Prerequisite: 7th level
As an action, you gain the ability to see through solid objects to a range of 30 feet. Within that range, you have darkvision if you don't already have it. This special sight lasts for 1 minute or until your concentration ends (as if you were concentrating on a spell). During that time, you perceive objects as ghostly, transparent images.
Once you use this invocation, you can't use it again until you finish a short or long rest.
Ghostly Gaze: Look Beyond the Obvious
Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
With a shiver, the drow holds her hand up to the wall, and her vision shifts. Color leaves the room, as the walls and floors flicker in a ghostly translucent form, like looking through clouded glass. On the other side of the corridor, a band of two bugbears and their goblin boss tremble, arms held, waiting silently for the party to open the door for them to unleash their fury for their boss. The drow signals their locations and strategy; with a fluid motion, her rogue companion pops open the door, and the ranger lays waste to the lurking predators with perfect accuracy.
Ghostly Gaze is brilliant. It’s simple, useful, and only held back by its limitation in quantity of uses, concentration, and prerequisite level. This is an incredible little invocation most any warlock looking to expand their toolkit can look towards taking it to add a new option to play with basically no other character can get. This is a warlock invocation at its finest.
While 30 feet isn’t a particularly long distance, it very often is just enough distance. Being able to check a doorway for interlocking trap mechanisms is a tame use case for this. Worried a tunnel is too inconspicuous? Ghostly Gaze can automatically detect any and all objects nested in the ceiling and walls that would come out to kill you! Need to know what the combination to the dwarven safe is? Get within 30 feet of it, and watch somebody else open it none the wiser. At its worst, this scouts out a room you’re venturing towards once a short rest and provides some peace of mind. At its best, Ghostly Gaze can give you information that’d otherwise require very specific checks and questions to unearth, and do so simply and easily, no checks required. That’s superb.
Its limitations do kind of bog it down. 7th level may be a fine time to open this up, but I think it being gated additionally to the few uses makes that a bit harsh. Eldritch Sight and Book of Ancient Secrets each open up different forms of vision as basically at will abilities, and are online at 1st level. Unlimited Ghostly Gazes does seem troublesome, as it makes traps very difficult to run in moderate quantities, but having this both be something that you can’t explore around with and try out till 7th level and something you’re getting to use once or twice and adventure is going to often make it feel like a resource you have to save for just the right moment, and end up using less than you could be.
Concentration is also a major bummer. Warlocks love long duration concentration effects like Summon Undead and Hex; when you only have two spell slots to play with, long duration concentration effects can help you stretch their utility. Ghostly Gaze requires you end those effects to use it, making it clunky in a lot of builds. In a dungeon, if you’ve got a summoned creature running around with you after one encounter, you’re likely going to come into scenarios where you’d want to use Ghostly Gaze to check for traps, spy on an upcoming room, or look for secret tunnels or doors, but instead choose to keep up your summoned companion because that is far more critical to your gameplan. I don’t get why this needed to be here, either; Ghostly Gaze for a minute with no concentration once per short rest doesn’t seem even remotely troublesome to me. If you’re DMing for it, I’d highly recommend removing concentration from this ability; having DMed for both as a concentration effect and non, it felt a lot better for my players as a non-concentration ability.
Still, rules as written this invocation is sweet. It's a new unique tool that makes your warlock distinct from the other party members. Ghostly Gaze is a cool new way to open up exploration that doesn’t really exist elsewhere. This is a reason to keep playing warlocks to me; we need more of these.
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