rule clarification: Warlock pact of chain and eldritch blast.

[Jared Vanotterdyk]

Ok, so i have a question i have yet to find an answer to. for the warlocks pact of the chain descriptions, the description says you can forego one of your attacks to let your familiar attack. makes sense in most cases. but it gets a bit more interesting when you have the extra attack feature offered by some classes and invocations.


I have found that most everyone agrees that any attack in the extra attack feature allows you to instead make an attack with your familiar, essentially letting you attack twice (or even four times if your a high level fighter) with your familiar.


but there's one instance that I've yet to see asked or answered. and that's with eldritch blast. eldritch blast is this really unique cantrip that scales with the caster not by just increasing the damage, but by making the caster cast multiple blasts, each with their own attack roll and additive bonuses. which is the main reason everyone agrees its the strongest cantrip. but this mechanic also confuses me in regards with this pact of chain familiar feature.


if you cast eldritch blast, can each attack roll made for the individual beams be counted as an individual attack for the sake of this feature, or do you need to use the whole spell to make one attack with the familiar.


if the latter is true. then it would mean the pact of chain,familiar scales much better into the later game than if not, being able to cast eldritch blast and sacrifice some of your damage for poison potential is crazy cool. but again, it all depends on whether or not each beam is considered an attack that can be spent to use your familiars attack.

so my question, is their a rule that determines this within the hand book? or would this be more of a DM ruling kind of thing?.

 

[Kurotowa]

if you cast eldritch blast, can each attack roll made for the individual beams be counted as an individual attack for the sake of this feature, or do you need to use the whole spell to make one attack with the familiar.

A spell is a spell. Even if the spell calls for multiple rolls, it's still just a single spell. Anything that gives you extra attack actions says so explicitly, like Haste does for example.

So no, you can't get multiple familiar attacks from trading in EB bolts. They're not attack actions.

 

[Jared Vanotterdyk]

thank you for the clarification.

 

[jaelis]

Just to be really clear, the issue is that the chain pact ability says "when you take the Attack action, you can forgo one of your own attacks to allow your familiar to make one attack of its own with its reaction."

If you can figure out a way to cast eldritch blast as part of the attack action, then you would be all set. But it doesn't matter how many attacks you get to make when you use the Cast a Spell action, you can't use this chain pact ability.

 

[Caliban]

Note: you can only replace one of your attacks with an attack from your familiar, no matter how many extra attacks you have - it takes your familiar's reaction to make the attack, and they only have one reaction per round.