How to Play a Sorlock (Sorcerer, Warlock Multiclass) in D&D 5e

this week's episode of our show has been sponsored by fables and their first Adventure The Citadel of the Unseen Sun this fables Adventure is now coming to life in a physical form as six hardcover books which will be crowdfunded on backer kit these Adventures have been written by some amazing talent in the industry including James hake and yours truly as contributing to it and it is suitable for characters of first all the way up to 13th level exploring the dark vampire vampire ruled realm of estoya this series features over 500 pages of content over 40 monsters as well as all the maps and tokens that you need to run the adventures follow the links in the description below the hardcover books are launching at the end of November and now onto this week's episode greetings my name is Monty Martin and I'm Kelly McLaughlin and we are the dungeon dudes Welcome to our Channel where we cover everything D including advice for players and guides for GMS we release videos every Tuesday and Thursday so please like this video subscribe to the channel and hit the bell for notifications so that you can be up to date on all of our content and a big thank you to all of our amazing patrons for making the work that we do here on YouTube possible more information on how you can support the channel at the end of the video but for today Cali and I are going to be taking a look at how to play a sorcerer warlock multi-class character in DND 5e affectionately known often as the sore lock now there's a lot of things to love about combining a warlock and a sorcerer this is known and well regarded in the DMD Community it's one of the more powerful multi-classing combinations So today we're going to look at building a character from first level through to we might look at eighth level and then talk about how you would go further from there we're going to talk about how many levels of each class you want to take what spells ability scores Feats races and all of that that you're going to want to keep in mind when building a sore lock there's so much to talk about in how to play this character as a fantastic magical damage dealer with a hefty dose of great utility packed in as well so let's get rolling to start off let's talk about the goal of this character our goal is to reach five levels of sorcerer and three levels of warlock now there's many different Avenues on how to get there and a few different Avenues offer a few different play Styles right off the bat but for the most part you're going to be great at dealing damage with spells that's kind of the Forte of this character this all comes from the fact that with three levels of Warlock and five levels of sorcerer you are going to have a core of the sorcerer's metamagic abilities but you're also going to be able to dip your toes into the Eldritch invocations that boost up Eldritch blast so we're going to be combining metamagic Eldritch blasts and Eldritch in invocations to yield a very very potent combination you're gonna have some great combos going on here by having an area of effect spell like hunger of Hadar and then also your Eldritch blast with reliable invocations like agonizing blast or repelling blast and then also pairing that with the ability to do things like quick and spell or empowered spell so many of the metamagics and the invocations combine really nicely to create a unique package only available to this character as an example with this this character in a single turn you'll be able to Quicken hunger of Hadar dropping that horrific spell on the battlefield and then using your action to cast Eldritch blast to knock any foes that weren't in the area into the hunger of Hadar thanks to the forceful blast invocation and then on subsequent turns you'll be able to reinforce this and throw Fireballs into your hunger of Hadar while still knocking more enemies into the hunger of Hadar with subsequent Elvis blasts it's a really amazing combination of both Battlefield control and damage dealing and is a very very rewarding playstyle one of the things that I always look for when I'm building a multi-class is that when I'm divvying up my ability scores I can reliably overlap the ability scores of the characters that I'm combining with a sorcerer and warlock they are both charisma-based spellcasters so luckily for us we don't have to stray too far are from looking at Charisma and Constitution as our main two this means that the two classes mesh perfectly and you don't have to stray very far from what you would have done with one or the other anyways in terms of abilities and leveling up now the pack magic spell casting and the regular sorcerer spell casting don't stack together to give you access to higher level spell slots by combining these when we have an eighth level character as a sorcerer warlock unfortunately we're going to have second level packed magic slots and only third level spell slots as our sorcerer because they don't combine together as if we multi-class say perhaps a wizard in a cleric however we can still use our sorcerer spell slots to cast our warlock spells and we can use our warlock spell slots to cast our sorcerer spells but more importantly we can also expend our warlock spell slots using the font of magic class feature to get sorcery points converting those warlock spell slots into sorcery points that we can use to replenish our sorcerer's spell slots or that we can use for more metamagic and because those warlock spell slots come back on a short rest this character now has a much more reliable supply of sorcery points and can replenish their their sorcerer spell slots by extension now there's a bunch of different ways that you can cheese this out and that is a Surefire way to get your dungeon master very angry at you and have a giant bolt of lightning Smite your character from the sky so as a disclaimer any of the kind of