How did the Warlock class develop?

[BeefGood]

I'm looking carefully at the warlock for the first time and it seems like a Frankenstein's monster to me. A bunch of disparate pieces bolted together. There are...
*two different conceptions of spells, one for 1st-5th level spells and another for 6th & up.
*pact boons
*eldritch invocations
*and of course the patron.
These things don't seem strongly related to me. For example, I can't see an argument that, "because Warlocks get their power from a patron, they should have eldritch invocations." It's hard to imagine a person sitting down one day and designing this class from first principles. I'm curious--how did the Warlock class develop? Maybe someone with knowledge of earlier editions could shed light on this.
Or, if you think that the various parts do make up a unified, thematic whole, I'd be interested in hearing that perspective too.
Thanks in advance for your thoughts.

[Yakk]

3e had the concept of a warlock using at-will magic and invocations.

4e had per-encounter spells for many arcane classes. This was new.

5e gave the warlock access to per-encounter spell slots and at-will invocations in a merger between the at-will magic of 3e and the idea of per-encounter spells of 4e and using unified spells with other classes of 3e.

---

Then, 5e decided that level 6-9 spells are restricted. In 3e, high level casters got a whole pile of level 6 7 8 and eventually multiple level 9 slots. This was one of the causes of 3e quadratic wizard divergence at high level.

While you get 2 slots for level 1-5 spells real quick, you get 1 slot for level 6-9, and only at high level do most casters finally get a 2nd 6th and 7th level slot.

Warlocks have the simplifying rule that their spell slots are always highest level, but that doesn't work if you give them 9th level slots; nobody is supposed to have 4 9th level slots. So either they stop getting more slots, or you split off 6-9 level slots somehow.

So they get their 6-9 level slots as a kind of once/day spell like ability. This is a bit weaker than the other casters, but they can (in theory) make up for it with other level 11+ features.

---

The dual subclassing is strange, and I don't have an idea how that developed.

[Man_Over_Game]

The dual subclassing is strange, and I don't have an idea how that developed.

If I had to wager a guess, it probably started as "Rapid-Fire Mage isn't really a theme", so they added a bunch of versatile features to make it your own. They decided that they wanted the mechanical theme of a mage that relied on always-ready powers, they just didn't know how to fill in the rest of the spots to make the theme match the mechanics. So they added a whole bunch of options for the player to pick from so that they can decide for themselves what the "Warlock" meant to them.

In a way, the Warlock was the prototype for the Mystic UA. The Mystic failed in this regard because players had their own definitions as to what "Psionics" were and how they differed from "Magic", and the Warlock didn't have the same problem, not to mention a few glaring balancing problems for the Mystic.

Personally, though, it feels kinda stupid in hindsight. Sorcerer has a much more ambiguous theme than Warlock, and the Sorcerer's "Origin" factor would have definitely utilized the Dual-classing element of Warlocks better than the Warlock would, while Warlock's fluid choices of "Who's your favorite badguy" seems like it'd be a lot more rigid than the Sorcerer's "I have no idea why or how I'm magical" concept. They literally just had to make the Warlock a more difficult Wizard (more curses, self-affliction effects, more summoning, more binding, etc) and it would have worked for everyone. Or they could have used the same versatile chassis for the classes that don't really have their own themes, like Fighters.

[Snails]

I see Warlock as trying to fulfill the origin intentions of the 3e Sorceror class, as a spellcasting class that would be easier to play via a main schtick of spamming lower level magic. That is the main point of 3e metamagic. The 3e Sorceror ended up being not very successful at this role in terms of player experience, because, as a practical matter, the class was tied up with fussy metamagic rules and spell selection that could be nearly as arduous as a wizard.

Of course, a spellcaster that did nothing more than "archery with magic" would be nearly pointless, so this class has to have a small number of spells to choose from for special occasions. But the idea here is to keep this limited, both to make the class both easier to play and to maintain a degree of inter-class balance. Obviously a class that has "overpowered" cantrips cannot be as exactly as good in spellcasting as the usual dedicated spellcaster classes.

Thus a mechanical Frankenstein's monster was born.

[Joe the Rat]

Lessee...

