Hexblade Change

[Scylon]

So, I have been attempting to fit the hexblade into some sort of build outside pure and have been having issues. Based on the changes highlighted below, it just seems like an effort to punish multiclassing it rather then reward being pure:

+ Hexblade
Hex values and scaling capped at 5, 1 per 6 Hexblade levels
Hexblade pre-epic feats are now distributed at every 6th level: 6, 12, and 18 instead of 5, 10, 15, and 20. A net loss of 1 feat.

A couple of build that would have been viable but are no longer for example:

10/10/10 hex/knight/cav
24/3/3 hex/bg/lock
25/5 hex/WM
25/5 hex/LM

Hexblade from my perspective just feel like it's broken now. The class as a whole just don't seem to mesh with anything and even going pure feels like its not overly rewarding compared to other classes. I'm thinking it should be reverted back to on 5 levels, still cap it at +5, and add "something" to level 28 to make pure ones get rewarded.

Am I just being stupid here, or is there something to my line of thinking?

[Good Character]

From a meta POV, the change to scaling was deliberate to tone down people's accessibility to penetrate +5 DR without heavy investment.

As far as the feats I have no idea why that occurred.

[Ork]

I fail to see how the majority of those builds are no longer viable from a -1 hex relative to before.

10/10/10 got hit the hardest but it was hardly viable to begin with.

[Dreams]

Edit: I can’t read

[AstralUniverse]

Warlock levels count as 1/2 for hexblade's curse and hex. This means that 24 lvls of hexblade with a warlock dip can reach +5 weapons as per lvl 25th hexblade. Worth clarifying here that Curse weapon was not nerfed at all, only hex. Curse weapon still +6 at lvl 30. Getting +5 with 24 hexblade 3 warlock right now. Hex's power is affected by these warlock levels but they stack to 25.5 CL, rounded down, so it changes nothing now.

Something else I noticed in my tests, when picking 24th hexblade level on lvl 30, after the warlock levels, suddenly the spells that would be marked [Pact] for warlock spellbook also carry to the Hexblade spellbook, except that they arent really infi and it's just a bug. However, Crushing Despair improvement from star pact applies to the Hexblade's spellbook and makes it guaranteed to debuff at least -1. Also glowing eyes and free Deep Speech. Nice.

[Dreams]

Oh! I grossly misunderstood the change notes.

[Scylon]

Oh! I grossly misunderstood the change notes.

as did I it seems. i assumed the nerf was class wide, i didn't realize it was hex only. that changes things a bit for the better.

[a shrouded figure]

I too am happy that the hex change did not affect curses, however, I’ll say that the every 6 levels for a feat is savage and a bit “weird” if you’re focusing on curse weapon. It’s particularly painful to Curse of (Element, not Hypocrisy) in that there’s all of zero situations where Curse of (Element) makes more sense to take than curse of Hypocrisy. Granted that was true before, but it does feel like the curse of elements / elemental decay choices were essentially deleted.

I struggle to find a situation where taking a curse of elements or particularly hex of decay (outside my best friend is an /insert caster or spellblade/) is a good choice.

I’ll be the first to say that Hexblades rule, but I still like consequential decisions and right now deep or shallow, there’s clearly better (in almost any situation) picks.