Thinking about a melee-focused Sorlock build

[ButzSanchez]

Hey all, longtime lurker, first time poster. I've gotten a lot of answers from these forums since I started playing 5E and decided it would be beneficial to join in and add to the conversation.

What I'm working on now is a build for a melee-focused Sorlock, and the big consideration I'm wrestling with now is what weapon to pick. Here's some details for stuff I've checked out myself.

First, I'm sticking to a dual class build. The DM I play with isn't fond of multiclassing beyond that. She's tolerant of the first multiclass without much explanation, but starts wanting story cues for anything more, which I feel is reasonable.

This will follow with the Hexblade warlock, pact of the blade boon (because of course, sorry to all the DM's shaking their fists at me right now) and Divine Soul sorcerer (for access to the cleric spell list). If you think something might work better, or provide a more interesting concept, lemme know. Also, race will be half elf with the elven accuracy feat, and with the way I'm building him he'll take at least 5 warlock levels to get thirsting blade so he can attack twice with the pact weapon, and likely trade an invocation for eldritch smite at the same time for fat nova damage. This build starts around level 7, but also considers the next few levels of advancement.

The idea for the build is to get as many advantage rolls as possible for as many crits as possible while having access to spells. I'm a sucker for melee-caster hybrids. The downside I'm seeing thus far is the heavy focus in combat specialty also means a lack of versatility in roleplaying and utility abilities/spells, and if your DM is picky about how you cast spells, you end up needing another feat to take Warcaster (a three feat build reduces overall stats, so you're pretty much stuck with what you got at the start).

So the question becomes what weapon should my guy be using? I've narrowed my choices down to three, each with their complementary feat for the weapon "style"; Greatsword (GWM), dual wielding (dual wielder), and halberd/glaive (polearm master). I've also crunched some averages for damage between the styles. All my hypotheticals assume I've done something to attain advantage for every attack in a round, and that I have thirsting blade and can attack twice with the attack action.

First, odds to hit are tied more to the number of attacks, whether I've used Hexblade's curse, and if I can attain advantage. With a plain ol' two attacks, both having advantage and triggering elven accuracy, there's a 26% chance to crit on an attack. With Hexblade's curse, that gets turned to a 46% chance of crit thanks to the increased crit range. If for any reason I get a third attack (haste or use of bonus action), a normal round of attacks has a 37% chance to crit on one of them and a massive 60% to crit with the curse. If both haste and the bonus action get used, 4 normal attacks have a 54% chance to crit on one and with the curse, a ridiculous 71% for one to crit.

So, with the build's intention to be "get as many crits as possible", weapon choice matters. And yeah, I know you can just use eldritch blast and forego all of this extra stuff, but I like getting up in a baddie's face.

With the greatsword style, the build does 2d6+charisma bonus (lets assume 4 for the rest of this exercise) per attack. Getting a crit or downing an enemy triggers the bonus action attack, and if going up against enemies that don't have great AC, elven accuracy seriously blunts the downside of taking a -5 to hit for the extra 10 damage (which can be triggered per attack), potentially letting you slice your way through minions easily. Additionally, crits have a potential to be hugely damaging, since that can add up to at least 8d6+12 full round damage (2d6 for non crit attack, 4d6 for the crit, and 2d6 for the bonus). The downside is without using some kind of outside ability or GWM, your bonus action may not end up always getting used, lowering the amount of opportunities to crit.

With dual wielding, the Dual Wielder feat allows you to use any one handed weapons instead of just light ones, so lets just go with the standard longswords as an example. That's 1d8 per attack, though only the pact weapon gets the attack bonus (assuming main hand). The three guaranteed attacks of a dual wielding style come out to 3d8+8 (avg 20), which averages the same as the greatsword's usual two attacks at 4d6+8. While it won't deal as much damage as the greatsword can with a crit, simply by nature of always being able to use that bonus action to attack it will get it's crits more often. That, and DW gives an additional +1 AC, which increases survivability.

Lastly, with a Halberd style, the build would use the feat Polearm master. Like DW style, you gain the ability to use a bonus attack, though this is just a d4. Unfortunately, you need to take a feat to use this extra attack in the first place, unlike normal dual wielding. Despite not getting the AC boost that DW gives, Halberd style has some strong advantages. Being able to attack at range means being able to slip out of most enemies' grasp without provoking opportunity attacks. Also, because both attacks use the pact weapon you get to add the attack bonus to the damage of each hit, using 2d10+8 and 1d4+4 for damage, actually surpassing the average damage of the DW style. After crunching some averages, I also discovered its average damage is much more consistent than the other two styles. Also, with metamagic there exists the potential of quickening eldritch blast to use instead of the other side of the weapon, increasing the number of hit rolls made per round. You CAN technically do this with the other weapons (assuming the DM doesn't call you out for not having a hand available, or lets you shoulder your two handed weapon), but you'll take disadvantage (canceling even the triple advantage of elven accuracy) unless you started the spell further than 5 ft away from your target. With your handy dandy reach weapon, it'll always be an option for you if you wanna pile on the damage. Lastly, any enemy that enters your enhanced reach gets a nice smack, increasing overall damage per round further.

