Heroes and abilities

[Seravy]

I guess we have to pick one of Dark Mist and Surge then.

Dark Mist sounds better and more fun. On the technical side, it would be implemented as if it was Magic Immunity, granting the "Item Magic Immunity" flag, but changing actual spell and combat damage, and "nontargeting" spells to ignore the "Item Magic Immunity" flag and only check for normal Magic Immunity.

I'm worried it might be overpowered though - spell damage is the main counter to early game heroes.

[Nelphine]

Lightning in particular needs to affect heroes. So I'd say this idea isn't an improvement over normal magic immunity, although I love that death might get it. So, I'm still a fan of it.

[Seravy]

Well, the fortress lightning uses the call lightning spell which is "nontargeting" in the sense you aren't the one who targets it, it just hits things at random.

Problem is, units aren't going to be capable of killing heroes so without spells nothing can.
(also it makes the "hero uses life steal spells or items to survive" tactic in death obsolete which is sad)

So yeah, it sounds great in theory but in reality it has the exact same problem as magic immunity. Heroes need to take damage from spells to not beak the game.

[Seravy]

How about this for Death :
?name - At end of each combat turn, the hero transfers (all/half/some amount) of damage from itself to the closest friendly unit.

Nah, still too OP. I guess we could limit it to like 3 hit points a turn to balance it? Then it's like half of a healing spell each turn for free - but for the price of losing other units. And it is very much like what Death would be doing to save their heroes.

Implementing it might be hard though, but probably not overly so.

[Seravy]

Something else I'd consider fitting for Death : "loses 4 resistance but gains 4 defense and attack". Too easy to abuse it by having Charmed heroes though so we likely shouldn't have it.

What about "recover 2 hp each turn but lose 2 resistance", a mini-regeneration?

[namad]

Feels like death should have the effect:
Any enemy creature this character kills counts as being zombified. As if by life drain style damage.
It's crazy powerful, but only in what I would consider absurdly unique circumstances. If simply dealing at least 1 damage, the final 1 damage is too easy, make it require dealing the final 5 damage or X damage or whatever. This is a strong part of death's theme. The ability to convert neutral cities into hordes of zombies, and randomly get that weird single one of per game death caster djinni.... but IMO this effect gets weaker as the game goes on and this customization could be good?
Call it necromancy? or Call of the grave?

Yes this is very similar to "Vampiric" oh well? remove vampiric and replace it with this? I feel like life stealing is decent on the core of your army (summons) but isn't worth giving a hero because it doesn't change your ability to win battles and keep the hero alive that much, and life stealing -2 has a lot of things it cannot do.... whereas I think it would be really cool to get this zombification effect via normal regular damage on a hero because sometimes a hero has really big regular damage.


Chaos...hmm how about charges of "Chaos Channels" ? A spell that there would be no other way at all to cast in combat? Or is that not code-able (count as an ability not a spell?) or too weak/boring? Throwing around a bunch of free chaos channels feels thematic to me, make them last forever (as usual) or make them wear off after combat (that way if you roll poorly who cares?) Bonus: if it wears off after combat I've as far as I know fixed the ai problems with Chaos Armor. It gets targeted, it's effect lasts all combat, shouldn't that make it a lot like chaos armor but something the AI could comprehend?
Call it, uh, Chaos Swirl? or Chaos Swell? Surge? etc?


Edit: oh also it seems to me like you've buffed the death summons and their life stealing capabilities throughout caster of magic, but vampiric itself was never upgraded, if you don't like my idea maybe just upgrade vampiric itself to -3 or -4 or -5 (make it cost more or require more books if you want, but I think my idea (if possible) is more "fun".) Oh and if you like my idea for necromancy and think it steps on the toes of other death spells too much... maybe make it fantastic units only? Maybe then call it Grave Binding or Death Binding?

[Seravy]

Granting Create Undead to any unit has been rejected several times already.
If you specifically mean zombies and not undead units, that would be nice but there is no such damage type.

You can't cast Chaos Channels in combat. It doesn't go into the usual buff slots like others, it goes into the permanent mutation slots. So it does not work as a buff at all. Same for Haste except that goes into a "combat curses" slot.

Vampiric was already upgraded (I believe it was to -2? find it in the changelog.)

[namad]

Yes, I meant create undead, I had figured it could be balanced by how hard your final strike had to be. However, as you pointed out, vampiric already does this, and you've already upgraded it once, and probably don't want to upgrade it again.

What about chaos armor, but instead of rolling 0-9 defense each turn it rolls randomly, once per combat to grant one of the following, for that combat only:

Divine Barrier
Guiding Beacon
Soul Linker
Supply Commander
Logistics
Prayermaster
Leadership

It's insane powerlevel could be balanced by, well, how insanely random and unreliable and likely to be useless it is? Additionally could be balanced by adding a few weaker options, or duds. Possibly impossible to code. Sorry. I don't think I know enough about "code" to tell the difference between this suggestion and the original chaos armor.

[Seravy]

Hero abilities can only be granted permanently.

If we do that we should do it like Mystic Surge, but I'm not a big fan of a completely random item power.

[namad]

Hero abilities can only be granted permanently.

If we do that we should do it like Mystic Surge, but I'm not a big fan of a completely random item power.

Yeah sorry, in my mind I was taking the "random buff" of mystic surge and making it a hero power, which as you just said, is impossible, given that, yeah, mystic surge sounds fine. The random buff felt underwhelming to me because hero's will typically have a copy of every buff you know anyways.