galehar wrote:Last I checked hexes doesn't exactly make noisy explosions,
There's nothing in the hex definition that says that hexes must be silent. Many of them are, because they support the stabber playing style which puts a premium on maintaining silence, but hexes needs a broader appeal than just that. This particular noisy explosion affects other creatures, so even though the noise is unusual for a hex the spell still shares the core definition of a hex.
galehar wrote:nor does it create anything.
Deoxygenated air is a common hazard in mining and spelunking, which bears some significant similarity to the player's activities in the Dungeon. The bad air often sinks to the bottom of a passage, and miners pass through one way without incident, but when it's time for them to return something has stirred up the slurry of bad air at the bottom of the passage and they suffocate if they attempt to pass back through. The air is colorless and odorless, resulting in the practice of bringing a fragile canary into the mines, since you can't possibly know when this stuff has been kicked up.
The Mephitic Cloud is pretty much the same, but it reacts with the ambient radiation from the Orb of Zot to create an unearthy cacophony resulting in nausea and hallucinations. On the plus side, the hallucinary light show shows where the dangerous air is, so affected individuals and animals can stagger out of the afflicted area even if they don't have a mining canary to warn them.
galehar wrote:The school change would need to be accompanied by some changes to the spell itself to make it work.
I'm afraid I literally don't understand why this is a big deal. I don't understand the vehemence of your objections, although I do acknowledge that you appear to feel strongly. If I'm treading on your feet, please be assured that I'm doing it in confusion rather than malice.
asdu wrote:Regarding moving mephitic cloud to hexes, I don't see what that would accomplish besides a sort of nerf (which might be desirable). Hexes' main problem is being useless later on, not lacking good early spells. Even if I was forced to dabble in hexes in the early game due to an unrenounceable spell, I would still have no reason to learn any other spell from that school. Much like mephitic cloud currently doesn't help making poison more desirable for the late game (and poison is already a far more useful school than hexes).
Ultimately, hexes needs to be useful for the entirety of a 3-Rune game. We can all agree on that, right? Accordingly, it probably does need some high-level spells that have a reasonable chance to work on magic-resistant targets. But these will never be guaranteed, because that would also be too strong. Hexes needs to be exactly strong enough at every part of the game leading up to Zot, and being too strong is as bad or worse than the current state of not being strong enough.
At the moment, the hexes' early game is impaired by the fact that hexes are simply not the best tool for the job, for most characters. Conjurations and transmutation are useful in general for every caster, and Mephitic Cloud and Evaporate do the early-game job of hexes much more efficiently. Investing in hexes is an actively bad idea during the early game unless you started with that focus, because you're diluting your xp to get an inferior effect.
Once you're past the early game, hexes start to be better at what they do, but you absolutely need to focus on them if you want to stay ahead in the magic resistance race. A character who doesn't focus on hex skill won't even be able to incapacitate a big, dumb brick of an ettin, much less a more dangerous target. I don't think we're ever going to get to the point where a high-level hex allows the player to coast through Zot on 10 or 12 hex skill, because that would be a terrible idea that we should actively avoid. 18 or 20 hexes skill is more appropriate for your heavy-lifting skill, but if you were going to build that up from scratch just because you got access to an endgame super-hex you might as well have pumped it into Tornado instead.