So which of these sounds like the better option? I'm also open to other suggestions regarding weapons, classes, or feats taken. Personally I'm leaning toward the halberd, though the fat crits from the greatsword sound cool.

Edit: As a quick aside, I realized an easy fix for a lot of this is to use the expanded spell list for the divine soul sorcerer and just take spiritual weapon to always get that bonus action anyway. However, another player in my party is playing a cleric with that spell and he uses it all the time, and I don't like to step on my teammate's toes and ape their shtick if I can avoid it. Maybe in the future when he uses it less I'll grab it, but for now I'm considering things along these lines.

[Griswold]

I'd go with a two-handed weapon like you say, since it makes spellcasting easier (especially if you can get your hands on a Ruby of the War Mage).

Personally, I'd go with a greatsword, because it involves fewer feats to be effective. Polearm Master feat won't combine well with Hexblade Warlock, since your curse and the hex spell are already competing for your bonus action. If you want a bonus action attack, just quicken booming blade. If you go that route, halberd is also out, because you'd need Spell Sniper to use it at range.

[ButzSanchez]

Personally, I'd go with a greatsword, because it involves fewer feats to be effective. Polearm Master feat won't combine well with Hexblade Warlock, since your curse and the hex spell are already competing for your bonus action. If you want a bonus action attack, just quicken booming blade. If you go that route, halberd is also out, because you'd need Spell Sniper to use it at range.

Yeah, I considered both those things as well. The only issue I have with using quicken for booming blade is the limited number of times I can do it with sorcery point. I know I can coffeelock to mitigate that issue, but I don't want to abuse the Sorlock combos so much that I irritate my DM and other players (i.e. - casting darkness on my weapon and making combat fun for me and infuriating for everyone else).

I also considered the action economy of the hexblade's curse, hex, and other spells I could use with bonus actions to hit my opponent. I'm looking ahead to things like Bestow Curse and Contagion and thinking about how quickening them to prep for the next round of attacks would eat my bonus action beforehand. But again, I get that nagging feeling in the back of my head that Hexblade's curse can only be used once per short rest, and again, worried about not being able to take a short rest all the time.

Guess it ties back to another major weakness of the build; set up. It takes turns and resources to bestow advantage and debuff the enemy, and that takes time.

[Damon_Tor]

It seems odd to me you'd want to use the attack action at all on a sorlock. Booming blade can be twinned and quickened, dealing much more damage. And free of the need for part of the blade and it's invocations, use shadow blade. You say you want advantage all the time? Shadow blade can deliver that.

[ButzSanchez]

It seems odd to me you'd want to use the attack action at all on a sorlock. Booming blade can be twinned and quickened, dealing much more damage. And free of the need for part of the blade and it's invocations, use shadow blade. You say you want advantage all the time? Shadow blade can deliver that.

Yeah, I know using sorcery points can effectively get you that double attack and bonus attack, and do bonus damage on top of that, but they're a finite resource per combat. Once you run out, you're down to one attack per round, and that's if you didn't use them on other spells.

That said, holy moly, didn't even think about Shadow Blade before now, thank you for pointing that out. This opens up options like stopping at a lower warlock level or grabbing pact of the blade anyway and going with the dual wielding style. Or maybe pact of the chain and using a psuedodragon's blindsight in darkness. My only concern with the spell is, again, resources. Even with regenerating warlock slots it's still a 2nd level spell that gets eaten every combat just for the weapon. Still, something new for me to chew on.

[Corran]

If you are interested in damage, your best bet is to take the feats PAM, GWM and elven accuracy (since you will be a halfelf) in that order (and then take another charisma bump to max it). Here is the thing though. To make good use of GWM and EA, you need a reliable source of advantage, otherwise you don't want to take these feats. And another thing. Hexblades are squishy (especially if you don't have a shield), so you could profit from some defensive buff at the same time. The way to go around this is by taking either darkness & devil's sight or shadow of moil & darkvision/devil's sight. These buffs are mandatory if you want to use GWM, and they are pretty good defensively, perhaps mandatory if you are not using a shield. Darkness lasts longer but shadow moil is better and does not necessarily require an invocation.
ps: Dakness/shadow of moil doesn't work well just with GWM and elven accuracy. They also work well with PAM. Being unseen means that you do not provoke OA's, and that means you can move around freely, and that could certainly mean more reaction attacks thanks to PAM.



