Guild Wars: Fixing Hexes

I had a brainstorm last night about my problems with hexes in the way the game currently plays – namely that they're weak individually but incredibly strong collectively. They push strategies to the extreme and force similar extremes in reaction. The only way I can tell to make hexes really work is in a build dedicated to making them work by covering them and overloading a team's ability to remove them – hex heavy, in so many words. The only way to deal with that is mass removal options like Divert Hexes (Which got a nerf over the weekend – to no end of whining - while a lot of hexes were buffed. That's a bad testing environment of course – did hexes get better on their own or was it the decrease in teams ability to remove them that made them work as well as they did? But Divert Hexes is arguably stronger than any other removal out there while still not being as nasty as condition removal so it's probably a trial that needs to be made.) which aren't very good against teams that don't run a lot of hexes. It's not very viable to run a hex heavy team because if you play enough you'll run into a team running a lot of removal and your strategy falls apart. At the same time it's not very viable to run mass hex removal so when you run up against a hex team you're going to be overwhelmed. But if that happens you don't load up on hex removal you just pick yourself and go again because there won't be many hex teams. So each strategy gets pushed to the edges and I don't think that's exactly healthy.

Anyhow, it's a problem I'm not entirely sure how to fix although I think if hexes were more viable without needing massive infrastructure to support them – if, say, you could sprinkle them throughout a build doing something else and use them to good effect without having to turn that build into a hex heavy one – then they'd be more common. More common hexes means removal gets more common. And that means extreme hex builds have a much harder time and won't be able to steamroll their opposition though they will still have a chance to overwhelm them if, you know, they're well put together. That would, I'd think, take a lot of the silliness out and make the game much more rounded.

The first step for me, then, is figuring out a way of making hexes matter when they're not covered and apt to be removed easily by anything like decent removal options. So, I was thinking about something else entirely – preprotting and why it's not viable at the moment (Basically, any enchantments you put up on a target about to get spiked are shatterbait. They won't stick thanks to how vigorous removal is at the moment – thank you Grenth's - and they're actually going to hurt the target's ability to survive if only by wasting the energy going into casting them which could be spent elsewhere.). And for some reason I thought about what's happened to shouts in Nightfall.

Shouts first came into the game to, well, give Warrior's and other classes that shouldn't be using magic a way of doing magical effects (Interestingly, I believe when Dazed used to be Silence and you know, just completely shut down spellcasting, it also prevented characters from using shouts. Doesn't do that now, of course, but might be interesting if it did.). But by existing as a separate mechanic it wasn't covered by the ways that magical spells and effects were countered. They couldn't be removed and by having no casting time they couldn't be interrupted either. As a general rule, then, what shouts existed were kept low in terms of power because they were effectively uncountered. Enter Nightfall and the Paragon – a class based, in part, around using shouts for a large number of effects. Which, I'm sure, posed a dilemma in getting those skills to actually matter while not overpowering the game.

The developers, as I see it, took two approaches to this problem. First, they designed a series of counters (Which by the standards of spell or enchantment counters are pretty weak but they don't have to be that strong – they just need to be there as a safety valve in case anything shout based gets too out of hand. If the counters are well made then they can be used to shut down anyone relying too heavily on shouts and, therefore, keep everyone from using that overpowered build that exploits a shout.) like Vocal Minority or Roaring Winds. All well and good but what interests me is they also created several new skill types that are closely related to shouts but have different mechanics that make them easier to stop and, therefore, able to carry higher power levels at effective prices. There's chants, of course, which are basically shouts that have a casting time – so they can be interrupted to prevent them – and which end when they trigger a certain condition – so they don't stick around forever.

But what really interested me at the time were the echoes. They're something like meta-shouts, if you will, in that they make shouts better or act in conjunction with other shouts. There are a few different kinds. There are ones like my old buddy Mending Refrain where as long as shouts and chants are going off they'll be continually reapplied and, therefore, step around the duration problem. If unopposed they last technically forever but if the “shouters” in the party run into counters or an energy crunch or are otherwise molested then they're going to fade so even though they can't be removed directly they can be stopped. But there are also echoes that don't do anything until a shout or chant ends – like Blazing Finale.

