which could include find familiar but you’d have to give up devils sight so probably better for the shadow sorcerer option).

Pact of the chain would give you an amazing familiar. I’ve played with a chain pact divine soul sorlock who makes really good use of the familiar.

You want to cap the warlock at three levels max so you don’t lose level 9 spell ability if you play to tier 4.

[Orc_Lord]

You start Sorcerer not warlock so you get CON as a save.

Divine Sorcerer so you can have backup healing which helps.

Lock archetype hexblade is over rated. You will be 80-120 ft away most of the time. So armor is not as important as people think.

I like Fey because advantage to the whole party is amazing.

[Man_Over_Game]

One particular advantage a lot of people miss with the Shadow Sorcerer is the fact that you can completely remove the need for any Devil's Sight invocation.

Take a level 3 Warlock spell slot, convert it into Sorcery Points with a Bonus Action, spend 2 of the points on the Sorcerer's special Darkness, keep one point as profit or for a metamagic on Darkness. This allows you to have a different invocation at Warlock level 2, like Repelling blasts.

This is an effective strategy for leveling into Warlock over Sorcerer, which gives you more consistent firepower with high-level Warlock spell slots to combat the crawl-heavy experience of Adventure League. It also gives you a lot more defensive options, being able to afford things like Tomb of Levistus or Trickster's Escape, on top of the hit die increase from being a Warlock.

So I'd recommend something like this:


Sorcerer 1 (for Constitution proficiency)
Warlock 1 (for Hexblade's armor bonuses)
Sorcerer 2
Sorcerer 3 (for Darkness)
Warlock 2


Continue into Warlock until you reach Warlock 7, then level into Sorcerer 4. Then continue until you hit Warlock 9, then get Sorcerer 5. Then go Warlock all the way. This ensures that you don't have any Warlock spells being converted into wasted sorcery points.

[Sigreid]

Take an investigator type of background and name him Sorlock Holmes.

I'm almost sorry, but I couldn't resist.

[BloodSnake'sCha]

Sorlocks are easy. However, do not expect to use the “coffeelock” idea in AL.

Anyway, there are lots of ways to build a sorlocks.

Suggestions: hexblade warlock for armor and weapon proficiencies as well as hex warrior (won’t be used much) and hexblades curse.

1 start vhuman hexblade warlock and take resilient constitution. 14 dex, 14 con, 16 cha .. use medium armor+shield

2 warlock level 2 - take agonizing blast - can also take devils sight for seeing in complete darkness - in my opinion necessary if you go divine soul sorcerer .. optional if you go shadow sorcerer since they get 120’darkvision as a class feature.

3 sorcerer level 1 .. popular choices are shadow sorcerer which works thematically with hexblade or divine soul which gives you some healing options which can be extremely useful in AL since you never know who will be playing and having at least one character with healing word is very useful.

4+ sorcerer levels


If you want more spellcasting you can go warlock 3 for pact of the time at some point. (This gets you level 1 and 2 rituals which could include find familiar but you’d have to give up devils sight so probably better for the shadow sorcerer option).

Pact of the chain would give you an amazing familiar. I’ve played with a chain pact divine soul sorlock who makes really good use of the familiar.

You want to cap the warlock at three levels max so you don’t lose level 9 spell ability if you play to tier 4.

I checked it in it look like coffeelock is AL legal.

[Orc_Lord]

One particular advantage a lot of people miss with the Shadow Sorcerer is the fact that you can completely remove the need for any Devil's Sight invocation.


The disadvantage of this is that quicken already takes 2 sorcery points as well. Standard coffeelock needs as many sorcery points as possible to quicken Eldritch blasts every round.

Darkness also is akward at times. You might say it gives disadvantage to hit to the PCs but advantage to hit NPCs so it cancels out, but that discounts multiple NPCs that have blindsense/tremorsense. With a 15ft radius you can't avoid it.

Faerie Fire (Fey patron) not only gives you advantage, but your entire team. Granted they can save but it's an AoE so it can affect multiple creatures.

To me that's better.

Also it's actually better to go to level 11 sorcerer first. For my Sorclock I leveled the way you suggested, but at level 5, with Sorcerer 3 you can only quicken once before having to spend spells to get sorcery points to get another quicken. Even at Lock 2/Sorc 5 or whatever you only get 2 rounds.

I feel that Sorc 11 has 5 rounds before they run out of SP which is covering all combats.

Until then Scorching Ray does comparable damage.


I checked it in it look like coffeelock is AL legal.

They are, but coffee locks don't sleep they stay awake to not lose their infinite spells, which means you get exhaustion levels.

[Keravath]

I checked it in it look like coffeelock is AL legal.

RAW they don't appear to be legal so they wouldn't be allowed in AL.

"p164
Pact Magic. If you have both the Spellcasting class feature and the Pact Magic class feature from the warlock class, you can use the spell slots you gain from the Pact Magic feature to cast spells you know or have prepared from classes with the Spellcasting class feature, and you can use the spell slots you gain from the Spellcasting class feature to cast warlock spells you know."

