Proto-type for a class: A New Take on the Warlock/New Ideas
I've been thinking up a re-design for the 3.5 Warlock. Trying to figure out new ideas for this class in the re-design.
One of the most common problems that I see with the Warlock, and I will admit that I suffer from this myself, is its 3.5 fluff baggage where it pertains to how the Warlock got their abilities from Dark, Forgotten, Fey, or whatever problems. I've come to the conclusion that this is one of the major cruxes of the issue with warlock conversions to pathfinder.
The simple fact is that the 3.5 Warlock was designed to do what the 3.5 Sorcerer abysmally failed to do. The 3.5 Sorcerer was suppose to have the blood of arcane heritages coursing through his veins (sound familiar) but was nerfed so badly because of the over estimation of the power of spontaneous casting.
Rather than fix the issue WotC decided to just about abandon the Sorcerer and designed his replacement.
Well now we have a new problem. You see the Warlock is not OGL, so guess what, Paizo can't get him. To compound the issue, they actually FIXED the Sorcerer by giving him back what he should have had in the first place, his bloodlines. Thus if you try to directly convert the warlock, flavor and all, he really starts to step on the sorcerer's toes.
THE NEW IDEA: So I decided to try and go a new route with the Warlock in terms of flavor. Rather than have him bound to a fiendish, feyish, or whatever heritage, I said to myself why not ditch all that and instead think of the Warlock as a maverick spell caster. The rogue of the arcane world with no formal training. Unlike the Sorcerer his power doesn't necessary stem from a heritage. Unlike a Wizard he had no one to teach him how to properly wield his power. Instead I'm envisioning the warlock as someone that has learned how to tap into the very primal energies of arcane magic, and through sheer force of will learned to channel that energy in a very basic but very effective fashion. Thus they never really learned spells, their abilities (aside from blasting things with raw power) are spell like abilities that they have learned to sculpt out of the magical energy they wield. This power gradually begins to infuse their very being, granting them more special abilities like damage reduction, energy resistance, ect.
The Decision to Incorporate Channeling: Like I said earlier, the idea to make the warlock into someone who just channels raw magical energy opened up a new idea. The ability to channel raw magical energy. For this I'm drawing inspiration from the Psionic class: The Wilder. Specifically the Wild Surge ability.
Restructuring of Eldritch Blast For the blast abilities it just made sense to go with a progression of gaining 1D6 at every odd level rather then to switch it up from levels 11 thru 20.
Eldritch Powers: In an attempt to try and bring the class in line with Pathfinder standards I'm considering doing something very similar to the Alchemist discoveries or Rogue Talents. The reason behind this is simple. These abilities will allow for the further customization of the class beyond the simple selection of invocation powers.
Stripping out the old flavor: One of the things I really wanted to do was remove all the dark over tones over the class. Thus invocations would be renamed to be more generic, abilities like Fiendish Resilience would be converted into simply "Fast healing/X". Also heritage specific abilities would be neutralized. DR would be changed from DR/cold iron to DR/Magic.
So these are some of the basic ideas I've had for this redesign. I'm looking for thoughts and input. If you have ideas and you want to share them feel free. I'm looking to brain storm.
Tell me what you all think.
DR/Magic isn't going to age very well.
DR/Magic isn't going to age very well.
Its a starting point. I'm thinking about having some way of changing it via a discovery/talent.