Some of the D&D design team sat down to talk about why the Hexblade ended up being cut from the upcoming Ravenloft book.
Hexblade Warlocks are a well-known feature to anyone who started getting into character optimization in 5th Edition D&D. With their ability to wield a conjured blade using nothing but Charisma (and not having to rely on any other stat), they were the foundation for a number of multiclass builds that were all about spells and swords. Or sometimes just swords with the occasional bit of smitery.
However, while the Hexblade was featured in the rounds of Unearthed Arcana dealing with all things spooky and dark, leading up to the final printing of Ravenloft: The Horrors Within, that’s one subclass that didn’t make the cut. Over the weekend, Wes Schneider and Makenzie De Armas spoke with YouTuber Nerdcore about why the Hexblade was cut from Ravenloft. In this video, right here!
The Hexblade, Cut From Ravenloft For Feedback Reasons – But Why?
As Wes Schneider, Design Lead on Ravenloft: The Horrors Within, puts it, the Hexblade went through two rounds of testing. The page budget was there, the art was commissioned, and considerable work had been put into the Hexblade. Time, effort, money, all of it; but the community feedback was a resounding “this ain’t it.”
“When the community is telling us, ‘this ain’t it’, it gets turned to the designers, the leads on the project and we’re like ‘well, what are we going to do with it?’ And as a design team, if it doesn’t meet certain thresholds, our only response is ‘that’s it, we’re cutting it’. What’s going in those pages? We’ll figure it out. We’ll design something else, we’ll create something new, we’ll expand something elsewhere.
But if the community is telling us ‘this is half baked’ or ‘this isn’t the way that we want it’ […] we’re not going to put out something that then we have to live with.”
So ultimately, it’s because of community feedback that the Hexblade wasn’t included. Now, what’s interesting is the tenor of the feedback. Because in order to understand what people were finding lukewarm about the latest iterations of the Hexblade from the Unearthed Arcanas last year, you have to understand the purpose of the Hexblade.
Originally, in 5th Edition, the Hexblade was the Melee Warlock. It was a subclass introduced in Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, and it marked a big shift in rules design for 5E. Because, as Warlock players will doubtless know, there wasn’t much in the way of rules support for a Hexblade Warlock.
Sure, there was the Pact of the Blade, which allowed the Warlock to summon an eldritch blade that was bound to them. But that meant focusing on something like Strength or Dexterity in addition to Charisma, which can be tricky when trying to get the biggest numbers fastest. Enter the 5E Hexblade.
At level 1, it granted a Warlock the ability to make melee weapon attacks using Charisma in place of Strength or Dexterity. And now, there are plenty of things that let a character make melee attacks with a spellcasting stat instead of one of the physical ones. But it changed the game for Warlocks. That matters, though, because in the new edition, those changes rolled over into the Warlock proper. Now, Pact of the Blade does what the Hexblade’s subclass did; or at least it does what most people remember the Hexblade’s subclass doing.
A Question Of Identity
The new Hexblade, then, was searching for an identity. We saw two different iterations. The first was the Hexblade envisioned as more of a Fighter with different magical attacks, like maneuvers almost, that let them make melee attacks with magical effects baked into them. The second Hexblade was more about cursing and hexing their enemies.
Neither version seemed to find purchase with an audience. Which meant that it was cut. As Schneider explains in the video, nothing tested is so set in stone that it can’t be pulled. This makes me wonder about the much-maligned banneret fighter (formerly purple dragon knight) because I would have thought that did worse than the Hexblade.
But, as designer Makenzie De Armas points out, that doesn’t mean the Hexblade is gone forever. Sure, it went through two different rounds of playtesting. But, De Armas pointed out that there’s still a hunger for a melee-focused Warlock. Albeit one with maybe a slightly broader playstyle.
There’s room to balance things out with invocations. And, as the design team says, there’s still plenty of “learnings” taken from the Hexblade, that can be used in other Warlock subclasses. Subclasses that we may well see in a future product. Not necessarily Arcana Unleashed: Deadfall, because that’s probably going to be all of the Arcane Subclasses from a while back.
But they have interwoven bits and pieces of that design into other Warlock subclasses. One thing that stands out to me, though, is the sudden number of people in the comments with the supposed “fix.” Read through the YouTube comments or look on whatever forum you like, and you’ll find people who seem to think that all the Hexblade needed was medium armor and shield proficiency.
But I think, that too, points to where the community is thinking in terms of what “a melee character” looks like. Tougher, with a higher AC maybe. Whatever the Warlock that is good in melee ultimately looks like, you can be sure it will have grown out of the ashes of the Hexblade as we knew it.
How would fix the Hexblade?
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