At wills and Invocations are from its 3rd ed origins. Invocations were all they did, besides the eldritch blast - and most were at will magic.
Patrons were core to 4th. IIRC, they started popping up at the end of 3rd. This is where the short rest slots come in.
I suspect that the Binder and Hexblade also fed into the Warlock concept, the latter possibly being behind the Blade Pact. That or someone was a big Sanderson fan.

The Mystic Arcanum is really a scaling patch: slot size stops at 5, but they wanted it to parallel full casters with the 9 spell-level progression. I suspect it was this or four Mystic Arcanum invocations...

Boon and Patron are really one piece - this is the Archetype. The specific combination of boons that went to each patron would be worth a talk-through.

the Pacts are an odd duck - they are kind of like fighting styles for the martials, albeit with a much larger relative impact on function. It wouldn't be hard to turn this Pacts into another Invocation - having invocations dependent on other invocations instead of pacts is a different direction, and would let you double up or avoid the three if you so chose, but invocation-switching could create a dead invocation situation. Hrm.

[jmartkdr]

Others have covered the spellcasting, so I'll chime in on the Pact Boons:

I think they were originally intended to be a secondary thing - a big invocation, so to speak, or similar to a fighting style in that it defined your look without really changing your playstyle. An if the Pact Boons were chain, Tome, and Talisman that would be obvious.

But Pact Blades are something else. This is because of another 3e class they didn't want to scrap although it didn't warrant a base class to itself: the Hexblade. In 3e they were an arcane half-caster who would curse enemies to weaken them and then use weapons to attack. It got a decent amount of traction, if not as much as the warlock (which took off like a rocket.) I can't find the term Pact Blade in 3e, but in 4e, they were a common magic item that worked like a wand you could also stab people with, and in the Essentials line they merged hexblades into warlocks by letting warlocks chose to make a pact blade instead of shooting lasers.

So having 5e warlocks without pact blades wasn't a thing they wanted, and not having anything like a hexblade wasn't a thing they wanted, so they let 5e warlocks create a pact blade and figured that would cover hexblades as well.

It didn't because they massively overvalue the ability to attack in melee as well as cast spells, but that's a whole other thread.

[follacchioso]

I remember some articles in old Dragon magazines for 3e, describing the concept of wizards making pacts with powerful entities in exchange for powerful spells and abilities.

Sacrifice your left eye in exchange for an extra high level spell slot. Give up a bit of your sanity for a few extra damage dice to your spells. Betray your twin brother and sell his soul, so you can access lichdoom.

This has always been a theme in fantasy games - I guess they just wanted to formalize it in a playable form.

[MeeposFire]

The influence of the 3e and 4e warlock on the 5e warlock is obvious what is less obvious were the other classes that influences the 4e warlock and then of course the 5e warlock which are the 3e binder and to a lesser extent the 3e hexblade.

The pacts for the 4e and later 5e warlock were a concept taken broadly from the 3e binder which was an interesting class that was also dripping with flavor (among the most in 3e and you can see how parts of that was later given to the 5e warlock) and also had many at will and pseudo encounter abilities (which in 5e eventually became cantrips and short rest abilities). A binder would make pacts with various entities (called vestiges) to gain different abilities and would make a new set of pacts every day. The powers given could be passive (like immunities), at will (like blasting enemies with lightning), usable once every 5 rounds which is essentially a 1-2 use per encounter ability (something like breathing fire), or even daily uses (some random spell effects). The idea of making pacts as we know it now was taken mostly from the binder and attached to the warlock class in 4e (3e warlocks were not always created the same way current warlocks are for instance it is possible and specifically mentioned as an example that your character did not make a pact with a fiend but one of your ancestors did and your bloodline gives you your warlock abilities. In 4e and 5e your bloodline giving you power would be even more strongly associated with the sorcerer but in 3e the bigger defining difference was that sorcerers used spells and warlocks used the not spells called invocations). They noticed that these two popular new classes had some similar flavor ideas to them and essentially combined them into one class in 4e which became even more clear when they later added the vestige patron to the warlock and later created a controller warlock type actually called the binder.

