I'm wondering why BHVR hasn't buffed Hex perks yet. No one runs them because they get cleansed in 1-2 minutes and do nothing. Hex Ruin was the only Hex perk (that spawns at game start) that was ever good. Now that it's been nerfed, all Hex perks are bad.
I only use Plaything because it's good perk. It gives second objective to survivors. Sure they can ignore it but then i am getting surprise hits.
Time to time, i am using Devour but it's cleansing before even i get some stacks.
So overall, hex perks are bad.
Some hex perks can be useful like blood favor, devour and plaything, but yeah, most of them are garbages especially due to its unstability. They need huge buffs.
They can be good on the right maps and the right killers but mostly they are very unreliable.
One match, you stomp because of them and the next all your totems are gone in the first 60 seconds.
If a Hex is cleansed in 2min into the match. All you see is losing a perk.
And mostly, because Hex perks are out of meta. Survivors dont use Small game anymore (my favourite perk) which make finding Hex harder.
I miss Small game in most of my loadout to make sure Ruin and Undying being removed in actual 2 mins.
But yes some Hex are not worth using.
I wouldn't state that Hex: Perks are genuinely bad tho I totally agree that Hex: Ruin is terrible and should receive a buff. Hex: Perks have mostly strong effects and different synergies. There are alot of Hexes being played quite often alone or at least in combos which kinda proves that they all"aren't as bad as you make them seem.
I am talking about Perks like Hex: Plaything, Hex: Pentimento, Hex: Retribution, Hex: Thrill Of The Hunt, Hex: Hounted Grounds, Hex: Undying, Hex: Devour Hope, Hex: Noed Hex: Undying, Hex: Blood Favor, Hex: Face the darkness and Hex: Crowd Control.
Most of them are actually very good especially Hexes like Blood Favor and Crowd Control. Just because some people don't like the concept of losing a perk, doesn't make them automatically bad. So most of the Hexes actually don't need a buff besides a few like Ruin, Third Seal or maybe Huntress Lullaby.
If people run Hexes it's either..
Hope this helps to see the usage of Hexes. Not every killer will profit out of Hexes and that is fine - but they are far from useless.
Some of them are. Even the ones that spawn at the start can be perfectly good, there's just a bit of a risk that they'll be found super early.
The two ways around this are to just accept the risk and bring a hex as part of a wider build that still functions without it (I've brought Blood Favour in some chase builds, for example), or to bring a full hex build that includes trap/defence perks for your hexes. Either way, hexes are perfectly viable, and have been for a while; Ruin wasn't the only viable hex before, it was just the most directly powerful one.
More to the point, hex perks aren't bad. Most hexes are actually pretty damn good perks if they aren't cleansed super early, it's the shared mechanic that could use some buffs. Something to at least make hexes being broken in the first minute of the game less likely would be quite nice.
I don't run hex perks at all. That's putting a hefty chunk of my power into the hands of those I'm trying to kill.
Plaything, Penti and NoED are good, mainly because they don't work like normal hex perks. Face the Darkness too I suppose.
Out of the 'normal' Hexes it's only really Devour and Blood Favour, (maybe Crowd Control on certain killers) that are worth bringing, and you of course HAVE to bring Undying with them. The issue is that even with Undying you can lose half your perks within the first minute through no fault of your own.
Normal hexes are just far too unreliable to want to bring regularly, for every game you get solid value out of them, you have two games where they're cleansed before you can even really use them.
Huntress lullaby goes HARDDDDDD!!!!
Except from the motivational boost you get from huntress lullaby.
Can't be beaten.
It’s extremely funny that the entire concept of hex perks is that they’re so powerful they must be cleansable, when most of them are completely terrible even if not cleansed.
I don't really like relying on rng but some hex perks are pretty good.
Devour hope, plaything, pentimento, blood favor and haunted grounds (+ undying with some of them) are decent picks
NOED, Ruin, Plaything, Pentimento are the only "good ones" then you have others like Undying and Haunted Ground which are only good if you're using other Hexes.
I wanna take a moment to talk about Ruin because no it wasn't a typo and no I don't mean Devour. Devour low key is kinda trash it'll win you a game and then do absolutely nothing the next 4 -5 games. Like don't expect moris with it at best it'll maybe be NOED you get a little bit earlier that gets cleansed the moment survivors know about it. It's really only free kills in low MMR where survivors don't know bone spawns yet.
So onto Ruin which people like to call a dead perk. It isn't a dead perk instead it's a supporting perk which is certainly a downgrade from being the best killer perks in the game but let's be honest the game was kinda obnoxious when it was the best. So ruin basically says for every 4 seconds you keep a survivor off a gen you're regressing the gen 1 second.
