When making a character forDungeons & Dragons, it can be tempting to divide your choices between spellcasters and martial classes. However, the often forgotten half-casters can be a great choice. One such class is the warlock, gifted with martial and magical abilities by an otherworldly patron.
While many who make warlocks look to the spellcasting side of things, it can be a lot of fun, and beneficial to build one with melee in mind. By mixing martial prowess and the right set of spells, you can create a warlock that has the best of both worlds and keeps up with any full-blown martial class in melee combat.
7Species Options
Your Lineage
Any species can bea valid choicedepending on both the type of character you want to play, backstory-wise, and what you think will benefit your character the most as far as the species traits go. For a min-max approach to combat, the dwarf, dragonborn, and human species are all great choices.
Dwarves have Dwarven Toughness, which slowly but surely adds HP to your maximum as you level up, and Tremorsense to boot. The dragonborn Breath Weapons are a great choice for elemental damage at close range, plus Draconic Flight can boost your movement opportunities. For players who want more freedom, the choice of being a human allows for open-ended choices for proficiencies and your origin feat through Skillful and Versatile.
In addition, the Guard, Criminal, and Soldier backgrounds are good choices if you want to focus solely on maximizing your character’s abilities due to their feat and proficiency allowances.
6Ability Scores, Skills, And Feats
What You’re Good At
The idea of a melee warlock is a balancing game. You want to diversify your choices to allow your character to shine in melee, but not work against the inherent magical abilities that warlocks come with. Knowing this, you’ll want to hedge your ability scores towards Charisma, and either Strength or Dexterity, depending on what weapons you want to use.
Any extra points can be shifted towards Constitution for the added benefit of a greater HP maximum.
Your skills should, in part, be chosen based on what makes sense for your character to be proficient in, and also in part based on what is needed for the party dynamic. For a melee warlock, things like Athletics, Acrobatics, and Stealth are obvious choices. You could also flavor things like Slight of Hand, Nature, and Medicine into your character’s backstory, or even add something like Persuasion to bolster your already high Charisma score.
Feats are a great way to add a little extra flair to the skills you already have. For this build, weapon feats like Piercer or Slasher, or armor feats like Medium Armor Master, are great at giving and taking damage. You can also diversify your approach in combat with ones like Skulker, Defensive Duelist, or Charger. Feats are an optimal place to add a bit more martial flavor to your warlock.
5Subclasses
Pick Your Patron
There is a great amount of variation in the subclasses of warlocks, and some actually add to the idea of a melee-focused character quite well. The best two subclasses to choose from for this build are the Archfey Patron and the Fiend Patron. The Archfey Patron, combined with a martial focus, is all about hitting and running. Steps of the Fey and Misty Escape are great for moving in close, attacking, and then escaping to a safe distance, which is great for saving your moderate HP as a warlock. Your Archfey Spells also have a fair amount of immobilizing and confusing your enemies.
Where the Archfey allows for good defense and movement, the Fiend Patron is all about hitting hard and often. Dark One’s Blessing rewards you for finishing blows on enemies, and Dark One’s Own Luck means you won’t have to suffer through missed attack rolls as often. In addition, the Fiend spells are all about doing heavy damage with your slots, often through fire.
Hurl Through Hell is also a great endcap to the Fiend subclass that can do a devastating amount of damage in a single turn.
4Features And Invocations
Abilities & Facets
There are a lot of choices to make for this build, but thankfully, the choice of which warlock pact to use is an easy one. The Pact of the Blade is an easy go-to for a melee warlock that allows your main weapon to be bonded to you with magic, allowing it to use your Charisma score instead of Strength or Dexterity.The Eldritch Invocationsfeatures are surprisingly handy abilities that add various bonuses and extra abilities to your character depending on the choices you’ve made so far.
Keeping a high Strength or Dexterity is still a good idea when you want to add more weapons to your arsenal.
For this character archetype, options like Thirsting Blade, Armor of Shadows, and later on Devouring Blade are easy choices to do more melee damage. Don’t sleep on Agonizing Blast and Eldritch Spear though, as Eldritch Blast is a warlock spell with a consistent amount of combat usefulness, plus it’s easy to fit into the action economy of the class. you’re able to also adjust your movement and non-combat abilities with Invocations like Ascendant Step, Gift of the Depths, or Witch Sight.
3Spells
Damage, Healing, Utility
Even for a half-caster, your character’s spells can be a great boon in and out of combat. There is a wealth of things to consider when it comes to which spells to choose, but for this build, it helps to stay diverse, going back and forth between spells that modify damage, can be used at range, and the ever-present utility and healing spells. Some good spells for this build are as follows:
2Weapons And Armor
Keys To Martial Strength
Your weapon options for this class are quite diverse. It isn’t a bad idea to have something ranged as a backup for when you don’t want to use a spell slot, light crossbows or shortbows are a great option for this. But you’ll want a melee weapon as your primary here, obviously. It is possible to use two-handed martial weapons here, especially if you want to multiclass into barbarian or paladin, but any one-handed weapon will allow for more versatile use of spells and martial combat.
Any simple one-handed weapon like the dagger or sickle is fine, especially at low levels. To maximize your opportunity at high-damage, though, you should go for amartial melee weaponsince your Pact of the Blade feature works for them too. Scimitars and shortswords are favored choices for warlock players all around, but there is nothing wrong with a warpick, morningstar, or similar weapons, especially when combined with the feat that coincides with those damage types. Your armor choice should be either light or medium to keep with the warlock’s focus on ease of movement and stealth opportunity.
1Multiclass Options
More Martial Than Spellcaster
While it is easily possible to make a solid melee warlock using only the warlock class, it can be bothtempting and beneficial to multiclassfor other added features. Any martial class is a good choice to multiclass into for this build since the warlock class has plenty of spell options already.
Barbarians, paladins, and clerics are good choices for their added defense through Rage and proficiency in heavy armor, but these can be clunky to add into the warlock class, where optimization is concerned. Fighter, monk, and rogue are easier for this, and each has their own benefits, ranging from melee proficiency in unarmed combat and stealth. The fighter is the best choice, though, for features like Second Wind, Action Surge, and the added benefit of Fighting Styles to further the abilities of the weapons you choose.
