Ok 12 seems ok. And yeah psionic blast is uncommon now right? 16 should be good.18 might be ok, but magicians can spam it, so I'd be careful.
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CHAOS Realm
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April 20th, 2018, 05:44
(This post was last modified: April 20th, 2018, 05:46 by teelaurila.)
I would rather reduce the cost of psi blast a bit. It is common afaik? Otherwise blue can turn all magicians into faux-warlocks, and I don't think blue needs more help dealing with late game?
Psi blast is very strong to spam against high-armor targets. Although for the player phantoms can be more effective, it is in my experience one of the most dangerous ai spells at its level.
Yes, it's common.
Strength 16 deals 4.8 damage - aside from spam, that isn't a very good amount of damage. In fact it's horrible. Below what can be restored by a single Healing spell, even. Magician spam is scary, yes. So is when they cast Confusion 9 times in a row and kill your entire army with it. At strength 18 it deals 5.4 damage - still not that great but you have a reliably chance to kill sprites with it at least. Reducing the cost is also an option, but "dangerous ai spell" shows we are on the right track. Sorcery AI is vulnerable in the early game and these common spells can deter a human attacker or at least make them suffer some losses. Confusion is similar. Phantom warriors are strength 21 for 15 mana. That's still quite a lot better so I guess 18 for 20 is fine. Albeit maybe 17 would be the ideal?
maybe a problem with doom bolt is that there is no way to scale it between only the wizard being able to cast it and having 9 units able to do it. that's a 10-100 damage difference.
maybe the bould could have a slider option with units that use the abily version forced to rely on the minimum power? would it be easier to balance if the damage difference becomes 15-60 insead of 10-100 (assuming a sliding power between 5 and 15)?
I'm not sure exactly what caused it, but my great drake (focus magic, land linking, chaos surge, blazing march) had 43 melee attack and 42 breath. I then cast mystic surge, and his attack reduced to 40 melee and 40 breath - which looks like he isn't being affected by the chaos surge anymore?
He got 0 abilities from mystic surge (presumably he actually got some, but since he already had a number of buffs, they just overlapped what he already had), so he didn't turn undead.
April 23rd, 2018, 00:14
(This post was last modified: April 23rd, 2018, 00:19 by teelaurila.)
"Current Doom Bolt deals 0.244 damage/MP. The target needs to have 18 or more defense to make Warp Lighting strictly worse on MP effectiveness, and at least 12 defense to make it worse on damage deal per turn. So basically Doom Bolt is a niche spell you never cast unless you're facing something almost invincible. "
Can I open this discussion a bit still, as I am presently facing a Lo Pan so there seems to be incoming data on chaos direct damage and psi blast. I think the main point that seems to be missing from the above consideration, and related math, is that the defense of multi-figure units essentially stack. You want to kill the whole unit, or at least about half of it, for blasting to be a good choice. So for that calculation magicians got effectively ~20 defense, and are one prime target for blasting anyway. I think this shows in my present Lo Pan using psi blast to rather good effect, while fire bolt is a joke. While chaos should be the best in direct damage? It seems my Lo Pan missed lightning bolt, though, and has only just arrived to rares so does not have doom blot or warp lightning yet. He is using psi blast instead of fireball for magicians, but is regularly attempting to fireball hammerhands (which is usually a stupid choice). I suppose it's by design that fire bolt is effective only very early where mp-effectiveness is key, whereas psi blast really comes to its own in the uncommon era, when there is enough MP to take advantage of it's power per turn? 
While defense of multi-figure units stack, there are spells that hit every figure so against those units, those spells are always the best (Fireball, Immolation, Wall of Fire, Fairy Dust) - defense ignoring spells are only the second best.
12 damage on Doom Bolt is good because it allows you to kill a unit entirely - as long as it's a cavalry or halberdier. Also Warp Lightning is definitely better on multi-figure units than Doom Bolt as long as their defense isn't extremely high - as Warp Lightning rolls defense for each bolt separately, the extra defense rolls from having more figures don't make very much difference. Psionic Blast competes with AEther Sparks and fire bolt - those two are far more cost-effective but Psionic Blast at least deals more damage/turn now IF the target is high armor. Fireball would probably deal more damage to magicians if they had more hit points per figure (elite) but with only 4 hp, Psionic Blast and Fireball are equally effective (both kill the unit), and Psi Blast might even be more reliable due to how the rolls are done on it. But with anything that has more than 5 figures or at least 2 hp/figure, Fireball is stronger. |