Yeah, and when youre done answering our unbiased poll, perhaps some suggestions on how it could be brought up to a combat viable level.

I just want a simple 3 hexes thrown at once for 5-6 power. And maybe a skill to drag hexes around with me, a few seconds to move per room and you pull them with you.

It needs to be changed to be a viable skill. The divine have got to have noticed this by now.

As it stands its just useless, thoroughly managable numbers of afflictions to anyone who knows the definition of "curing" or "system" or any of the above combined, possibly using prepositions.

Maybe a dualhex skill, allowing one to push two hexes at once with no power cost. Perhaps allow one to sketch six hexes on the floor of a room which causes one of the hexes sketched on the ground to then hit enemies once per round (like fused runes). Pure afflictions are only useful if you can hit them hard and fast. Factoring in the power regen time, the fastest one can hit with hexes is around 1.5 per round (averaged over the time needed for power to regenerate for another allhexe).

Perhaps some other utility skills could be added too.

*does the 'I once got a kill using only gifted hexes' dance*

Yes, but you fall into the category of being unable to cure. Hexes are the easiest thing in the world to kill poor fighters with, but the hardest thing in the world to kill good ones with.

I was killed by pure hexes three or four times early on, because I didn't have a cure for masochism

Got a kill, not got killed.

Ahh, then I bet your victim wasnt too good at curing.

I have no idea, I was never in the same room as them. I guess that sorta means they weren't though.

Possible ways to improve hexes-
*Dualhex- throw two hexes simultaneously at your target
*Hexbond- infuse the ground with up to six hexes, from which a random one afflicts your opponent each round
*Bloodhex- 3 power- for a short period of time, you may sling hexes without preparing them by drawing the price direcly from your body. (also constant minor bleeding)

Some utility hexes, to expand the usefulness of the skill
*Soulhex- 6 power- A temporary death, (no experience loss, though if you have vitae, it will set it off) transforming the target into a spirit. When the hex wears off they resume human form once more at the same health mana power wp and endurance levels as when the hex struck. (does not hit upon entering the room, must be specifically targetted)
*Hexgate- 10 power(5 per gateway)using the sacred glyphs that comprise Hexes, one can make a gate between two locations on the same continent that will remain open for a month, or until a hex user COLLAPSEs the HEXGATE.

I really dislike the fusing of hexes. The hex list of afflictions are way better than runes. (although the use of hexes isn't as easy having to draw them etc). If runes could give anorexia, asthma and the other afflictions that hexes can give, then sure but be sure to give runes a boost too.

The way I see it hexes are different to runes, hexes have better ranges of afflictions, dont cost rune/tints to make and don't take power to push 6 of the real fast into another room.

Runes can be fused, slinging is good for instantly afflicting (no need to draw them, just make them in quiet time) but they dont have the best range of afflictions. their advantage is that you can illusion with them, so at the moment runes are slightly better than hexes.

If you give them the ability to use a few at a time for a power cost, then reduce supersling to one power, or give us anorexia/asthma rune to sling at people.

An aeon rune would be fun too, but i don't see that happening in the near future.

Don't you have an "aeon" rune? I know when I was fighting some aquamancer I kept getting a "You move sluggishly into action." message whenever I tried to do something after one of their runes.

Edit: That is to say, it only effected one command, and the rest worked normally.

That was a bug, or else it was Olthala. And yes, runes need to be tinkered with too, ditch the fusing of hexes, bad idea.
Yes, supersling should only take one power.
And rune users do need to get anorexia and asthma runes.
However, runes can be set into statues and totems as well, giving it a permenant allhexe style attack that hits you as soon as you enter. It takes 26 seconds to erect and fully rune and tune a statue.

The Dualhex and bloodhex I think are the best ones, but the hexgate and soulhex would make things quite interesting, and diffuse the worthlessness of hexes that they currently possess.

I would enjoy seeing hexes being much more subtle and damning over the long term, rather than the short term.

Like a hex that only after 3 days does it start making your teeth rot, and so any food you eat causes you pain.

Or a hex that makes you increase the rate at which you become sleepy, untill the point that if the hex is on you for an IG week, your falling asleep every few seconds.

The healing of these hexes would be normal herbs, but they would not show up on Diagnose, instead you would need a ability in Discernment that shows you what hex you have, but any other person who has hex can see hexes on others.

I suggest this not as a replacement of the current skill, but perhaps just an additional 5-8 skills.

Hexes are bad, but they aren't absolutely horrible, if and only if you are a Mugwump. If you are not a Mugwump, it is not worth the effort to draw them, if you are a Mugwump, they can be used to some effect.

so basically what you are saying is that they just need to reduce the balance time a bit?

Here's my personal opinion, beginning with the simple easy to do changes, that don't require vast reworkings of the skillset, and entirely new abilities, which rarely get implemented. I have had hexes at transcendent since the first day credits were available to be sold, and have been using them more then anyone really, so I believe I have a good understanding of them, and where their problems lie.

First. If any of you are familiar with evileye, some of the evileye afflictions do not give messages. These are Amnesia, Confusion, Dizziness, and I believe plague. Perhaps there were a few others.

