DEATH Realm

[Nelphine]

Honestly I'd rather reduce its health (as you already plan) resistance (as you already plan) immunities (as you already plan) and armor (by 1 or 2).

And even with my suggestion you're already reducing the life steal modified by 2.

That IS a huge amount of changes.

[teelaurila]

I've rather easily killed (neutral) demon lords with (high elf) magicians. If wave of despair cannot easily wipe magician garrisons anymore, that should be a threat, at least to one or two DLs. And 9 very rares should dominate, of course. When I had DLs in play, they were powerful as can be expected, but I was against mostly water elementals, nightmares and warlocks, which could clearly threaten the DL (prayer was involved as I recall). Not to mention storm giants.

It would be sad if demon lords had life steal clearly below wraiths. It's true the ranged ability is huge, though. But a DL really would be nice to be able to create undead. Which otherwise falters in the late game.

It's understood the base stats need to take into account strategic value.

Some thoughts:

The Doom Bolt. I suppose it's there so that death has an answer for end-game heroes? Doesn't the demon lord's direct attacks suffice?

The quick casting. This is massive - the fact that the DL can doombolt/summon AND life steal at range on the same turn. Is it that necessary?

The ranged attack: Perhaps the life steal need not go so low if the direct damage becomes small instead? Then DL would turn low-resistance targets to undead en masse, and be in far more trouble against high resistance ones. But that's just fitting. This reduces strategic value. Also ammo could be 4. If ranged damage is reduced, big ammo count can force the use of ranged when melee would be better.

Against attacks, particularly ranged: Perhaps armor could be reduced so that DL is clearly threatened by magicians. Also reduces strategic value.

Against heroes: Perhaps the melee strength could actually increase if doom bolt goes. Also compensates for strategic value.

Strategic value: Perhaps health can actually be increased to keep strategic value, if armor is reduced, for less invulnerability? Armor is clearly more important in actual combat, except against heroes or other big single creatures. Which presumably would be good for the DL to be able to tackle.

Finally, does the DL really even need the ranged attack? That would cut the spell+ranged attack combo. The DLs melee could even be increased, and armor kept, then. Life drain maybe even increased. The DL would need to either play defensively by summoning, or offensively and charge. Healing by drain would only come in melee. Maybe it's too much like death knights then?a

[Nelphine]

Sadly, if you want undead creation, focus magic ghouls are the only reliable way to get it. And those stay relevant until early very rare tier, which unfortunately means I don't bother with any of the higher tier summons, even if they're better at winning some combats, until I get a very rare summon. So regardless of stats, the demon Lord will never be used for undead creation.

Partially because, you wouldn't want to give it any decent ability to create undead, or you'd be able to get very rare undead reliably. Similarly with wraiths and death knights - you can't give them the ability to get rare or very targets reliably, but since ghouls can already get up to uncommons reliably (and can get rares as often as death knights) that leaves no place for any other undead creation unit.

[Seravy]

If wave of despair cannot easily wipe magician garrisons anymore, that should be a threat, at least to one or two DLs.

It wasn't even though they were all Troll magicians and even had a gorgon or two supporting them. The two demon lords pretty much always finished the battle with max health despite using auto after the first turn (or in same cases, even immediately - I wanted to see how powerful they are so I used auto even for some battles where I normally would not.)

It would be sad if demon lords had life steal clearly below wraiths.

While it doesn't look like it, they already do. Wraiths do FOUR life steals at -3, while the Demon Lord does only one at -5 (or 1 or 3 whichever we end up with in the final version)

The Doom Bolt. I suppose it's there so that death has an answer for end-game heroes?

It's more like for flavor but that was part of it - it was added before the existence of Wave of Despair.
However it took a very large amount of work to make it work properly together with Summon Demon on the same unit so I want to keep it if possible. Offense isn't the problem, the problem is Demon Lords just refuse to get damaged in any battles due to their extreme defenses and Life Steal.
(10 armor +1 from Darkness is enough to take minimal damage even from Magicians. Then Life Steal heals all of it back and the DL is immune to most spell damage.)

The quick casting. This is massive - the fact that the DL can doombolt/summon AND life steal at range on the same turn. Is it that necessary?

This is necessary because summoning taking away the first 3 turns of the unit was pathetic and nearly worthless. Again this was a lot of work to actually make them work together and I wouldn't have done it without a reason. 

But a DL really would be nice to be able to create undead.

Basically to create undead you would need to deal more undead than normal damage. Since endgame units like Demon Lords need to be able to deal lots of normal damage to be worth using, their chances of creating undead is not that great.

The ranged attack: Perhaps the life steal need not go so low if the direct damage becomes small instead?

One more time, damage isn't the problem, the problem is the Demon Lord being (near) impossible to kill or even hurt.

