Melee'locks (Hideous Blow Quandary)

[wuhwuhwolves]

Hi, I'm newish.

I've been trotting around on a few characters to figure out who I want to play for the long term, and my latest is an attempt at a strength melee warlock. Seems straightforward enough.

Unfortunately I have been able to get Hideous Blow to trigger only once out of many attempts. I cast the invocation, I hit wolves/snakes/bandits, I get no magic damage. Am I making some obvious mistake? Do I need dex to beat an invisible touch attack roll? I have no idea. Please help.

[illithid]

Hideous blow applies a maximum of once around, and triggers on the first successful attack in that round. So should trigger on attack 2, 3, 4 etc if the first misses

If it's not activating just double check that the text comes up "Hideous blow enabled" when you cast it, as casting it multiple time toggles the invocation on/off.

[wuhwuhwolves]

Unfortunately I've followed those steps to no success. Seems like my character might be bugged.

[Tsidkenu]

Hold your horses! The magic damage from hideous blow applies after your regular weapon damage. If one strike from your weapon is enough to kill wolves, snakes and bandits then hideous blow will not take effect. Try on something tougher like a kobold that you do not kill in a single strike. It does work, though.

[wuhwuhwolves]

Great! I'll test this out soon! Thanks for the replies.

[fashionisdanger]

and unfortunately if your damage is not high enough to overcome a DR it won't kick in

[Kanada]

I love locks. Played about a million of them in the past few years. I have my best melee lock ever right now and as he's getting into epics...it's not going good. The lack of ability to buff ac effectively combined with the rarity of good nonmagical armor means he gets the crap beat out of him.