shenanigans that you can pull off with this like a character resting continually to get infinite spell slots or a character that is taking way too many short rests when they're not needed despite the rest of the party wanting to move on If You're Gonna Play This build in actual play I recommend that you avoid that kind of behavior because that will make your dungeon master very upset with you and don't even poke the bear on whether or not it actually works and in my experience a lot of characters left to take a short rest whenever possible and so the fact that as a spellcaster who's going to have all of these reliable ways to use your spell slots not just for spells but for metamagics you are going to be benefiting a lot more than playing a straight sorcerer would or even a straight warlock so let's dive into actually building the character starting off at first level where we're going to choose our race and assign our ability scores for the purposes of this video we're going to be using Point by however if you're using a standard array or rolling the idea is knowing where to put your best stats for race though really you can go a lot of different ways here I think that one of the best options to choose is the half elf the half elf just gives you a really good assortment of ability scores to divvy up has some cool features and just feels pretty iconic on the character so in terms of ability scores with Point by we're going to max out the Charisma with a 15 there I think we're also going to grab the maxed out Constitution with the 15 there as well because we're going to be going hex blade warlock we're actually going to get medium armor proficiency so if we put a 13 in our dexterity and then use one of the half elf boost to bring that to 14 we're going to max out our our AC wearing medium armor then from there intelligence wisdom and strength put whatever leftover points you got I put intelligence wisdom at 10 leave the strength to nothing we're only going to wear medium armor so it shouldn't be too bad for carrying capacity um of course the half elf brings our Charisma up to 17 and we put the plus one of the other plus one into con so we end up with Charisma 17 con 16 dexterity 14 tens in the in the intelligence wisdom and an eight in strength so one of the most important questions when you're multi-classing is at level one which class are you going to start with and I think in the case of the sore lock it is best to start with the sorcerer the main reason for this is that Sorcerers gain Proficiency in Constitution saving throws which is going to be really handy for all of those concentration smells also having a good Constitution safe can help out in a lot of other situations but mainly worse spellcaster good con is important especially if we're going to be squishy luckily we have the hex blade to give us medium armor so we're actually going to be a pretty robust spellcaster we're going to get into what spells we're going to load up this character with but I think to be really iconic to really mesh the Sorcerer And World Arc together we're going to go with the aberrant mind not only does the aberrant mind fit the theme but I also really love the expanded spell that's the the operant mind gets and it feels like it just gives us more of what we want for this multi-class it's going to give us an expanded spell list it's going to give us more opportunity to grab some really good warlock spells through the sorcerer side of things and it's going to make the whole character feel very very cohesive I think especially because we're going to be multi-classing into Warlock the aberrant mind is naturally going to have those psychic Whispers that call to them from an otherworldly Patron now the next question is beyond first level are we going to multi-class into warlock right away are we going to take a couple more sorcerer levels and this is where I think the answer to this question is are you actually playing this character from first level or not I think that unless you are starting out as a higher level character I think that playing through five straight levels of sorcerer is gonna feel stronger at those early levels of play than dipping into warlock any earlier than that so for me I recommend just progress as a sorcerer to level five so that you can get those third level spell slots as soon as you possibly can and then take your three levels of Warlock the other popular choice here is still starting with sorcerer taking one level but then immediately jumping into three levels of warlock this is going to give you your Eldritch Blast Your invocations it's also going to get you that Medium armor proficiency and all of the hex blade goodies as soon as you hit fourth level with this character both are very viable options depending on what it is you're looking for I do agree with Monty though that if you're playing right from first level that dip can make the first two to three levels feel pretty weak where as if you go straight sorcer you're at least dishing out the normal sorcerer package of spells and meta magic so that you would normally get either way once we hit Level 8 and have that five levels of sorcerer three levels of warlock we have fully got all the pieces we need to bring this all together and we're going to talk about the metamagic and invocation and spell Selections in a moment after this point though I think we're pretty much just going to advance as a sorcerer from here we get kind of all those goodies from three levels of warlock that we need and from here on out we just want to get those higher level spells and higher level spell slots so we get more dramatic and impactful effects it might be tempting to take one more level of Warlock and depending on how your campaign is going that might be a very viable option if your campaign is going into the high levels where you expect to be able to cast ninth level Spells at some point then you