Prerequisite: Pact of the Blade feature
You can use any weapon you summon with your Pact of the Blade feature as a spellcasting focus for your warlock spells.
In addition, the weapon gains a +1 bonus to its attack and damage rolls, unless it is a magic weapon that already has a bonus to those rolls.
Finally, the weapon you conjure can be a shortbow, longbow, light crossbow, or heavy crossbow.
Improved Pact Weapon: Needs Improvement
Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
Pact of the Blade is iconic in 5e as the worst warlock pact option, no doubt. Hexblades exist largely to fulfill the fantasy Pact of the Blade so spectacularly failed to deliver on: its that bad. Improved Pact Weapon, alongside Thirsting Blade, are attempts to empower the martial warlock archetype in nearly exactly the ways you’d expect to see: multi-attack, and Magic Weapon plus some ranged weapon options. There are some problems with this, though: it doesn’t scale with other magic weapons you get as you adventure, and already have access to shortbows and light crossbows. If you’re taking this, you can potentially upgrade from a d6 shortbow to a d8 longbow, or a d8 light crossbow to the d10 heavy crossbow (while still struggling with the loading property while trying to make extra attacks using Thirsting Blade).
What I think this will look like to the majority of warlocks who want it is a +1 greatsword or a +1 longbow. It doesn’t give you anything new to do you couldn’t do already, and the moment either of those weapons become options to bind your pact weapon to, this stops having text entirely. While you can’t normally summon ranged pact weapons with the Pact of the Blade feature, you still can bind to any magic weapon you find regardless of if it's melee or ranged. If your DM gives out any improved weapons at all, there is no reason to take this, and even if they don’t you’ve got way better options.
Using a pact weapon as a spell focus isn’t really that helpful simply because you only have two spell slots to play with for most of the game anyway. If you’re killing people, you can kill them with your pact weapon. If you need to cast a spell, drop it for a second and grab your staff or orb or whatever your focus is. Warlocks already aren’t struggle to get an open hand in combat for their focus and somatic components. Most of the time a fight looks like casting a spell prior to drawing your weapon anyway; you just don’t need your blade to be your focus, though it is crazy to me that it isn’t part of the base Pact of the Blade feature.
+1 to hit and damage is fine, but not new, nor does it feel particularly impactful, and again, DM given magic items make this non-text. The supplemental ranged options are (in a world where you can’t get access to magical versions ever) a dice upgrade for shortbow warlocks and not much else. If you’re playing Pact of the Blade, you take Thirsting Blade as fast as possible. If you are committed to playing a bow based warlock, this enables multi-attack on them, which is something you’d greatly care about, while upgrading your die size. If you ever get access to a magic bow, you can immediately replace this, and if you’re not using the bows at all, you definitely don’t need this. Improved Pact Weapon is not worth the invocation for the vast majority of builds. I’d steer clear.
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