Prerequisite: Pact of the Chain feature
Whenever you regain hit points while your familiar is within 100 feet of you, treat any dice rolled to determine the hit points you regain as having rolled their maximum value for you.
Gift of the Ever-Living Ones: Keep the Receipt
Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
Are you feeling constantly worn down, like you just can’t get your HP back up? Do you take three or four short rests a day, with one long rest only happening after eighteen hours of adventuring? Are you expending all of your hit dice regularly, and still finding you’re going down every fight because you can’t get your hit points refilled successfully? If so, what game are you playing? Because that’s not a real problem basically anyone who plays D&D 5e faces.
Gift of the Ever-Living Ones SOUNDS neat. This guarantees you can heal to full on short rests, and never over-spend hit dice if you don’t want to. With Gift of the Ever-Living Ones, you have perfect control over your healing from hit dice. The reality of the vast majority of 5th edition games is that you shouldn’t ever need this, nor really get anything that is beneficial from it.
5e heals you to full on long rest, and gives you hit dice you can use to get functionally another full heal divided up as you’d like over however many short rests you get. The short rest/long rest system already suffers from rampant inconsistency. Stacked on top of that is variance in damage dealt to each party member, and finally, should you both be at a table where you’re taking enough short rests and taking enough damage, hit dice add an extra element of variance to how healthy you can actually get. Most adventuring days, players aren’t taking more than one short rest, in which expending all your hit dice, even if you’re at 1 HP, is likely restoring you close to or to your HP maximum. This circumstance is rare, and still doesn’t justify you taking Gift of the Ever-Living Ones, as you’d need to take enough damage to put you back to one and then take another short rest for it to make any meaningful difference.
What’s wild to me is that if your familiar dies, this invocation stops working entirely. That’s wild. Imagine taking an invocation that already has next to no applicable value and then further gating its use cases by attaching it to your low hit point tiny servant you can resummon on long rests. Who thought that was a good idea?
I promise you, much like the Durable feat, Gift of the Ever-Living Ones is ghoulish overkill. The tankiest, damage sponge-iest warlocks have better defensive options than this that will actually help prevent you from going down in the first place like Fiendish Vigor. Gift of the Ever-Living Ones is a trap; don’t take it.
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