Genie Warlock Handbook: DnD 5e Subclass Guide – RPGBOT

You got a brand of magic never fails
You got some power in your corner now
Heavy ammunition in your camp
You got some punch, pizazz, yahoo, and how?
All you gotta do is rub that lamp

Friend Like Me – Aladdin

Introduction

They say Hexblade’s curse is pretty good since it’s PB scaling damage on your cursed target, but it only lasts one minute against one target once per short rest. What if instead it was once per turn, every turn, against any target? Well then it would be Genie’s Wrath, and that’s pretty neat.

The Genie Warlock has four flavors, depending on what kind of Genie you want for a patron, determining your additional spells list, your damage resistance, and the damage you deal with Genie’s Wrath. We have the Dao, Earth genies with Bludgeoning; Djinni, Air genies with Thunder; Efreeti, Fire genies with Fire; and Marid, Water genies with Cold. We’ll go over the pros and cons of each in the subclass features section.

Just don’t miss the example build down at the end of the handbook. Especially if you’ve ever been told that only Hexblade Warlocks can use weapons. If you’re tired of Eldritch Blast and just want something a little different from Warlock I’m sure you’ll find plenty of inspiration.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Disclaimer
• Genie Patron Features
• Genie Patron Ability Scores
• Genie Patron Races
• Genie Patron Feats
• Genie Patron Weapons
• Genie Patron Armor
• Genie Patron Multiclassing
• Genie Patron Invocations
• Example Genie Warlock Build – Half-Genie Accuracy
  • Damage vs Utility: Why Pact of the Blade?
  • Playstyle and Tactics
  • Abilities
  • Race
  • Background
  • Skills and Tools
  • Feats
  • Levels

Disclaimer

RPGBOT uses the color coding scheme which has become common among Pathfinder build handbooks, which is simple to understand and easy to read at a glance.

• Red: Bad, useless options, or options which are extremely situational. Nearly never useful.
• Orange: OK options, or useful options that only apply in rare circumstances. Useful sometimes.
• Green: Good options. Useful often.
• Blue: Fantastic options, often essential to the function of your character. Useful very frequently.

We will not include 3rd-party content, including content from DMs Guild, in handbooks for official content because we can’t assume that your game will allow 3rd-party content or homebrew. We also won’t cover Unearthed Arcana content because it’s not finalized, and we can’t guarantee that it will be available to you in your games.

The advice offered below is based on the current State of the Character Optimization Meta as of when the article was last updated. Keep in mind that the state of the meta periodically changes as new source materials are released, and the article will be updated accordingly as time allows.

Genie Patron Features

1. Expanded Spell List: Unlike most warlock subclasses, the Genie gives you a base set of additional spell options, plus the choice of four spell lists depending on your genie patron’s specific type.

   You also get a type of damage resistance depending on their type at 6th level, but the spell list is the big part. Every variety of genie also adds Wish as a 9th-level spell option (Mystic Arcanum), so the 1st through 5th-level spells are where each variety of genie distinguishes itself from the others.

