Pact of the Blade:
Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
A lone warrior, unarmored beyond a radiant aura and wielding a lone, slick, gilded silver blade advances up the steps towards the gargantuan demon lord of sloth, prepared to finally bring about their patrons final plan and end this monstrosity for good.
Pact of the Blade is one of those features that reels a ton of people in with an exciting premise. You’re promised a magical weapon of your patron's creation, a tool of some elder entity that assists you in delivering justice or punishments to those who cross you. For the edgiest of us, it's an opportunity to get a thirsting blade hungry for violence and souls. Others want a delicate, ornate fey dagger, or a brimstone crusted greatsword illuminated by flames of the damned.
All of that SOUNDS incredible. The fundamental problem is Pact of the Blade gives you this presentation, and nothing else.
Mechanically, you’re getting access to a melee martial weapon of your choice, typically a rapier or greatsword, depending on if you want to be Strength or Dexterity based, and that’s it. Being able to summon and dismiss it as an action is often going to feel like a worse version of simply drawing a normal weapon. Hypothetically, you can use this feature to get access to every melee weapon from the equipment section of the Player’s Handbook, which has some niche utility when you need a pick ax to break through a stone wall, but because it takes an action to summon, that’s the full extent of its utility.
It also lets you bind to a specific magic weapon to be your pact weapon, but that’s not overwhelmingly useful either as it doesn’t actually give the weapon any meaningful new abilities or improvements. A neat little feature here is you can bind to any magic weapon, not just melee ones, meaning if you can get a magic bow or gun you can get the pact weapon improvements a lot of invocations offer, but again, that’s not something the boon specifically is great for.
The only reason to take this in the first place is the invocations it offers; Thirsting Blade is how warlocks get access to multiple weapon-based attack rolls each turn. This is critical to basically every weapon based warlock build. Getting extra attack in this way feels more like it costs you your Pact Boon and an invocation, which is a bit of a bummer, but still absolutely worth it.
Improved Pact Weapon isn’t particularly amazing, but if you want to be building a multi-attack ranged weapon based warlock, and your DM isn’t in the mood to throw you a magic ranged option, it’s required to make that build happen.
Lifedrinker adds an extra modifier of damage to your two weapon attacks you’ll be making; this can stack pretty fast, especially if you’ve got both a high Str/Dex and a high Cha. It isn’t revolutionary nor particularly exciting, but does help upper tier weapon attacking warlocks continue scaling in the damage department.
Finally, there is Eldritch Smite; Pact Magic is already incredibly limiting. An invocation that only gives you a new way to spend your Pact Magic slots isn’t good enough. The free prone is nice, but you’ll already feel that your build is spending a lot of its features and options on attacking; Eldritch Smite will go on characters who don’t spend their spell slots on other things, which is to say, next to no actual warlock builds.
All in all, if you’re picking Pact of the Blade, it probably should be with the expectation of taking Thirsting Blade at 5th level, and possibly Lifedrinker down the road. If you don’t want to be consistently making weapon attacks round after round, you do not want Pact of the Blade. Hexblades even require it for their extra attack, making it so if you want to be weapon attacking as a warlock, you’re more or less required to go this route. Still, if you’re playing a warlock committed to staying with it for all twenty levels, given that warlock otherwise isn’t a martial class, this option is useful to flesh out a lot of those fantasies. I just wish Pact of the Blade empowered weaponed based warlocks in some other interesting or useful way. It often feels like you’re not even getting a new feature at 3rd level when you pick this up.
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.