Prerequisite: 7th level
You can cast Confusion once using a warlock spell slot. You can't do so again until you finish a long rest.
Dreadful Word: Ni!
Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold
Sometimes Wizards of the Coast makes mistakes. We all do. The designers are human, after all. Dreadful Word is a mistake. It's that simple.
For an invocation, requiring you be 7th level, you get the opportunity to spend one of your precious two pact magic slots on casting the Confusion spell. Want to cast it again? You have to wait until you finish a long rest just to get the privilege to cast this mediocre spell once more!
Confusion requires your concentration for up to a minute, and at its best, will be a save or die that occasionally debilitates a few creatures. It hits a 10 ft. radius sphere, giving you a 4x4 grid to work with. Three fifths of the time, the creatures will not take actions (which is primarily what you care about). A fifth of the time, they’ll act normally, and a fifth of the time they’ll make an attack against a random creature in reach if possible, otherwise wasting their turn.
Confusion has its moments, for sure. Its potential is quite high; sometimes you’ll cast this on a pair of hill giants before they get a chance to approach you, and while one stares off dumb-founded into space, the other clubs it in the gut. But it's not wildly out of line for 4th level spells; this is something bards, wizards, druids, and sorcerers can learn like any other spell and cast with their 4th level spell slots, of which (by 8th level) they’ll have two. When you’re rocking two 4th level spell slots, you can only ever cast this once per long rest.
Any of the invocations that basically let you learn a new spell are horrible when compared to nearly every other invocation out there. They don’t give you a new resource, but instead give you the equivalent to learning a spell, just worse. This, like Thief of Five Fates, needs to be giving you more uses of Confusion to justify taking the invocation at all. If you added it to your known spells and got a free cast once per long rest, I’d still say this is meh. It would still compete with your concentration options, and wouldn’t be giving you something to do as powerful as a lot of the at will spell invocations or augmenting effects for actions you take consistently. This would at least be a decent tool for a warlock who likes the idea of Confusion. Where it stands now, those warlocks are just out of luck, because this is demonstrably terrible.
If you want to play with Confusion on your warlock, I’d first just ask your DM if you can add it to the warlock spell list. It's not abusable like Animate Dead or anything; Confusion is just a fine 4th level spell. If that doesn’t work for them, I’d consider asking for an amendment to Dreadful Word to change it as I described above. Anything short of that will leave it nowhere close to usable when compared to the majority of your other mid tier invocation options. If you’re running things rules as written, this is unusably bad.
Thank you for visiting!
If you’d like to support this ongoing project, you can do so by buying my books, getting some sweet C&C merch, or joining my Patreon.
The text on this page is Open Game Content, and is licensed for public use under the terms of the Open Game License v1.0a.
‘d20 System’ and the ‘d20 System’ logo are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast, Inc.
and are used according to the terms of the d20 System License version 6.0.
A copy of this License can be found at www.wizards.com/d20.