   • Genie Spells: You get these spells regardless of what type of genie your patron is in addition to spells from one of the four lists below.
     • 1st-level Spells: Situational. Helpful in any party, but spending a warlock spell slot on it is hard.
     • 2nd-level Spells: A good option against creatures with poor Intelligence scores (which is most creatures). The effects don’t scale with spell level, but if you don’t care about the spell’s damage this remains an effective way to lock down single foes for your whole career.
     • 3rd-level Spells: Rations are cheap.
     • 4th-level Spells: An excellent single-target damage option, and all of the damage scales with spell level rather than just the initial damage.
     • 5th-level Spells: Fantastic if you’re creative enough to find a use for it, but generally not a go-to option.
   • Dao: With one exception, everything on the Dao’s spell list is excellent, and every spell is new to the Warlock’s spell list.
     • 1st-level Spells: Potentially forcing enemies to give up an attack is great. Sanctuary has a Bonus Action casting time, so you can attack or cast a cantrip in the same turn, then follow it with Sanctuary. However, since Sanctuary allows the attacker to retarget their attack, Sanctuary isn’t as effective against ranged attacks, and if you try to hurt your enemies while it’s running the spell ends early. So you may want to use this to protect yourself while you cast buffs or utility spells, if you have an ally who’s unable to attack for some reason, or if you already have an ongoing non-damaging spell running like Hold Person.
     • 2nd-level Spells: 2d4 damage every 5 feet, and it’s every time the creature “travels”, not every time the creature moves. So if you push or pull the creature, they take damage. Sounds like a job for Eldritch Blast!
     • 3rd-level Spells: Very situational.
     • 4th-level Spells: One of my absolute favorite utility spells.
     • 5th-level Spells: Not as precise as Stone Shape, but much easier to use in combat. Give yourself cover, separate enemies, or make yourself a nice home out of stone.
   • Djinni: Several good options, but the Djinni’s spell options range wildly in effectiveness.
     • 1st-level Spells: Decent short-range AOE damage, especially if you’re being swarmed or grappled and can’t teleport. This isn’t a go-to offensive option since the AOE is small and the damage isn’t great, but it can occasionally solve problems for you.
     • 2nd-level Spells: Useful for pushing enemies into ongoing AOE damage effects, but since it requires Concentration it’s hard to combine with things like Hunger of Hadar so any ongoing AOE damage effects would likely need to come from an ally.
     • 3rd-level Spells: Very situational.
     • 4th-level Spells: Invisibility in 5e is really good, and running around for a full minute being almost impossible to target is a huge advantage. Sure, you already get Shadow of Moil at this level, but Greater Invisibility prevents you from being targeted rather than just making you difficult to attack.
     • 5th-level Spells: Very situational, but with an 8-hour duration you can cast it early in the day and immediately take a Short Rest and recover your spell slot. Still, it might not be worth learning permanently.
   • Efreeti: The Efreeti is a blaster, sharing many spells with the Fiend. The biggest things that blasters need are good AOE damage spells and lots of spell slots to fuel them. Warlocks don’t have the spell slots to back this up. This is definitely the simplest option for the Genie, but that doesn’t make it good.
     • 1st-level Spells: Burning Hands is a decent AOE, especially at low levels, and since warlocks get armor and more hp than other arcane spellcasters like the wizard you can survive being close enough to melee to use it. However, I wouldn’t use it beyond very low levels. You’ll get more total damage out of Hex or other spell options despite Burning Hands’ scaling.
     • 2nd-level Spells: Like Eldritch Blast but with a worse damage type. It works great with Hex since you get an additional ray per spell level (up to 6 when you get 5th-level spells), but that’s the only thing that makes it better than Eldritch Blast once you add Agonizing Blast.
     • 3rd-level Spells: Fireball remains the best instantaneous AOE damage spell at every spell level until around spell level 8, and while the Warlock can’t cast Fireball past 5th level, it still remains a perfect go-to AOE blast option. However, remember that you will often get better results out of spells with ongoing effects like Hunger of Hadar, and with so few spell slots you need to squeeze as much out of them as you can.
     • 4th-level Spells: You’re almost certainly not built to be in melee enough that using this makes sense. Cast Armor of Agathys.
     • 5th-level Spells: Flame Strike is Fireball, but a smaller AOE and worse damage. Sure, some of the damage is radiant, but if damage resistance if a problem you should be using Eldritch Blast since nearly nothing resist Eldritch Blast.
   • Marid: Almost nothing worth having.
     • 1st-level Spells: An excellent way to cover your escape, but you can’t see through the fog any better than anyone else, so don’t expect to fight in this without some other advantage.
     • 2nd-level Spells: A great defensive option, but with a short duration and it requires Concentration. Still, it’ll help until you can get Shadow of Moil.
     • 3rd-level Spells: This is not good enough for a 3rd-level spell slot.
     • 4th-level Spells: Too situational.
     • 5th-level Spells: Cone of Cold is decent but unremarkable AOE damage, but if you need area damage you’ll have better results with Hunger of Hadar.
   • All:
     • 9th-level Spells: The best spell in the game. You get one Mystic Arcanum which can cast a 9th-level spell, and honestly Wish is so good that there is very little mechanical reason to select anything except Wish.

