Warlock Patrons: The Undying
Guide by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold
I’m not going to sugarcoat it: the Undying Otherworldly Patron is going to be nearly unusable at the majority of tables. When your core 1st level feature is Spare the Dying, advantage on saves against diseases, and an undead exclusive Sanctuary effect, you’re already looking at a niche that more or less requires you to regularly face undead to justify taking it. The upper level options don’t get so much better that the severely lacking 1st level feature can be overlooked.
Still, there are one or two redeeming qualities here, most of which also show up on the Undead Otherworldly Patron released in Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft. If you want the skeletal/necromantic warlock feel, that option will serve you better. If you do know you’re going into a world full of zombies and ghouls, the Undying may be good enough, but barely.
See Also: Best Feats for Undying Warlock
1st-3rd Level: Among the Dead and 1st and 2nd Level Expanded Spells
Among the Dead, as mentioned prior, is a majorly lacking feature at the majority of tables. Spare the Dying on its own is a glorified Medicine check, and easily replaced by access to a healer’s kit. Advantage on saves against diseases in a system lacking exciting or interesting diseases confronting most parties makes it, too, almost a non-feature. Among the Dead’s attack mitigation can be powerful, especially given that it only goes away when you target each undead specifically or they pass the save, but the truth of the matter is most D&D games aren’t against endless waves of undead. There may be a dungeon or two where you’ll get a lot of mileage out of this feature, but unless you know going into a campaign that undead will be a central antagonist, this feature will be mostly unusable.
False Life isn’t worth a Pact Magic slot. It has way too low of an impact, so low in fact that the invocation Fiendish Vigor offers you at will casts of it. On characters at tables fighting against swarms of zombies regularly, Fiendish Vigor can be a massive boon to builds looking to leverage their defenses by wading into the undead masses and soaking hits and repelling monsters. If you want False Life, that is absolutely how you should get it. You don’t want to spend spell slots that only grant you some temporary hit points.
Ray of Sickness is a low damage 1st level single target spell that needs to both hit and have the hit target fail a save to poison them for a single round. Compared to Guiding Bolt, Inflict Wounds, and Chromatic Orb, this is an absolute joke. Eldritch Blast and similar cantrips do nearly this much damage. Up-casting it doesn’t improve its usability, as it starts getting compared to spells dealing even more damage. Ray of Sickness is a uniquely terrible spell that will not feel good to spend one of your few Pact Magic slots on regularly.
Blindness/Deafness is the first mediocre spell to grace the expanded spell list for Undying patron warlocks. The up-cast hitting multiple creatures and not asking for your concentration lands it as a perfectly reasonable scaling save or die to use when you want one while also concentrating on a Hex or other potent concentration effect. Deafness won’t come up all too frequently, but a multi-round blind to set up allies and weaken an enemy or two can be worth the cast for sure.
Silence, while not benefitting from up-casting, has a unique effect that can act like a silver bullet against specific enemies (namely spellcasters). Its utility will drop pretty radically past 3rd level as far as its out of combat applications, but having this spell on your sheet will completely defang some terrifying enemies. All you need is a good grappling buddy and Silence to take all the wind out of a wizard’s sails. It also being a great addition to espionage missions and secretive discussions makes it a spell you’ll be happy to include on characters that already know what few spells they’re regularly casting with their Pact Magic.
4th-7th Level: Defy Death and 3rd and 4th Level Expanded Spells
Defy Death can be a spectacular ability; getting an extra round to cast an escape spell or finish off the villain will take some fights from losses to victories out of nowhere. Getting a d8 + Con back when you stabilize somebody else is almost worthless comparatively. Them both sharing the same resource is a real bummer; you should basically always wait to get more actions out of this by recovering from death rather than healing yourself while stabilizing somebody else. The downsides of Defy Death being attached to passing a death save is sometimes you’ll just fail three death saves in a row, dying outright. If you assume you’ll get the save passed and don’t, you can set yourself up to randomly die when somebody else may have been able to intervene. This puts it as a clunky, difficult to use feature that has the potential to save the group from a total party kill, but sometimes may just leave you dead when you try to get back up with it.
