Prerequisite: Eldritch Blast cantrip
Once on each of your turns when you hit a creature with your eldritch blast, you can reduce that creature's speed by 10 feet until the end of your next turn.
Lance of Lethargy: Take Some Wind Out of Their Sails
Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
Eldritch Blast is the warlock cantrip. It's what most people initially lean towards when playing the class, much like how Vicious Mockery is the go to bard cantrip. It's just expected to many. Lance of Lethargy is one of many upgrade options offered through invocations, offering a once per turn Ray of Frost slow effect. If it did anything more, I’d be all about it. As it is, it just likely isn’t going to have enough impact for me to justify trying it on even the most dedicated blasters.
The ten foot slow will only matter in very specific windows; if the creatures you’d want to slow are within its speed minus ten of you, this doesn’t help you. If moving without the slow wouldn’t put it within striking distance of you, the majority of the time this doesn’t change how many actions it needs to take to get there. This slow will typically only matter if a creature is exactly 25-30 feet away from you after you’ve had the ability to move. In this scenario, you’ve forced a creature into a bad spot where it either has to dash to get to you, or take another less optimal action and still not strike you. Forcing specific actions is great, a major boon to your team. These exact specifications make it overwhelmingly likely that this won’t be the case, though.
When you start mixing in elements like difficult terrain generated by friends, it does become more impactful. Slowing a creature with a speed of 30, when combined with difficult terrain, takes the available spaces it can move from 3 (15 ft.) to 2 (10 ft.). This is particularly relevant because of the typical radius’s difficult terrain effects. Take Entangle: it creates a 20 ft. square of difficult terrain that comes with a restrain. If you center it on a creature, it can move 10 feet through it on its turn, and 10 feet normally beyond it. With the slow, it can’t even leave the difficult terrain. When that difficult terrain harms them, like a Hunger of Hadar does, this can result in additional damage ticking up round after round. While awesome in theory, the practicality of it is suspect, and requires a lot of factors to go right to work. Alternatively, you could take a consistent invocation with uses outside of specifically pairing it with other effects that become even better when built around. Lance of Lethargy, even when you work your entire build around taking advantage of it, isn’t going to be doing anything that remarkable, namely because of how few creatures it can affect.
Lance of Lethargy isn’t good enough on its own to really sell me on it. Because Eldritch Blast based warlocks tend to fire out blasts every round of combat (including the first), this is more likely to have an impact on any given fight than Ray of Frost will, yet it costs a lot more to put on your sheet than Ray of Frost. The slow effect can be helpful, and in the right circumstances can shine brightly, I just don’t see that occurring that regularly. For that reason, Lance of Lethargy probably isn’t worth it, but if it speaks to you, you’ll definitely get some cool moments with it over the course of a few levels.
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