Heroes and abilities

[Seravy]

I also think 6 is a safe average resistance to assume. I believe only the healing matters - dealing more damage is rarely a problem against weaker targets, and strong ones will resist it.
A Healing spell restores 5 hp per turn, so I'd want this to be somewhere close, but from two attacks done - a unit gets two attacks a turn. That way Vampiric is roughly equal to common Healing - although it doesn't require casting a spell and spending mana. So I'd want it to be between 2 and 2.5. That means a save modifier of -2.

For the cost...A Drain Life spell charge deals about 2 more damage which is double - but once per turn. So Vampiric is as good as having that charge as many times as there are combat turns - but with the limitation of having to engage the enemy in melee (or use up an ammo) while the other is unrestricted.
Hard to compare them this way...
One thing is certain, it can't be higher than 399 otherwise it won't be available from Enchant Item and it's definitely too late for it in Create Artifact. Considering Death does poorly on early heroes, a low cost might be appropriate. Once you have Spell Charges, you'd use Syphon Life anyway, not Drain Life, so being superior to DL is acceptable.
However, requiring 3 Death books might be more appropriate. I think a cost of 225 - two units of werewolves or three ghouls - is fair and high enough to feel relevant, yet low enough to be affordable.

Oh, you can't have Vampiric on a ranged weapon. I guess it's not that powerful then, and Drain Life in charges still is useful.

[Seravy]

Tested the -2 modifier. Against a neutral klackon city, it filled the hero to 30+ hearts and raised 5 undead swordsmen. That's quite brutal tho "anything works on a neutral city" so yeah. Zombies+Clock of Fear can do this...
Against Hell Hounds the hero fights roughly evenly - gaining as much as it takes in damage - note it only has +8 defense.
Think this is fine as is.

[Nelphine]

I think 2.5 healing per attack is too high. That means they get to cast a healing spell every time the enemy attacks them. But I'm.not super concerned.

[Arnuz]

Well, you can't just consider this with klackons. Against ranged attackers the early hero needs to run after them first, and try to get some attacks in while still alive to recover the health - maybe from deep red! Klackons can be dealt with by just about anything, what about sprites and archers? Or the now super common water elemental. Even if the hero is accompanied by troops, the AI likes to target heros a lot. And for sprites, the weapon needs to be shadow too - weird name for an ability granting a thrown attack btw - so the cost piles up. I wouldn't create an item just to deal with a klackon city, that's for sure. And an item that becomes obsolete as soon as you get enemies with resistance 9 is just sad, so its cost needs to reflect the fact that it'll be discarded in 20 30 turns. 2 units of ghouls beat it hands down, I'd craft it for 100, maybe 150, but no more. More death books on the other hand is fair, this is a hallmark death ability, I wouldn't mind making it even more death specific as long as it allows to keep the price down.

I also don't like it that as usual the thief gets more out of this item than the barbarian. I proposed this to give early melee heroes something better, right now barring the thief they're glass cannons that you throw at the next node without remorse as you're hoping for a better one anyhow. An ability like this one should be better on a strength hero than on an agility one. Is making it consider both damage actually dealt and resistance unacceptable/impossible? If the issue is changing wraiths and death knights, it can be solved by making it average more or less the same as now on these units based on their attack strength. If this is already explained then sorry, I missed that.

[Soviet elf]

1. Suggestion: divine protection provides death imm + endurance (instead of lucky), cost reduced; teleportation provides only teleportation, cost reduced too.
I dislike that endurance (life spell) is in sorcery artifacts (teleportation). It's from different realm, and sorcery artifacts are probably the most powerful (though life artifacts are very good too), no need for +1 to def. It also means less +to def for life wizards, no stacking endurance spell+lucky artifacts.
May be, lucky should be in chaos (as a separate item power)? Luck sounds chaotic. And chaos artifacts are the weakest, no extra protection except fire&cold immunity.

2. Suggestion: artifact weapons shouldn't provide any +def at all (just like there is no +att in armor, and no +to hit in armor and acc-s). Heroes could still get +12 from max plate+acc or +8 from 2 acc-s. That's enough, I think.

3. I dislike that ability improving unit movement in combat is called logistics - that's not what logistics is about (logistics is supply commander). May be, rename it to "tactics"? Or "maneuvering" or "tactical maneuvers". Personally I would also make it just +1 movement in combat (not per hero level, just +1). I very rarely see and use it anyway, but it looks strange that high lvl hero can accelerate his troops in combat so much without magic.

