DEATH Realm

[Seravy]

Well, it's not exactly the same but Syphon Life roughly does 5 more damage compared to Life Drain, or more if Life Drain had a chance of doing 0 at certain rolls. So compared to its base damage (at 7 resist), about 2.5 times as much, but way more if the target has high resist. That sounds about right for 3 times the cost (as you get the effect in one turn), maybe even on the "much better" end of the spectrum, but that's acceptable for a spell of a higher tier. Life Drain will still do more against very low resist targets (as each missing resistance means 1 additional damage per spell and LD is used 3 times) meaning both have uses - but against something with 8 or more resist you'll always want the uncommon.

[teelaurila]

In my somewhat-recent black+blue channeler game syphon life was amazing. Shooting it at <10 resist units causes skill point increase at roughly equal the mana spent, so essentially it's free (but, channeler). On top of killing the enemy unit for free, you gain an undead slave! And that undead slave can initiate more combats against small stacks, so it snowballs. This was amazingly effective against ships - enemy navys were decimated for free and my zombie-ships roamed the oceans. (Pegasi did help to get that started) As a result, in that game I spent nearly nothing on skill and almost all on mana, but still had skill growth roughly on par with other games.

Drain life is a different story. It can be spammed by caster units. With Black Prayer it can work against lower resistance races. But I think it's few and far between where it would be better than, say, summon zombie

It can save a magician unit from death because of healing.
Another use for drain life is heroes with -save items. -6 save and drain life at 10 mp is win. But then again, -6 save and almost any resistance hitting spell is.
It can still be cost-effective in combos (warp creature, black prayer, mind storm), which particularly with magicians can net lots of undead.
It's the only way to heal undead casters (excluding very rares and FM which allows to reach syphon).

But if you increase the drain life modifier it risks becoming extremely strong quick. It gives skill/healing AND undead units. So I think it working well only on the lowest-resistance units is ok. If LD was as effective as black sleep + zombie/ghoul, then why use that combo when LD gives you also skill?

So in summary Life Drain is presently a niche nuke spell with powerful sides, and I think it works fairly well. Its sides are very powerful for a common, but as a killer it is mostly redundant to black sleep (LD is better if all you need is a little damage). Increasing the power of LD risks making black sleep pointless and is too strong because of the sides. There doesn't seem to be a good solution because the sides are so strong: Being too weak to cause damage means sides don't matter either. Being able to cause good damage makes the sides super good. So present niche use seems ok.

[Seravy]

Yes, it certainly is bad if it becomes too strong so I'm definitely not doing -6. I think we should try -5 and if it's too powerful, we can always undo it, however considering how rarely the AI and even human players, use the spell, shows it's too weak currently.
Note that Black Sleep also becomes more effective on lower resistance targets : on 2 resistance it only costs you 15 MP (one use) to kill a unit, while Life Drain would still only do 8.5 damage on average - which is impressive and for 1.5 uses is 13 damage but Black Sleep can still kill things over 13 health while LD can't (but you don't get skill for it).

[Seravy]

Aside from Life Drain, a few other thoughts about spells in this realm :

Summon Zombies
-Creating undead like no tomorrow in the early game. The buff to Life Drain might help make this look less overpowered, as it'll be a more viable alternative in several cases.
-I really could have given this a better name. Either just "Zombies" to follow the generic naming scheme of summon spells, or something more creative. (I'm fine with Summon Demon though, it's a special case spell which works both overland and combat so breaking naming conventions there makes sense. "Demonic Contract" might be better though...)

Drain Power
A bit unsure about this one. In theory it's not that great but casting it 7 times in a turn to drain a total of 4-5k mana is just wrong, and that can happen in large enough maps with Spellweaver. It's not even the fact that it gives you skill to further accelerate itself, but that this amount of mana is too much even for highest level AIs to lose every turn - even if I ignore the fact that you have other spells to reduce their power income. It has a huge price though - you could be summoning a Demon Lord each turn instead...

Reaper Slash.
Might be why Syphon Life is underused. Damage is slightly higher for about the same cost, and the luck factor is somewhat less so if the battle is important, it's better to use even if it means wasting the chance to gain SP or undead.

Reaper Slash and Wave of Despair.
While less powerful than their Chaos equivalents, they are way too close in effectiveness, which might devalue the Chaos realm too much.

Wave of Despair
Maybe too effective against 9 magician garrisons, not much worse than Flame Strike, you can expect to deal ~3.6 damage per unit, wiping out half of them in one go, all with two uses. It's also the strongest single target nuke in the game if that situation arises by a large margin. Maybe a slightly reduced attack power on it would be more appropriate? I believe being effective against Magicians was intended though so maybe it's fine as is. Considering Night Stalkers are Magician counters, I guess it isn't overly important either.

Wrack
Underused, no doubt, and I'm not very happy with that, but as far as I remember we already determined there is no good way to improve it.

Demon Lords
Might be too effective against AI. Mainly because they summon things that draw enemy fire, are immune to a lot of spells themselves, and on top of that, fly and are fairly durable, and even drain life from enemies with attacks. Haven't had much chances to try them myself though so this is just speculation.

[Nelphine]

Zombies are fine.

Drain power: despite having it many times I've never used this spell that much. Always feel I have better choices. I think it's fine as is.

Reaper slash: definitely not too strong. Poison immunity means it doesn't impinge on chaos mich - chaos also has a variety of choices that are often situationally much better. I don't think reaper slash poses any problem.

Wave of despair. Definitely ok with this being weakened - only flame strike competes and I would want flame strike to be the better choice more often.

Wrack could possibly use an extra -1 to resist. As a rare, there are too many bonuses to resist in the game by that point. Also, while it's fine in concept to have damage over time, unlike nature, it's much harder to plan around it with death. Death also has too many other '''must cast" spells and so wracj often comes too late in the combat to be worth the damage over time.