do not want to take the fourth level of warlock as that's going to hinder your ability to gain access to ninth level spells bear in mind though that this character will only get ninth level Spells at level 20 so again if your campaign has no intention of running up to level 20 you might be fine to take the fourth level of warlock so we mentioned that for subclasses we're going to be going with the average mind and the hexblade Warlock these give us those extra features that expanded spell list those armor proficiencies we're not really going to be fighting in melee as a hex blade it's just that the armor proficiency is really juicy you could go with another warlock packed here I just don't think that you get as much bang for your bucket of another one I do think that depending on your play style subclasses are actually completely interchangeable the thing that we're really here for is invocations meets metamagic but we happen to like the Auburn mind meets the hex blade we think that it gives us the best of everything but I think that you could totally play this character as a Divine soul with a Celestial pact yeah I think that you could play this character as a master of of both Dragon magic and of fiendish Magic by having the dragon and the um and the fiend pact I think that you could do all sorts of things with wild magic and a Fae pact and of course the great old one is always an option here I really think that any combination works well although my top three on the sorcerer side would definitely be the Clockwork Soul the Divine soul and the aberrant mind and I I do agree with that and I do think I mean when we first picked aberrant mind I kind of immediately thought great old one yeah but we want that Medium armor proficiency but if you're going for Pure flavor the great old one meets the Auburn mind is Iconic now with both characters we're gonna get two big Choi choices to make two metamagic options and two Eldridge invocations and I think we're pretty sold on what these need to be I think that for your meta magic options you need to take quick and spell and empowered spell quick and spell is going to open up a lot of options for you to continually Eldridge blast people while dropping important spells on the battlefield if you mess up the role on an Eldritch blast or drop a damage dealing spell and just roll a bunch of ones empowered spell is a great way to just share things up and make sure that you are the damage dealing spellcaster on the battlefield I will say it's hard to say no to subtle spell though and you might get interesting benefits from Twin spell although remember you can't twin Eldritch blast past level five as a character because it already can Target more than one target there could be some interesting options there for taking twin spell it can be a little bit more expensive metamagic Point cost wise but you got lots of points coming back to you on the Eldritch invocation side I don't really think there's a lot of wiggle room here though you want to double down on your Aldridge blast that is the bread and butter of this character so agonizing blast is a must and I think that repelling Blast for the character that we're building we love the character that can knock people around into area of effect spells and we're going to do the same thing with the sore lock here combining a good area of effect spell like hunger of Hadar with Eldritch blast that can knock people back into it that's the key to success and so those are the two that I would take now jumping into spells it's important to break down whether we're getting the spells from the Warlock side or the sorcerer side so for the Warlock side obviously we're taking Elders blast we do get to pick one other cancer appear what would you take mine sliver maybe I guess we're gonna get five canterps on the sorcerer side which I think we're gonna go with the classic combo of prestidigitation minor illusion magehand and then for those early levels of play I would probably just grab Chill Touch and Firebolt if you're doing levels one to five as a sorcerer that means you're not going to have Eldritch blast until sixth level so having a few reliable damage dealing cantrips is going to be important now for first level spells on the Warlock side of things our Patron being the hex blade we can grab Shield here as well and I think it's good always as a warlock to have hex in your back pocket it's just an easy thing that you can always rely on there's going to be combat encounters where you can't push the enemies around where they are always going to make their saving throws where you can't throw down that damaging AOE and sometimes you just want to hex them debuff an ability score and get some extra damage I like packing that with me as well for first level sorcerer spells I think the big one here is absorb elements I think with us having medium armor the ability to stand on the middle to front lines we probably don't want to be on the front lines too often but hey if we get hit with something absorb elements is just going to help us fight back we may not be a Melee character but you can always choose to hit somebody with melee and you're not losing a lot by doing it I also think that I mean with the introduction of silvery barbs I see it I'm probably going to take it the there wasn't too much else that stood out to me there's some good spells so really after absorb elements from the sorcerer list I'd say pick your favorites I went with silvery barbs and of course as an aberrant mind we're already gonna have arms of Hadar and dissonant Whispers I guess if you wanted to you could throw something in here like Tasha's hideous laughter or sleep that you would keep for a couple levels and then retrain out for those just early levels of play but I love both dissonant Whispers it's another great way of driving enemies and forcing their movement and it's a great low-level spell to keep in to