Prerequisite: 5th level, Pact of the Blade feature
You can attack with your pact weapon twice, instead of once, whenever you take the Attack action on your turn.
Thirsting Blade: Obey Your Thirst
Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
Warlock is such a nifty class to me because it gives you ways to make it fit comfortably in so many different “class buckets”. With a robust suite of utility invocations paired with Pact of the Tome, you can cobble together a high utility full-caster adjacent magic user. With Thirsting Blade, you can concretely land in the half-caster territory alongside the rangers and paladins out there. You can bend warlock in whatever directions you want, get exactly out of it what you ask from it. Thirsting Blade is a critical example of this.
A lot of classes don’t get a choice when they reach 5th level; they simply get Extra Attack. Fighters, rangers, monks, barbarians, and paladins all open up their combat options by getting a second attack every turn for the rest of time. Warlocks, instead of being forced to get Extra Attack, get to make a choice. If your goal is to play a more martial, weapon based warlock highlighting your combat prowess, you pick up Thirsting Blade. It’ll functionally turn you into a half-caster; you’ll have some spell casting options still for utility and durability, but also get decent combat options. It pairs well with Hex and other on hit damaging effects, meaning you can aim an entire build at attacking with multiple melee weapons, but you aren’t locked into this direction when you pick the class. Maybe you want Extra Attack to function well enough in combat, but want to dedicate your concentration and spell slots on better out-of-combat exploration or social navigation tools. Warlock lets you do that.
Thirsting Blade does require Pact of the Blade, which is kind of a bummer as that pact boon is largely considered to be the worst option, but Thirsting Blade does a decent job redeeming it. You can even build around being a ranged weapon attacker if you can just get access to a magic longbow to bind as your pact weapon, no other invocation required. If you aren’t getting a magic ranged weapon anytime soon, the Improved Pact Weapon feature is something you can take prior to this which will help you feel like a fighter with their arsenal of endless weapon choices.
Thirsting Blade is an invocation for the combat weapon based warlocks out there. This will often be the only invocation I pick up dedicated to martial warlock builds if I’m staying for a while in the warlock class and really want to kill stuff with a greatsword or longbow. It being an option opens up the warlock class to fit a variety of different play styles and fantasies. I wish it wasn’t limited to Pact of the Blade, but it does justify taking that boon on its own. Extra Attack is critical for martial builds; this will help you keep up with the other martial characters at the table at the cost of one of your invocations. That’s a great deal.
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