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Warlocks have spell slots that scale with their level. Usually most spells that have an upcast feature either deal extra damage (they seem to follow the DMG guidelines for damage/level) or target extra creatures. Conjuration spells may summon extra creatures and healing spells heal more but that also relates to damage.
Are there any spells with more unique or powerful effects (even if just dealing more damage than expected when scaled)?
Not necessarily from the warlock spell list.
This spell has a highly unusual upcast description:
At Higher Levels. If you cast this spell using a spell slot of 4th level or higher, the duration is concentration, up to 10 minutes. If you use a spell slot of 5th level or higher, the duration is 8 hours. If you use a spell slot of 7th level or higher, the duration is 24 hours. If you use a 9th level spell slot, the spell lasts until it is dispelled. Using a spell slot of 5th level or higher grants a duration that doesn't require concentration.
Not only does the duration grow pretty rapidly, it eventually reaches "until dispelled", and at 5th level it turns the spell from one that needs concentration into one that does not.
We discovered, during play, as my bard used this spell to debuff various enemies, that blinding a lot of enemies by upcasting blindness on them (with a high enough spell save DC, it was striking how often the save was missed) really made the battlefield change. I upcast to levels 4, 5 and 6 on a number of occasions in Tier 3 play. A couple of great aspects to the spell are that: (1) it does not require concentration and (2) if the enemy can't see the party, there are a whole host of spells and abilities that cannot be used until the save is finally made.
That it gives allies advantage when attacking the blinded opponent was a key reason I'd use it, since I was playing the bard as a support caster.
I saw similar results with blindness as a DM when the cleric player used it as a debuff.
While it was occasionally useful at lower levels, blindness became a lot more useful as my bard's Spell Save DC went up and she could impact more enemies. Unlike hypnotic pattern, it didn't have the "charmed condition" rider that makes that nice debuff not useful versus creatures who are immune to the charmed condition. (As CR goes up that number seems to increase).
Two other spells that I see upcast with some frequency are fly and invisibility. Upcasting provides the benefit to more creatures, which can tactically have a substantial impact, and both of them can also have an impact outside of combat. (10 minutes of flying gets you over a non-trivial number of obstacles, the whole party being invisible for an hour allows for quite a bit of movement, infiltration, evasion, etc in many cases).
Most damage-based spells increase damage OR target extra creatures, but which one is fixed per a given spell. With Scorching Ray, every upcast level produces an additional ray, giving you the flexibility at cast time to either spread out targets or pour more damage into one.
With a warlock, this may not be super interesting since Eldritch blast scales the same way with character level.
So I have been playing a bard recently and it turns out that they don't do much blasting, which means I started to be more creative with my spell choices and upcasts.
Aid
There are bunch of other buffs that are concentration based but by targeting the entire party on upcast make parts of the game that are often dangerous or difficult trivial.
Enhance Ability
I recently started really enjoying upcasting this spell in non-combat situations. Do you need your party of dummies to suddenly get better at a given thing? Just upcast this and give them advantage for the duration.
I play in a party with three charisma casters (including me) and this became a pretty strong combat buff. It turns out that you can counterspell pretty much anything when you get advantage on the ability check.
I don't think it is clear if you can choose different effects for different targets when upcasting the spell (question that addresses it is here) but if yes, it becomes even better.
Fly, Invisibility
Armor of Agathys
That depends on whether it's Warlock specific or not, the question is confusingly phrased.
For other casters, lots of good ones have been covered in other questions, but for Warlock, because they only get up to level 5 spell slots(the Mystic Arcanum spells are once/long rest class features, they don't give higher level spell slots), Armor of Agathys is by far the best upcast:
A protective magical force surrounds you, manifesting as a spectral frost that covers you and your gear. You gain 5 temporary hit points for the duration. If a creature hits you with a melee attack while you have these hit points, the creature takes 5 cold damage.
At Higher Levels. When you cast this spell using a spell slot of 2nd level or higher, both the temporary hit points and the cold damage increase by 5 for each slot.
It's really useless at lvl1, the temp HP can take 1 hit and deal 5 damage, but at level 5, it can absorb 25HP of dmg and deal 50-100 damage, depending on how many hits it took to break it and is a must-have spell to always have known.
