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Nerdarchy > Dungeons & Dragons  > Top 10 5E D&D Homebrew Magic Items for Warlocks by a Factor of Three*
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Top 10 5E D&D Homebrew Magic Items for Warlocks by a Factor of Three*

Worlds Collide When 5E D&D Meets The Office
D&D Ideas -- Petrification

Over at Nerdarchy the YouTube channel Nerdarchists Dave and Ted take a look at magic items in fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons with an eye towards the ones particularly beneficial for a warlock. Like the discussion on top magic items for rogues this is an unusual topic because it’s rare for a character to choose magic items. However there’s a few opportunities I can think of off the top of my head. In Adventurers League play items can be traded on a one-for-one basis for items with the same rarity at a cost of 15 downtime days unless they’re playing at the same table. Games beginning beyond 1st level often allow for players to choose magic items too, like in our own monthly fan one shots. And in the Ghosts of Saltmarsh campaign I’m currently running, one of the NPCs in town acts as a magic item broker who takes requests, and I imagine other 5E D&D adventures contain similar opportunities. But this is Top 10 by a Factor of Three! All the official content gets thrown out the window as we browse homebrew magic items at D&D Beyond looking for the best ones for warlock characters. So let’s get into it.

Magic items for warlocks at D&D Beyond

It’s worth noting you can create homebrew content for private use and share your homebrew content publicly at DDB at no cost — there’s no subscription required to access these services. However if you want to add any of the homebrew magic items mentioned below or any other homebrew content you come across to your collection you must subscribe at the Hero Tier or above. There’s a lot you can do at DDB for free. Check out what you can do here.

Subscribers can enjoy the latest feature from DDB — Digital Dice!

The DDB homebrew collection uses several statistics to track entries. Views shows how many people looked at any particular homebrew creation, Adds shows how many times a creation was added to someone’s collection and Rating is an upvote/downvote system. Since there are over 101,000 magic items in the collection I’m going to share the top 10 highest rated, most viewed and most added selections that also make particularly good magic items for warlocks. We’ll have a little objectivity and a little subjectively, but I’ll use Dave and Ted’s criteria for guidance and look at magic items that either provide extra spell slots, enhance spell power or specifically enhance the warlock’s signature spell eldritch blast.

I can already tell this Top 10 by a Factor of Three is gonna be weird.

Warlocks, am I right?

Notice that asterisk up in the title? I’ve delved into DDB homebrew for character options, spells and even magic items before but this one was the most difficult of all. The content filters for magic items don’t lend themselves to narrowing down what I’m looking for in this situation. Very quickly the research went sideways and even the veneer of methodology in this series couldn’t disguise the chaos roiling beneath.

Tinkering with all the filter options resulted in a chaotic mess, and would not be useful to compare between search categories to come up with any reasonable top item list. Instead, here’s a list of the Top 10 highest rating magic items warlocks. There’s one on the list not so useful but I left it there for posterity and because almost everything else is so overpowered or unbalanced they more than make up for the outlier.

Top 10 highest rating magic items

  1. Book of Infinite Spells. A bit on the wordy side but basically it’s more spells for your warlock to cast. While not truly infinite the way you’d think, 1d8 +22 spells you can cast from this legendary magic item while it need not even be on your person is pretty awesome.
  2. Book of Grudges. I had high hopes for this! Turns out it’s a Book of Exalted Deeds copy left unfinished. Hopefully the creator returns to this item and completes it since I’d love to know what it can do.
  3. Cortex of the Creators. Yadda yadda yadda “Once per day the caster may cast one spell of their choosing from any class list and of any level.”
  4. Cane of the Warlock. It’s got the name of the thing in the title! Extra damage for your eldritch blast, advantage on Charisma saves and checks, advantage on Dexterity checks and at the end of the day it’s a mace too.
  5. Hexus. The Hexblade warlock who attunes to this artifact greatsword can put all other Hexblade warlocks to shame. Here’s just a couple of the many features: advantage on all melee attacks with this weapon and recovering you Mystic Arcanum. I dare you to drop this one in a treasure pile in your campaign.
  6. Cloak of The Fiend. Wearing this cloak gives you +3 AC and +2 eldritch blast damage. Not bad for an uncommon item. Someone get Monty Hall in here.
  7. HexBlade. A +2 longsword that potentially causes dramatic death scenes when you drop a creature.
  8. Warlock’s Hood. A bonus to Charisma skills and a percentile chance for an extra 1 or 2 spell slots each day. I do like percentile dice.
  9. Exalted Spellwoven Robes. Add your spellcasting modifier to your AC!
  10. Ring of the Warlock. When you kill a creature with a spell, if you’re wearing this ring the spell slot is not expended.

A warlock as depicted in the fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook. Good luck trying to play one of these as a pacifist. Eldritch blast doesn’t exactly scream “I don’t want to hurt you!” [Image courtesy of Wizards of the Coast]

5E D&D warlock and magic item resources

Normally we wrap these Top 10 by a Factor of Three posts up with some other places to find similar content. Since this entry in the series wound up so disastrous, I’m expanding this section to offer you several places to get some fresh 5E D&D content as a palette cleanser. Enjoy!

  • Over at Dungeon Master’s Guild we’ve got 36 titles! Most of these are Character Build Guides with fun guides for an entire adventuring career plus a new NPC for DM’s to use, each inspired by the player character version. They’re all pay what you want and during the #PlayItForward event going on in May creators receive 100% of the sales. Add ’em all to your digital collection! Check it out here.
  • Did you sign up for Nerdarchy the Newsletter? You can do so over in the sidebar and among the benefits you’ll receive a coupon code for $9.99 off anything in Nerdarchy the Store. We’ve got over 30 digital products with Fifth Edition content ready to drop right into your game, 3D printed miniatures and terrain and most exciting of all — Out of the Box: Encounters for 5th Edition! If you like magic items especially check out Secrets of the Vault: Mage Forge Vols. 1 and 2. Check it all out including hardcover preorders here.
  • Over on Patreon you can get early access to all our store products every month, and new supporters get instant access to previous month’s rewards too (requires lots of scrolling down though — be warned). Check it out here.

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Doug Vehovec

Nerditor-in-Chief Doug Vehovec is a proud native of Cleveland, Ohio, with D&D in his blood since the early 80s. Fast forward to today and he’s still rolling those polyhedral dice. When he’s not DMing, worldbuilding or working on endeavors for Nerdarchy he enjoys cryptozoology trips and eating awesome food.

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