       For more help with Wish, see our Practical Guide to Wish.

1. Genie’s Vessel: Bottled Respite is mostly for flavor, but Genie’s Wrath is a compelling reason to keep your vessel in hand when you’re in a fight, and to work to prevent its destruction even though you can get a replacement for free.
   • Bottled Respite: Use this to eavesdrop on people, to evade harmful effects, and to hide or store items, but the fact that you can only enter the vessel once per long rest means that you can’t just pop in and out at random. Eventually you’ll be able to stay inside long enough that you and your whole party can rest inside the vessel, conveniently removing the need for things like tents, keeping watch while resting, or spells like Rope Trick or Leomund’s Tiny Hut, but even at low levels you can still stay in the vessel long enough to take a Short Rest without risk of enemies wandering by and surprising you.
   • Genie’s Wrath: A small, but meaningful and scaling bonus to your damage. It only applies once per turn, but that’s really all that you need. This applies to attack rolls of any kind, and once again the warlock is the only class to add their Proficiency Bonus to damage (the Hexblade does it too).
     • Dao: Things with resistance to bludgeoning damage typically resist bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage from non-magical attacks. You will likely deliver this with either a cantrip or a magic weapon (Pact of the Blade), so nearly nothing in the game will resist it. You can combine this with the Crusher feat for extra benefits.
     • Djinni: Resistance to thunder damage is very rare.
     • Efreeti: Fire damage is among the most common resistances/immunities, so you’ll often find that your bonus damage is ineffective.
     • Marid: Cold damage isn’t quite as commonly-resisted as fire damage.
6. Elemental Gift: Flight for 10 minutes at a time which you can activate as a Bonus Action without Concentration. This would be good once per Short Rest, but you can use this 3 to 6 times per day depending on your Proficiency Bonus. Oh, you get some damage resistance too. But honestly, the flight is so good that I forgot about the damage resistance.
   • Dao: Bludgeoning damage is one of the three types of weapon damage, but most monsters which deal damage through weapons rely primarily on teeth and claws so bludgeoning is the least common of the three weapon damage types. Of course, it’s also difficult to get permanent resistance to weapon damage types, so the rarity of this resistance adds to the value.
   • Djinni: Thunder damage is uncommon.
   • Efreeti: Fire damage is one of the most common types of non-weapon damage, so permanent resistance is great.
   • Mardi: Cold damage isn’t quite as common as fire damage, but it’s still very common.
10. Sanctuary Vessel: The ability to hide your party in something as small as a ring while taking a short rest means that you can rest even in extremely dangerous places so long as you can hide your vessel somewhere. The added healing benefits are minor, but they still feel nice even when taking a 10-minute short rest in an extradimensional space isn’t an impactful benefit at the moment.

    Consider having one person who doesn’t need a Short Rest carry the vessel while the rest of your party has a ten-minute power nap. This removes the need to hide the vessel and prevents you (and potentially a subset of your party) from making the party wait around while you take a nap.

14. Limited Wish: You know how the Bard gets Magical Secrets? Yeah, forget that. This is so much better that it’s in its own league. You don’t even have to pay for expensive components! Sure, there’s a 1d4 Long Rests cooldown, but when the effect is this good a few days is nothing. Look for anything that has expensive material components or a permanent duration. Abuse those spells.

Genie Patron Ability Scores

We’re a Warlock, the wacky different spellcaster. That means we’re still a spellcaster.

Str: There are some melee setups we could do, but those are uncommon.

Dex: We wear Light Armour, so we need some of this for AC.

Con: Hit Points and Concentration saves. We need some of this.

Int: Alright, listen: smart people do not ask Genies for stuff. We are not smart.

Wis: However, we also have Wisdom save proficiency, and Wisdom saves against mean stuff.

Cha: This is our zippy zappy blasty stat. Max it out. Or don’t. Maybe you’re some weird archery build. That’s totally a valid warlock build.