Demon Lord: perhaps not ai friendly, but no worse than invisible sky drakes or supreme light archangels or iron skin colossus or mystic surge hydra. I wouldn't change demon Lord one bit - it's simply amazing, but comes so late that it should be.

And the AI uses it effectively as well, even if has a hard time fighting it.

[Seravy]

For wave of despair, what goals should be define to adjust the formula?

How much damage per unit on average for 1, 2, 5, 9 targets, assuming the targets have an average (8?) resistance?

This is how much it does now (and Flame Strike for comparison) depending on the number of targets.
   
It's stronger than FS up to 4 targets, weaker at 5 or higher, but also harder to defend against (Bless, Resist Elements, Elemental Armor etc does not help) plus the damage type is irrecovereable and the resistance won't reapply for each figure, so overall it's likely better. It does cost 10% more and "9 units" is the most likely scenario in battles where FS is twice as good, but even with that WD seems better.

What's somewhat shocking is, the total amount of damage doesn't really decrease much over 5 units, it just gets more diluted. 34 damage for 66 MP is still an amazing bargain even if it "only" means 4 damage on each of 9 units. Especially considering it happens in a single use, so it's like dealing 2 Warp Lightnings worth of damage in one move (albeit not on a single target).

So I guess it'll need a change, question is what amount of damage should we aim for. I think the amount for 1-3 targets is about right, but above that, not really.


Repear Slash is 45, assuming 10 armor, 35*.3=10.5 damage for 32 MP.
Lightning Bolt is 35, assuming 10 armor halved, 30*.3=9 damage for 25 MP.

RS = 0.328 damg/MP, LB = 0.36 dmg/LB.
However RS deals more in a single hit so overall the two spells are about the same effectiveness. Lighting Bolt should be better my a larger margin.

[Seravy]

One idea for Wave of Despair :

Strength 246 attack divided by 2 plus the number of targets, defended against by twice the target's individual resistances, ignoring conditional resistance effects.


Basically, resistance sounting twice, and base strength raised enough that it results in the exact same damage for 1 target at 8 resistance. (If needed we can raise it a bit more.)

This would be the result (last 4 columns, showing damage values for 8 and 15 resistance targets)
   

First, effectiveness would plummet at higher target count, enough that it'll always need two, sometimes three uses to kill an army of magicians, instead of the first use wiping out 85% of the figures, and second, if the enemy army is very high resist, there won't be damage done if the number of targets is too high.

For Reaper Slash we don't need anything special, a straight cut in attack strength, maybe back to 42 or 40 (wasn't it 42 at one time in the past?) could work.
At 40 it would be equal damage against 10 armor targets as a Lightning Bolt, but for 7 more MP, which is fair considering Chaos is the better direct damage realm.

My only worry is that these changes might reduce the AI's chances to have an answer to human heroes with Death. Albeit, heroes just lost the ability to gain Poison Immunity from Wraith Form so if anything, Reaper Slash is much better than before.

[teelaurila]

Used drain power when under spell blast suppression to decent effect. At that point instant summons were to ineffectual, and more expensive ones obviously got blasted. Basically it was a "nothing better to do" deal, but both the skill and the mana drain actually helped get from under spell blast.

[vicwaberub]

Wrack is not very powerful. -1 HP per combat round? We have only 25 rounds... -3HP (one figure of a multi-figure unit often and 20-30% of a middle sized unit like a fire elemental) seems to be better for me.

[Seravy]

Done with the change to Wave of Despair, will be tested during the next game I play, but first, there are a ton of other things to take care of.

Reaper Slash - I tried looking for a discussion on the decision for the strength and cost of this, but found none in this thread. Either it was elsewhere, or it was like this from the beginning of the thread and we never gave it a serious thought.

So compared to Lightning Bolt it's definitely stronger than desired.

So we'll need to define some goals.

Goal 1 : It should be weaker than Lightning Bolt but stronger than Ice Bolt.

For all of these I'll assume 10 defense targets, albeit it won't make a big difference even if I assumed 8 or 7.

Ice Bolt is strength 35, 25 after defense, and costs 25. That means you get strength 1 for 1 cost. It does not work on Col Immunity.
Lightning Bolt is strength 35, 30 after defense, costs 25. That gets you strength 1.2 for 1 cost (and this rises as enemy armor rises which is a bonus) and there is no immunity against it.
Reaper Slash currently is strength 45, 35 after defense, and costs 32. That means you get 1.09 strength per mana, and it is blocked by Poison Immunity.

This looks about right, except that Reaper Slash deals more damage in a single turn than Lightning Bolt. That's problematic - this is a more important criteria than damage/cost often enough to make it look equally good to Lighting Bolt when it is supposed to be strictly weaker.

Goal 2 : Damage should be relevant enough to hurt those high armor midgame heroes up to 15-20 armor and too much resistance to kill otherwise - Death has no way to damage them at all otherwise. So we want at least damage = 9 on a 15 armor enemy unit. That means it needs to be strength 45 exactly.

This contradicts goal 1 and with the introduction of Wave of Despair and Blood Lust, might be obsolete. I think we should drop this goal.

Goal 3 was to imcrease the relevance of an underused immunity, in this case we chose poison. I believe that works as intended and we won't change anything that would affect that.


So to fix the spell for "Goal 1", I propose the following changes :

+2 strength to lighting bolt at the same cost
-3 strength to Reaper Slash at the same cost

This would make both spells have an effective 32 strength against a 10 armor target, but Reaper Slash would cost 7 more mana and would not work against Poison Immunity, and it'd be strictly inferior even in damage against 11+ defense targets (which isn't that uncommon as Bless, Resist Elements and Elemental Armor all raise defense against it.)