Prerequisite: Pact of the Tome feature
You no longer need to sleep and can't be forced to sleep by any means. To gain the benefits of a long rest, you can spend all 8 hours doing light activity, such as reading your Book of Shadows and keeping watch.
Aspect of the Moon: No Rest for the Wicked
Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold
Sleep is a weird mechanic in 5e not that thoroughly explored in the PHB. Xanathar’s Guide to Everything expands out the sleep rules a bit, but for the most part, what Aspect of the Moon offers you is one of two things: more time for light downtime activities, which is pretty underwhelming, or a tool to never need to sleep again and abuse font of magic and pact magic to generate spell slots. Nifty!
First, let's look at the fair uses for Aspect of the Moon. Light activity, as described in the PHB, consists of reading, talking, eating, and standing watch. Normally, you’re gated to 2 hours of those activities. Now, you can spend the whole 8 hours doing them! Huzzah! Revolutionary! You now are always on watch duty, I guess! Your DM may be more flexible and allow for spellcasting (ritual casting specifically if you’ve also got Book of Ancient Secrets), artisan tools work, or other downtime activities, but your mileage may vary, and the end result still isn’t all that impressive. You don’t really need eight extra hours of sleeplessness. At least, when considered fairly.
Unfairly, you can mix this with sorcerer’s font of magic to ignore the sleepless penalties introduced in Xanather’s Guide to Everything to get eight short rests instead of one long rest without sleep every day. Then, you’re just making DC 10 Constitution saving throws to shrug off the exhaustion, something you can mitigate with well timed Resistances and other boons to aid saving throws. Then, each short rest can bank you 4 or more sorcery points which you can convert into spell slots as you please. If you can just get 5 levels in warlock, you’re looking at 6 sorcery points per rest, for a grand total of 48 sorcery points per “long rest”. The math here gets a bit wonky, as each spell slot has different conversion rates, but it can fuel you with 24 1st level spell slots, 16 2nd level spell slots, nearly 10 3rd level spell slots, 8 4th level slots, or 6 5th level slots, regardless of your overall level. You can mix and match as you please, but fundamentally you’re breaking the resource options in the game should you be able to maintain a healthy amount of HP. Mix in a Divine Soul sorcerer or go with the Celestial warlock patron, and now you’ve got access to an unending pool of spell slots, healing magic to cover your HP problems, and eventual access to Greater Restoration to purge the levels of exhaustion you may incidentally build up!
Aspect of the Moon is honestly kind of lame. If you’re going to do the “coffeelock” thing, I think having a push your luck element to exhaustion is kind of fun with it, especially as you work to manage the save with countermeasures. When the only two uses for Aspect of the Moon are make a busted, game warping build that likely will get addressed by the DM or being a completely useless mechanic offering you more time to whittle, I just can’t justify it existing.
I truthfully have no idea why this is gated behind Pact of the Tome. I don’t get why the developers felt this was worth an invocation slot on its own, and how it felt fun to take and use. If you’re considering it, and aren’t looking to pad a build aimed at breaking the rest mechanics (which you could already do as an elf or any number of other ways), stay clear of Aspect of the Moon.
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