GW:EN Sneak Peak: Hexes Still Problematic

As I see it, hexes, the bugaboo of the meta when I last left the game, are still a problem. The thing is you can't use them by themselves, there aren't too many hexes that can make an impact, let alone survive, standing alone. Even skills like Expose Defenses are there to fuel a Sin's combo, it's the fact that they do something while doing so that makes them so good. But when you start getting a lot of hexes together, when you overload on them, all the little ones you don't care about become extremely troublesome and allow the big, heavy ones you do care about to stick long enough to matter.

The problem, I think, stems from lack of effective removal. Teams trying to remove hexes can't race teams trying to put on hexes. Not unless they sell out on extreme measures that leave them weak against other strategies. And that's because hex removal is designed to race against the big, heavy hexes that take a while to do their damage. To be viable those need to stick for at least a few clock cycles, not get blasted as soon as they arrive. Hexes like Migraine and Backfire or Empathy,for example, that tell over time. And while you wouldn't expect them to stick if that was your only hex and your opponent had even something as basic as Remove Hex (Love the new shortened casting time, by the way. Monk spells need to be pretty damned good to justify another more than a casting time of 1 second. And the most basic single hex removal just doesn't cut it – but, again, Remove had that lengthy cast time to give hexes a bit of a chance to do some damage before they were gone so you weren't just wasting your energy.). But that's not how hexes get used, realistically. There's a lengthy recharge on most hex removal to give the hexer a chance to get their good stuff on and around for a little while before the removal recharges and gets blasted away.

The problem is skills like Conjure Phantasm and Life Siphon (Phantasm more than Siphon because it's in a prime hexing attribute). Low cost hexes with recharges that mean even if they get removed, you're able to apply them before the removal is finished recharging. They're just too quick and trying to remove them is a losing battle from the start, almost requiring more drastic measures like wasting your elite slot on Divert or Expel instead of something that will help you against teams that aren't hexing (Nothing against Divert or Expel, of course, both exist as helpful safety valves against hex-dominated play. But when they get to become staples of the metagame, I don't feel it's a healthy state.). And it's even more problematic because those are the skills being used to cover the import hexes that are really killing the other team. Those money hexes are being buried under a flurry of the inexpensive stuff that makes fighting them off prohibitively expensive and unreliable.

So, hex removal needs to be balanced not against the premier ships of the line but the small cutters that are wrecking havoc with the shipping lanes. Single removal has to consistently fight off a skill like Conjure Phantasm or Life Siphon, that's the balance point. They have to make it at least a stalemate with the hexer trying to keep those up. Someone standing there with just Remove, say, should be able to pluck off a Phantasm just as soon as it lands. Hexers can still thrive in such a scenario because they can still overwhelm removal with multiple hexes but it means they have to expend more time and energy on making sure their valuable hexes are covered.

To that end, if removal is going to speed up, I think hexes should speed up, too. The focus should be on active skills. Skills that reward players who are moving, thinking, acting, and not sitting back to push buttons. Changes to hexes like Blurred Vision which now has a shorter duration but a shorter recharge as well, are to the good. It floats in and out of combat, requiring more effort to maintain it but also becoming more flexible since you can switch targets more quickly. You don't have to wait 30 seconds for it to recharge anymore, once you figure out that it's really the second Warrior with the axe that's the problem and not the Hammer guy you've been prioritizing. As the battle swirls, as tactics shift, a skill like the new Blurred Vision rewards players better than slower, bulkier ones. Even as it rewards defenders who can tie up more of an opponent's efforts into maintaining that effect instead of putting it down and concentrating on covering it up.

Got that? Faster, shorter, more active. On both sides.

The basic idea is that a dedicated hexer shouldn't be able to keep three or four opponents swapped with hexes. Not all by themselves. They should be limited by costs and, more importantly, recharges to being able to two or three at most. And only that by being completely unmolested. When you start adding things like interruption and disruption into the mix – when you have someone chasing them up and down the map trying to get rage all over their face – they shouldn't be nearly as efficient. Balancing both hexes and removal to reward more skilled play is what it will take to get to that point.