And that's when it hit me – what if there were enchantments that could d the same thing. Or, to put it a better way, a new skill type of meta-enchantments that could do the same thing. Call it a dweomer or an inspiration or something but what if you had a skill like “Divine Reversal. Meta-enchantment. For 30 seconds the next time an enchantment ends on target ally they're healed for 100 health” or “Divine Grace. Meta-enchantment. For 30 seconds while target ally is enchanted they have 3 health regeneration. When an enchantment ends Divine Grace ends and they're enchanted with Protective Spirit”? Wouldn't be an enchantment itself. Wouldn't be subject to any kind of enchantment removal. And it wouldn't do anything unless someone tried to remove an enchantment. And, in so many words, if you preprot someone and your opponent tries to shatter it, they've just blunted their own spike. The exact details need some working out and you'd have to be careful not to make the effects too powerful but I grabbed onto the idea of hiding enchantments by making them immune to removal. Either by making them trigger on removal as with that skill I just made up or by shunting them into the future with a trigger or a timer.

Here's the thing. You could do the same thing with hexes, too. Hexes, after all, are offensive enchantments (And enchantments are defensive hexes.) and you can apply similar mechanics. Hide hexes so they're not stopped by removal or you can force their triggering to really harm your opponent. That way you don't have to worry at all about covers and stacks – you need one good hex and a way to exploit it and you can cause some damage. Such meta-hexes would also combine with hex centered strategies to make them stronger, too.

Here's what I'd propose. Several new subtypes of hexes or skills that work on hexes the way echoes work on shouts or glyphs work on spells.

• Shadow Hexes. These would be hexes on a timer like Lightning Surge or Incendiary Bonds. But instead of being a hex you need to quickly remove or else you're hurt they'd read something like “after x seconds target foe is hexed with y.” That way they couldn't be removed and you'd have all that time to set something else up – whether it's casting another hex as a cover or using a spell to attack or coordinating a spike, whatever.
• Curse Hexes. These would trigger something nasty when the opponent did something specific. An example would be “the next time target foe attacks they're hexed with Empathy.” or “the next time target foe casts a spell they're hexed with Backfire.” They'd work a lot like Clumsiness, then, except imparting hexes instead of conditions (While not being hexes that can be removed themselves so probably with much less effectiveness.). But it could also be as simple as "while target is hexed they also are afflicted with...something." Whether that's extra degen or a slower attack rate or whatever else you might want to throw on there. Either way you create a dilemma - provide the trigger and take the hit. Or avoid the trigger and cripple yourself.
  
• Nightmare Hexes. These would trigger when other hexes end or expire. That way you can have mechanics like “The next time a hex ends on target foe it is reapplied.” or “Target foe takes x damage whenever a hex ends.” That hammers any attempts to remove hexes while also letting whatever hexes you're applying go just that little bit further for just a bit of time and energy more.

There could be others and you can mix and match the effects but those would be the three big mechanics I'd want to play around with. First, hide hexes by affecting their time of application. Second, create the ability to apply or reapply hexes on a conditional trigger. And, third, create some immunity to hex removal. They'd all work a lot like offensive shouts (Maybe to the point of being shout-based themselves – it would mean that the existing shout counters could be brought to bear against them. Meaning those counters would have more utility and likely see more play therefore being more likely to stop what they're intended to stop.) in that they'd be very hard to interrupt and impossible to remove so they'd have subtle effects that could hopefully be priced lower than if they worked more directly. Throw in some moderate effects when these metahexes are applied – like Parasitic Bond's one pip of degen, say - and you have a way of making a single hex on your bar pop while also having a way of making a team of hexers more problematic without having them creating massive stacks.

Obviously, something to consider for the next expansion rather than fixes to current skills. Although, like Malaise, perhaps during some test weekend one or two could be tweaked into something similar as an experiment. Not sure if it would work but, hey, that's what testing's for.