DEATH Realm

[Nelphine]

I understand your points in all cases (although I don't agree with them all, particularly that direct damage isn't comparable to resist or die. That's only true if you expect to win wars in or two casts. As soon as 5+ casts matter, they become comparable again.) However I firmly believe death knights need 11 resistance and archangels need 15 (after holy bonus).

However, your argument that if you changed banish to be -3 and spanmable, that would be the same as excircuse... But that's what petrify already is. If it's ok for petrify, why isn't it ok for banish? That makes no sense. Sorcery has other options. Nature doesn't. Death knights need resistance 11, and only nature will have any problem with this. Therefore, changing banish to be the improved excorcise, and petrify to be the costlier -4, is healthy for the game. Healthy gameplay is important, even if two things end up similar. No one is going to say 'darn, I got banish, but I already had excorcise' unless they already say 'darn  warp lightning and I already had lightning Bolt'. And at least banish and excorcise are different realms!



Re: massacre. I agree with you. But that probably means every other aoe spell is overpowered, from holy word to apocalypse.

There's a reason I discuss flame strike as a game changing spell, and not massacre.

[Seravy]

However, your argument that if you changed banish to be -3 and spanmable, that would be the same as excircuse... But that's what petrify already is.

How would it be when it targets different unit types?

Sorcery has other options. Nature doesn't.

That's exactly why Sorcery's LIMITED spell that only targets fantastic units must be more powerful than Nature's GENERIC spell or Sorcery's GENERIC spells.

And I define "better" as more powerful. MP efficiency is of secondary relevance, what matters is to actually get things killed ASAP before the AI gets to summon another 8 earth elementals or whatever else.

Petrify is already way more powerful than it has any right to be, being a resist or die spell in Nature, we merely pushed it up because Nature can't deal with Death creatures otherwise (and not just Death Knights but also Shadow Demons and Wraiths) so it was a necessity.

I rather raise Death Knight resistance and do nothing else than break petrify and banish just to justify the resistance, but is the resistance needed? 10 resistance is a lot on a 4 figure unit, as even a single surviving figure means the survival of the entire unit (and might even restore the lost figures despite the damage being irrecoverable, as life stealing adds new health instead of healing damage.), unless you can actually prove why it's not enough, I won't change it.

Other low resistance very rares are single figure, thus easier to kill despite the higher resistance.

[Nelphine]

City troops are already generally killed by all kinds of things. You don't need to use petrify on city troops by the time you get rares - you've got summons and iron skin and cracks call to deal with normal troops.

So whether banish or petrify have a unit restriction on them or not, in actual play, they end up acting the same.


As for other sorcery spells, stasis has a STRONGER save penalty than banish, and creature binding has the same targeting restriction and the same save penalty. Sorcery does not have something with weaker penalty, except confusion, which is common and isn't remotely comparable. So yes, sorcery can afford to have one of its 3 different save or virtually die spells with a weaker penalty.

Petrify won't be broken with a stronger penalty. Sure, nature isn't a save or die realm.. but really, they are. They have almost as many save or die creatures or spells as any other realm. They just happen to have them on units. And we've already discussed how much of a problem it is for nature to rely on 'call lightning plus earth elemental'. In general nature needs better options for the AI, so they aren't spamming 60 cost move 1 summons.

Annihilate, which was the original purpose of this conversation, is why death knights need more resist. You can't make annihilate better because it's already too strong against death knights - but in almost every other case, it's too weak. If you make death knights, stronger, you can make annihilate stronger against everything else, so that it's more relevant.
But also, banish, creature binding, warp creature, any of the spells that aren't pure save or die - these are too effective on death knights and they end up being simply meat against ranged city troops little better than cavalry.

[Seravy]

We already decided against the idea of Annihilate with a higher save, so that's not relevant. At higher save it would become strictly better than Disintegrate which is not acceptable.

[Nelphine]

That just means you increase disintegrate to 11 as well. Disintegrate already suffers from the same problem you described for annihilate - at that stage in the game, single target low resistance units are generally just not relevant enough.

[Seravy]

Disintegrate is powerful enough. It's always 100% success so it is not a save or die spell.

Anyway, what we still need to decide :

1. Do we want Exorcise at -2 or not?
2. Do we want to raise the MP cost of Wave of Despair or not?

1. Most commons also save at -2, so this is probably good at -2. Changing it will however trigger a chain reaction of other changes...
Three realms getting early save or die at -2 (confusion, black sleep, exorcise), the 7 resistance single figure uncommon creatures will be pretty much entirely unplayable, only working against Nature/Chaos. In particular, this means Fire Giant and Great Lizard. They were already pretty bad (even at -1 Exorcise made them risky against Life) but now they'll be even worse. I don't think we can raise the resistance on them either, the lizard needs this weakness due to regeneration, and the giant is the "lower resist" creature in chaos as the other two can't be that (chimera is expensive and gargoyles are mean to be high resist). The lizard is probably fine as it regenerates from one of those (sleep) and one can be dispelled from it (confusion), but the giant is a problem.
Furthermore, -2 for 20 vs -4 for 35 at rare isn't enough of a difference so Banish would need to get stronger, which is also not an option. Note we can't increase the cost of Exorcise as it must be available to Magicians (to counter shadow demon and lizard stacks).

2. Wave as is is always more cost effective vs 5 or fewer targets, even if they are high resistance and low armor, than Reaper Slash, and it's spammable enough to kill those last 1-3 very rare creatures in a single combat. (You need to use it 4-5 times but at the current cost, that's doable with the late game skill of ~300...)

[Nelphine]

Wave of despair I agree with. I completely disagree with basically all your reasoning on excorcise, except I agree on fire giants. But to me, they're already practically useless (meanimg in actual play their are no situations where I will use fire giants) so making excorcise 1 penalty stronger won't have any actual gameplay impact on the ability of fire giants.

The comparison to banish I've already stated is a bad one, although I'm fine with moving costs around as appropriate. I consider costs to be done at the end after you figure out the balanced and important effect.

On a different note, given that summons are generally considered better, and in particular for death, city troops are considered obsolete, how can massacre be seen as already incredibly powerful, when holy word exists?

[Nelphine]

On death knights again, particularly when summoned by the ai , resist 10 is far too vulnerable to great unsummoning. Although realistically, against that, no very rare should have more than 10% chance of failure.

[Seravy]

Obsolete units still have to be killed and the efficiency of killing them still matters a lot. Massacre kills them a lot faster than anything else, Possession included, so it's better.

Also, a spell that makes city troops obsolete by itself is obviously way better than a spell that does not (holy word).

I see no problem with having at least one very rare creature that's actually not strong against Great Unsummoning. And Death is the ideal realm for such a creature as it has powerful, generally low resistance creatures and doesn't rely on creatures too heavily.

[Seravy]

Actually, Exorcise is working as intended against most creatures at the current -1 save modifier (since those creatures have low resistance). Shadow Demon being the only exception. So I think we should leave Exorcise as is and reduce resistance of Shadow Demons by 1 instead. If the problem is Shadow Demons have too many figures which makes resistance based spells inefficient against them, reducing their resistance should be a good solution.
As they are naturally immune to all the other early game -2 save spells (Confusion, Shatter, Black Sleep), this should be safe to do.