The hexblade also influenced the warlock though that came later. The 3e hexblade was a class that combined a sort of dark arcane paladin with an inverse barbarian rage where instead of being a buff to the character it gave you a similar but inverted debuff to an enemy in the form of the curse. The hexblade did not receive a lot of attention in 3e but it did come back in 4e as a warlock type. The designers realized that throwing around curses sounded like a warlock bit of flavor and creating a weapon based warlock would be a new niche so they took the name and the curse sounding abilities and created the weapon using hexblade warlock. Obviously this eventually turned into the blade pact in 5e and even more obviously was the naming and in many ways ability inspiration of the hexblade archetype.

Now seeing these things some of the decisions on abilities start to make some sense at least from a certain point of view.

Pact boons are most directly from the 4e warlock in terms of how they kind of work but at the same time that ability came from the 3e binder which got bolted on to the 4e warlock.

Invocations the term comes from the original 3e warlock and has been in use with the class even in 4e though now they are no longer essentially the spells of the class but are now instead ways to choose your own abilities. That aspect also has some commonality with how some of the binder worked (though the binder could change these additional abilities each day when they redid their pacts but since 4e and 5e warlocks do not change their pacts every day I guess this concept went away). They also could be seen as how to do the various things feats would give you in 4e with the warlock but would not work in 5e because feats are much more scarse in 5e if you even have them at all.

The patron is directly from the 4e warlock more than anything (you may know and have a patron in 3e but you also may not as evidenced by those who become warlocks merely from a bloodline that had an ancestor that made a pact) but even the 4e type is a modified idea from the 3e binder.


The warlock in 5e is an interesting amalgamation of several different unrelated but similar in concept and theme classes from 3e that were made into one concept in 4e and was refined some more in 5e. Its bunch of building tools mark it as one of the more interesting classes mechanically and it has some great flavor (both of these again really point back to that 3e binder which has similar ideas though done differently).

[Abracadangit]

I'm not nearly as well-versed in the evolution of their abilities through editions, but I wholly agree with what other people here have already pointed out, that their mechanics have always made way more sense for Sorcerers, theming-wise.

Sorcerers are effectively quick-charging batteries of living arcane power (spells come back on short rests), they can manifest that power as shotgun blasts of raw arcane energy (Eldritch Blast - even goes in line with the sorcerer's theming towards more straightforward evocation and damage spells), their bloodlines and gifts give them X-Men-like arcane powers (at-will utility spells like invocations), and their aptitude for cranking up the volume on their spells means they always cast their spells as powerfully as possible (like how pact magic slots are always upcast at the highest possible level). It just MAKES MORE SENSE.

Plus I've always been of the mind that warlocks should be Int instead of Cha casters. (I've heard apocryphally that in the original 5e playtest, they were Int casters before final changes were made). People often make the argument that warlocks are really just mooching arcane secrets off of their patron, so Cha dictates how much knowledge they've acquired - but that seems so weird to me. Warlocks shouldn't be smooth-talkers and persuaders - if anything, they're even MORE asocial and emotionally maladjusted than wizards. It takes intelligence, diligent study, and constant seclusion to read and understand all these tomes of forbidden lore that they're getting demons' true names and Old One rituals from - they should be like black belts of Arcana, Religion, etc.

In my games, I always allow warlocks to take a "family" of patrons, as opposed to a single one. So for flavor purposes, if you take the Fiend, the idea is your warlock learns arcane secrets from a number of fiends as opposed to just one. Coaxing magical knowledge out of several entities at once feels so much more in line with the feel of the class - swearing allegiance to a SINGLE patron feels rather Renfieldish and against the grain of what warlocks are supposed to be all about.

In sum, I agree with the sentiment that their mechanics and flavor fit together awkwardly. The real bummer is since the classes seem to have all congealed in this edition, I doubt they'll get a substantial rework until the next edition altogether. Here's hoping.

[Morty]

Like others said, the 5E warlock seems to be a somewhat confused mix of 3E and 4E warlocks. When Complete Arcane came out, the concept of an at-will caster with an at-will magic blast was novel. At-will cantrips weren't really a thing back then yet. 4E kept Eldritch Blast even though everyone had at-will powers in it. And so on. The warlock is a pretty typical case of D&D's design by accretion.

