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[Persus13]

I played a Triton GOO Blade Pact warlock for a bit. The main thing is you're squishy, but having a barbarian and a cleric should help him out there.

I used Armor of Agathys a lot (temp HP and cold damage when hit in melee is great, especially since it scales up), as well as crowd control spells like Darkness, Hold Person, and Hunger of Hadar (GOO also get Dissonant Whispers) to protect me from being hit. I tried using Hex and it was helpful, but I got hit often and lost concentration too many times to get maximum usage out of it.

I also recommend seriously considering starting or MCing at least one level into Fighter as well. Second Wind, Medium or heavy armor, and Defense will help a lot. (If he ends up not like blade pact warlock but wants something similar, he might like Eldritch Knight or Valor Bard).

[delphonso]

Yeah, I tried getting him to go Eldritch Knight, but he's set on Warlock. He chose Mountain Dwarf, so he has Medium armor already - I'll recommend he consider those concentration spells wisely.

Darkness might ruin the rest of the party, but yeah - I did a tome GOO warlock and the darkness stuff is really amazing.

[Cthulhu]

The party I'm running for is a tiefling, hill dwarf, kobold, and minotaur (half-orc reskin), so they all have darkvision.  It's a different experience. 

[Kadzar]

The party I'm running for is a tiefling, hill dwarf, kobold, and minotaur (half-orc reskin), so they all have darkvision.  It's a different experience.

Huh. My group actually runs with darkvision races so much that often the non-darkvision races usually end up with Goggles of Night to make up for it.

I played a Triton GOO Blade Pact warlock for a bit. The main thing is you're squishy, but having a barbarian and a cleric should help him out there.

I used Armor of Agathys a lot (temp HP and cold damage when hit in melee is great, especially since it scales up), as well as crowd control spells like Darkness, Hold Person, and Hunger of Hadar (GOO also get Dissonant Whispers) to protect me from being hit. I tried using Hex and it was helpful, but I got hit often and lost concentration too many times to get maximum usage out of it.

I also recommend seriously considering starting or MCing at least one level into Fighter as well. Second Wind, Medium or heavy armor, and Defense will help a lot. (If he ends up not like blade pact warlock but wants something similar, he might like Eldritch Knight or Valor Bard).

The time I played a blade pact warlock before Hexblade was released, I played a half-elf Feylock. It is nice when you get to 6th level and can just teleport away and turn invisible when you feel like you've taken too much damage. I also started with a level of fighter so I could have heavy armor, which is good if you want to fight in melee and don't want to worry about having to escape eventually (though I could if I needed to). I mostly fought in melee with the character and saved spell slots for utility use, like turning people invisible or casting Seeming on them.

Outside the topic, but related to spellcasters who fight in melee, lately someone in my group has been playing a Bladesinger,, and I have to say, it's interesting to see a wizard being played as a melee fighter. He apparently has less HP than my Conjuration wizard, but he gets away with it for the most part from having a high AC, especially when he casts Haste on himself (which is most of the time), though I think he has to use Shield more often than I do, since I don't get hit as often, and blows are more likely to be above what I can block than they are for him. From what I've seen, it seems like the archetype strikes a nice balance of doing what it's intended to do without being overpowered, which is nice.

[scourge728]

I wish kobolds were better...

[Taricus]

But they're already great. They're kobolds after all

But in seriousness, they're pretty good in 5e, especially as rogues. Nothing like being able to proc sneak attack a hell of a lot more often than other rogues.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Yeah, I'll say. Having gotten to go around some more classes now, does anyone else think that 5e sneak attack is ridiculously powerful? There are things other than DPS that are important, but I'm not sure I've seen anything that beats a decently stacked sneak attack build.

[delphonso]

Sneak Attack is special because of the advantage - you're ALREADY going to hit, and boom extra damage on top. It's like a double reward.

Static damage upgrades are better, I think. A fighter style and barbarian rage at 16 str can give you a minimum of 8 damage per hit at 2nd level.

[Superdorf]

Sneak Attack won't outperform "nova" abilities like Divine Smite, Action Surge, that sort of thing (at least, to my knowledge), but it's not resource-dependent. That's pretty special.

Still, other classes get other goodies. Sneak Attack's just one of many.

[delphonso]

We just had that first session of LMoP - boy was that close.

New player Warlock did well - taking out the chumps for free Temp HP. Rolled several 1s on cantrips and offhand attacks.

Cleric helped out by sniping from the back, but used all spells on himself as he was the only one who took damage from early encounters and traps. Leaving us without heals for the final fights.

Barbarian (me) killed Klarg by myself, but was a single hit from party-ending death as we fought up the stairs toward Klarg's room without a solid escape plan.

Oh boy, Lost Mines of Phandelver is great. We flubbed all our stealth rolls, but made it through on luck, grit, and martial ability.

[Persus13]

Sneak Attack is a really good ability, but its also one of the better balanced ones out there, and is only good for high HP targets.

If you think its too good, the problem might actually be that you're giving too much leeway to allowing your rogue to hide.

[Kadzar]

I'm pretty sure the designers have said that it's intended for rogues to be able to to get sneak attack every round. They'll probably need to fulfill some condition or another to get it (maybe get an ally in there), but it should take some significant circumstances for them to have no recourse for sneak attack during a fight.

Damage-wise, you have to keep in mind that they can only use sneak attack once per turn, can't get anything more than a bonus action attack without taking away at least 5 levels of sneak attack progression (and probably other damage bonus sources that are really better for someone with Extra Attack), and are limited in damage and combos they can pull off by only being able to use finesse and ranged weapons for sneak attack. Plus the aforementioned fact that the you can only attack one target at a time, and the damage will likely be overkill for most targets.

[GiglameshDespair]

are limited in damage and combos they can pull off by only being able to use finesse and ranged weapons for sneak attack.

To be fair that just effectively means they don't have two handed weapons. They don't lose any damage over anyone else using 1h weapons since a rapier is 1d8.

Amusing as the imagine of sneak attacking using a maul would be.

[Kadzar]

It also limits your options as a barbarian/rogue, since you can only get rage bonus damage from strength attacks, though apparently you can just use rapiers with strength somehow.

This also made me think that it would be possible to add smite damage to sneak attack, since it just requires a melee weapon attack. Not sure what you'll do with the strength score required for the multiclass, though maybe you could use that to wear medium armor, since this edition doesn't give rogues penalties for wearing heavier than light armor. Hell, if you started as paladin, you could even wear heavy armor.

Just imagine, you're fighting someone, then his buddy walks up to you *clink* *clatter* *clink* and stabs you in the ribs.

[Mephisto]

Kobold talk - it really showed what WotC thought of the race. In a world where every single race gets a total of +3 to various attributes and some neat abilities, kobolds get +0 and they can cower real good. Oh, and sunlight sensitivity, a thing that pretty much only drow had til that point.