You can see normally in darkness, both magical and nonmagical, to a distance of 120 feet.
Devil’s Sight: Specs of the Devil
Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold
Cornered and alone, the drow scout quivers with their one remaining scimitar left. The darkness has never been this empty before; their friends lost to its tendrils, a blackness that they’re superior vision couldn’t pierce, using their lightless society to its advantage. From behind the remaining warrior, a barrage of warped green bolts flash from seemingly out of thin air, putting them down like the rest of their scouting party with a stifled horrified shriek. A little gnome in green robes walks into the mundane darkness, blue eyes brilliantly shining in the empty cavern, and quickly dismisses the engulfing blackness, waving on their allies to approach. Operation drow city infiltration is go.
Devil’s Sight is superior darkvision without sunlight sensitivity for most warlocks. If you don’t want to commit to hiding in darkness effects of your own creation, it's about as good as a racial trait. That’s definitely not worth your invocation. However, and this is a big however: when paired with magical darkness, Devil’s Sight starts to feel like at will advantage on all your attack rolls while simultaneously imposing disadvantage on all incoming attack rolls. That has a lot of potential.
The first spell you may obviously think to pair with this is simple: Darkness. It gives you a little bubble of magical darkness you can move around, like a reverse torch. Problem is, unless you’re getting it as a racial trait (namely through drow magic), you really don’t want to be spending one of your two or three pact magic slots and your concentration on just Darkness. Fortunately, you’ve got another option, albeit an unconventional one: Summon Fey.
Summon Fey is a conjuration spell from Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything that loves to be upcast. As a 3rd level spell, your fey companion gets one attack each round; as a 4th level spell, that goes up to two attacks. That’s pretty solid for a warlock; the upcast to 5th level gives you more damage on their short sword attacks, a higher AC, and some more hit points. What separates it from the others summon spell options is the tricksy fae’s teleport ability: it fills a 5 ft. cube within 5 feet of it with magical darkness. While this won’t be effective against creatures with darkvision, it provides an easily reusable tool for getting your advantage over and over again on attack rolls against creatures without it. Have your fey charge in (while you're within 30 feet of an enemy), strike them twice, then teleport back next to you to provide you with the temporary darkness cube. Rinse, and repeat.
Now, I interpret magical darkness as only interrupting regular darkvision when it explicitly says so. If I’m wrong, and all magical darkness blinds regular darkvision creatures, this is excellent against everything, short of enemies with Truesight. If it doesn’t functionally blind creatures with darkvision, though, you’ll still want some other ways to get magical darkness the way Darkness provides it, especially if you can make it happen without concentration. This is something I’d work out with your DM ahead of time when possible, as it will have major impacts on your character's means of navigating combats in the mid to upper tiers.
Devil’s Sight is a build around me kind of invocation. You need to be taking more advantage of it than just acting like regular darkvision 99% of the time. If you can, it can be a major boon to your build, often just turning on advantage for an endless barrage of Eldritch Blasts or making areas of darkness you can hack and slash into with a bit more safety thanks to the disadvantage being imposed. If you don’t want to dedicate your concentration to a darkness creation effect, or don’t want to manage a build around this concept, you definitely don’t want Devil’s Sight on your character sheet.
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