I'm basing everything on my own experimentation with these, so I might be wrong and others might correct me. It's just that in my experience, the boost in attack from the priest's chime was more significant than the tiny cast speed boost from the starter chime.
If you're unsure about miracles or hexes, here's my experience on it as a player who used miracles for the majority of the game (50 fth, 5 int. both versions of lightning spear and sunlight spear + lightning defender's greatsword +5) and later switched over to hexes:
They're both really good. Pumping up faith to 50 allows you to use the best miracle chime in the game by far (Dragon's Chime), as it has the highest base damage, an S scaling in lightning and incredibly high casting speed. If you spend an hour or two in the
covenant, you also get sunlight spear (requires more faith, but you can decrease the requirement with a certain spice item), which is basically a boss killer. These offensive miracles hurt like hell and they practically have infinite range if you aim with binoculars. However, they do have incredibly limited uses, so you can't solely rely on them and the sunlight spear has 3-4 uses, which is why it's best kept apart for bosses. Most enemies will still take 2-3 hits from your great lightning spear (GLS) and you'll probably only be able to carry 9-10 of these for a while. It's also quite a bit slower than hexes, but really, the infinite range makes up for that.
If you're going for Hexes, you could basically stop pumping points into faith and intelligence at 30 and concentrate on other stats afterwards, as from that point on you're going to encounter severely diminishing returns. It has some great spells like Dark Orb and Great Resonant Soul (GRS), but the former is short range and usually won't hit an enemy outside of lock-on range, while the latter costs 500 souls per cast. Spells such as GRS also take in 2 attunement slots, whereas all three miracle spears only require a single slot. The spells are also bound to two different weapon types, namely chimes or staffs, meaning that you're either going to have to carry two different "best" items or a single one that can cast both in expense for lower damage. But enough negative talk and onto the positive stuff...
Hexes are pretty insanely strong. I use a sunset staff and a chime of want for my hexes as those tend to be the best possible weapons for hexes when fully upgraded. Dark Orb does comparable damage to a GLS and has more than twice the uses. GRS does more damage than a sunlight spear and has three times the uses. Both spells cast in a significantly shorter time than the aforementioned miracle spells and Dark Orb actually staggers a lot of enemies, letting you bombard them with your insane amount of spell uses (you can get up to 70+) without them even being able to get near you. A lot of enemies and bosses seem to be non-resistant or even weak against dark spells, so they rarely survive long enough to GRS or Dark Orb spamming. Dark Fog + Bat staff is almost OP in PVP as it instantly poisons the opposition (the damage seems to be higher than regular poison) and it's incredibly difficult to dodge the fog, meaning all you have to do is keep up the pressure and be careful and they're done for within seconds. It also gives you tons of options, as you can experiment with both sorceries and miracles to a lesser extent. If you enter a certain covenant, namely
, you mget a ring that increases your hex damage in trade for tiny amounts of health. Hexes actually make it possible to clear entire levels with spells alone, without having to rely on melee combat. I'd say it's potentially more powerful than miracles, but it also asks more of the player in return.
