With the new invocations from tasha's, are imps really weak as a familiar option?

[Rfkannen]

The new book, tasha's cauldron of everything, has a new invocation that I think really fixes up the pact of the chain warlock, and I imagine most chain warlocks are going to take it. It gives your familiar either a fly or swim speed, makes its weapons magical, all it's save dcs are now your spell save dc, you can command it to take the attack action with a bonus action, and you can use a reaction to half damage to it.

One problem I have with it is that while this really helps most of the chainlock familiars, the imp isn't helped that much.

A sprite now has a ranged attack with a pretty good dc that poisons or knocks out. Perfect!
a psuedo dragon has the same power but melee range, pretty good!
A quasit can poison and has a frighten ability, solidly okay!
However the imp just does an attack, with no condition applied, this is quickly going to become way weaker than the other options by mid level imo.

What do you think, does this invocation make the imp a worse choice for familiar than the other options? Which options do you think are best?

[OvisCaedo]

I think...while the DCs might scale better, even halving damage taken isn't going to help super much if the familiars are regularly being active in combat and ever get targeted. A sprite has 2 hp. Though being ranged means that there probably is still a viable chance of making use of that scaling DC if the sprite is making heavy use of full cover or such. Pseudodragons are probably going to be in real danger if they try to make use of their poison bite much. Quasits might get away with it a bit more due to having some natural damage resistances, which stacking with whatever the reaction thing is could maybe go a long way.

In the early game, the imp's poison damage is probably actually pretty dang good. As the game goes on though... hm. Quasit and imp already seem pretty similar in a lot of ways, and flight on the quasit's base form makes it even more so. Poison in either form can be sketchy for target reliability in later game, so the quasit having a fear ability is nice even if it's only once a day.

i'm also not clear off the top of my head how familiar action economy works, so i'm not sure if there's a way to safely hit-and-run with familiar melee attacks without provoking AoOs.

[AttilatheYeon]

It's still an invisible flying familiar that can shapechange into animal forms. There's a lot of utility there. It may not be the best combat familiar, but far from the worst. It has resistance to B/P/S from nonnagical attacks, resistance to cold and immunity to fire, with a decent amount of HPs for a familiar. Use inspirering leader and now the imp can take some hits.

In Rime of the Frostmaiden my wizard has an imp familiar and has been using him to great effect. He's a first rate scout and even managed to steal a VR staff from an NPC. This changed the balance of the encounter and the NPC didn't want to fight our party. All because my invisible imp familiar was super useful.

[Kane0]

So how does the eyeball hold up?

[Chaosmancer]

Imps still have everything that was going for them, and the Sprite is still not great (and I say that as a Feylock who loves his sprite)

The Sprite does 1 damage and the poison is decent for giving disadvantage but even a high level warlock is going to have a hard time getting the unconcious effect to hit.

Though, I will note that the poison from a Sprite is 1 minute, no further saves, compared to the Quasit who is save every round. I think the biggest boost is the Quasit being able to fly, since now all three of them are flying and invisible.

The Psuedodragon gives disadvantage for an hour, but otherwise nothing useful.


So, it depends on what you want. Want a flying, invisible scout? Quasit, Imp, or Sprite no difference.

Damage? The Imp is the best, but still an average of fifteen isn't great.

Quasit has more debuffs and special abilities, and the Sprite has a range of 40/160 and a potential for lots of disadvantage, but little else.

So, close, and maybe the Imp loses overall, but the most powerful abilities are still pertinent.