Prerequisite: 5th level
You can cast Slow once using a warlock spell slot. You can't do so again until you finish a long rest.
Mire the Mind: Slow Off the Mark
Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
There are a handful of invocations that are utter trash, functionally unusable, and all of them share important words. The read as follows: “You can cast SPELL NAME once using a warlock spell slot. You can’t do so again until you finish a long rest.” Mechanically this is supposed to be a balancing factor for pact magic, the warlock mechanic gating their spell slots to two or three per short rest. It's a release valve the designers added in to prevent spells from getting repeatedly cast and abused over and over again. For spells like Animate Dead or Conjure Minor Elementals, I’d understand. For Slow? Get out of here; this is just a horrendous oversight in design, a massive missed mark of understanding how pact magic and the Slow spell both would perform.
Slow is fine on full casters; it's a situational area of effect save or die that can majorly debilitate some creatures, while other times it won’t meaningfully detract from enemy actions or majorly impact a fight. Ranged attackers making one attack a round (commonly seen in the low to mid tiers) don’t care about Slow. If you’ve got melee allies going to engage single attack making melee monsters, Slow is only primarily imposing a -2 to the creatures’ ACs. For Slow to shine, you want it to mitigate multiattack, eat actions by forcing dashes, and give other ranged allies a free round or two to hit from a distance. Otherwise, options like Fear will likely be more consistent.
Nothing about this even remotely justifies spending a warlock spell slot on it, let alone an entire invocation. Nothing about Slow is so good you’d want to spend one of your precious few invocations being told you’re ALLOWED to cast this. It doesn’t scale with spell level, meaning as soon as you hit 7th level you’re spending 4th level slots on a 3rd level effect, eats your concentration, has a duration of only a minute, meaning its a short lived impact for one of the few spells you’ll be casting all day, and is a massive opportunity cost when you could be taking a critical damage upgrade with Agonizing Blast or Thirsting Blade or a major toolbox upgrade with any of the “at will” cast invocations.
Mire the Mind is an embarrassment of an invocation. You can’t afford this on warlocks. It gives you a spell you’re not going to want to cast with your pact magic slots, then gates it to once a long rest anyway. This is worse than learning a spell that is bad on warlocks. Don’t take Mire the Mind. Almost every other invocation is better than this.
Thank you for visiting!
If you’d like to support this ongoing project, you can do so by buying my books, getting some sweet C&C merch, or joining my Patreon.
The text on this page is Open Game Content, and is licensed for public use under the terms of the Open Game License v1.0a.
‘d20 System’ and the ‘d20 System’ logo are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast, Inc.
and are used according to the terms of the d20 System License version 6.0.
A copy of this License can be found at www.wizards.com/d20.
