Star Pact Warlocks

[Zahlfire]

First feedback thread here ever, but here we go. I apologize in advance for the word vomit.

With the recent changes to warlocks and their blast types, immunities, etc. I feel that the Star Pact lacks quite a bit in some departments compared to the others (and primarily the Fey pact.)

Let's start with their respective spell lists.

Star gets four hour/CL spells on their pact list, and Fey receives one. People might see this as an advantage for the Star, but it's the opposite. With the time change and the number of spell slots a warlock gets, there is no reason to need more than one or two hour/CL spells on their pact list. They're spells that you only need to cast once or twice per person, and you have plenty of spell slots from the class and metamagic to cast them ten times over.

Moving onto the shorter-duration spells, we have another problem. Star gets no access to a decent concealment spell in their pact list, but Fey gets Improved Invisibility, and Hag gets Displacement. This puts one of the caster-focused pacts at a disadvantage compared to the other two that fulfill a similar role. Star also just lost their ranged concealment bonus from their Epic Pact. Finally, Star gets infinite Ghostly Visage, a feeble spell, with only the 10% concealment having any effect if you get the Epic Pact feat as the innate 10/+5 from their Epic pact trumps Ghostly Visage's.
Adding onto this, See Invisibility. It is a useful spell but useless for the pact itself as they get a permanent version of it at the Greater Pact tier. You could cast it repeatedly on others, but how often will you need to that you need infinite of it?

Star also gets quite a few offensive spells compared to the other pacts, and this feels alright enough, though the focus on spells that require a save to lower other's saves in addition to their hex feels lackluster. You have Mind Fog, Crushing Despair, Eyebite, and Hex of Acedia that can lower someone's Will save on a maximum roll between the four by nineteen! That's huge! Will it ever happen? No. Your target will long be dead by the time you lower their saves enough with repeated castings from the above to make use of your other spells. If Star had a bonus to their spell DCs, I could see it being better. I'm just talking about PvE here as well. Star falls even more behind the others in offensive capabilities in the current save-meta. The community can constantly argue this point back and forth, but I'm not here to do that. This is my opinion, and I stand by that. They don't get access to Epic Spell Focus, and if they go all-in on Charisma to boost their DCs to a still less than competitive level they are giving up or hurting other tools they have, which they arguably need.

Before we leave the spell lists, let's look at one more. Nightmare. Why does Star get infinite casts of Nightmare when they have no infinite way of putting a target to sleep to use it. This one baffles me. They get Eyebite, but that only puts a target with four or fewer HD to sleep. Not four less than you, four total. They have Sleep on their spell list, but wasting spell slots for a chance at putting targets to sleep to spam infinite nightmare (which you can only cast on a target once) is awful.

Some people feel that Star should have infinite Haste like Fey does (no cooldown on self-cast) as they had the spell before it was given to all warlocks, but I don't feel strongly one way or another.

Alright! Moving on from their spell lists, we have their pact bonuses.

Tier 1 Star gets a language (neat) and a saveless penalty from Crushing Despair, which is alright but weak.

Tier 2 Star gets a weakened version of Hexblade's Hex (culminates in a -3 AC debuff at 27 Warlock), immunity to Fear, and the permanent, as mentioned earlier See Invisibility. Not bad options, honestly. However, your infinite castings of it nullify the See Invisibility boon, and the immunity to Fear is nigh useless if you're a caster Warlock with high Charisma, dipping Hexblade, or Blackguard. I mention this only because a Charisma-based caster is what Star seems to be focused on, and a Dark Blessing dip only makes sense for it.

Tier 3 Star is the troublesome one. For investing three feats, you get: A -3 saves addition to your Hex, which is excellent given that they're focused on reducing saves/utilizing save-based spells. You also get a +5 bonus to your Lore and Spellcraft, which is decent. Next is a unique summon skin that is very cool but not an actual mechanical boon.

Finally, like the other pacts, you get a couple of bonuses from your eldritch blast. I feel this is the weakest on a Star pact because, as stated above, you are already focused primarily on casting if you wish to utilize your pact spells appropriately. These bonuses last for one round, meaning you lose them if you stop blasting. You get a 10/+5 Damage Reduction shield, and if you have the Abjuration line of feats, you can get immunity to ILMS and IGMS. Not only do you need to be blasting to get these bonuses, but they are terrible. 10/+5 is nigh worthless in epic content when mobs can and will hit you for far more. Even a boost to 20/+5 would be decent since it only lasts one round; however, then we come to PvP, where a +5 weapon isn't that hard to come by now for many classes, let alone the meta picks right now. The ones that won't utilize a +5 weapon will typically deal enough damage to completely ignore that 10 DR. Then we have the immunity to ILMS and IGMS. You will have the Shield spell up if you are trying to stay alive. +4 AC, and it works with your Abjuration feats to defend against ILMS and IGMS making this perk redundant. When playing my Feylock I had Shield up if I was in a dungeon with mobs that cast missile spells or in a PvP fight. It's a cheap spell and common sense. The +5 Lore from your Tier 2 Pact is enough to cast it from a scroll (50 gold) even with zero lore investment!

