Heroes and abilities

[Nelphine]

Yeah I just don't think any chaos spell except flame strike is worth it. Anything that's single target direct damage can be replicated through other means. 

However, you may be right; warp lightning may need a cost of 1 above efreet caster value. What's the expected damage of warp lightning against armor 8? That gives us a damage level that may be problematic, and we can look at other realms to see what else gets that damage level.

For instance, elite Lionheart holy weapon mithril slingers (cheaper than efreet, either via altar of battle or heroism), are +3 to hit, strength 10, 8 figures. Toss in prayer, so +4 to hit.

Against armor 8, they average a little under 35 damage, so expected damage is about.. 37?

Obviously, the slingers have more weaknesses than the efreet, but they do even more damage than warp lightning, and 24 health is enough that despite their weaknesses, it's not trivial to hurt them.

[Seravy]

It's 13.41 damage. So basically 1 efreet = 1 dead enemy normal unit.
Not that Fireball wouldn't do the same, but Warp Lightning is more versatile and less dependent on figure count or enemy armor.

Buff stacked slingers isn't something I care to compare to it, they are an entirely different thing altogether. (You need all the buffs, an enemy without dispelling, they are weak to a billion things from magicians to warp wood, and they move 2. And you need a city to produce them at, on top of all that.)

Compared to Efreet, Slingers are trivial to hurt. They are not immune to Flame strike, Massacre, Crack's Call (efreet needs web plus has too much hp), have low armor, and their damage decreases with lost figures. (yes, adding more buffs helps but that raises the cost and it still only covers half their weaknesses at best)

Efreet work like a stack of caster heroes. They are durable enough to not die on turn 1 or 2 (you might lose one out of 9 but that's acceptable) and can win the battle in 2 turns. Very rares also do this, but Efreet aren't very rare so I don't think they should. A stack of Angels, Wraiths, Gorgons, Stone or Storm Giants win much slower, and suffer more damage. So efreet either needs to be less durable (lower resistance, no fire immunity) which I don't think I like, or not win that quickly.

[Nelphine]

I disagree that they're better than other rares. Gorgons + nature's cures decimate anything that can't chew through their health, which is better than many very rares.

Admittedly, gorgons are arguably overpowered too.

But 13.41 damage just isn't a problem to me. Anyone using 2 HP normal units at that stage of the game should lose. Those units literally should not be relevant once rares exist.

I'd rather just decrease their attack strength (both melee and ranged), and go with the fact they have front loaded damage.

[Seravy]

13.41 damage is a lot. You cast Flame Strike, do about 5-6 damage to each unit. Then hit each for 13.41 and even a Stag Beetle or other 20 hp unit dies. And not much has more than 20 hp in the game, almost nothing.
Although considering Chaos is almost impossible to defend against anyway, and has Fire Storm and whatever else, maybe that's ok. You aren't supposed to stop a stack of 9 Efreet anyway.

I still think Efreet are too durable though. Why 12 resistance? No other rare is 12 resistance except Angel which is supposed to be the highest (and that includes the holy bonus).
We should make them have 11 or 10 resistance, not sure which. (to begin with, are we ok with Doom Bat being low resist and Efreet being high? Shouldn't it be the opposite? Doom Bat is already vulnerable to spells and does melee. If it's resistance you want, maybe Chaos Spawn should be the one with high resist?)
I feel that 12 resistance is a leftover from the old times when rare creatures had a cost of 50% higher than now.

[Nelphine]

Ah that's true. I wouldn't object to reducing their resist, though we should move that to another thread. I don't know all rare resists off hand, nor all chaos resists. Heck, I don't know resists in general. Terrible. (As you can see, brute force is how I solve everything. )

But it does prove my point about hero casters. Considering I don't even think warp lightning a problem, but heroes get much better spells, I think rating caster very very high is warranted.

If you change spell skill item cost (I would put +15 and +20 into create artifact level, with +15 only barely into create artifact; probably like 140 per 5 skill), then I would change my caster formula to:

1+0.5 per tier (so 3 for champions), +1 per extra caster level the hero has. Which would obviously change around a lot of my numbers.