[Kyutaru]

Warlocks originate even further back to 2E and were found in the Complete Wizards Handbook published in 1990 containing wizard subkits. At the time the kit was called "Witch" (it was mentioned warlock is a male witch) and had similar mechanics to what they have today, namely a dark patron that granted them power risking losing your character forever along with a flexible casting system based on spell points. At wills developed from that because spell points were too generous and potent but they both aim for the same goal, a caster that is not limited to preparation but can fling magic around all day. Sorcerers appeared along the same lines despite having a completely different variant wizard in 2E so they appear to have been popularized by the Witch kit as well. One could easily argue from a roleplay perspective that their sorcerer gains his powers from a patron. But when that didn't quite fit the lore and didn't quite have the martial mage aesthetic they went another step forward and gave us Warlock in 3.5, an armor-toting sword-wielding magic-for-days slinging champion. But it sucked because Vancian casters never ran out of spells anyway so having at-wills of only a few weak ones was not very good. Still you could devote all your invocations to improving Eldritch Blast and become a weird magic archer that fireballs people from long range and you could apply whatever conditions you needed to on the fly.

[Willie the Duck]

I suspect that the Binder and Hexblade also fed into the Warlock concept, the latter possibly being behind the Blade Pact. That or someone was a big Sanderson fan.


But Pact Blades are something else. This is because of another 3e class they didn't want to scrap although it didn't warrant a base class to itself: the Hexblade. In 3e they were an arcane half-caster who would curse enemies to weaken them and then use weapons to attack. It got a decent amount of traction, if not as much as the warlock (which took off like a rocket.) I can't find the term Pact Blade in 3e, but in 4e, they were a common magic item that worked like a wand you could also stab people with, and in the Essentials line they merged hexblades into warlocks by letting warlocks chose to make a pact blade instead of shooting lasers.

So having 5e warlocks without pact blades wasn't a thing they wanted, and not having anything like a hexblade wasn't a thing they wanted, so they let 5e warlocks create a pact blade and figured that would cover hexblades as well.

The Hexblade clearly influenced the Hexblade archetype from XGtE. For the actual Pact of Blade, I've always assumed a different influence: Glaivelocks. In one of the later 3e books (Dragon Magic, I believe), there was a new Warlock invocation: Eldritch Glaive: "(Least)Prerequisite: Blast Shape; Your eldritch blast takes on physical substance, appearing similar to a glaive. As a full-round action, you can make a single melee touch attack as if wielding a reach weapon. If you hit, your target is affected as if struck by your eldritch blast (including any eldritch essence applied to the blast). Unlike hideous blow, you cannot combine your eldritch glaive with damage from a held weapon. Furthermore, until the start of your next turn, you also threaten nearby squares as if wielding a reach weapon, and you can make attacks of opportunity with your eldritch glaive. These are melee touch attacks. If your base attack bonus is +6 or higher, you can (as part of the full-round action) make as many attacks with your eldritch glaive as your base attack bonus allows. For example, a 12th-level warlock could attack twice, once with a base attack bonus of+6, and again with a base attack bonus of +1. " What this allowed was to use your eldritch blast -- in 3e normally 1/round, consistent-but-very-weak DPR effect (more akin to 5e wizard cantrips than 5e warlock's Eldritch Blast) -- multiple times per round (depending on the multiple attacks based on Base Attack Bonus, as per normal 3e rules), just with the caveat that it be melee. Enter a whole cavalcade of Warlock/X (something with 1/level BAB advancement, or other riders you could attach to per-attack effects). This cemented the concept of 'melee warlock' into the 3e optimization culture. I'd always assumed that that was where Pact of Blade originated.

[BeefGood]

Thanks everyone for your perspectives.

[Ganryu]

Apparently patrons are a last minute addition in 5e. They originally had the flavor of warlocks as having found some forbidden eldritch lore that changed them, and they were an int class, but in testing people wanted warlocks to be patron based because that's what they used to be, and they didn't like the change, so they became an charisma caster again with patrons.

I'd find the tweet from it, but I'm just on lunch break and don't have time.

[Sception]

The dual subclassing is strange, and I don't have an idea how that developed.

