Prerequisite: Spellcasting or Pact Magic feature
Studying occult lore, you have unlocked eldritch power within yourself: you learn one Eldritch Invocation option of your choice from the warlock class. If the invocation has a prerequisite, you can choose that invocation only if you're a warlock and only if you meet the prerequisite.
Whenever you gain a level, you can replace the invocation with another one from the warlock class.
Eldritch Adept: Invocation Dispensation
Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold
Warlock’s defining feature, outside their deeply flawed pact magic, is their invocations. These define the good from the great warlocks; they’re the options that open up builds to be tuned to exactly what you want for your specific character. Eldritch Adept opens up these to the world, and while you’re limited primarily to the 2nd level invocations, there are enough really good ones that this can easily replace multi-classing to open up an avenue you otherwise had closed off to you. If you’re a character with access to spellcasting, that is.
The invocation list isn’t as robust as you might expect. In total, there are only eleven invocations that do anything on non-warlocks: Armor of Shadows, Beast Speech, Beguiling Influence, Devil’s Sight, Eldritch Mind, Eldritch Sight, Eyes of the Runekeeper, Fiendish Vigor, Gaze of Two Minds, Mask of Many Faces, and Misty Visions. All the remaining invocations have some kind of prerequisite, or empower a warlock specific feature like Thief of Five Fates. Even if you are a 5th level character, if you aren’t a warlock, you can’t take an invocation with the prerequisite of “5th level”. These prerequisites basically require you to be a dedicated warlock to get access to the upper tier options, which is probably for the best.
Of the list you DO get access to, though, there are a handful of exceptional options non-warlocks would love to have. Fiendish Vigor gives you False Life at will, acting as a constantly refreshing 8 hit point well that can make a paladin or eldritch knight feel incredibly resilient early on. Mask of Many Faces on a bard opens up Disguise Self at will to a character who is usually deeply social, and has a suite of tools at their disposal built to help infiltrate, deceive, and perform in all manners of ways. Imagine a rockstar who could change their entire attire with a flick of their wrist. You could do some pretty spectacular spectacles.
Devil’s Sight is ripe for abuse with characters leveraging Darkness or similar spell effects; rangers or arcane trickster can start working in complete darkness with no penalties, getting no penalties to being permanently heavily obscured and receiving all the benefits of enemies staring into darkness to try to make you out. Misty Visions gives you an upgraded Minor Illusion you can whip out anywhere; this is by far my favorite, and I’d recommend nearly any player that likes illusions to consider this option whenever it becomes available.
There are some duds in here, though. Eldritch Mind is a worse version of the Mage Slayer feat. Eyes of the Rune Keeper is neat conceptually, but almost certainly not worth a feat. Same goes for the Detect Magic and Speak with Animals at will you get from Eldritch Sight and Beast Speech respectively. Both of those are ritual spells you can get from Ritual Caster instead alongside another ritual spell and the ability to get new ones as the game progresses. Beguiling Influence is a lot worse than just taking the Skilled Feat, and Gaze of Two Minds is very challenging to get use out of. Armor of Shadows is only particularly useful for characters with lackluster ACs anyway; it probably lands close to Moderately Armored without the ability score bump; that most certainly is not where you want to be.
After cutting through most of the duds, we’re left with Devil’s Sight, Fiendish Vigor, Mask of Many Faces, and Misty Visions as the four best invocations you can get with this, and that’s enough to make it excellent on a decent chunk of characters. If you’re in the market for a better cantrip-like ability, Eldritch Adept has four excellent options to open up your character's strengths. Alternatively, if you’re a Warlock who desperately feels they need another invocation to get their character online, Eldritch Adept gives you a fair trade many will be happy to take.
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