4. Suggestion: reduce or, may be, even remove chance of prisoners (heroes) as reward (in lairs and nodes), instead increase chance of items and spells. My least favourite reward, in some games I received useless prisoners too often.

[Seravy]

1. Don't think "Divine Protection" is something that would make a unit move faster. Considering how expensive movement in items is, Endurance is probably worth as much or more than Lucky.
Removing Endurance from Teleportation makes sense - it wasn't originally intended, it just got added into the old Endurance slot and I didn't know how to remove that part of the effect back then (tho not sure if it can be removed without investigating) - but then it's a copy of (in fact, inferior copy of) Merging.
Stacking +To Def is kinda the point - unless you want to always disband non-lucky heroes on sight when playing Life realm wizards, you will want to be able to produce the ability.
Lucky in Chaos would make sense but to add a new item power, one would need to be removed.
(Moving the whole "Divine Protection" ability to Chaos is an option but...then we are back to the "I'll disband this champion because it doesn't have Lucky, my Thief is better" problem.)
I do agree Chaos needs something/better in armor/accessories for heroes but defensive abilities don't suit the realm and we don't need offensive, nor do we have a free slot.
(One way to produce a slot would be to get rid of the non-enchantable Magic Immunity that only exists on two predefined items)

2. No to this, it would remove the diversity between melee weapons. (some grant def, others don't but grant res or movement instead) For ranged weapons the main problem is ranged heroes usually can't wear an armor, and have low starting defense without agility - but they still need high DEF otherwise they get killed by spells and ranged attacks. So ranged weapons need to provide defense, if we don't want to limit ranged hero usage to Nature who can regenerate them.
3. Don't want to change the ability scaling by levels, but I don't mind changing the name if necessary. "Tactics" implies a defense boost as per Tactician retort though so that's not good.
4. I like finding heroes. They aren't worth that many treasure points anyway - a 400 value random item is almost always useless garbage.

[Arnuz]

Eh eh, there are no useless heroes at the beginning when you have none, and before the 30 turns limit. Of course then that changes afterwards, but the first 30 turns are all-important at lunatic

[Soviet elf]

Divine protection sounds like it shouldn't improve to-hit either. Protection, not precision. I agree that movement is useful (isn't it an argument in favor of limiting logistics/maneuvering too?), but unique ability (lucky) is more valuable than common spell (endurance).

I thought too much defense on heroes was considered a problem and a disbalance? You even introduced special new armor piercing mechanic and then turned it into ability for top summoned units. Now it's as intended?

Options for slot for lucky - flaming or some resist-or-die (exorcist)?

Life want lucky heroes - flying invisible heroes of sorcery may need it slightly less, but other realms want lucky heroes too. And life has more ways to protect (endurance, prayer, invulnerability, lionheart) and resurrect heroes than other realms already.

[Seravy]

I thought too much defense on heroes was considered a problem and a disbalance?

It's considered an unfixable problem. There are dozens of ways to add armor or To Def to a hero and we can't do anything about it. Removing one or two sources changes nothing. Removing all of them is not an option, they are all perfectly balanced on their own.
I hope it works as intended now but I obviously can't play that many games to know this quickly. There are 14 races and 6 difficulty levels that need testing not to mention 5 realms and 214 spells. Plus heroes all their item powers and...I think you get the point. We'll find it out but it takes time, lots of it. Fortunately, it is a very specific problem that only affects hero strategies, even out of those mainly the Artificers (which btw isn't a Lunatic tier strategy at the moment, at least I don't think it is).

Flaming is fairly useless, I wouldn't mind losing it. Removing Magic Immunity is even better though.

Spent some time thinking about Divine Protection and Lucky.
Manipulating chances randomly is Chaos. Manipulating chances in your favor is Life. In fact it's hard to not notice how Lucky and Prayer grant the exact same bonus.
I'd expect an armor in Chaos to randomly boost or reduce my defenses or something.
For example : Each combat, the hero gains a random effect for the duration of combat from this list : Magic Immunity, Invulnerability, Invisibility, Regeneration, Wraith Form, Warp Creature (any of the 3 effects at random)

[Nelphine]

Technically, stacking ARMOR is hard to fix - although the biggest culprit is simply items (and the second is agility). But you've already stated you don't want to reduce the bonuses on those. Stacking +to defend is very difficult, and every source you remove makes a big difference. There's only, what, 4 of them in the game? No, 5. I'd be all for removing lucky from divine protection in return for something like true sight. (To be honest, wasting a slot on true sight always feels bad.) Sure it would probably need to be cheaper, but you could just remove the true sight item ability then.