One type of fight I always avoided over the my time playing was hexe fights, decide to explore whats actually going on with them and they turned out to be easier than I expected overall but there is a huge **\*.** 

I would say there are 2 main dangers in these category of fight.

1) Actual hexe group composition, which ranged from trivial to really problematic with sort of unpredictable consistency. 

For example, this run I did three hexe contracts of all 3 difficulties. 

1 skull was the fight that is on the screens, some spiders and 1 hexe.  
2 skull was imo actually the most high risk out of all of them, 4 hexes and 1 bog unhold.  
3 skill was like 11 or 12 wolfs, 2 of which were frenzied and 1(!) hexe.

Not sure how day scaling affects this, the last fight I did was 1 skull on day 45, rest were all done and spawned earlier than that. 

2) Hex spam, especially if you unleash a dog/dogs. Hexes can cast spells while engaged in melee, unlike necromancers, so if you are not careful with your positioning on the hexe and your dog timings - you may very easily lose a bro for basically no reason.

On the plus side, hex damage does not injure your bros and can be stopped with 9l. So even if you slam a hexe with a mansplitter - the 9l bro will be good to go for another fight after some brief HP healing. 

  
**Ranged vulnerability** 

As screen demonstrate, hexe groups seem to lack protective guards that would block the ranged attacks.

I suspect that thats because "beast" enemies dont have that intellectual capacity for that, unlike raiders, so if a hexe can spawn with raiders - it can introduce the ranged guard.   
  
But if the guard is not present - seems like they just leave themselves wide open.  

Additionally, so far, every turn 1 I have seen them move up and attempt to charm and never seen them move up and hex on turn 1. 

This leaves them extra vulnerable to high INI ranged units who can basically do an 18 AP attack sequence if they wait on turn one and go ahead of the hexe on turn 2, no bow/xbow mastery needed, they are really squishy so the base damage of tier 2 bow/xbow will be plenty enough, especially cuz they dont have helmets. 

**Positioning and movement manipulations**  

Both "Hex" and "Charm" spells have range limiter of 8 tiles, which means that movement manipulations become possible under the conditions that you are either faster than the hexe or you have resisted first round of charms. 

I suspect this opens a huge window of opportunity in cases where they spawn with an unhold. 

You can move back and lure unhold with you. As the unhold gets closer but while you are still outside the range of hexes - you unleash dogs. I \*assume\* dogs will target visible witches and ignore unholds and since your bros will be out of range of "hex" - the dogs are left free to chomp on the witches.

I havent tested this tho. 

Also, interestingly, hexes won't attempt to charm ranged units that have no melee weapon in pockets, at least this was my experience so far. 

**Reasons to fight withes:** 

1) You gain a stack for "Scout" retinue, in my run  I got 2 stacks from hexes as I hadn't encountered other beasts, so progression factor is strong.   
  
2) Their loot sells for a nice chunk of gold.  
  
3) The charm made of their loot grants 6 resolve, thats an insane amount of stats gained without a level up spent, huge.   
  
4) The time between accepting the contract and hexe appearing is very short, nothing like alp quest or even regular beast hunting. 2-3 seconds of camping and the fight is there.   
  
5) Practically zero risk of injuries. I feel like if you play your cards correctly you have basically zero risk period.   
  
Overall, I would say these fights fall under "medium" tier in terms of resources needed, slightly below unhold contracts but in that general group. It is defiantly not something you rush to accept  but once you have a banner and a couple of high resolve bros to resist the charms I think it is alright and has a lot of worthwhile rewards.    
  
My compassion of choice so far:

All bros in the second row, highest resolve bro in the first row. All bros with swords/spears and shields and ranged bros with their respective bow/xbow. Having a couple pocket stun clubs would really help to stop annoying hex spam, hexes have no zone of control so you can freely surround them for high chance stun attacks.  

For clarity, this is all on max difficulty settings. 



Hexe groups have questionable survival instincts + findings after doing 1, 2, and 3 skull hexe fights