Hexblades: Feedback and Suggestions

[GeneralGormal]

Hexblades are the most mechanically challenging class to play among the updated melee classes. Building hex power (HxP) and spending it on finishers in an intelligent way is very difficult to automate as it requires you to hold back on spending that HxP when enemies are dying around you in order to go into the next fight fully charged--there's an inflection point in any given fight where some enemies are still standing, but they no longer pose a threat, making resources spent during this period reduce only the time spent fighting, rather than bringing your most powerful tools to bear against a fresh set of mobs that can still kill the party.

2h vs 1h: As it stands now, there's very little reason to use 1h. Bahamut blades are a huge factor in this as they're so strong that they make up most of the single target damage ostensibly traded for the AOE of 2h. This is worsened by a total lack of viable offhand choices for 1h Hexblades and a weaker pool of standalone 1h options.

Buffs and Debuffs: Baleful Hex is very strong and can be used in either 1h or 2h mode, but most of the class' other effects are redundant, weak, or inferior to other spell options.

Debuffs: Darkworm Feast (16s 1h slow)
Armor of Winter's Grasp (16s slow when hit)
Eldritch Chains (40s weakened)
Hexblast (12s +10 AC)
Baleful Hex (25% damage taken and 25% to-hit penalty)

Buffs: Armor of Hexes (weak blur, doesn't stack)
Armor of the Void (40% all resists) shares slot with Blazing Doom
Cloak of Flies (5d5 acid damage when hit)

Armor of Winter's Grasp and Cloak of Flies require you to be hit before they work (the latter dealing such low damage that it's not worth using over a 13d45 AOE with vampiric healing attached). Armor of the Void shares a spell slot with Blazing Doom, your most potent damage spell, and is flat out inferior to CLR/SOS/SOW spells on the 3 fighter hybrids both in terms of potency and being 5th circle you have one fewer cast and a longer recharge time.

Hex Power (HxP): Combo points are a great new mechanic for the game as they help encourage player choice, except that in their current state, the only choice is when to use your finisher (VF/VS) and weapon enchantment. Pretty much all of the "new" classes have a few shorter cooldown abilities and a couple longer ones, which makes sense, except that Hexblades' longer cooldown abilities have the added requirement of needing 3 HxP to function. In practice, this means that if you miss your finisher (very common against endgame mobs, especially those with blur), you can use your other finisher, and then you still have 25 seconds of just hitting HxP builders until VF/VS come back up. If accidentally used at <3 HxP, you only get a 100% weapon strike and still incur the 28s cooldown.
Rangers have one round every 10 or so (depending how you open the fight) where all powers are recharging. Paladins, Blackguards and Warriors can have no downtime. Hexblades have downtime when they miss any power and they're stuck waiting on the next HxP builder to come up. It really sucks to miss attacks on a Hexblade.

Utility: Astral Eyes - Handy for the few newer characters roaming around without access to the many DI/Sense items/scrolls/potions
Spectral Fade - Conceptually neat, but 3 casts of hide are dramatically inferior to rangers getting infinite hide that works with their sneak ability or more commonly a perm-sneak item to turn them into rogues. The 'hide' part of this spell doesn't work properly and it's effectively just invis/camo.
Slowness - 1h Hexes apply this to their target and you can apply it to anyone hitting you through AWG (the overlap here when using 1h decreasing its usefulness), but Hexblades are trying to avoid getting targeted in almost all situations.
Baleful Hex - A great debuff for the entire party, but perhaps even moreso for the Hexblade itself as missing attacks hurt them more than other classes since the bulk of their damage in 2h comes from the aoe component of VF/VS and weapon enchantment spells (sidenote: damroll doesn't impact either of these, so hitroll is just more valuable to Hexblades than any other class relative to damroll). The downside to BH is that while you can in theory maintain 100% uptime as it's 30s duration 30s recharge, very few fights are single target, and typically your target will die in <30s. Additionally, because of the timing on BZD/BOA, using BH inside those buff windows not only costs you the enchantment damage for that round and the HxP point, but commonly pushes one of your finishers outside the buff window, so it gets used "naked".
Hexblast - Good for the party, but has diminishing returns with players' worn hitroll and other +armor debuffs like Baleful Hex.

Suggested Changes:

Eldritch Celerity - Add a hit or dam bonus to offset the loss of an offhand weapon's bonuses if no better offhand options (see below) are added.
Baleful Hex - Make this generate 1 HxP so it doesn't hurt your HxP cycle and acts as a filler when you miss an HxP builder. Also would let you passively build HxP in 1h, so you could swap to 2h between fights and go in charged up rather than 4 rounds away from doing real damage.
Void Star/Vortex of Fire - Reduce recharge to 12s. Missing a finisher in this case means you would lose that round's damage and HxP, but your overall HxP cycle wouldn't be impacted unless you miss 2 in a row as one will come up after you build 3 more HxP.
Spectral Fade - Apply sneak as well as hide/camo/invis and make the hide work with sneak like rangers/rogues/bards. Still limited by 3 casts, a short duration, and doesn't help people loaded with tia/baha sneak gear.
AWG - Add fire and melee resist or something to this or make it give your attacks a high chance to apply slow.
CoF - Add resists, damage, debuffs...anything really. This spell is not worth casting.
AoV - Add vampiric healing or some kind of offensive boost. You only get 2 of these and at the cost of your best buff.
Darkworm Feast - Short duration single target slow is okay, but if 1h is supposed to be more survival/utility focused, all of the 1h debuffs feel weaker than just using 2h to kill the enemies faster and letting other people debuff who can do it far better. You only get BH, this slow, +10AC HB, bash, an armor that can also slow, a single target weakened (rangers do this, and that's it. That's two unique debuffs (I think HB is unique) and nothing to impact groups of enemies, which are the bulk of fights.

Offhand options: Add a new item type: Fetish. Allow hexblade only held items/shields that come with a variety of powers, letting them do some fun item-swapping like the old days or pick the buff/debuff they think is best for the situation. Allow high hit/dam values on these if eldritch celerity isn't adjusted to boost these.

Hex: Why do no Hexblade powers apply the Hex debuff? In general, Hexblades bring very little utility to a group in terms of unique or powerful debuffs, when that feels like the niche they should be filling. Giving them access to poison like Blackguards would be an easier (but ultimately worse) way to solve this problem. Some kind of AOE debuffing other than slow (warriors and blk can already aoe slow) would be very valuable to a party---ray of enfeeblement is one I'd personally love to use.