Wyll is obviously supposed to be a meelee warlock. He is not called "the eldritch blast gun of frontiers" after all.
But pact of the blade warlocks have famously been very bad in DnD before XGtE. If does not matter what weapon you take, you will never really outclass eldritch blast and hex, even with sharpshooter and similar feats.
And eldritch blast takes one invocation to be good, whereas pact of the blade, to stay competitive, requires almost ALL of your invocations. Devils sight, thirsting blade, improved pact weapon, eldritch smite, lifedrinker, ...
Since the archetype is very interesting, many are requesting playing as a hexblade. But that obviously is not fitting thematically (Mizora is not the Raven Queen), and hexblade as a patron is annoying since it is so centralizing. Ever since it was introduced I have never seen anybody play fiend etc. Imo what should be done is adding hex warrior to the pact of the blade feature. So you get a weapon, shield and medium armor proficiency, and can attack with cha.
I do not think hexblade warlocks will ever be introduced, but they still would be very good with hexblades curse etc. It is just that other subclasses can ALSO use the pact of the blade effectively. If you want you can add other XGtE stuff to, especially eldritch smite would be welcome, but it would not be necessary, just cool. But pact of the blade, as written, is more or less useless. And have you seen Wylls dex modifier
Ranger was massively reworked, I think that should be done with other "trap choices" too, especially pact of the blade warlocks. It is a very simple fix, just a few lines of code, and Wyll could finally live up to his name (if we chose too).
(for a breakdown of the different pacts and their strengths in 5e, see
here
This will also make warlocks less abusable as a dip class. With 2 levels of hexblade, you get eldritch blast + agonizing blast, devils sight, hex blades curse, shield and medium armor proficiency, attacks with cha...
Almost all optimized builds, for all classes, take 2 levels of hexblade.
With this change, you would need to take 3 levels in warlock, and all warlocks would be viable for multiclassing, making the class as a single class more viable.
Would that make blade pact OP?
It still requires a lot of invocations, unless you just pick it for the armor, and forces you not to pick other very strong invocations. The imp is also very strong, tome gives you ritual spells (so a lot of additional casts with your limited spell slots) etc.
Imo it is balanced
Thoughts?
Can we finally show, that Wyll giving up his soul to the devil was actually worth it, and people are not just calling him "blade of the frontiers" ironically, but that he can actually hit something?
