D&D 5E Hexblade main stat

[NotAYakk]

It is about AC.

Unless you have heavy armor or equivalent, dex is a srcondary stat; you'll want 14. AC is just too useful.

Strength has a hill to climb. With finess weapons, you can use Dex instead of Strength and do fine. With alt-attack-stat, Strength is again only useful if you have heavy armor.

...

One thing I have played with is half stat, but add.

Ie, you add 1/2 of your int (round up) to weapon attacks with your Hexblade if the weapon is not otherwise magically accurate. If it does have a magical bonus to hit, this bonus is reduced to +1.

In addition, if the attack is dex based, add 1/2 of your int (round up) to damage; if strength based, add int to damage.

This is a bit complex. But it does avoid over-stacking with artificer int-to-attack, balances dex and str choices, and maintains bounded accuracy.

It also avoids the trope of swingibg a greatsword with 8 str; the hexblade magic makes middling str/dex usable, but not ignorable.

Max stacked, this is +8 to hit/+10 to damage with str/int, or +8/+8 with dex. With a +3 weapon it becomes +9 to hit/13 or 11 to damage (before proficiency)

A 16 int/14 dex character starts out with +6/+4; a 16 int/14 dex/14 str with +6/+5.

Duelist fighters with 18 attack stat are +6/+6. Archers are +8/+4.

Going for an extreme, 18 str/14 int is +7/+6.

So this is strong, but not out of bounds. May still be a little too good.

 

[DND_Reborn]

I've made Hexblade its own class and removed Pact otB and Hexblade from Warlock options. At lvl 5, it automatically gets Thirsting Blade invocation.

What other stat besides Charisma would you use for Pact Weapon? I'm not really a fan of attacking with Charisma (how does it work?)
Warlock was supposed to be INT class, so that's probably the best choice. Not sure if there are any "broken" multiclasses / feats to consider, like Bladesinger or something.
I think there's already too many WIS classes, but could be cool...

We (sort of) did something similar just recently, so I am pleased to see we aren't alone.

First, we rolled Sorcerer in Wizard, so Wizards get metamagic and the Sorcerer class is gone. (There are many nerfs to wizards in our mod, so this became there "thing" like Clerics get Channel Divinity and Druids get Wild Shape.)

Second, Bards became Universal half-casters. They only get up to 5th level spells, but there is no longer a Bard spell list--they can learn from any spell list.

Third, Warlocks became half-casters for Wizards, akin to Paladins for Clerics and Rangers for Druids. This means they gain Extra Attack at 5th level now. We felt with all their Eldritch Invocations, they fit nicely as a half-caster class. In this process, they now use INT for their spellcasting ability, to mirror Wizards.

Fourth, Clerics now use Charisma as their spellcasting ability, due to the concept of Conviction which is part of Charisma. This allows Clerics and Paladins to both use Charisma. Druids and Rangers both use Wisdom. This gives us a pair of caster/half-caster for each INT, WIS, and CHA; and allows Bards to be the universal half-caster.

Now, do you still have a non-Hexblade Warlock class? Or are you really just giving all warlocks the Hexblade subclass and allowing them to choose a second subclass on top of that??