Hexblast has had its skill mechanics and damage adjusted to account for the loss of Doom’s scaling. Broadly speaking, it does less damage at the very top end of gameplay but getting it to a fairly decent level of damage is easier than before. It now removes a random Hex from an enemy and will deal more damage with hits and ailments if a Hex was removed in this way. Its damage is also more consistent because you no longer need to wait for Doom to build up.
Another issue that we feel undermines Hex builds is the Doom mechanic. We designed Doom with the goal of making self-cast Hexes more effective than other more trivial applications of Hexes, such as the Blasphemy and Hextouch Support gems. The Doom mechanic was somewhat successful in its goal, but came at the cost of adding a lot of complexity to Hex-related mechanics.
We are removing the Doom mechanic and as a consequence will be making several other changes to mechanics that previously interacted with Doom. For example, all stats that reference Doom have been replaced with other curse-themed stats.
Hexblast has had its skill mechanics and damage adjusted to account for the loss of Doom’s scaling. Impending Doom has also had its base damage roughly doubled to compensate for this loss. We have replaced the Doomsday keystone with a new Hex-themed keystone.