[Seravy]

Now, back to the topic of heroes. We don't want Huntress to be the lowest tier, we have enough archers there.
I'm not changing the War Monk or Warrior Mage and they are strong enough for this tier due to Agility. Assassin is obviously too good for tier 0 as well.
So we have to swap Rogue with Thief.
Super Legendary on the Rogue. It's +30 Fame with Heroism. However, the hero takes a slot so while you can get the second best tier, you get half as many hero offers or even less. Ultimately, you are unlocking the range of heroes Summon Hero and prisoners can get you early, but the price is the reduced chance to hire a hero. You are also sacrificing the slot itself, as this hero isn't particularly good for battle and has no casting power to boost your overland skill. So overall probably balanced. (You also get more mercenaries and items but at this time of the game you can't afford much of that anyway)
30 Fame also grants 30 gold in maintenance reduction. Better than a Noble, but Noble also clears own maintenance so the difference is probably no more than 4-6 gold, and this gold is something you won't get until after you build 30 gold worth of army. So again, this seems fair.
Which means there is no reason to now swap these heroes.
The remaining question is, are we ok with the Rogue as is. I ranked it 6 points which is the upper limit for the tier. Compared to the Bard, both get Leadership. The Rogue gets the legendary and a random ability, Bard gets Holy Bonus and caster. I think that's a fair trade. So fine to swap as is.
Do note this hero is very unlikely to gain a high level from Famous because it's the 22th hero in the ranking. So for that purpose it levels as if it was tier 4. We are planning to limit those levels at 4 anyway.

I'll keep thinking about the rest, for now at least we can make this much progress immediately.

(I'll kinda miss the unstoppable early AI Thief hero but it probably wasn't fair either...)

[Nelphine]

Can we give the huntress the +1 to hit and a random ability then?

And couldn't we just reduce rogue to normal legendary?

[Nelphine]

Oh one other comment - yes units with 20 or more hit points are not common. But against any doomstack of rare or better units, that's still the minimum to be relevant. So in terms of a discussion about a stack of rare units, yes I believe all units less than 20 hit points are completely irrelevant and will be decimated anyway.

And yes realistically I believe that stag beetles are irrelevant at that stage. Which means, yes many races are completely irrelevant at that point.

[Seravy]

I was considering to reduce to normal Legendary but it doesn't seem to be necessary. We can do it one way or the other (and adjust hiring cost appropriately), as we prefer. One puts the hero at the upper edge of the tier, the other in the middle.

So next, the archer heroes. There are only 5 so I think they each need a well defined role to not waste the opportunity.

Dervish's role is to be the archer that moves fast, as that has obvious synergy. So she has Logistics. Good as is.

Beastmaster is our Soul Linker. Not changing that even if hell freezes over. It's necessary for AI purposes, and it also adds a reason to use heroes for an otherwise summoning based game, or Chaos game (both of which generally don't want heroes otherwise). The ability might be a bit better than usual, and so is the hero but since it's exactly the ability you don't want for a typical hero game, there is no abuse potential in that direction. So he/she stays unchanged. (and also that's my personal preference, it was the first hero I made custom sprites for. Ironically I didn't care that much for the anime character but as a hero she is one of my favorites.)

Orc Archer is clearly our archer support. So she gets Supply Commander. Sadly there are no other random abilities to support archers to give her, so there isn't much room for improvement in that direction, however when Supply Commander is needed, it's amazing. She even has a random warrior leader ability, so I guess that's good enough. She ranks really low on score though. Either we should rate Supply Commander a 3, or, my preference, buff the hero stats a little. A support that cannot enter the battle safely is a bad support, so 1 more armor and 2 more resistance?

Which leaves the Huntress and the Ranger.

The Ranger is clearly our "toolbox", do it all archer with good melee, casting ability, etc.

So Huntress needs to be the pure "archer" damage dealer. She likely needs to lose some melee attack. She already has Blademaster so she does stand out in ranged damage output. Capacity is already on the Elven Archer (albeit her shots are magical), and random abilities don't help in being a better archer. So we don't have all that many options here. We don't even have Lucky (ranger does that). Bonus to hit is kinda redundant with Blademaster and I've had that before and we removed it because it made the hero too powerful. So I don't really have any better idea than to just give her like +5 extra bow attack strength. Alternately we can give her super Blademaster but then we end up with no normal blademaster archer and only a super.

For the Ranger, the possibility to move her up a tier if we need to swap exists, but then we'd need to give her an extra random ability or other improvement. Considering how bow attacks get obsolete really quickly, I'm not a fan of this idea though.

[Nelphine]

I think it's funny. I always loved the elven Archer, because she was the only champion that didn't have awful magic attacks. I thought they were awful because they couldn't hurt sky drakes. 

I'd like to give lucky to huntress and remove from the ranger, but I prefer to remove lucky from ranger and give a random to the huntress. Ideally I'd like as many heroes as possible to have at least one random ability.

Why can't beastmaster move up 1 tier? No other changes. If necessary teach the AI to get colosseums faster.

I also think the barbarian is underpowered and could use a random ability, as well as all tier 3 except unknown needing boosts. I would start by making sure each one has at least 2 random ability.