I firmly believe the Pact bonuses for Star need to be tweaked and made better because, as it stands, they are weak for such a heavy investment. It is weird to have a pointless damage shield and spell immunity from your blasts that only lasts for one round on a pact that is pushed to focus on its spellbook. I like Star being focused on Defensive blast bonuses rather than Offensive, but they currently don't feel good.

Finally, let's discuss the Eldritch Blast essences, immunities, etc.

At Tier 1 Star, you get the Psychic blast and 5% Psychic immunity/DR. A very, very cool and thematic blast type with a great VFX. The only problem is that any creature that is mind-immune (and there are a LOT) is entirely immune to this blast type. Why not use another? Well..you only get this one until level ten, meaning you have to rely on a cantrip. You can't even use your eldritch blast against a mind-immune mob starting off, and there are many of them in the lower levels! Oozes, undead, insects, driders, and gibberlings, to name a few. My proposal for a change is to give Star pacts a reduced damage dice when using Psychic against mind-immune creatures.

At Tier 2 Star, you get Entropy blast, 5% Entropy immunity/DR, and better Psychic immunity. Entropy is a powerful blast type currently. No (existing) mobs currently resist it, and the only defense against it is a 5/- DR essence. It's the new Positive from Fey after Fey's got nerfed.

At Tier 3 Star, you get Magic blast, and your immunities improve by another five each. Typical for most warlocks.

The problem here stems from the weird layout of the blasts, their strengths and weaknesses, and the levels you get them at. A proposal I thought of was to give them Cold at Tier 1, Psychic at Tier 2, and Entropy at Tier 3 and rework it to function similar to Magic/Positive, but that comes with the drawback of not having a single strong blast type and unlike Positive, Entropy doesn't heal. So if you encounter something immune to cold and mind-immune, you suddenly only have a weak blast to use against them. I don't think this is the right solution, just one I thought of. It tackles the Psychic immunity issue at levels 3-9 but comes with its own set. Psychic, Entropy, and Magic are also very fitting for a Star pact, so I'd prefer to keep them.

The balance of the Warlock pacts has been a topic of conversation on Discord frequently over the last few days, with Star being mentioned more than the others. That about does it for my word vomit. I probably contradicted myself a couple of times, but I feel this needed to be written down now so that the developers could do something about it. Maybe someone else will have better feedback below!

[xf1313]

That is very well said, I only just started to play starlock, and I had to dip into a Nighthag pact to get the sleep and most importantly, darkness...to survive in battle. Honestly these 2 has good synergies. Pure starlock that goes epic Eldritch Mastery would most certainly needs a group to survive.

I do not know if it is intended, a warlock has to make hard choices and the feats seems really really tight. A blast master would have no summon (save for demon and devil, who gets everything) Fey, demon, devil are just soooo good lol.

[Ithalan]

There are a couple of odd choices on the pact spell, I think. But overall I feel like it works. The problem I see is mostly that the offensive pact spells are spread across several different spell schools, exacerbating the problem Warlocks already have with lackluster spell DCs by making it difficult to boost them with spell focus. In practice you'll most likely pick Spell Focus: Enchantment and/or Spell Focus: Evocation, and then ignore the offensive spells not from those two schools entirely.

Star Pact at the moment feel in general like it gets pushed toward using mind-affecting abilities hard, and that's cool. But it also gets impacted pretty hard by anything with clarity/lesser mind blank/mind blank up, and has no effective way of dealing with that due to their relatively low placement on the breach list.

Since the 10/+5 damage reduction on eldritch blast at tier 3 makes no difference unless you're constantly eldritch blasting, and feel kind of inadequate even then as described by others, perhaps it could be replaced with a dispel effect that only targets the above-mentioned 3 spells? It would give eldritch blast a proper use for a Star Pact warlock focusing on pact spells rather than blasting also.

