Prerequisite: 9th level
You can cast Conjure Elemental once using a warlock spell slot. You can't do so again until you finish a long rest.
Minions of Chaos: Wildly Inconsistent
Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
Prior to Xanathar’s Guide to Everything and Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, Minions of Chaos served a noble, albeit frustrating, purpose. Warlock’s pact magic feature created a weird situation with a lot of long duration effects like Animate Dead, where by taking frequent short rests, you could hypothetically get far more out of the spell description than a full caster normally could. If people played with the design teams expected quantity of encounters per long rest, and mixed in an appropriate amount of short rests, warlocks could feel oppressively strong with an endless barrage of conjured enemies. In reality, almost no tables played this way, leaving warlocks in the dust while full casters actually got to feel like unstoppable summoners with endless barrages of tiny cretins at their disposal.
Minions of Chaos is a relic of the original design premises that warlock is built from. Conjure Elemental is one of the worst summoning options druids and wizards get access to when compared to Animate Objects, Conjure Minor Elementals, Conjure Animals, and Conjure Woodland Beings. This spell gives you one elemental, determined by the DM that is appropriate to the area. It can be any elemental CR 5 and under, meaning CR ¼ and ½ mephits are as likely options as the iconic large elementals and salamanders. This creates an incredibly volatile spell; sometimes you’re getting an 126 hit point earth elemental with 2d8+5 multiattack. Sometimes you’re getting a 27 hit point mud mephit. All of that on a full caster is bad; on a warlock, once per long rest, will feel uncastably bad. It's not worth risking one of your precious few spell slots on something that could be nearly useless. You need your pact magic spells to be high impact; this is going to be wildly inconsistent.
Ultimately, Minions of Chaos is not worth an invocation, not even close. Like Thief of Five Fates, all it does is functionally teach you a spell, then gate your usage to it to once a long rest instead of just letting you use your regular spell slots on it. Plus, warlocks now have access to Summon Shadowspawn and other FAR more consistent summoning effects, and have access to it a lot earlier. You don’t ever need to waste an invocation learning a mediocre, unstable summoning spell when you’ve now got access to consistent ones that scale with your pact magic well. Take invocations that empower what you’re doing in new ways, or open up new options to help you engage with the world. Minions of Chaos does neither.
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