In which way are the Divine Soul and Hexblade redundants ?
Both subclasses can be summed up by a single feature that can either be fulfilled or abused by some other classes ?
What about the rest of the features they bring, or even (god forbid), the RP, themes or gameplay they provide without resorting to minmaxing and multiclassing?
I guess it's easy for people that weren't interested in these subclasses to begin with to say it's no big deal and it's
enough to multiclass or extract the one feature people are only interested in and throw the rest into the river. 😅
In any case it's impossible to please everybody, let's hope for mods then. 😛
Hexblade is a cludge fix for the PnP version of Bladepact being borked. It is to vague to provide good "RP opportunities" in a game like this. The Undead and Genie patrons have far more RP potential, in that they actually have patrons you can have a chat with.
Sentient weapon that corrupts the wielder is a very old trope, and does have its place, but they never made it clear enough what your patron really is...
Sentient weapon? Raven queen? Spirit from the shadowfell?
And if your patron is a weapon, is it really appropriate to have it just be a regular sword? Should it level somehow with you? Should your DM give you some artifact at lv 1?
Or is (because your don't HAVE to take the pact of the blade) your pact weapon a weapon your sentient weapon gave you to fight with?
Weird...
The thing is, the thing that made hexblade mechanically distinctive has been taken away. Which would mean that the subclass would have to be changed significantly, even if you retained the theme.
You might come up with a Pact of the McGuffin. The patron appears as an object in the player's inventory, which they can talk to, and change into any type of weapon. As the warlock gains levels the weapon becomes more powerful. Furthermore, it could function differently if the warlock chose Pact of the Chain - a floating sword as a familiar - or Pact of the Book - a spellcasting focus that gives a bonus to spell attacks and save DCs.
But this is very different to the Hexblade in terms of mechanics.