Feign Death is a deception tool near and dear to my heart; I love the ludicrous plans of smuggling living people in through the morgue to snoop around for clues down there, plans involving hiding from a villain atop their massacred victims to get the drop on them from out of nowhere. Warlocks don’t have a lot of room on their sheets for these kinds of low impact, high risk utility spells. It being a ritual does mean if you have ritual casting through Book of Ancient Secrets you can get access to the ritual version of this (which is WAY better), but you probably don’t want to be in a spot where you need to spend one of your two or three spell slots on this, especially when they’re 4th or 5th level slots.
Speak with Dead can be obtained through the Whispers of the Grave invocation at 9th level; if you want it prior to that, you can learn it here and forget it later! Speak with Dead has a unique information gathering effect few other spells and features in the game can really mimic, meaning while you’re not jazzed to spend higher than 3rd level spells on this effect, when in exploration mode looking for clues or secrets having access to dead NPCs to question can be valuable regardless of tier.
Aura of Life is a nearly uncastable concentration effect that will feel like a silver bullet against exactly and only creatures that deal necrotic damage. Bringing up downed allies might make this a 4th level version of Cure Wounds in some instances, but if everyone is already down and you still have spell slots left, you probably are one of the reasons people are down, as other spells almost certainly would have helped mitigate that in the first place. It taking your concentration as well makes it so whatever necrotic monstrosity you’re facing down is just encouraged to slap you around till it goes away, and again, the affect on its own is terrible outside this hyper niche scenario. Aura of Life is terrible on clerics, worse on paladins, and worse yet on warlocks.
Death Ward comes as a long overdo major toy for the subclass to play with. Its 8 hour duration will often leave this feeling more like a feature than a spell; if you’ve got an hour or two of downtime before an adventure begins, you can cast Death Ward with all your spell slots, short rest for them back, and still have the wards up with the feeling of no slots expended. If you’re playing an Undying warlock, this is a spell I highly recommend picking up, as a few well placed Death Wards can keep you and your other party members alive for extra critical rounds, all with the context of Pact Magic spell slots making it feel free for the taking.
8th-10th Level: Undying Nature and 5th Level Expanded Spells
Undying Nature is functionally a ribbon effect, a non-mechanically impactful upgrade. And its all you get at 10th level. Even resistance to a niche damage type is worth more than this, and I’m NEVER excited about those. As far as ribbons go, you’re only ever really get to see the first portion of Undying Nature. Some munchkin builds looking to abuse Font of Magic from the sorcerer class with back to back short rests that play with new rules added for missing sleep might consider the no sleep text here reason to take it, but seeing as elves and other races can avoid sleep without committing 10 levels to warlock and an invocation with Pact of the Tome offers the same benefits I can’t imagine this is a real reason to consider the Undying patron.
Contagion has a distinct effect that I want to love, but the nature of the diseases and ease of access to detect and remove the diseases makes it a clunky, difficult to use effect that will disappoint people excited by the fantasy. A creature is making at least three saves after you spend an action poisoning them with a hit attack roll; sometimes, that’s all the spell will do, and if that’s ever the case, you’ll be sour for casting it.
Even if you do get a creature to fail three saves before dying, the diseases are predominately disadvantage on a type of ability score roll. Flesh Rot and Slimy Doom offer vulnerability to all damage and a stun when damaged effect, both of which can be excellent, but with how many rounds this takes to actually get set up and how impactful it is out of combat, I can’t justify ever wanting to cast this. I don’t think any warlock should consider it, either.
Legend Lore is the last expanded spell offered, and all I really have to say about that is I’m sorry, Undying fans. This ain’t it. Legend Lore is a 250 gold priced wikipedia search via the DM. It’s loose, unreliable knowledge that takes money to use. As an out of combat way to gain information, try a library. Ask around town. Get in touch with the local historians. All of that doesn’t cost you spell slots, and none of that can possibly run you more than 250 gold pieces.
14th Level: Indestructible Life
Indestructible Life rounds out this underwhelming patron with yet another massively disappointing feature. Once per short rest, you get… Second Wind. The first level fighter feature. But worse, because the dice is 1d8 instead of 1d10. Reattaching limbs doesn’t save this feature. It is abysmally bad.
All Together
The only redeeming elements on the Undying patron are Death Ward, Defy Death, and Among the Dead (and only at tables fighting for their lives in a literal zombie apocalypse). If you want the fantasy the Undying warlock is offering, the Undead warlock is a revamp of it that offers Death Ward, an upgraded version of Defy Death, and a suite of other interesting and exciting options. Unless you’re playing a low tier undead themed game, I can’t recommend trying this option out: it's truly terrible at the vast majority of tables.
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