Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Pact of Blade confirmed via interview

Sounds like the right move to me. Many people found the Hexblade subclass weird from a thematic and flavor viewpoint and if you take Pact of the Blade these days you're very often going Hexblade anyway. This might open some more interesting options too by getting the good stuff of Hexblade and mixing it with other patrons.



Well, Hex Warrior by itself does that, the extra attack comes later. It also gives you proficiency with shields, medium armor, and martial weapons, which is also a pretty big deal.

All Blade Pact warlocks have access to extra attack through the "Thirsting Blade" invocation. Hexblade bladepact must also take that invocation to get extra attack. The primary reason that blade pact needs Hexblade is the charisma to attack feature (which vanilla warlocks do not get). A secondary reason is that Hexblade grants medium armor, but there are other ways to get that so it is less crucial.

If Larian is indeed including charisma to attack/defense as part of the blade pact feature then hexblade is really no longer necessary to make a blade pact warlock.

Note: a hexblade that does not take blade pact does not get access to thirsting blade, and therefor does not get extra attack. The extra attack feature is NOT tied in any way to hexblade. It is OP because of the charisma to attack/damage feature, which saves blade pact from its otherwise crippling multiple attribute dependency.

Pact of the Blade needed the help, so I am fine with some Hexblade features getting rolled into it to make it less of a bad option. You shouldn't need an entire subclass to make a core class feature good.

+1

Ok so IF it is true that the Pact of the Blade warlock is being reworked similarly to how the new player's handbook will be next year then it sounds like some of what Larian is doing may be aligning BG3 with the next generation of D&D which is what is arriving next year. Great, right? No, nonononononono, not at all...what I have managed to find out about the next generation of D&D can be summarized in one sentence: Wizards of the Coast are going burn D&D to the ground. Hold on to your 5e books like they are precious artifacts because when they go out of print D&D will be over.

They are eliminating crits as a possibility for NPCs, a natural 20 now guarantees success...even if the difficulty of the task requires 30 and your modifiers trash and you normally couldn't succeed even with a nat20. I also fear that the insanely awful multiclassing rules that BG3 is reported to have might also be part of the many horrors that are reported to be in the next handbook. This is honestly just soul crushing. You can read a bit more about the upcoming horrors here.

I just hope this is true and that we're not getting our hopes up prematurely.

Is there any real reason to believe this is happening? I mean, other than wishful thinking or "it would make sense if..."

I agree that some of that is horrible, and I'm not wild about many of those changes.

I **DO** think that the change to bladepact that is alluded to here is good though. It should have been incorporated into the base game long ago.

Eh, its fine either way. If they don't do it then I'll use a hexblade mod.

Yeah, people said that when 5E first came out too... and 4th... and 3rd... it was true for 4th ed honestly but I mean many people still liked 3.5 the best. It'll be okay. Your GM can homebrew whatever they want or use whatever edition they want. Or you know, you can just switch over to Pathfinder like I did. At least Pathfinder's gish classes get support and can be interesting sometimes, and many are basically multiclasses designed to actually synergize naturally without needing to multiclass.

I don't think I could figure out how to install a mod. It took me two weeks to manage to put together my avatar picture.

What do you mean by "this"? The pact of the blade stuff or the "BG3 will be making lots more changes to look like D&D5.5e" theory?

For the former, the reason is the interview that everyone has been discussing and quoting, which explicitly says that Pact of the Blade will incorporate abilities from the Hexblade patron. Like, sure it might be a complete ChatGPT fabrication. But it's not April Fools and it'd be very ballsy of "mutiplayer.it" to put out a full interview article with the Lead System Designer of Larian 3 weeks before their newest and biggest game's release date.

While people did say that about 5e and 4e and 3e and probably 2e.
a.) as you say, it was true for 4e. 4e died a brutal enough death that it spawned an entirely new ttrpg
b.) never before has the company in charge of D&D (openly) sent the Pinkertons to raid someone's house, and just weeks after having a huge fiasco about OGL and their corporate greed.
Like...yikes, it's not looking good.

Here's the link to that UA: https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/ua/ph-playtest-5

The Pact Weapon info is on page 11.

So they removed the stat limitations from multi-classing.

That is huge!

Makes a lot of combinations easy.

If it makes you feel better, Wyll alone makes it likely as he's the reason people assumed hexblade had to be in if not blended into pact of blade long ago already, and it probably does make more sense to just add the hexblade features over the subclass since hexblade patron isn't all -that- flavorful compared to other actual patrons, raven queen smeen or not.

Choosing Archfey was a weird choice, but I could say that about spore druid and maybe champion. Almost feels like they just picked some of the most unpopular subclasses to try and buff them for fun or see if they could make them more interesting. The Fathomless would have been cool with a few minor tweaks to the flavor and a ton of people would have hard ons for Celestial, Undead, and Genie.

It's all good though. I might pick archfey just to challenge myself and see what they've done with it. Picking fiend just feels too generic.

Just so you know, the article you referenced is over a year old, and several of the complaints you listed have been rolled back in more recent playtest material. Specially around not 1's & 20's and allowing DM's to still crit.

I don't think you quite understand how bad a Wizard with intelligence of 8 is, or a Warlock with charisma of 8, etc. etc. etc. Those limitations were there to protect players from their own stupidity...this change only offers them the rope to hang their characters with. Inappropriate multiclassing when you don't have a minimum stat requirement to make that multiclass level viable is a completely wasted level-up.

Well they promised all of the PHB choices would be in game, so the Archfey and Champion were basically guaranteed.

Also helps when the kits are easy to implement, Ie refactoring abilities already in game

This is basically the "no Sh*t Sherlock" of news. Wyll has bad DEX because he was always intended to use CHA for his rapier attacks.

More interested to see what they have done with Pact of the Book. That would also be pretty rubbish RAW in BG3 because of the distinct lack of out of combat utility spells.