This by itself isn't impressive but keep in mind it can combo with other perks. If you bring something like Ruin/Haunted Grounds/Undying Pentimento you're keeping survivors off gens looking for bones allowing ruin to work and once you get Pentimento up the regression becomes more valuable because you're getting slower gens on top of they have to do that when the gen regresses they have to do it over again at the slower speed. Now I'm not going to sugar coat it it's not that impressive by the numbers, with Pentimento up with Ruin is means every 20 seconds you keep a gen from being worked on you get an additional second in addition to the 5 seconds that would usually buy you so 60 seconds goes from 15% regression goes to 18% regression. But keep in mind this is while the entire gen is slower and they have to go find bones and unhook and be in chase. In my experience it makes getting those first 2-3 gens done absolute pain for survivors.
Then we have that while Ruin can't be used with gen kick perks there are perks it does work with. Pain Res and Surge still work so maybe that 25% becomes 27% or the Surge gets you 10% instead of 8%. You also have perks like Deadlock and Merciless Storm that can kick survivors off a gen and if you go harass them the gen won't regress with the entity around it but once it goes away it's regressing and you didn't have to kick it and the survivor is no longer around working on it so then Deadlock will have bought you even more time.
So Ruin is not an amazing top tier perk but it's this support player in the background that's always working and making good perks just a little bit better and I do think it deserves a little more use than what it's seeing currently when it all the perks it synergizes with are already good, throw it in as a 4th perk and see if your games aren't a bit longer on average.
Crowd control is funny to use on small maps because you can just have a small chunk of the map with no usable vaults for a while
Isnt't that the point of hex perks? High risk, high reward?
The power is set based on the novice survivor who cannot look for and find the totem; I can only assume that most of BhVR's balancing criteria are set with the novice survivor in mind.
Devour Hope is definitely worth using and Third Seal can be very powerful against solo players.
But they will always have a risk. Without Old Thrill of the Hunt to protect them or Undying to save them, your totems are vulnerable.
Yeah, though the reward isn't all that high for the most part. Especially now that most survivors know common totem spawns. So you are left with a very high risk and the potential for a decent but not very high reward.
They can still work but most of the time you'd be better off using something else (not even meta perks, necessarily).
Well, you said it, it is a lot of RNG. Are they all worth a slot? I dont think so.
But to be fair, some are actually better then many make say. The reason most wont run Hex perks anymore (beside Devour and Penti) is more that they get overshadowed by other, more powerful and more consistent perks.
Plaything is good...other than that I run devour hope and undying on wraith. It can be a miss strategy but wraith is extra good at protecting totems.
I've been running Huntress lullaby on my Hag and it's gets decent value. Like 60% of the time, I'm able to get 4 or 5 stacks b4 it gets cleansed (IF it gets cleansed).
I still think that Hex are better than "boon totems" (which are useless, although I think their idea is poorly designed), I see a lot of killers using hex, the difference is that generally killers create builds based on Hex, different from the past when they used hex to make games easier
I feel some are worth it, but I feel a slight change to the Hex Totems in general are needed, with some such as Third Eye, Crowd Control and Devour Hope benefitting from the Totem being lit after the first benefit is felt (first unhook of Devour Hope, or first hit from Third Eye). It's a small thing, but it would at least grant some use.
The only hex perks that are actually good are Hex: Plaything and Hex: Face The Darkness- Outside of that most of the hexes suck just simply due to how bad totems work in general since there's a good chance that your totem either:
A) spawns in the middle of nowhere and it can be spotted extremely easily cough cough cornfield totem spawn.
B) it spawns directly next to a gen which is almost guaranteed to be found.
C) a survivor straight up spawns on your totem forcing you to tunnel them out because they aren't gonna stop touching the totem otherwise.
On top of that some of the hexes just aren't very good such as Ruin with its effect AND the fact that it turns off automatically anytime a survivor dies. Then you have Huntress Lullaby which IS a decent hex, but the flaw it has that makes the hex bad is the fact that it reveals itself in a way that it SHOULDN'T reveal itself in because, as we all know, hexes typically reveal themselves to the survivors only when the hex is effecting them and Huntress Lullaby reveals itself to the survivors if they complete a skill check even though the hex(at least at the start of the game when it has 0 tokens) only effects the survivors if they fail a skill check.
So, at the end of the day, the only truly good hexes until BHVR fixes all the problems with them are Plaything and FTD because they both don't spawn in immediately for survivors to just insta-cleanse and they both have their perks where Plaything is its own slowdown while Face The Darkness is just hard to cleanse while giving you 2 types of info at once.
Speaking for myself it depends on what you're aiming for. At least two or three builds I currently or have used utilitized totems to good effect.
My current Doctor build is Hysteria and Hexes Plaything, Pentimento, and Retribution. Static Blast can hit Oblivious Survivors, so Plaything is a must. Retribution also inflicts Oblivious and gives you auras besides. Pentimento gives slowdown and more potential Retribution procs. Even in the worst case of Retribution being cleansed early, you still get its effect once.
A build I used on Skull Merchant before her rework gave her drones T-Rex vision was using drones to guard Devour Hope and Thrill of the Hunt in a strategy much like Devour Hope Demogorgon. Thrill over Undying was deliberately used to stall the cleanse.
A pre-rework Sadako build of mine used Hex: Face the Darkness to good effect.