Class conglomeration. 5e doesn't like having more classes, so multiple previous classes get rolled together. Hexblade is a semi-popular concept, and was its own class in 3e. In 4e it was a warlock variant, allowing fun patron flavors, but was different enough to the base warlock that it might as well have been its own class. In 5e it was deemed not popular/iconic enough to get its own class, and so like 4e it was merged with warlock, but unlike latter day 4e, in 5e subclasses aren't allowed to be 'functionally an entirely different class but with the same class name for no good reason'.

So you have warlock with its various patrons, since different patrons are the natural subclass concept for warlocks. But if your patrons are your subclasses, then hexblade can't be a warlock subclass, because hexblade as a patron doesn't make a lot of sense and hexblades should have a range of patron options just like regular warlocks. So instead they stapled hexblade into the warlock as an awkward second subclass in the blade pact. The other pact boons were imagined up for there to be alternatives to bladelock for warlocks who didn't want to also be hexblades.

Unfortunately, that left the resulting bladelock as a variant of a squishy caster class, without even the full feature set of a subclass to make them work. So they didn't work, certainly not without multiclassing. So the devs eventually caved and stapled on a bladelock fix in the form of the hexblade patron, which, sure, made hexbladelock kind of work again, but also does exactly what they didn't want to do in the first place because hexblade still doesn't quite really work narratively as a patron, and even if it did you're effectively restricting bladelocks to a single patron. And since hexblade gets that bladelock fix on top of being an otherwise fully functional patron, it became the best patron for non-bladelocks, too, compounding the problem. And it's an even more front loaded subclass of an already too front loaded class (a result of the devs making your patron your subclass, but then not feeling like it made sense to make you pick a patron after level one, so you get first level subclass features crammed onto first level class features), making one monster of a dip class for anything even vaguely cha related. And just banning hexblade from your game doesn't really fix things, since it's there to patch a very noticeable problem, and removing it just brings back the problem with bladelocks, though at least then the problem is contained to bladelocks.

It's really quite a mess, and the entirety of it could have been avoided if 5e devs were less averse to adding additional base classes to the game, because then hexblade could have been a stand alone half-pact-caster class, related to the warlock the way the paladin is related to the cleric or the ranger to the druid. Warlock then wouldn't have needed the awkward double subclass thing, hexblades could have had a full and flavorful range of patrons, warlocks could have been made more effective casters since they wouldn't have to also play at being a melee class, hexblades could have appropriate hit points and proficiencies for a martial class without making those proficiencies so easily available to casters who didn't need and shouldn't so easily have them, etc etc etc.

Some concepts, even thematically closely related concepts, just work better as completely separate classes. The game would not be better off if 'paladin' was a cleric subclass or if 'bard' was a rogue subclass or if 'barbarian' was a fighter subclass. Forcing Hexblade and Warlock into the same class really ruined both, and if I could make one wish come true in some hypothetical 5.5e or 6e, it would be adding enough interesting and effective necromancy spells to the wizard spell lists to make necromancers fun and interesting and distinct from other wizards over their full level range. But if I could make two wishes come true, the second would be to bring back the warlord as a stand alone class, because I have never had as much fun in combat in D&D as when I was playing warlords in 4e, and no fighter variant will ever fill the hole in my heart. But if I could make three wishes come true, the third wish would be making warlock and hexblade two entirely separate classes, because that's the only way to fix them. Until then they'll always be a mess. Not necessarily an unfun or unplayable mess, but a mess all the same.

[KorvinStarmast]

How did the Warlock class develop?

A couple of devs at WoTC were sipping some Mezcal on a Friday night and before they knew it, they'd finished the bottle. One of them had passed out, so the other one ate the worm.
He ended up having a conversation with a Great Old One.

The rest, as they say, is History. :smallcool:

[Wizard_Lizard]

How did the Warlock class develop?

A couple of devs at WoTC were sipping some Mezcal on a Friday night and before they knew it, they'd finished the bottle. One of them had passed out, so the other one ate the worm.
He ended up having a conversation with a Great Old One.

The rest, as they say, is History. :smallcool:

.... congratulations you just won internet comedy!