Relying on these spells to this extent has some issues that you need to solve.

Firstly, they are hard on your spell slots, so at the very least forget about smiting until at least level 11 (seriously though, it will usually be much better to spend the slot on AoA instead of waiting for a crit smite; you could pick branding/banishing smite before, for cases where you'd know that using AoA would not be a good idea and when you happen to have slots available to do so of course), though that's the least of your problems. The real problem is that you wont be able to use no-concentration spells often (spells like AoA, counterspell, dispel magic, synaptic static, etc), and that hurts your overall efficiency. Essentially you trade versatility for focusing on melee damage, but since I guess that's the intent here, I'll just move on.

Secondly, you need good concentration. Up to two of your ASI's (GWM, elven accuracy) rely on having advantage *and PAM also profits from constant repositioning), and you rely on disadvantage mostly for your defense too. And you don't get many slots, and your defense without disadvantage on incoming attacks is weak. Combine everything together, and you can see that losing concentration hurts too much, and it is not really an option. The problem is, that to boost concentration you need to spend feats on it, and this is already a very feat dependent build. And even if you get one of con save proficiency or warcaster, your concentration checks wont be great; not a great as they should be when we depend so much on the concentration spell that we are using. So even if you get one of warcaster or con save prof, you will still need to do some hit & running to avoid the bulk of the enemy attacks (hopefully you have a melee ally who can deal with those; besides, hit and run wont be bad if that means that you can get some PAM reaction attacks, just hope the DM sends something after you but has the main enemy force concentrate on another melee pc). There are two ways to go about picking one concentration boost. Start as sorcerer (or fighter) for con save proficiency (and put a 16 in con), or start as a variant human warlock and pick resilient con (or warcaster; warcaster is better early, but con save proficiency is much bigger than BB OA's, especially since you can already have strong OA's and good ways to use your reaction -PAM). In the first case, you trade wisdom save proficiency with con save proficiency. In the second case, you trade the triple advantage (but not the cha boost) and one invocation (which will have to go to devil's sight) for con save proficiency. IMO going with vhuman and resilient con is better, because it speeds up a build for which it would already take too long to bring all the pieces together otherwise, and because dumping our wisdom saves is pretty bad on a melee dpr character. Dumping wisdom saves leaves you completely vulnerable to a number of effects that can shut you down completely. If you want to risk it, shadow moil (because unseen) and a good initiative roll can protect you from some of these effects, but you are still open to AoE's and to effects that key off you seeing (or hearing) the enemy (most classic example, fear effects, which would cancel your triple advantage and would not even allow you to go into melee reach).

Last but not least, relying on self buffing as a dpr, means that you probably want to find a way to boost your action economy somewhat. Two ways to do that. Action surge (fighter 2) and quickened spell (sorcerer 3). Action surge is better, hands down. I allows you to also use curse during the same round you buff and make your first attack. It requires less investment (only 2 levels instead of 3), and eventually it combines with spellcasting which creates for some good opportunities (scatter and synaptic static/cone of cold/forcage or forcage -solid box version- and sickening radiance and perhaps better gimmicks of which I am not aware). Plus a fs and second wind are not bad. Sorcerer also gives you stuff other than quickened (access to low level slots with which you can use shield and absorb elements; grab absorb elements if you take sorc levels; 2 slots at 1st level, another 2 slots at 2nd level, and 3 quicken per day assuming you turn your 2nd level slots into sp; another metamagic, perhaps subtle combine with some 2nd level sorc utility sorc spells like suggestion and detect thoughts). Sorcerer can get you nice things too. But strictly from an action economy perspective, action surge is better and comes online sooner (the latter is important for this build). Personally, I would go with warlock 17/fighter 2/sorcerer 1 for this build, but if I had to pick one of them, eh, I dunno. So if you are set on sorcerer, go for it, but keep in mind that quickened will not help as much as action surge would. One last thing. If you go with sorc levels, hands down the best archtype for multiclassing into, at least imo, is divine soul. Favored of the gods is a godsend for your build (because you really don't want to lose concentration and because your saves could also need some help; be careful though, FotG is not good enough on its own to cancel the need of boosting concentration or for justifying dumping your wisdom saves, at least imo). And it can also get you command, which plays very nicely with your 5th level slots (great spell for denying dangerous enemies their action).

[Trustypeaches]

The majority of your damage isn’t going to come from your weapon itself, but from cantrips and smites.

So I’d just go Sword and Board.

[ButzSanchez]

Welp, after some thinking I came to some conclusions.

First off, if I want a build that gets as many crits as possible with as many rolls as possible, starting out with a sorlock is just poorly conceived. There's just too much extra work to do, I might as well make a half elf fighter to start with.

