A Warlock of The Celestial

The Celestial Warlock

Your patron is a powerful being of The Upper Planes. You have bound yourself to an ancient Empyrean, Solar, Ki-Rin, Unicorn, or other entity that resides in The planes of everlasting bliss. Your pact with that being allows you to experience the barest touch of the holy light that illuminates the multiverse.   Being connected to such power can cause changes to your behaviour and beliefs. You might find yourself driven to annihilate the undead, to defeat fiends, and to protect the innocent. At times, your heart might also be filled with a longing for the celestial realm of your patron, a desire to wander that paradise for the rest of your days. But you know that your mission is among mortals for now and that your pact binds you to bring light to the dark places of the world.   The Celestial offers three tempting options: access to some cleric spells, a pool of easy hit point restoration (Healing Light), and access to some sources of radiant/fire damage. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do either especially well. The radiant/fire damage options will still lag behind your core Warlock options, and the Cleric spell options are so limited that they’re only good in a party where having a real divine spellcaster is not a possibility or where your divine spellcaster has an unconsciousness problem.   If you’re desperate for healing but also need to be a warlock for some reason, the Celestial is fine. Otherwise, it’s a mix of decent healing and disappointing blasting on top of the Warlock’s excellent core features. If you want to actually cast spells like a cleric, consider the Divine Soul Sorcerer instead.  

Expanded Spell List

Most of the options are poor attempts to introduce fire damage to the Warlock’s spell list, but there are a handful of useful options mixed in with the garbage, including staple healing options like Lesser Restoration and Restoration.   The Celestial lets you choose from an expanded list of spells when you learn a warlock spell. The following spells are added to the warlock spell list for you.  

Celestial Expanded Spells

 

Spell Level	Spells
1st	Cure Wounds, Guiding Bolt
2nd	Flaming Sphere, Lesser Restoration
3rd	Daylight, Revivify
4th	Guardian of Faith, Wall of Fire
5th	Flame Strike, Greater Restoration

   

1st-level Spells

You don’t really need either. Cure Wounds is tempting, but you get Healing Light which will provide comparable healing without eating your extremely limited spell slots. You can still use Cure Wounds right before a short rest to get some healing out of any leftover spell slots, but I’ve never seen a warlock make it to a short rest with remaining spell slots.  

2nd-level Spells

Both good options, but Lesser Restoration should be left to your party’s divine spellcaster if possible. Flaming Sphere looks tempting with Radiant Soul, but Radiant Soul only applies to one damage roll for a given spell, so you don’t get to apply it every time your sphere hits something. Still, it’s a decent area control option and you get a lot of use out of a single spell slot.  

3rd-level Spells

Get Revivify. Let me clarify: you should really get Revivify. It’s really good. The one concern is that you only have two spell slots until 11th level and it’s hard to reserve one of them so that you always have revivify ready. Get a Pearl of Power if you can.  

4th-level Spells

Wall of Fire is one of the most iconic area control spells, and it works very well in the warlock philosophy of spending one spell slot to massively reshape an encounter before reverting to cantrips. You can use invocations to push/pull enemies through the wall, too. Unfortunately you still only get to apply Radiant Soul once each time you cast it.  

5th-level Spells

Flame Strike is fine, but it does less damage in a smaller AOE than Fireball and Radiant Soul’s bonus damage only affects one target, and in general spending a spell slot to deal AOE damage is rarely a good use of a warlock spell slot compared to other damaging options like Hunger of Hadar. Restoration is a situational but important healing option. If you can, leave high-powered healing to your party’s divine spellcaster.  

Bonus Cantrips

At 1st level, you learn the Light and Sacred Flame cantrips. They count as warlock cantrips for you, but they don’t count against your number of cantrips known.   Warlocks don’t have a way to create light with a cantrip, so Light is nice. Sacred Flame won’t matter often since Eldritch Blast will outpace Sacred Flame’s damage (especially with Agonizing Blast), but more cantrips never hurt and sometimes you need to keep zombies down and sometimes creatures have high AC but low Dexterity saves.  

Healing Light

At 1st level, you gain the ability to channel celestial energy to heal wounds. You have a pool of d6s that you spend to fuel this healing. The number of dice in the pool equals 1 + your warlock level. As a bonus action, you can heal one creature you can see within 60 feet of you, spending dice from the pool. The maximum number of dice you can spend at once equals your Charisma modifier (minimum of one die). Roll the dice you spend, add them together, and restore a number of hit points equal to the total.   Your pool regains all expended dice when you finish a long rest.   Roughly equivalent to Healing Word, but without eating into your spell slots. However, it’s the Celestial’s only healing option and doesn’t solve problems beyond hit point restoration so you still need to look elsewhere for options to handle status conditions.  

Radiant Soul

Starting at 6th level, your link to the Celestial allows you to serve as a conduit for radiant energy. You have resistance to radiant damage, and when you cast a spell that deals radiant or fire damage, you add your Charisma modifier to one radiant or fire damage roll of that spell against one of its targets.   Warlocks deal the vast majority of their damage with Eldritch Blast and Agonizing Blast. Celestial warlocks get Sacred Flame, which is probably the best way to make use of this. But If you pick up Agonizing Blast (you should, it’s amazing) this will almost never come up with cantrips because Eldritch Blast will massively outpace any other cantrip’s damage output even with the damage boost from Radiant Soul. If you don’t take Agonizing Blast, Sacred Flame will do slightly more damage than Eldritch Blast.   The Celestial’s expanded spell list offers a handful of extra spells that deal radiant/fire damage, but most of them aren’t a great use of your warlock spell slots and the damage still only affects one target on one damage roll (e.g. one target of Flame Strike). The primary use case for this is definitely cantrips, but since Eldritch Blast+Agonizing Blast is so effective Radiant Soul is rarely impactful.  

Celestial Resilience

Starting at 10th level, you gain Temporary Hit Points whenever you finish a Short or Long Rest. These Temporary Hit Points equal your warlock level + your Charisma modifier. Additionally, choose up to five creatures you can see at the end of the rest. Those creatures each gain temporary hit points equal to half your warlock level + your Charisma modifier.   This will save a ton of your party’s healing resources. It’s not quite as good as the Inspiring Leader feat since it only works after a rest, but it’s very close, and you don’t need to give your party a 10-minute pep talk to make it work.  

Searing Vengeance

Starting at 14th level, the Radiant Energy you channel allows you to resist death. When you have to make a Death Saving Throw at the start of your Turn, you can instead spring back to your feet with a burst of Radiant Energy. You regain Hit Points equal to half your hit point maximum, and then you stand up if you so choose. Each creature of your choice that is within 30 feet of you takes radiant damage equal to 2D8 + your Charisma modifier, and is blinded until the end of the current turn.   Once you use this feature, you can’t use it again until you finish a Long Rest.   There is no save to resist the blinding effect, so you can stand up and safely walk yourself to somewhere safe before going back to lasering stuff to death. Since creatures that you damage are blinded, you get Advantage on attacks against them so it’s a great time for Eldritch Blast.