AITA for the way I'm playing a warlock?
My character is a level 10 warlock. I played her through an entire campaign with this DM and party, and we carried the same team into the DM's next campaign. For context, this is a pro DM who runs games off Start Playing.
The character is a ranged control caster. I took pact of the chain and gaze of two minds, and in most battles my strategy is to stay back behind cover and send my familiar, George the imp, into battle. I cast from the familiar's location. George can fly and turns invisible at the end of each of his turns, so he rarely gets killed, but if he does I just resummon and carry on. This strategy does mean that my character, who is quite squishy and low defense, rarely takes damage. But I also don't deal much damage, mostly focused on pushing enemies into better positions for my party to hit or locking down enemies with stuff like fear, hypnotic pattern, banish, etc.
Thought this was all going well until last week we got into a battle that was in a large open space doing aerial combat on flying mounts. No cover or anywhere to hide, and the enemies had very high movement speed so I couldn't really stay away from them. I cast a banish early in the fight using my last spell slot, and all the enemies decided I was the primary threat and completely focused on me, ignoring the rest of the party. That party does include other full casters who were actively doing damage with their spells, so it wasn't just a matter of taking out the caster first. I spent the rest of the battle stunned and/or poisoned, missing nearly all my turns and unable to do anything about it. The rest of the party dealt with the enemies. I woke up after the fight was over and everyone was crowing about how much fun that fight was and their cool strategies.
So I felt pretty bad about it, and chatted with George afterward. Asked his advice on how to do aerial combat better since he does it all the time. The DM plays George when we talk, and his response is: "Your usual strategy of being a coward and sending me out to do all the dangerous work while you hide in the back like a chicken is what you do best. You should stick to that." Literally used those words. Whole party was listening and laughing about it.
Is he right? Have I been annoying the party and the DM this whole time and I was somehow oblivious? I'm fairly new to D&D so maybe this is some kind of widely hated meme build and I just didn't know it.