Warlock: Pact of the Blade

by Lucifer1389

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Warlock:

Pact of the Blade

  • As a bonus action, you can summon your pact weapon in a free hand. The pact weapon is a simple or martial weapon of your choice. You are proficient with it, and it counts as magical for the purpose of overcoming resistances and immunities.
  • Your pact weapon disappears if it is more than 5 feet away from you for a minute, or when you dismiss it to a pocket dimension as a bonus action.
  • You can transform a weapon into your pact weapon by performing a 1 hour ritual while holding it.
  • When you take the attack action using your pact weapon, you can attack an additional time when you reach 5th and 11th level in this class.

Invocations:

The following invocations require Pact of the Blade.

3rd level:

Ceremonial blade

You can use your pact weapon as a spellcasting focus for your warlock spells.

When you attack with your pact weapon, you can use your Charisma modifier, instead of Strength or Dexterity, for the attack and damage rolls.

Pact knight

You gain proficiency in medium and heavy armor. You can use your charisma modifier, instead of strength, for the purposes of carry weight and armor requisites.

7th level:

Witch blade

When you use your action to cast a warlock spell of 1st level or higher, you can make an attack with your pact weapon as a bonus action.

Weave eater

While holding your pact weapon, you can cast counterspell or dispel magic as a warlock spell, without expending a spell slot. If you successfully counter or dispel the effect, you regain hit points equal to 10 times the level of the spell. You can use this feature once, and regain expended uses on a long rest.

Author's Notes.

The pact of the blade is supposed to represent a character mixing steel and magic. However, when you consider the exitence of Eldritch blast, the existing blade pact fails in the following regards:

  • Staying competitive with Eldritch blast requires multiple invocations (thirsting blade and lifedrinker)
  • Blade pact doesn't offer any invocations except those used to stay relevant to Eldritch blast, compared to fun invocations given by other pacts.
  • Playing a melee warlock requires you to choose Hexblade to be effective.
  • Non-blade warlocks can more easily fight in melee using cantrips such as GFB, BB, and Shillelagh.

Considering the above flaws, this revision fixes these issues in the following ways:

  • Eldritch blast progression is baked into the blade pact. However, it only gets scaling upto level 11, since 4 attacks is something unique to the Fighter class.
  • Ceremonial blade is an equivalent of Agonizing blast, thereby removing other invocation taxes.
  • You can play an equally effective bladelock using any subclass.
  • Bladelocks get unique abilities of their own, in the form of new invocations.

Pact of the Blade by Lucifer

Art by Noirsnow

 

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