The Hexblade is king—anyone who’s been playing D&D since 2017 knows this, though Baldur’s Gate 3 players were only introduced to the Warlock subclass in Patch 8. D&D 2024’s now taking steps to dethrone it, as seen in June’s Unearthed Arcana rules—free playtests released to the public for balance passes.
For the uninitiated, the Hexblade is an infamous multiclass dip in D&D’s 2014 ruleset for a list of reasons. Multiclassing in D&D requires you to level sequentially through your other classes—postponing your main classes’ features—which makes frontloaded classes super important. And boy howdy, was the Hexblade top-heavy.
Simply dropping one level into warlock would snag you medium armour and shield proficiency, a couple of very useful spells like Shield and Eldritch Blast, a Warlock spell slot and, oh yeah, the ability to use charisma for your melee attacks.
That last one’s key for charisma-based spellswords because of something called MAD (multi-attribute dependency). D&D 5e only gives you so many attribute increases, which are also jostling for space with your feat selection. A Paladin, for instance, is split between prioritising strength, constitution, and charisma.
A single-level dip into Hexblade lets you pump all their points into just charisma and constitution—leaving them able to swing a sword while getting the highest bonuses out of their charisma-fuelled features. Plus it raised their spell save DC, making control spells more effective. Strap a Sorcerer to the side, and you get the dreaded Sorcadin, bane of DMs trying to make balanced combats everywhere.
D&D 2024 has been taking steps to make the Hexblade less appealing, steps which started with the release of the Player’s Handbook itself. So, what’s changed?
Pact of the Nerfed Blade
The proposed 2024 version in the Unearthed Arcana material postpones all these perks to level 3, with the exception of charisma-based attacks, which you can snag via the level 1 invocation Pact of the Blade.
Your medium armour and shield proficiency are both gone; instead, you gain a +2 bonus to AC (as long as you aren’t wearing either of those things) If you’re within 10 feet of your Hexblade’s Curse target. Critting on a 19 or 20 is now also a 14th level feature. Oof.
There are some other benefits, mind. Unyielding Will is genuinely very cool, allowing you to punish enemies after succeeding on a saving throw to maintain concentration once per turn without a reaction cost—and, once per long rest, being able to turn a failed concentration save into a successful one.
This is slightly undercut, however, by Warlocks not getting proficiency in constitution saving throws (the stat used to keep concentration on a spell). Saving throws you aren’t proficient in don’t scale with level, either—so it’ll be harder and harder to maintain all-important spells.
Hindering Curse is potentially very strong, too. If you hit a cursed target, it gains disadvantage on the next saving throw it makes before the start of your next turn. This could be nutty as a variant on the typical ‘Sorcadin’ build, focusing on Warlock levels instead of Paladin ones.
The real bummer here is the lack of medium armour and shield proficiency, and the subclass’s insistence on not having those.”
A level 6 Hexblade, level 2 Sorcerer multiclass could curse a target on their first turn. On their second, they could attack them, then proceed to Quicken Spell metamagic a powerful control spell—like Hold Person—with imposed disadvantage. Nasty.
The real bummer here is the lack of medium armour and shield proficiency, and the subclass’s insistence on not having those. Because without it, the Hexblade Warlock is… kinda squishy. Getting hit more means more chances to drop important concentration spells, too, and Unyielding Will only helps so much with that.
Either you burn an invocation slot on grabbing Armour of Shadows, or you multiclass into something like Paladin—which renders Accursed Shield useless, anyway.
If I were sitting in Wizards’ design room—well, I’d probably start talking obnoxiously about how good PF2e’s three-action system is and how they should crib it—but after I was done with that, I’d suggest they make a new Warlock invocation that gives access to medium armour and a shield. Heck, make it require 3rd level—Warlocks can swap out their invocations as they level up.
Weirdly enough, I think Wizards has incentivised multiclassing for the Hexblade more, not less, by refusing to give them AC-boosing invocations. Mind, Unearthed Arcana is test material. The kind of nitpicking I’m giving right now is exactly why it’s being passed by the public first, and I’m both curious and keen to see whether Wizard’s designers can thread the needle in the subclass’ full release. They absolutely need a win.
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