Hexes are like any perk. It's all in how you use them. That includes planning around them being cleansed. The Doctor build turns that against Survivors, the Skull Merchant build guarded them, the Sadako build uses a totem that goes in and out of effect.
All Hex perks have immense flaws by themselves and due to map spawns, are extremely predictable and easy to play around.
The only hex perks that are on the same level as many other perks are Pentimento, Devour Hope, Retribution, and Thrill. But the problem is, outside of Devour, three of these require totems to be cleansed, which would only kinda work with Devour. Pentimento and Thrill are great slowdown when they are in play, and Retribution is just a great perk in general, both for aura reading and obliviousness.
Unless you run undying, no. I see Devour occasionally.
No, absolutely not. Hex perks are a hot steaming pile of 💩
Some hex perks are pretty bad but if you combo a few into a build it becomes a real pain to deal with. Like devour or Face the darkness, undying, Pentimento, thrill of the hunt. Or Plaything, Pentiment, face the darkness. These are really annoying to go against and add a ton of slow down for no reason to any killer.
Hexes haven't been good since the old Ruin/Undying days, imo. There are a handful of decent ones, but I don't run them because of the uncertainty. The can be strong, or they can be nullified almost immediately. There's enough luck/uncertainty in the game without me voluntarily adding more.
I don't run NOED because I have self-respect.
And FWIW, think boons (including old CoH) would have been fine if BHVR had just done the obvious thing ant make Shattered Hope a basekit feature (i.e. have them work the same as hexes).
Ah thats why we see them frequently used. Cause theyre bad. Sigh.
Hexes are ok.
The terrible spawn logic of totems is the reason why people don’t use them.
Loading into a game and having your ruin cleansed off the bat is not a good feeling even if it doesn’t happen all the time.
I really like using bloodfavor on Clown, but tbh the times when it doesn't get cleansed usually means I was winning anyways, so it is just a win more perk. Meanwhile the matches where it goes in under 60 seconds are probably the ones where I really wish it was still up.
c'est la vie
The only hex perk I ever run is Plaything. The activation upon hooking someone is a good design, IMO and I think BHVR need to be more creative in how hexes activate and get deactivated. In their current state, all hexes except Plaything are pretty much useless unless you're going up against noobs, in which case you probably don't need them to win anyway. If I'm running a hex perk, half the time it will spawn out in the wide open or right next to a gen. Even if it's well-hidden, it will usually be found within the first minute or two and then I'm down a perk slot for the rest of the match.
They’re a bit of a double edged sword tbh, and even then only a handful of them are viable. Most aren’t worth running and the ones that are can be easily countered.
They're decent, imo. Some of them could do with buffs (a revert of ruin to 200% normal regression springs to mind), some with reworks (third seal is broken at low levels and trivial at high levels)
imo a lot of complaints from killer players about hex perks come from either misunderstanding their point (i can't believe a high-risk high-reward perk has a high risk! it should be no-risk high-reward) or from exaggerating their downsides (i think you're exaggerating when you say your hex perks are "usually" cleansed within 30 seconds)
Devour Hope is still one of my fav perks and I run it without Undying. Two Can Play is also really good, even without Enduring Spirit Fury, but considering how easy totems can go now its not uncommon to lose everything quickly
Aside Pentimento/Plaything combo, the others are either flawed, weak, or both
IMO hex perks should be reworked to always have some weaker version of its effects when cleansed, so it doesn’t feel like a waste if (when) they get cleansed 20 seconds into the match.
For example, if Devour Hope is cleansed, it simply requires an additional 3/4 tokens for each effect. Ruin goes back to 200% automatic regression, but if cleansed then generators no longer automatically regress but kicking them causes them to regress at 150% speed.
Maybe not those numbers or exact effects, but they should do something because right now they feel like “extreme risk, zero reward.”
I think if you bring a single hex perk like Ruin, they're kinda meh. But if you bring Ruin/Devour + Undying + Pentimento for example they're good. Underrated. ESPECIALLY on high mobility killers or killers that already have built in slowdowns/side objectives like Wesker, Pig.
With Pig, once the snowball starts survivors will be running all around the map trying to get their trap off, trying to cleanse all the hex totems and meanwhile trying to keep their gen progress going and probably healing. With some good game sense (or Ultimate Weapon) you can easily interrupt these survivors, causing chaos.
I also disagree when people say totem spawns are bad. BHVR switches totem spawns up every so often but just doesn't mention it. Will experienced survivors eventually find the totems if they know all the spots? Of course, but you wouldn't expect otherwise, no?
Oh, Hex are great. Super useful 90% of the matches. And the placement and spawn logic? Flawless...
Now seriously, the only few Hex perks that you can use without a whole build dedicated to it or a killer that is able to somehow defend it are those that had conditions for it to activate (e.g. Plaything, Face the Darkness). The rest are going to be cleansed before you even have the chance to get value from it as RNGesus decided to spawn it in the most visible and accessible totem of the whole map.