Genie Patron Races

• Elves^PHB: Elven Accuracy is a hell of a drug. We’re either going to fire off Eldritch Blast with Charisma or do some weird Archery thing. Both of these would benefit from Elven Accuracy.
• Races with Innate Known Spells: We have a very limited number of spells known. These races can expand our list a bit, giving us a bit of extra utility and flexibility, as well as letting us cast a few more spells per day.
  
  Look for races that have text along the lines of “You can also cast either of those spells using any spell slots you have of the appropriate level.” Those races add the granted spells to your spells known. While most races going forward that have spells, such as Fairy or the Genasi in MMotM, have that text, a handful of older published races, like Drow, do not grant the spells known at the time of writing this article. That said, even once per day, an extra casting of a spell can be very strong given our Warlock limitations.
• Races with Expanded Spell Lists: This is a standard feature on the Dragonmarked races. We would still need to learn the spells with our limited number of spells known, but some racial lists have options that are not usually on the Warlock spell list.

Genie Patron Feats

The write up in the Warlock Handbook is pretty comprehensive. Not too much changes by being a Genie.

• Crusher: However, if you choose Dao, you’ll always add some Bludgeoning damage on an attack every turn. Crusher doesn’t limit the direction of the movement when this happens, so with some positional setup, we can lift a target up diagonally 5 feet towards us, changing the angle they get sent when Repelling Blast moves them away from us, leaving the target up 15 feet in the air and then causing falling damage.
  
  This works from 10 feet away because the game handles movement in discrete 5 foot increments. According to Xanathar’s Guide, when two things happen at the same time, we as the active player decide the order, so we get to decide that they target is lifted first, then launched.

Genie Patron Weapons

Contrary to popular opinion, we can use weapons without being a Hexblade. Yes, Hexblade is a little easier because it can use Charisma for weapons, but we still like having high Dexterity and we can Fly without using Concentration.

• Longbow: Slightly less damage than a Heavy Crossbow or Eldritch Blast, but no Loading property means that if we choose it as an Improved Pact Weapon we don’t need Crossbow Expert to use Thirsting Blade.
• Heavy Crossbow: It’s just like Eldritch Blast except you can use Sharpshooter for extra damage, and it requires martial weapon proficiency.
• Melee Weapons: I would advise not closing to melee. You certainly can make it work, but it’s not the easiest setup unless you’re doing some multiclass stuff.

Genie Patron Armor

• Armor of Shadows: Yes this is an invocation but unless you find +1 Studded Leather this is your best option, and you would need to find +2 Studded Leather to beat it.
• Half Plate: If you’re doing a multiclass thing, this is better than Armour of Shadows until Dexterity is 18, then they’re equal.

Genie Patron Multiclassing

• Fighter: At Genielock level ten, we gain the ability to jump into our Genie bottle and get a short rest in ten minutes. At Genielock level twenty, we gain the ability to get our Pact Spells back in 1 minute. Both of these are once per day. In narrative time, those are about the same so if we take 2-3 levels of Fighter instead of 20 in Warlock we gain a Fighting Style, Action Surge, and maybe a subclass and still get to sneak in an additional short rest of spells every day.
• Rogue: Sneak attack is once per turn, Genie’s Wrath is once per your turn, Booming Blade is one big attack. Getting one nice big swing in each turn with all of your damage is pretty nice, especially if you can get some Advantage going to increase your accuracy.
• Paladin: Six levels of Genie adds Flying to a Paladin, three Invocations, a pact boon, a pair of 3rd level short rest recharging Smite slots, some damage resistance, and PB to damage once per turn. You could argue this applies to any martial, but since they both need Charisma anyways, it’s less of a stretch to meet the multiclassing minimums just to add a little Genie to your Paladin.

Genie Patron Invocations

While the Eldritch Invocations Handbook covers most of these, we can make some special considerations.