If you have both pact magic and spellcasting you can use the spell slots to cast spells from the other class. Nowhere does it say that you can use the warlock spell slots as part of a sorcerer class feature ... it ONLY says you can use them to cast spells from the other class.

JC as source of the comment.
https://twitter.com/jeremyecrawford/status/1029177242985742337?lang=en

The other approach as another poster suggested is enforcing exhaustion when the character does not take a long rest (even if they do not need to sleep - they do need a "long rest").

[BloodSnake'sCha]

RAW they don't appear to be legal so they wouldn't be allowed in AL.

"p164
Pact Magic. If you have both the Spellcasting class feature and the Pact Magic class feature from the warlock class, you can use the spell slots you gain from the Pact Magic feature to cast spells you know or have prepared from classes with the Spellcasting class feature, and you can use the spell slots you gain from the Spellcasting class feature to cast warlock spells you know."

If you have both pact magic and spellcasting you can use the spell slots to cast spells from the other class. Nowhere does it say that you can use the warlock spell slots as part of a sorcerer class feature ... it ONLY says you can use them to cast spells from the other class.

JC as source of the comment.
https://twitter.com/jeremyecrawford/status/1029177242985742337?lang=en

The other approach as another poster suggested is enforcing exhaustion when the character does not take a long rest (even if they do not need to sleep - they do need a "long rest").

RAW there is no limition on the kind of slots and the warlock pact casting gives you spell slots.



Flexible Casting
You can use your sorcery points to gain additional spell slots, or sacrifice spell slots to gain additional sorcery points. You learn other ways to use your sorcery points as you reach higher levels.

Creating Spell Slots. You can transform unexpended sorcery points into one spell slot as a bonus action on your turn. The Creating Spell Slots table shows the cost of creating a spell slot of a given level. You can create spell slots no higher in level than 5th.

Any spell slot you create with this feature vanishes when you finish a long rest.

If it isn't written in the rules it is no RAW.

About RAI, I don't agree. You do as you like in your table, AL have rules that say you can't do as you like in your table so you need to follow RAW.

About the rest with the tomb invocation, I will edit it as I am out of phone battery.

Edit:
You can use spells at higher level to lose the exhaustion, even if it rest every day it is useful.

[Willie the Duck]

Oh good, someone here to tell us what RAW really means. And predicting the actual subject of the thread drowned out in 3... 2...

OP-pick what you want. I would tend to want to go 3 levels in warlock to pick up the chain familiar or tome cantrips or the like (or I guess 2h hexbladelock weapon use, but I agree with others that you should be standing back and blasting), but that would hurt your progression by a level so I understand if people disagree. Any type of sorcerer probably will be fine (although dragon getting +cha to cantrips is a pretty big redundant ability the undoubtedly paid for with lack of other awesomeness, so that would be a dis-synergy), and will go a long way to shaping how your character plays out.

From my perspective, the thing you have to decide is whether you are playing a machine gun (spell+quickened EB) first and otherwise caster second, or letting your EB just be your main combat contribution such that you can keep your sorcerer spells in reserve to accomplish other things. That will shape your spell selection and usage.

[Naanomi]

Coffeelock doesn’t work in AL because AL ‘assumes/forces’ rests between sessions... it doesn’t provide a mechanism to avoid long rests like non-AL play might allow

[Keravath]

Coffeelock doesn’t work in AL because AL ‘assumes/forces’ rests between sessions... it doesn’t provide a mechanism to avoid long rests like non-AL play might allow

I investigated this one and as far as I can tell this is not the case. None of the AL documentation actually goes into what happens between adventures. I too initially thought that AL 'assumes/forces' rests between adventures (not necessarily sessions since you can play hardcovers and in that case resources carry over from one session to the next). All AL appears to indicate is that you start the adventure with your full set of resources (and does not indicate how these were obtained).

[Willie the Duck]

That sounds fairly close to a distinction without a difference. Either way, you're starting the adventures with a full set of resources (not some other set of circumstances, such as being many days since your last full rest, but also with a truckload of extra spell slots banked up).

I think we need to clarify what the OP means by 'I am playing DnD Adventure League.' I mean, if they are playing with one DM who simply stated that they want AL-legal characters, then there's still one DM's ruling about what is allowed/going to happen going on. OTOH, if they mean they want to make an AL-legal character to take part in AL-sessions down at their FLGS, than they have to get this build past any-given-DM's understanding of what is AL-legal (in which case I do not like their odds).

[Bloodcloud]

I sure know my warlock player has been having a blast with repelling blast. Mind you, they've been fighting in mountainous terrain with lots of cliffside. Shadow sorc is good because of aforementionned free darkvision, for the lock you really have a all the choices, depending on your party. Tomelock can get you rituals, chainlock is great, infernal lock can bolster your survivability, goolock is weird, celestial gets you some healing...