keep around you could retrain these out for other spells thanks to the aberrant spells class feature but I think they're worth keeping as we move on to second level spells again we're only really gonna have a few options from the Warlock side and I think this is a great great place to pick up Misty step and invisibility I just love hugging the utility of both of these spells in my Arsenal and we've got the extra spells known that it's from the Warlock side that it's easy to pick them up and keep them absolutely uh both both of those spells are two of my favorite spells in the game and if you have the chance to pick them up I always say you should from the sorcerer's side this is where we start to see the play style that we're aiming for with this character I would pick up web and Vortex work both of these offer Battlefield control in interesting ways web is your first Port of Call for being able to drop an area of effect spell and blast people into it we're already there with web it's a bit of a smaller area of effect but if an enemy escapes the web and you blast them right back into it you're golden Vortex warp can just help if there's enemies who are really far away from the web and you can't blast them into it you can pick them up and drop them into it you can also bring your fighter and bring them right up to the people who are trapped in the web so that they can start hacking and slashing there's so much utility here with Vortex warp and now I think the character is really starting to come online I actually think that the power of Vortex warp is so good that going back to the metamagic options if you are going to take Vortex warp I I think I would take twin spell over empowered spell for Vortex warp alone being able to Twin Vortex warp to teleport two allies or two enemies is amazing we also had dissonant Whispers which is pretty good to Twin too it is true the empowered spell shares up damage the thing to note with twin spell is that you might pick it up later because of its cost and it is a costly amount of magic which is I always like empowered spell at early levels because it always just costs one sorcery point and it does a lot with one sorcery point now because we're an aberrant mind sorcerer we do get comma motions and detect thoughts already at second level these spells are cool but I might look at trading them out and with the apparent mind a psionic spells ability you can trade them out for any divination or enchantment spell and I do think there's some possibly better options out there yeah I think you can do much better with hold person and suggestion so that would be a very very easy retrain although I would might be tempted depending on your campaign to keep the tech thoughts the tech thoughts has its uses and that's where you really need to weigh what kind of character you're playing what sort of campaign you're in detect thoughts can go a long way in the right campaign but in both cases with suggestion and with whole person more reason to grab twin spell yes we're growing the reasons to grab twin smell here aside from suggestion and hold person another phenomenal spell for second level is Tasha's mind whip which once again enchantment spell perfect for twinning totally on brand it's really really cool what you can do with mind whip especially when you combine it with forced movement effects mind whipping somebody and repelling blasting them further away and then they have to choose whether to move attack if they're up against one of your allies and you blast them away after mind whipping them they're out of luck one of the really neat things that you can do is if you forceful blasts an enemy into your existing web and then Quicken mind whip and now they're stuck in your web but even if they break out of their web they have to use their action to break out of the web but then they don't have their movement anymore because they're mind whipped the web mind whip lock is an amazing combo once we get the third level Spells at this point we're only going to have sorcerer spells with us but the aberrant mind gives us hunger of Hadar which is awesome and definitely worth keeping Forever at least for the next couple levels until you get more powerful aoes to knock enemies into we're also going to get sending which I think is also worth keeping it's just a really cool spell that can have weird World building and Adventure design implications I know I'll never forget the time that I played in a campaign where the dungeon master told us that we had to deliver an important message over onto the other side of the Mountainside and I said I'm just going to cast sending if your DM isn't aware of sending you can really mess them up by having the sending spell but I think that it is actually one of those spells that is inconspicuous in its implications a lot of people don't think to take it but once you have it there are so many out of combat scenarios in a DND campaign where it's like I need to let somebody know something and they are far away well if you know the person you can just send them besides that though I think that both of those spells are going to be really really good and hunger of Hadar is excellent for now I do think that we might want to train it out as soon as you get access to something like sickening Radiance or wall of fire or something else to knock enemies into that has more of a upcasting capability however I do think that when it comes to our choices for sorcerer spells obviously we're going to want to take Fireball I feel like once you have your enemies positioned where you need them to be in the area of effect your blasting them back into it you can drop a fireball on your hunger of Hadar on your web even if you want to blow that web up into a big fire so there's there's a lot of really cool options with Fireball obviously but I also think that I would take slow is another concentration spell so keep that in mind