Unfortunately, the game has already started and he's a sorlock now, so I have to make do with what I got. Still want to make him melee focused, so I've adapted the build now. I considered changing him to shadow sorcerer, but stuck with divine soul for the cleric spell list's debuffing spells. Again, not sure I'm going to get the opportunity to triple class him to fighter for that 2 dip, so I'm not really considering that.

As others here pointed out, his bonus action is going to be used for quickening spells, curses, and hexes, so he won't have access to those for the first few rounds of combat. Couple that with the fact that most encounters don't last more than 5 rounds, and it doesn't make a ton of sense to try to occupy his bonus actions with attacks.

I figured out how my character would operate in combat too. Given that the best way to bestow advantage while giving an enemy disadvantage is to use either greater invisibility or the devil sight/darkness combo, it would make more sense for him to work at isolating a singular enemy hanging out in the backline rather than potentially disrupting allies in the front. Bestow advantage, hit the enemy with debuffs, cut them down as quickly as possible then move on to the next guy. Cleric spells like command and blindness/deafness also offer ways to inflict the dual advantage/disadvantage without disrupting my allies, and using spells like Hex beforehand can inflict disadvantage on the saves for them (though this takes a round of setup first). What's more, those two spells in particular don't require concentration. Once Haste is an option through sorcerer, I'd stack on extra AC, an extra action for attacking and disengaging, and I could slap blindness or prone-ness on a single target without expending the concentration needed for it.

I also realized I like the versatility of being able to have multiple attacks if I like, or being able to use a ranged weapon, and that's when I read up more on pact weapons and GWM. Turns out, you can change what kind of weapon your pact weapon is with an action, and GWM applies itself to a crit from ANY melee weapon, not just two handed ones. So, if I did decide I wanted to use my bonus action for attacks every round, I could switch it to a light one handed weapon and just carry an extra short sword. If I felt like I needed the extra AC, I could just carry a shield and turn it into a longsword. If I just wanna dish out damage, change it to a greatsword. And if I want to attack without risking an opportunity attack, I can change it to a halberd. GWM applies itself to all of them and there's nothing to stop me from just carrying the extra equipment (especially since my DM doesn't bother enforcing carry capacity).

I feel like I'd still get thirsting blade and trade another invocation for eldritch smite at warlock lv. 5, but beyond that wouldn't put anymore into warlock and instead focus the rest on sorcerer, maybe putting 3 more into warlock at a later time if I felt I really needed the stat boost, though getting wings from divine soul sorcerer also sounds cool. Still, I try not to think about builds that far ahead since games rarely last that long.

[Lilobot]

I have personally played a melee sorlock in a game and it was by far my favorite and the most powerful character I’ve ever played. How I build mine was I took 1 level of Hexblade (maybe a 2nd later) and the rest divine soul. I used a flail to knock enemies into a high-level cloud of daggers Spell using booming blade, triggering 8d4 damage for a 4th level slot, and again at the beginning of their turn. When the enemy moved out of the cloud, they also took the booming blade damage. Metamagic helped eliminate setup because i could just do it as a bonus action.

The dm didn’t like when I killed his evil Wizard boss in 1 round.

[Skrum]

I'll note that Shadow Blade does NOT work with hexblade (i.e., you'll be stuck using your Str or Dex for attacking, not Cha). The shadow blade is a temporary weapon and you can't "attune" to it to use Cha - or thirsting blade for that matter. Despite its superficial benefits, Shadow Blade is extremely finicky to use and if you want to make primary use of it, you're better off with bladesinger.

I would recommend taking your first level as sorcerer. You lose 2 hit points but gain Con proficiency, which is immensely helpful as a melee character that'll want to maintain concentration on spells. It won't mess with your armor proficiency either since hexblade still grants medium. Sorc 1 warlock 5 sorc X would be the path (I agree with you that thirsting blade is really good and worthwhile for a meleelock).

I would *highly* recommend sword and board. If you're planning on spending your concentration on combat spells like hex, spirit shroud, etc., and also have smite, there's no reason to 1) spend an additional feat, or 2) give up the defense of a shield. You're only going to have medium armor, and until you build up several sorcerer levels (well into t2), you're going to have extremely limited spell slots to defend yourself with.

War Caster. I have such a love/hate relationship with this feat. But you're gonna want it, especially if you want to use spirit guardians or haste (and, I can't possibly see why you wouldn't want to use those spells). The question is whether you take it as your first feat. Personally, I would. Yes it puts your primary stat slightly behind, and yes it delays picking up the crit-fish portion of the build. BUT - losing concentration on a spell as a warlock sucks. And you're gonna want to be able to cast shield. Even though it stinks to push off EA, I really think war caster is going to make this build operate much more smoothly, and actually feel like a proper melee gish.

[CTurbo]

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