I am amused by how my invocation is simultaneously overpowered and underpowered. I think you're both right .

Quote Originally Posted by Zazamori View Post
I view the 2 weapon cantrips as rather fair compared to EB without AB. The problem is AB is huge & there're no invocations like it for other cantrips, hence why I'm making some.

Are you stating the melee cantrips are mistakes, or EB + AB is a mistake??
Both, actually - they're both problematic for well-intentioned reasons.

1) Eldritch Blast is intended to be the primary combat strategy for Warlocks, much like how "punch something" is what Monks will do pretty much every single round. That's fine and dandy - Eldritch Blast might be a little above the curve on its own, but nothing too crazy. The issue is that cantrips are supposed to deal less damage than a martial character's Attack action, so they pretty much had to give Warlocks something like Agonizing Blast. And if they wanted them to be able to build around "I use my Cthulhu Lasers" as a combat style, they had to hand it out as early as possible. That's also totally fair.

The issue creeps in when you put multiclassing on the table. Suddenly, anyone Charisma-based has an efficient, automatically scaling magical attack that they can pick up for the low cost of two levels in Warlock (which also lets you pick up what are arguably the two best unique spells on the Warlock list, Armor of Agathys and Hex). It directly contributes to Warlocks being a "dip" class.

It also makes it really hard to design invocations for other cantrips - if you want them to match Eldritch Blast (which is essentially Fire Bolt, But Better In Pretty Much Every Way), you'll need to hand out a comparatively huge bonus to the cantrip in question... which makes you feel like you need to split it up into multiple invocations, even though you're really only making it match a pre-existing option.

Oh, and Agonizing Blast is an invocation tax - if you're using Eldritch Blast, you'll want Agonizing Blast, and Eldritch Blast is basically the best cantrip on the Warlock list. It's like how Druids effectively didn't get a feat at 6th level in 3rd edition (they basically had to take the Natural Spell feat at 6th level because not taking it was literally shooting yourself in the foot).

2) The weapon cantrips are a mistake because they are just straight-up better than other cantrips. They essentially have double scaling and are much easier to build around than other cantrips. After all, you can improve your to-hit with them by picking up a magic weapon, you can use class features that were clearly not meant to be combined with spells (Paladin Smite, Sneak Attack, Reckless Attack, and so on and so forth), and Booming Blade in particular does nasty things in conjunction with War Caster. Damage-wise, they're roughly as good for you as Extra Attack, for much less of a build investment.

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Honestly, the real issue is that the aforementioned cantrips don't really fit in with the general design for cantrips. Cantrips as a group are designed as a way to let casters feel magical without having to burn spell slots all the time. They aren't supposed to be spammed every turn.

Eldritch Blast should have been a class feature that pumped the power level of cantrips so that they could be your primary combat strategy. Like, if Warlocks gave you +Cha to damage with cantrips at 2nd level and an Extra Attack equivalent for Cantrips at 5th, you'd have a lot more build freedom. I might actually tinker with that a little bit...