that you can't have slow going at the same time as web or even hunger of Hadar but slow is another great Battlefield control spell that can just limit a large amount of creatures and you can drop slow on them without having to worry about where your area of effect is and then keep blasting them away from you it's just going to give everybody else the opportunity to mess with them the the speed reduction was slow it's interesting because slow is normally a spell but warlocks can only access with the mire the Mind invocation and I wonder if that's some of the combinations there that are possible because if you have a bunch of slowed enemies and are pushing them backwards with forceful blast they might never be able to close against you it's it's really really strong in that respect by eighth level you're only actually going to get access to one ability score increase or feat with this character now because we chose half elf as our race I think your best option here is to go with Elven accuracy with all of the Eldritch blasts you're going to be slinging applying Alvin accuracy on top of that is going to be really beneficial and just great for a blaster character anyway there are some other Feats that you might want to consider but that would be my first go-to with this character as we advance in levels of course we will want to max out our Charisma score but you may want to also consider Feats such as Eldritch Adept so that you can grab additional invocations there's a lot of really cool choices that you could pick up here that could boost your Eldritch blasts such as Lance of lethargy which now slows targets as well reduces their speed making it even harder for them to get out of the things that you blast them into I also think that taking metamagic adapts to get the extra two sorcery points but also two extra choices for metamagic can really give you more versatility if you found the choice between taking subtle spell and twin spell and um empowered spell very difficult this is an easy way to solve that problem I also think there's arguments here for having war Caster or Fey touched there's a lot of great feats that can really benefit this character so that can be one of the tougher choices you have to make even telepathic or telekinetic can be really cool with this character telekinetic gives you an extra bonus action to shove enemies with magehand although I think with this character you're going to be quickening spells so much that your bonus action is often spoken for I do really like that you can combine different sources and different warlocks and get completely different play Styles yeah I do think the hex blade and the Divine Soul makes a really good melee combat sore lock whereas the one that we're building is a battlefield controller and Blaster which is also a great way to go there's there's a lot of different Avenues here and you could actually have multiple sore locks that feel entirely different on the table yeah just changing your spell selection your strategies your tactics and of course those subclasses really creates different variations so we'd be interested to hear from you do you like our aberrant mind hex blade or would you prefer a different combination of Sorcerer subclasses And what spells would you combine them with I think the result of our sorelock is very much a blaster with an interesting Battlefield control component to it in that we're going to be using that forceful blast we're going to be using those area of effect zones and we're going to be using other spells like Vortex warp and mind whip to really augment that but you could go far more gung-ho on the damage dealing with this character I think depending on what choices you make as you continue to level up this character really from there you're just going straight forward with more sorcerer levels choosing your favorite sorcerer spells but keeping in mind how those spells compare with blasting people around the battlefield with Eldritch blast and that's really the fun that you get to have with this character this character presents such a versatile play style that if you wanted to play a bigger damage dealer than the one that we've presented here you can do it if you want to go more in on utility or support you can do that if you want to go more of a melee combatant you can do that it's really Limitless in the potential of combining the Warlock and the Sorcerer and really the only limit is your imagination and which subclasses you think sound the coolest and the way that you want to move forward with it so if you have played a sore lock we would love to hear about the combination of subclasses you chose your spell selections and what your big strategies were with that character in the comments below the videos that we create on our channel are made possible thanks to the incredible generosity of our patreon supporters if you enjoy the work that we do here and want to see more of this content please consider becoming a patron of our show by following links in the description below and if you want to see a sorcerer and a warlock neither of which are as cool as a sore lock in play you can check out our live play in the worlds of drachenheim which is Tuesday evenings on Twitch you can find all the previous episodes right up over here we've got plenty more build guides for DND 5e right up over here please subscribe to our Channel like this video and hit the bell for notifications so that you can stay up to date on all of our content thank you so much for watching and we'll see you next time in the dungeon

Channel: Dungeon Dudes

Views: 158,069

Keywords: dungeons, dragons, tabletop, gaming, roleplaying, games, accessories, rules, rule, gameplay, play, game, rpg, d20, player, character, D&D, 5e, DM, PC, tips, advice, guide, guides, review, dice, books, book

Id: jBwoSBBXKWE

Length: 28min 55sec (1735 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 15 2022