Prerequisite: Eldritch Blast cantrip
Once on each of your turns when you hit a creature with your eldritch blast, you can move that creature in a straight line 10 feet closer to yourself.
Grasp of Hadar: Get Over Here!
Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
Oh, the blaster-lock. A barrage of blasts burying baddies in bunches of force damage speaks to many. It's not really for me, as I find (as have more than a handful of others) it gets repetitive and feels bland after a few levels. For those of you who love Eldritch Blast and never want to do literally anything else, Grasp of Hadar is another invocation dedicated to empowering the cantrip. This may just be the worst out of all of them, but there may be some rare instances where you can do some neat stuff with it.
Grasp of Hadar makes each of your Blasts into a long ranged Thorn Whip. Isolated, in a vacuum with no other environmental hazards or party created areas of death, this doesn’t really do anything. More often than not, you probably want the enemies as far away from you as possible. You can hit them up to 120 feet away no problem; why bring them closer to you, then? Maybe you’ll get your fighter or barbarian in range of them without needing to dash, which can be helpful, but I don’t see that happening enough to justify the invocation on its own.
If you can pull something through a Wall of Fire, though, then we’re going places. But with it gated at once per turn, as opposed to once per hit creature or just with every blast, you’re not able to move things major distances to practically get them through said Wall of Fire. You might be able to do some nifty positioning and drag a creature through a Cloud of Daggers an extra time, which sounds neat, but the exact set up and spacing required to make that succeed is, to put it gently, unlikely. Pulling a creature through a Wall of Fire only becomes good if they weren’t going through it on their own already, or are trying to flee through it and you want to kill them AND they’re within 10 feet of it having just run through it at all. You can probably start to see where the holes in these ideas start to form; 10 feet just is such a tiny distance when the average creature can move up to 60 feet on their turn that you’re not reliable getting creatures to move through the spaces you’d like with this effect.
Still, you can try to make it happen with some coordination and cooperation. On your own, you can leverage spells like Hunger of Hadar, but because it competes with the action you need to spend blasting in the first place it can be tricky to actually get a sequence of events to occur where you’re getting bonus damage from Grasp of Hadar paired with his hunger. If you can have your druid friend use Spike Growth and immediately follow them up with some Grasp of Hadar blasts, you’re more likely to force enemies into corners and empower both effects to be a bit better than the sum of their parts. This likely isn’t going to be much more powerful than separate builds focused on damage or control in other ways, but can be really rewarding to pull off together.
Grasp of Hadar isn’t something any warlock needs, especially those who just take Agonizing Blast for combat and become a swiss army knife with the rest of their abilities. Dedicated blasters probably don’t want to stick around in warlock all that long, and if they do, they have better options than Grasp for empowering their blasts like Agonizing Blast and Repelling Blast (which isn’t gated to once per turn). If you like the idea of yo-yoing people, you could pair Repelling Blast with Grasp of Hadar, and potentially get a lot of mileage out of the aforementioned Spike Growth, but that’s not realistically coming together in the majority of encounters. I’d recommend most other invocations over this for the average warlock.
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