Strategic value: Perhaps health can actually be increased to keep strategic value, if armor is reduced, for less invulnerability? Armor is clearly more important in actual combat, except against heroes or other big single creatures.

This is true but losing armor is a much more significant nerf than losing health unless we are very careful about it, and armor does have a huge weight in strategic strength. For this unit in particular losing 1 armor is probably around losing 3 health in the overall outcome in strategic strength.

Making the DL a melee only unit is an interesting idea but that would be a HUGE hit to their strategic strength, pretty much halving it. And it would be too similar to all the other melee very rares (Archangels, drakes, etc) so I don't like that. There are only a few ranged very rares in the game and this is one of them.

[Nelphine]

I'd also prefer giving them slightly less armor and giving back the 1 HP to stop them from being 3 shotted by doombolt. Garrisons of warlocks will absolutely destroy them, which isn't good at their cost - and warlocks are very common for final wars against myrran AI.

[Seravy]

If you go against Warlocks as a Death player, you should be using Night Stalkers. Or, if you missed it somehow, take one dark elf city, buy Nightblades and use those - but you really shouldn't be missing Night Stalkers if you have Demon Lord.
Using expensive very rare creatures against Warlocks shouldn't be a good tactic - that's exactly what Warlocks and Doom damage in general is meant to counter. (yes, there are exceptions, like Sky Drake but in general)

[Seravy]

PS : I don't mind having more HP and less armor on the Demon Lord just not for that reason. However I'm worried that would be a much stronger nerf than intended. 1 armor does block an attack from each figure, so assuming there are more than 10 figures attacking, losing 1 armor means 3 less damage blocked, 36 attacking figures (9 magicians) would mean 10.8 less damage blocked. (effective additional health loss depends on how many of those shield rolls actually blocked a successful attack roll, so this is only the maximal possible additional damage, not the average. But it does show the risks involved when reducing armor.)

Basically, reducing armor would make the Demon Lord much more vulnerable to high attack multifigure enemy units than losing the health. (In exchange losing the health hurts more against high attack single figure units but those are far less likely to hit the Demon Lord than a stack of magicians - and they are meant to be more effective against it anyway.)

One argument for reducing the armor would be Darkness - which puts the Demon Lord at 1 higher armor than other 10 armor very rare creatures. However we buffed the armor on most of those already so those don't really exist anymore - Sky Drake is the only one left.

btw is there a need for Missile Immunity on it? It's nice for flavor (regular demons have it too) and missile attacks shouldn't really be relevant that late in the game but idk, it just makes it even harder to hurt. I suppose it is summoning demons who are also immune so it doesn't really matter.

[Nelphine]

Right but health makes it tougher against single target figures... Most high end figures that can already ignore its life steal are single or low figure.

Armor makes it tougher against low end multifigure targets.. which are the ones that have problems with its life steal.

Reducing the armor by one let's you keep the life steal closer to the original, and lets you keep the health above the point where the 3 city units can auto kill it every single time.

[Seravy]

So what, 8 armor 32 health, -3 life steal?
I guess we can experiment with that, too.

Let's try both.
The current 30/10/-1... against a city with 2 mammoths, 4 magicians, 2 gorgons and a war troll, on auto. (¬440 strategic strength)
Previous version I had no losses in these battles at all and usually no damage at all. (albeit this one probably wasn't where I did full auto)
First try : 1 Demon Lord dead, 1 unharmed.
Second try : Both survive with max health. wtf I was sure I saw them take damage? Huh, it seems they gain a ton of health even with -1 save.
Third try : 5 damage on one DL, none on other
4th try : 2 damage and no damage
5th try : 7 damage and no damage.

Okay, this definitely isn't the outcome I was looking for. I'd want at least one seriously hurt (or dead) demon lord consistently, if the player uses auto without spells against such defenders.

32/8/-3, let's try this one. (391 strategic strength)
1st try : max health on both
2nd try : max health on both
3rd try : 8 damage one on, none on other
4th try : max health on both
5th try : max health on both (and we got an undead magician)
Well this one is clearly further from the goal than the other, despite the loss of armor. It seems Life Steal is too powerful at -3 no matter what.

...maybe we should try these tests in another city too, where there are more magicians.
...I can't seem to find any cities with more than 5 magicians in this save file. Makes sense - the wizard has Earth Gate so the units are evenly distributed between garrisons.

[Seravy]

8/32/-1 :
1st try : 5+6 damage.
2nd try : both unhurt
3rd try : 27 damage on one, none on the other
4th try : 1 dead, 13 damage on the other
5th try : both unhurt

well this is a lot of variance but much closer to what we want I think than any of the others. If the enemy units weren't particularly bad against Demon Lords, it would probably result in the consistent 1 dead demon lord outcome we desire. We might even get away with having 35 health for this one.

With 35 health and 8 armor we get 428 strategic strength. Much less than ideal but could be worse.