• Grasp of Hadar: Having access to concentration-free flight means we can fly directly above a target and pull it ten feet into the air so it falls ten feet. If we’re a Dao with the Crusher feat, we can add another 5 feet, but 10 feet is enough to cause fall damage, which is enough to knock the target prone. Consequently, we should do this on our last blast of the turn or switch targets since being prone will give us Disadvantage on hitting the target.
• Repelling Blast: If we set up a dangerous area effect that does damage when a target enters the zone for the first time on a turn (Create Bonfire, etc.), we can push them in with this. If we also have Grasp of Hadar, we can pull a target out and then push back in on the same blast too.

Example Genie Warlock Build – Half-Genie Accuracy

Eldritch Blast is pretty great, and there are plenty of Invocations that support it and turn it into a great go-to option for any Warlock. This build takes none of those options. This build takes Pact of the Blade and shows off that you don’t have to be a Hexblade to be a weapon damage Warlock.

Damage vs Utility: Why Pact of the Blade?

At level twenty, a Warlock firing 4 Eldritch Blasts does this kind of damage assuming 8 on the die is a hit. We’ll be using Elven Accuracy to keep things equal:

This build will be using a longbow with Archery fighting style, the Fighter Champion subclass, and Elven Accuracy alongside various invocations that boost the Pact Weapon as well as using Eldritch Smite +6d8 on critical hits:

As you can see, when we have Advantage, we push ahead considerably, but what these numbers don’t show is the utility we give up. We don’t get to push and pull constantly with Repelling Blast and Grasp of Hadar. However, because Hex benefits us less, we can Concentrate on something else, like Shadow of Moil or even Greater Invisibility if we’re Dijinni, to gain the use of our Elven Accuracy.

Playstyle and Tactics

What this build does is use all the Warlock tricks to get Advantage like Darkness and Devil’s Sight or putting enemies inside Hunger of Hadar, but then combining Elven Accuracy with Eldritch Smite and 3 levels into Champion Fighter to fish for Smite Crits while also putting out Sharpshooter damage. Also we’re a Genie so we can fly at the same time that we’re busy Concentrating on those other spells.

Abilities

We’re going to be a Drow Half-Elf for access to both the Faerie Fire and Darkness spells, but that also gives us +2/+1/+1 ability score increases to work with.

While it may seem unusual to have our Dexterity ahead of our Charisma, we’re going to be using a Longbow and we’re not a Hexblade.

Race

We’re a Half-Elf Drow so we have access to Drow Magic on top of Darkvision and Fey Ancestry. A handful of extra useful spells to cast every day, but remember that you can’t recast them using your innate spellcasting, so if you want to cast them more than once you still need to learn them permanently.

Background

We’re taking Urchin to get easy Sleight of Hand and Stealth proficiency.

Skills and Tools

We’re actually taking our first level as Fighter so we can have Heavy Armor and Martial Weapon Proficiency, though we’ll only really wear Medium Armour due to low Strength. More importantly, we’ll have Constitution Save Proficiency for our Concentration spells. From Fighter we learn Acrobatics and Intimidation.

Feats

Usually multiclassing involves a lot of juggling to make sure we get our ASIs and Feats on time. However, we’re going to jump right back into Warlock at second level, so we won’t be far behind everyone else.

At fifth Level (Fighter 1/Warlock 4): We take Elven Accuracy, putting a point into our odd-numbered Dexterity score, making it an 18.

At Ninth Level (Fighter 1/Warlock 8): We take Sharpshooter, allowing us to ignore anything less than full cover, fire a Longbow from 600 feet with no penalty, and subtract 5 from an attack roll to add +10 to the damage roll. 

Why are we doing this instead of Eldritch Blast? Well if the average damage of 1d10+5 is 10.5, then firing Sharpshooter twice will make up the difference in damage of those two other blasts. Other factors would influence the DPR, such as if we’re Concentrating on Hex or not, but the point here is just about the damage of four naked Agonizing Blasts vs extra attack with Sharpshooter.

At fifteenth Level (Fighter 3/Warlock 12): We take an ASI in Charisma for 16->18.

At nineteenth Level (Fighter 3/Warlock 16): We take an ASI in Charisma for 18->20.

Levels