Warlock shenanigans

[Linearblade]

is at will bestow curse not the absolute wrecking ball I think it is?

Even without taking the “devise your own curse” part, and ignoring dragon magazine suggestions, just going by phb and bovd, your power is nuts.

This leads to whole chains of save or be totally wrecked curses.

Wither arms, “struck deaf and blind”, etc.

This is necromancy, and not mind affecting, meaning most of it is equally effective on undead.

Allowing for “devise your own curses” amounts to at the very least total npc dominance, well into levels 10-12.

And not just in combat, but for nearly all social encounters as well.

Things like -4 saves/skills/checks and -6 stats penalty (not damage), -8 particular skill checks coupled with basic least invocations lead to diplomancy nightmares against boss npcs.

Or against the super brawler monster, rapid nerf into oblivion, all because most of the nerfs are “penalties” and not ability damage.

Save dc / resistance can be supremely optimized with usual feat optimization, and it’s at will.

Or did I miss something?

[Troacctid]

It's pretty solid, but the opportunity cost of a lesser invocation coupled with the fact that Charisma isn't necessarily going to be your highest stat makes it far from a universal choice. There are a lot of good lesser invocations competing with it.

[Linearblade]

It's pretty solid, but the opportunity cost of a lesser invocation coupled with the fact that Charisma isn't necessarily going to be your highest stat makes it far from a universal choice. There are a lot of good lesser invocations competing with it.

Yes, but if if is your high stat, and you are using say force of personality feat and the dark ones old luck feat, it synergies pretty darn well.

It definitely bot the best choice with EB, but for umd / diplo abuse monkey, this fits in quite well until the suggestion at will greater spell comes in, which is equally abusive in other ways.

Pretty solid core concept that seems very overlooked

[Fizban]

Touch range, save and SR negate. Out of combat, well if NPCs just let you walk up to them, make a (literally) arcane gesture, and touch them, and then after rolling a save against an obviously hostile force you're still allowed to negotiate, well you could have just put a weapon in their face too. And no, you don't get to do that as the "surprise round," because that's not how initiative works- anyone that can see you gets to roll initiative as soon as you have hostile intent, even if they "don't expect" it (initiative is rolled when someone hostile sees you, thus as soon as you decide to curse them, they get to roll initiative).

Undead have high will saves, lots of hit dice, and do bad things at touch range. Low will-save brutes are also not something you should stand next to. Basically anything worth cursing is not something you want to be in melee range of.

[Troacctid]

Touch range, save and SR negate. Out of combat, well if NPCs just let you walk up to them, make a (literally) arcane gesture, and touch them, and then after rolling a save against an obviously hostile force you're still allowed to negotiate, well you could have just put a weapon in their face too. And no, you don't get to do that as the "surprise round," because that's not how initiative works- anyone that can see you gets to roll initiative as soon as you have hostile intent, even if they "don't expect" it (initiative is rolled when someone hostile sees you, thus as soon as you decide to curse them, they get to roll initiative).
Well, you can cast it beforehand and hold the charge pretty much indefinitely, but that may or may not create a conspicuous glowy purple aura around your hand, so YMMV.

[skunk3]

My experience with it (running an epic level Warlock now) is that it's very underwhelming because the majority of the time you'd want to use it, there's more effective options available to you. Also, it is a 4th level invocation so the save DC won't be that great unless you seriously pump CHA. (Which you should as a Warlock anyway IMO!) The possibilities of what one CAN do with it are cool to think about but I think you'll find that in practice it's gonna be way more effective to use crowd control invocations or just blast / glaive / claw them to death. Every time I've tried using Curse of Despair in the campaign I'm in right now, it has failed because the enemy made their save.

[Linearblade]

Touch range, save and SR negate. Out of combat, well if NPCs just let you walk up to them, make a (literally) arcane gesture, and touch them, and then after rolling a save against an obviously hostile force you're still allowed to negotiate, well you could have just put a weapon in their face too. And no, you don't get to do that as the "surprise round," because that's not how initiative works- anyone that can see you gets to roll initiative as soon as you have hostile intent, even if they "don't expect" it (initiative is rolled when someone hostile sees you, thus as soon as you decide to curse them, they get to roll initiative).

Undead have high will saves, lots of hit dice, and do bad things at touch range. Low will-save brutes are also not something you should stand next to. Basically anything worth cursing is not something you want to be in melee range of.

Seems like numerous ways around this.
Ros 133 conceal with slight of hand
Cast and hold the charge,
First curse = you never any curse cast on you or being cast on (it’s 5am, groggy, can’t word Smith this out)

Re undead;
Yes, it is a will save, however it DOES work. It’s sub optimal, and you might try other ways around it. But if you have a hard target, and you get the first one to stick, it’s easy enough to stack them up pretty fast.

Also keep in mind, this is primarily a problem for undead with accompanying high wisdom scores and gear. And there’s just not a lot of undead in that range with sufficient scores. (Ie, it’s a lesser invocation , typically be less useful at higher levels)

As for Sr, it’s the same problem that any caster has, although there are curses to lower future caster checks against this.

[Linearblade]

My experience with it (running an epic level Warlock now) is that it's very underwhelming because the majority of the time you'd want to use it, there's more effective options available to you. Also, it is a 4th level invocation so the save DC won't be that great unless you seriously pump CHA. (Which you should as a Warlock anyway IMO!) The possibilities of what one CAN do with it are cool to think about but I think you'll find that in practice it's gonna be way more effective to use crowd control invocations or just blast / glaive / claw them to death. Every time I've tried using Curse of Despair in the campaign I'm in right now, it has failed because the enemy made their save.

We’ve run epic warlocks before (and ironically the center of the campaign was a city of warlocks locked In time)

Some things we experienced :

Yes, warlocks pale significantly when the psion quicken/ split rays/that other mini mind spell crystal shards

But we’ve also house ruled greater curse in for a dark, and also allowed higher invocation slots to be used for “heightened” versions of lesser slots. Hours rule, but again seems reasonable.

Epic warlocks schtick for us always seems to be the infinite umd toolbox plus haversack staff caddy of casting whatever you want, which has been very fun.

But yea, sticking to raw, some things don’t quite hold up

In general, our groups have more or less clipped any spells that deliberately avoid the spell resistance mini game (orbs, crystal shards etc), and additionally avoid tier1/2 abuse

Warlocks are MUCH better when the abuse machine is not on.

Currently I’m playing the warlock (seems we’ve always had one in our games for 15 years or so now since they’ve been released) and I’ve rarely used Eldritch blast , and pumping charisma is the way to go.

Ability focus is the bomb. Cloaks of charisma drop like candy as well in most official adventures.

It could be our groups tho. We deliberately avoid excessive char ops abuse, because it puts more time constraints on the DM to handle it, and turns games into slow moving chess matches.