Prerequisite: Pact of the Chain feature
When you cast Find Familiar, you infuse the summoned familiar with a measure of your eldritch power, granting the creature the following benefits:
The familiar gains either a flying speed or a swimming speed (your choice) of 40 feet.
As a bonus action, you can command the familiar to take the Attack action.
The familiar's weapon attacks are considered magical for the purpose of overcoming immunity and resistance to nonmagical attacks.
If the familiar forces a creature to make a saving throw, it uses your spell save DC.
When the familiar takes damage, you can use your reaction to grant it resistance against that damage.
Investment of the Chain Master: Pimp My Familiar
Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
Pact of the Chain is a truly remarkable feature. It takes one of, if not the best, 1st level spells in the game and turns it up to eleven by adding in more powerful familiar options that change what the spell can do on a fundamental level. You get access to imps, pseudodragons, quasists, and sprites. Investment of the Chain Master is a further upgrade on Pact of the Chain if you wanted to treat your familiar more like a traditional summoned companion in combat instead of a tiny helper. While my initial impression was lukewarm, having gone over the options, Investment of the Chain Master seems excellent.
Investment of the Chain Master does five things: it gives all your familiars a flying or swimming speed of 40 ft., gives you a bonus action attack with it, gives your familiar's attacks the magic property, shifts the familiar’s save DCs to your spell save DCs, and gives you a reaction to give it resistance to incoming damage.
The fly/swim speed isn’t particularly useful simply because most of the familiars you get with Chain offer similar speed options. Swim speeds aren’t particularly useful outside of niche environments, and when needed, quasits and imps both can shapechange to get access to them as well as 40 ft. fly speeds. Magical weapon typing on your familiar’s attacks doesn’t really affect that many monsters in a meaningful way. Upgrading their ability DCs can be a big quality of life scaling upgrade that can feel decent. Offering resistance to damage can save your familiar in a lot of instances from one major death blow, but for the most part they’re still only rocking fifteen or fewer hit points, meaning most upper tier fights can kill them in a single blow anyway. Helpful, for sure, but nothing too get that excited about.
Finally, we’ve got the bonus action attack offered. This has a ton of potential to be excellent, especially with attacks like the imp’s sting which can deal 1d4+3d6+3 damage per hit, which is pretty baller. Sprites have a poisoning save that drops creatures unconscious; this at ranged as a bonus action is DISGUSTING, especially as it uses your spell save DC instead. This on its own can quickly become a problem a DM has to have answers for; that answer probably is killing the 2 HP sprite with ranged attacks. Quasits get a 3d4+3 poisoning claw/bite, and pseudodragons get the worst of the lot with just a 1d4+2 piercing bite or a 1d4+2 sting that can poison. Honestly, any bonus action that deals any damage and comes with a condition is excellent, so at minimum you’re getting a solid bonus action non-concentration option. When these cost you your attacks, this was very evidently not worth it. When it just takes your bonus action, these suddenly become major players in every fight, and more reasons why your DM is going to try to kill your familiars.
I think that’s ultimately where this runs into trouble. Familiars just don’t get a lot of HP to play around with, making most any hit they take lethal. Giving them resistance likely changes some mid tier attacks from one-shotting your familiar to needing two hits to take it out, but when they need to be in biting distance to get their bonus action attack, you’re basically asking for them to die. Sprites definitely are the best here, easily a cut above the rest, simply because the shortbow has a 40 ft. range and an impactful condition you can use over and over. The other three are going to be great out of combat options, but I think it’ll become quickly apparent just how few hitpoints 7 is.
Investment of the Chain Master takes your familiar and gives them a bit of a boost. They don’t really need the boost, but if it's the fantasy you’re going for, it fits and does add some scaling to them. The biggest factor to me is the DC increase for their varying abilities; this lets them actually have reasonable chances of affecting upper tier fights and exploration. That’s meaningful. Beyond that, unless you’re working with specifically a sprite, I think you’ll be better off with most other invocations for expanding your capabilities. This is fine, but not a “must have” by any stretch.
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