You can cast False Life on yourself at will as a 1st-level spell, without expending a spell slot or material components.
Fiendish Vigor: False Life as a Cantrip
Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold
False Life is one of the worst 1st level spells in the game. 1d4+4 temporary hit points for a spell slot? No thank you, I’ll use that to deal more than 1d4+4 damage, reduce more than 1d4+4 incoming damage with status effects, or put up better defenses that will very likely mitigate WAY more than 1d4+4 damage. But what if False Life was a cantrip? Then, this spell starts to look pretty appealing; at will 1d4+4 temporary hit points makes a character hella resilient. Fiendish Vigor offers you exactly this.
First, I should note that when you can cast this infinite times, you only need to cast it around four times to get the maximum number of hit points out of it. You can simply keep recasting it over and over until you get the 4 on the 1d4, and because it lasts an hour, you don’t have to go through this process all that often. If you’re DMing for it, I’d highly recommend allowing it to be shorthanded to out of combat 8 temp HP to save on time after the first few uses.
If your objective is to play a front line warlock who intends to take some hits, in the lower tiers especially, Fiendish Vigor is excellent. Basically, every fight you go into you’ll have 8 bonus temporary hit points to play with. Traps hurt a lot less when you always can mitigate 8 points of damage they deal. Any damage you’re taking out of combat becomes fairly easy to mitigate, and this pool of hit points is instantly refreshable so long as you aren’t in initiative. Fiendish Vigor reads like just False Life at will, but it feels like you take 8 less damage from every damaging effect you face out of combat, and 8 less damage in combat as well.
While you’re in combat, you probably won’t ever want to use it. Spending an action to gain more temp HP doesn’t actively push your team towards winning the fight; you want your actions in combat to lead your team towards ending the encounter as quickly as possible. Stacking more HP doesn’t really do that; it likely isn’t mitigating more than an action from an enemy. When that action is mitigated for free because it's done prior to combat, and can be done constantly out of combat with no resource costs, it's amazing. You don’t want to be spending actions in combat mitigating that damage, especially as it won’t often be the difference between you staying up and dropping to 0.
As you get towards the upper tiers, when damage starts to majorly outdo the temp HP you’re getting, you’ll probably want to swap this out for a better upper-tier invocation with a higher level prerequisite. This isn’t an invocation that scales at all; it's as good as it gets at level 2, and just gets worse from there. When you do get it at 2, though, it's a house of a feature. You will feel thick with Fiendish Vigor on. I think of all the warlock invocations, Fiendish Vigor may be the most slept on. If you haven’t played with it yet, and want to play a melee based warlock, this is an exceptional option to pick.
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.
