The 12 Days of Critmas: The Warlock

Laudna wins today!

Warlocks are a lot of fun, and very customisable, which means there’re a few more decision points than usual when creating a high damage in one turn build. As well as having two 4th level spell slots, and the usual subclass and 2 ASIs, warlocks choose a pact boon and 4 invocations. Luckily, for our criteria, pact of the blade and its associated invocations improved pact weapon, thirsting blade and eldritch smite, outshine all other options for pure damage output in one round. There is an invocation which allows a warlock to polymorph, and although a t-rex’s bite deals more than most weapon attacks, eldritch smite can’t be used with it, losing out on the massive 5d8 damage that invocation does with a 4th level spell slot. Warlocks have access to blight, so for the two ASIs, we’ll pick up GWM and metamagic adept as usual.

For subclass, the only damage improving options are hexblade, celestial, fathomless, genie and undead. Of these, Hexblade’s curse basically does the celestial and genie damage boosts but better, and the fathomless features are bonus action, which will be used up quickening blight. The hexblade allows you to use charisma for damage instead of strength or dexterity, and hexblade’s curse does another +3 when you damage the cursed target. The undead patron lets you roll one additional damage die per turn when you hit with an attack roll. For a greataxe, this will be a d12, which adds 2 points more in total than hexblade’s curse and charisma for damage combined. Our undead warlock hits twice with their greataxe using eldritch smite on one of these, and rolling an extra d12, then quickens blight. This deals a total of 166 damage in a turn (1d12 +2 +1 +10 +1d12 +1d12 +2 +1 +10 +4d8 +8d8). To maximise crit damage, we turn them into a variant human with shadow touched, quickening inflict wounds instead, and they can do 286.