The hexes I would suggest giving no initial messages (much like how the amnesia hex works currently) would be vapors, dizziness, addiction, confusion (needs to be added), and dementia. Which ones do and don't doesn't particularily matter, except for vapors. The vapors affliction once it is delivered, will cause blackout if you are standing up for several moments, so it gives a recurring message (meaning it will be cured eventually even with the message hidden). Basically I would see a person starting a hex combo with vapors, then switching to various other forms of attack, then once they see the blackout hit, they would be able to hex with several other hexes, which would be hidden due to the blackout (blackout hides all attacks done to you). The person would cure the vapors, in which point you'd begin another combo with vapors, and go from there, hoping to sufficiently mess them up.

I would like to see a confusion hex added, as well as a hypersomnia hex added. Hexes relies on being able to give a wide variety of different afflictions, I don't see why these were left out. Especially hypersomnia. Sleep hexes are very ineffective. With hypersomnia, they would be considerably more useful, since you could add it into an allhex, then follow up with sleep hexes.

Those are very simple changes, that would in my opinion, balance the skillset on it's own (At least for a Mugwump, I don't ever use hexes if I'm a Dwarf), but if you wanted to get fancier, and toss in some new abilities, I had several things in mind, though it seems a few other people had similar ideas, so I will only list the ideas I had that were along much different lines of thought.

One idea I had was, I was thinking the ability to bind a hex to a room, so that should an enemy walk in, it would strike them, but it wouldn't disappear, thus allowing them to walk into the same hex multiple times before it fades naturally.

To compliment this, I'd like to see an ability to put, for lack of a better word, "alarms" on your hexes. Simply put, if you dropped hexes somewhere, and an enemy walked in, you would get something of the manner "Your sleep hex struck person at place." Then maybe add the ability to seek out hexes in the local area, etc.

I had similar ideas to the "Bloodhex" shown above (though I tentatively called it swifthex) which would allow you to hex with undrawn hexes, without delay, for an increased mana cost. Then I thought this would be to powerful, so I thought what if you could choose to pool a certain number of hexes (like three, think of how blight works in curses, not what it does). You would then be able to hex with those three hexes without having to draw them first, though any other hexes would have to be drawn first as normal. Though, I realized the idea of not having to draw hexes is and would be entirely unbalancing.

For example, let's say you did not have to draw impatience to hex with it. Well, you could then do an allhex with masochism, stupidity, paralysis, anorexia, asthma, and impatience, and then continually "swifthex" with impatience over and over, much faster then the focus mind balance, making it impossible to break free from untill you die. Not good in terms of balance issues.

Or what of the paralysis hex? As a Mugwump I can already draw and then hex with paralysis faster then the focus body speed, so imagine if I didn't have to draw it first.

Dualhex, that would be another problem. If the power cost were low, making it useable, it'd be rather unbalancing to just dualhex anorexia/asthma whenever you feel like it. If it is high, might as well just allhex. The thing about allhex is, you see them drawing out all six hexes, so if you really want to avoid it, you can leave the room.

I also thought, wouldn't it be cool if hexes could trail you? Or rather then being drawn in the room, they could be drawn on one's body (essentially the same thing as them trailing with you). Problem with that is.. running into a room with a target and instantly allhexing them is bad, very bad. Not exactly balanced.

But coming back around to the concept of binding hexes into a room, you could also make it so that applies to hexing a person with that hex too, rather then just enemies walking into them. So you could draw out a hex, bind that hex, draw out another, bind it, etc, for a cost of like 1-2 power each, just enough so that you only put up your 1-3 most useful hexes. Then you could hex the person with that hex repeatedly without having to draw it again, since it would stay. If you were to allhex someone, all those hexes would disappear, even though they were bound, so that'd prevent someone from doing what I said in that above example.

Another thought is, just give all hexes a small chance to not give an affliction message (like amnesia does now) that slowly rises as you learn the skill of hexes, to where when you hit transcendent, like 1 in 3 or 1 in 4 hexes leave off the affliction pattern.

Anyway, these are just a few of my thoughts. I'd prefer hexes keep with the idea of the skill, that is the ability to hex different afflictions and such (much like curses), the hex gate idea suggested earlier just seems way out of its element.

My full report is actually a bit longer, so when explaining some of the ideas I had in mind, I left out duplicates with others have suggested.

One word- Illusions.

Yeah, aeon illusions are just evil.

Soulhex and Hexgate sound really fun and would make the skillset a lot more flexible. Soulhex reminds me of kai banish, except that the victim could move around like a ghost for the duration.

Here's another idea that I haven't seen come up yet - Sticky hexes.

The basic premise is that a hexer can make his hex "sticky". A sticky hex will remain on the target and periodically re-afflict until it is unstuck via one of:
- A "wipe" command that takes eq or balance.
- Scrub or cleanse.

Stickiness might be limited to certain afflictions.

This ability could be implemented in one of several ways. For example:
1 ) The hexer draws hexes in the room, then marks one or all of them as "sticky". Once thrown, they must be removed as above.
2 ) The hexer sets up a "sticky" defense, similar to Fool and Enigma tarots. The next X hexes thrown/drawn will be sticky.
3 ) The hexer may "bind hex" after throwing it. If the target hasn't cured the hex before it is bound, then the hex will become sticky.

Any of the above would cost an appropriate amount of power and/or mana, plus equilibrium.