February 12th, 2018, 09:22
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I thought bless does not help against direct attacks from death creatures, like it does in vanilla, right? So zombies, skeletons and ghouls (bless does not protect against poison either) are all good in the early game, as are werewolves a bit later.
Anything in death that would lower resistance further is devastating. There's a reason it's only Eternal Night after Black Prayer (I think). I had a mid-late -game plan around black prayer and mind storm in my blue/black game (the other plan being focus magic + wraiths). Even without mind storm, that is with just black prayer, I could black sleep + zombie-kill more than 2 full stacks of rare/very rare creatures and great lizards. And that was without Astrologer, so no undead from nodes, lizards mostly from enemy wizards. Should the rng had given me that mind storm to research early enough to matter, I would have been pretty much swimming in undead hydras, efreet, djinn, not to mention "just rares" (storm giants, chaos spawns). Giving that play to mono-color black, and at uncommon, would be way out there.
Bloodlust is pretty interesting as-is. It had synergy with werewolves and undead lizards. I even tried to protect focus magic magicians from nature direct damage, though that was probably not very cost-effective. (due to Syphon Life the not-healing is much less of an issue)
February 15th, 2018, 13:06
(This post was last modified: February 15th, 2018, 13:07 by muxecoid.)
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Did anyone try death artificer with -spellsave and + mana on heroes to drain life better?
February 15th, 2018, 16:03
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Depends why - are you trying to heal the hero more (in which case, I think making the hero invulnerable is more important and still very easy, but usually requires life), or are you trying to create more undead (in which case, why not using focus magic ghouls?
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Is disenchant area supposed to dispel unit buffs anymore? For some reason I thought it didn't, but when I cast disenchant area on my node (which my enemy was garrisoning), his wraith form got disenchanted too.
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I can't do anything about that, if not your units are on your territory (node or city), then enemy units get hit.
Disenchant and Dispelling Wave are the same spell, the only difference is in what tile you can target, enemy or friendly.
March 9th, 2018, 06:25
(This post was last modified: March 9th, 2018, 06:27 by Nelphine.)
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Edit: nevermind, you're saying disenchaht area can only target friendly tiles, so this is a largely unexpected situation. My bad!
March 11th, 2018, 06:24
(This post was last modified: March 11th, 2018, 06:24 by teelaurila.)
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How does AI warp node targeting work btw? I just started a war with Myrran mono-black (well, one blue book), and am a bit worried if he doesn't need to have seen my nodes...
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Exactly. Node scouting is not a thing. Neither is unit scouting, etc.
City scouting is the only kind the AI is aware of.
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So, been thinking and maybe Life Drain is underpowered?
Black Sleep on a 7 resist unit (average or even high for that part of the game) is 50% success so 2*15 = 30 mana kills the unit.
Life Drain on a 7 resist unit deals 2.8 damage on average - you need 3 of these to spend the same mana, which results in a net damage of 8.4 total. That likely won't kill any unit - even a halberdier has 12 hit points.
Assuming an average unit which is good enough to care to nuke it to has 16 health (in reality it's often 20 or more but let's be optimistic), it means Black Sleep is twice as efficient.
Another example, Fire Bolt, deals 7.2 damage for the same cost, minus enemy defense, assuming 6, the damage is 5.4. Roughly double of Life Drain again.
Now, Life Drain does give extra SP which is amazing, and ofc Chaos should be better at dealing direct damage - but not by this much. Also, the unit raises as undead - but truth is Black Sleep also does that, as long as you know Summon Zombie or have a Ghoul in the combat.
And Black Sleep gets better as enemy health raises - it has the same cost to kill a 30 health unit while Life Drain would take more.
So I think Life Drain needs a better save modifier.
At -5 it would be 3.6 damage - still not very impressive but it can at least outgun the Fire Bolt if the target is 5 or below resist (but 6 or more armor).
At -6 it would be 4.5 damage - quite good, still worse than Fire Bolt but considering the SP and undead gain, probably overall too powerful especially against lower resistance targets.
This likely also means Syphon Life needs a better modifier too? Not so sure - Reaper slash would do 10.5 damage on 7 armor, while SL does 8.5 on 7 resistance, but SL won't be reduced by armor on additional figures, gains SP, makes undead, and costs less by 2 MP, too. So I think it's fine.
March 14th, 2018, 13:48
(This post was last modified: March 14th, 2018, 13:50 by Nelphine.)
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I would do a direct comparison between life drain and syphon life. I think they're relatively balanced to each other, but both usually feel weak in practice. So changing one implies a change to both.
I would say resist 6 is a better average for life drain though. 7 is high at that time, except bless, and resist magic both work (I think those 2 are probably bigger problems. They take someone from 50% chance of being affected to 0% which is huge when most spells are based somewhere around 30% to 50%. It's effectively immunity to anything in tier. And they scale very well, allowing your rares to be mostly immune to even very rare resist spells, or uncommons immune to rares, etc)
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