[malcolm_mountainslayer]

That is very well said, I only just started to play starlock, and I had to dip into a Nighthag pact to get the sleep and most importantly, darkness...to survive in battle. Honestly these 2 has good synergies. Pure starlock that goes epic Eldritch Mastery would most certainly needs a group to survive.

I do not know if it is intended, a warlock has to make hard choices and the feats seems really really tight. A blast master would have no summon (save for demon and devil, who gets everything) Fey, demon, devil are just soooo good lol.

Planar binding is a useful spell. Use it. That and create undead. Doesn't need to be eldritch summon or pact spell to do pve

[Drowboy]

Playing around with Starlock and with other warlock types, it almost feels a little, like, left behind?

It's almost kind of got the nightmare/illusiony/spooky niche, but Night Hag hits that a lot harder. It's almost got an enchanting niche, but feylock exists. It's almost got a cool rider effect.. But not really comparatively, and certainly not a unique one, since anyone can take abj focus and use shield pots.

Overall? It's cool, it's so cool, but the coolness of the concept feels like it's covering some mechanical/thematic gaps that could be addressed with some swapping. As well, it seems like most pacts favor one to two spell schools: Infernal loves evo and conj, Abyssal likes conj and maybe transmu, fey loves enchantment, night hag likes ench and illu. Undying.

Whereas starlock has bits and pieces: some evo spells, an abjur-related blast, some enchantment, and a debuffer vibe that's thematically interesting but not really mechanically helpful, as such, due to pve kill times and how chaotic pvp can get if you're trying to debuff rather than kill as anything but a bard. This is maybe kind of sweeping, but I'd make the following changes:

1. Give them a clearer "spell focus" route: As above, most pacts favor one or two, but star's kind of all over the place. I'd argue for Evo and either ench or div (no scry).

2. Tweak the epic bonuses, removing the hex if need be to do so.

What that maybe looks like:

Add Moonbeam, displacement, and PW:Stun to their infinicast list, and PW:K to the warlock list at 8, give them back haste how feylock do it, and maybe a couple other interesting star/cold/night/sky/the crawling unknown/etc based spells, removing, say, nightmare, blindness, entropic shield, and whatever else doesn't fit the new paradigm.

Kill the abjur IGMS shield thing. Maybe kill Hex.
Instead: Starlocks that aren't in combat but are outside at night refresh x spell slots per whatever number of rest ticks, with the level of the spell going up with each pact tier taken. Only works if you have no other pacts.

Instead of 10/+5 DR, it's 5/-, with an additional x/- per div focus, lasting for 1+1d2 rounds.
or give them like a cold damage rider idk.

[xf1313]

There are a couple of odd choices on the pact spell, I think. But overall I feel like it works. The problem I see is mostly that the offensive pact spells are spread across several different spell schools, exacerbating the problem Warlocks already have with lackluster spell DCs by making it difficult to boost them with spell focus. In practice you'll most likely pick Spell Focus: Enchantment and/or Spell Focus: Evocation, and then ignore the offensive spells not from those two schools entirely.

Star Pact at the moment feel in general like it gets pushed toward using mind-affecting abilities hard, and that's cool. But it also gets impacted pretty hard by anything with clarity/lesser mind blank/mind blank up, and has no effective way of dealing with that due to their relatively low placement on the breach list.

Since the 10/+5 damage reduction on eldritch blast at tier 3 makes no difference unless you're constantly eldritch blasting, and feel kind of inadequate even then as described by others, perhaps it could be replaced with a dispel effect that only targets the above-mentioned 3 spells? It would give eldritch blast a proper use for a Star Pact warlock focusing on pact spells rather than blasting also.

It is very odd to have blindness in Enchantment and mass blindness in illusion? NightHag, fathomless and star needs a bit of adjustment.

[AstralUniverse]

I used Star for my warlock/bg and it was awesome. But I was only going for greater pact and and 5 blast feats so I dont really have much of an opinion on the pact as a whole except that for my greater pact build, Star was *definitely* the optimal way to go.

[malcolm_mountainslayer]

I used Star for my warlock/bg and it was awesome. But I was only going for greater pact and and 5 blast feats so I dont really have much of an opinion on the pact as a whole except that for my greater pact build, Star was *definitely* the optimal way to go.

Yeah I think starpact is great. Maybe not as good as feypact overall but it makes a great blaster build as you pointed out and it also makes for good daul pact caster builds


Like an abyss star pact warlock can have epic fiend, Lots of good damaging spell options, permanent ultra and see invisible, good infinite zoo buff pairing for buffing said summon empowered castings, infinite darkness which I never even need to use, etc.