Some advice please on qualifing the burning stake for the upgrades

[Yozzer]

I have just acquired the burning stake spell, but I am supposed to hex a number of enemies to qualify for the 3 upgrades. I have launched it 6 times, and though people burn, and when I kill them a wisp goes into the stake, up to now it shows I have only hexed 1. There must be a trick to this, or it will take aeons to get even to the first level upgrade.
What am I not doing, I am killing the enemy myself or I will die waiting, (shooting them).
Having fun, but it gets harder and I need the stake!

[Tentacle of Ozric]

The "hexed" counter goes up whenever the stake blows up and damages enemies, so you need some place with lots of enemies close to each other. The easiest way to farm the kills for me was to go to the tower on the center of first map (you need gnosis 2 though), on the ground level there is a huge stream of trash "madmen" mobs coming at you. Launch the stake and kill the mobs, you will be done in no time. I recommend to bring the "shockwave" spell too, since they can close up the distance pretty quickly.
After you're done with the level 1 you don't have to go deeper, there is a portal home after you clear it.

[Otets Oleksii]

Its supposed to work like this: you cast the spell, it burns enemies around, you damage them, the stake charges. Once it is fully charged, it releases damaging AOE, then the process repeats. In your case you are probably not killing enough enemies before the spell ends.
There were no problems to level up it naturally by playing the game, but if you want to grind it, best way IMO is 1st floor of the Island of the Damned tower, where the wave of more or less 50 grunts spawns

[Shocknfunk]

Wouldn’t say you “need” either. Just about all the heavy spells are super powerful in their own right with mainly the cornucopia being the trickiest one to use(most effective with the Hangfire revolver)

[Yozzer]

Many thanks for the replies. Though I have opened the stairway down, I did not go down at this stage as I was not sure if once I did that I would be stuck repeating the level if I died. I will go down immediately and have a go.

[Shocknfunk]

Originally posted by Yozzer:

Many thanks for the replies. Though I have opened the stairway down, I did not go down at this stage as I was not sure if once I did that I would be stuck repeating the level if I died. I will go down immediately and have a go.

Dying and leaving the expedition will always reset the map. The tower is meant to be replayed. Theres additional prophecies to obtain by killing the boss in the tower to which you can atleast obtain one per kill.

[Shocknfunk]

Apologies but, you have over 200+ hours invested and you’re still managing to have a rough time??? I’d imagine your stats have to be hitting their optimal points by now