Chaos-Sorcery

[Seravy]

See post http://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/showt...#pid853793

I believe there is a possibility that the Chaos Sorcery dual realm combination might need some improvement, so I'm trying to organize my thoughts and hope everyone helps with that here by answering the following questions.

1. Do you think Chaos+Sorcery is underpowered and/or not fun to play and needs additional synergy between their spells in the early game? In other words, is there even a reason to do something?
2. Which common or uncommon Chaos or Sorcery spells have a unique enough effect that a similar spell from the other realm would not benefit from whatever change we might implement? (We want to only alter how the two realms play together, without affecting mono realm gameplay)
3. What kind of effect from the other realm that matches the realm's capabilities could be added to indirectly boost those spells?
4. Which Chaos or Sorcery common or uncommon spell do you think could be altered in the first place? All the spells serve a specific purpose and have been tested for balance for a very long time, so careless changes are almost guaranteed to do more harm than good at this time.
5. What existing synergies are there in the two realms for common and uncommon tier spells?

An example of what kind of change I'm looking for, if any, would be Sky Fires gaining the effect to reroll curse resistance rolls and becoming Fate Mastery, an effect that does almost nothing to Chaos (and very little even for Life, Sorcery or Nature) but improves its synergy with Death significantly. The other example would be how Chaos Channel and being undead can coexist on units, making them count as both Chaos and Death units to receive buffs that affect either.

My thoughts :

1. Considering I haven't played the game for the past year or so, I'm far from being certain but I think yes. the overlap in spells between the two realms is massive (see linked post) and while I remember adding synergies for this realm pair, almost all of them were for mid and late game spells. I overlooked the early game as "that's where it should be difficult, this realm pair has the strongest late game" but it's very possible that the early game is too weak for higher difficulty levels now to last until the late game. Most of the powerful early game strategies have been made more balanced so it's not as simple as being carried by a strong early normal unit or hero anymore, or at least that's what I think right now. However I definitely do tend to overthink stuff so I might be wrong.

2. Phantom summons, Focus Magic(only casting ability buff), Blur, Flame Blade (only direct combat stat buff), Fire Elemental, Gargoyles (high armor), Philosopher's Stone (skill buff)

3. Some form of global and cheap attack buff could make Phantom Warriors much more powerful. A creature with casting ability or many figures and a magical ranged attack could make Focus Magic better. (I don't think adding a new create should be considered this late in the development though), Flame Blade would be powerful when combined with many defensive buffs on a low attack high figure unit. Fire Elemental would benefit from enemy units failing to do magical damage, activating the relevance of Weapon Immunity. Gargoyles would be drastically stronger if their attack could be buffed. Additional casting skill already benefits Chaos a lot, but mana crystals and range penalties for casting can still be a bottleneck, so improvements on those would have synergy with Philosopher's Stone.
As the two realms have many redundant common and uncommon spells with similar effects, a way to skip researching these "duplicate" spells or replace them with other spells could be beneficial. Chaos randomly shuffling spells in the research book would fit the realm's abilities. (However this is definitely a way too drastic thing to implement)

4. This is the hard part, idk. Disrupt could use some overhaul I guess. Not much else I can think of. However buffing Disrupt makes defensive gameplay in the early game harder which would make Chaos/Sorcery even harder to play so it is very likely to backfire.

5. Gargoyles with the high armor benefit massively from Blur and as they fly, also from having missile immunity. Sorcery can provide the much needed Resistance for Fire Giants to be viable against Death, Sorcery and Life wizards (Exorcism, Confusion and Sleep mainly). Water Elemental is buffed by Inner Fire but the latter is already a rare spell. Aura of Majesty helps negate the diplomacy effect of Corruption and Volcano to a small extent. Philosopher's Stone provides the much needed casting skill for Chaos to spam their direct damage spells.
Nothing else I can think of right now. Flight allows the chaos wizard to spam combat spells while out of reach, however Chaos Channels can already provide this buff which means no additional synergy is gained from it.


Right now the only semi-usable idea I have would be to replace Disrupt with a common combat global enchantment that grants wall crusher and an attack buff to fantastic creatures (indirect phantom warrior buff), however that might be way too powerful in general and alters the gameplay on a larger scale than intended. Maybe if it was specific to combat summons? That would be too weak and useless for Chaos though, they only have one common summon.

[Desertfox]

One of the most powerful blue spells is Confusion which kills enemies at the end of the turn, if they resist at -2. Repeat spamming in certain dungeons or nodes (either use a flying unit, a fast unit like Cavalry, or spam cheap units like ghosts or spearmen) until all the enemies are dead, is a way to clear very powerful nodes relatively early in the game. If you get some extra casting skill, Confusion has good synergy with Warp Creature which has a -5 to resist and, if successful, a chance to reduce enemy resistance to zero, which guarantees Confusion success. It's even better with Fate Mastery.

However, Hadriex refuses to use Confusion this way for roleplay reasons, thus handicapping himself when playing Blue.
He also doesn't use Dispelling Wave on the overland map, for reasons of fairness? Even though the AI occasionally does.
Hadriex is also scared to use some of the most powerful Chaos spells, notably the Very Rare global spells because he is afraid it'll piss off his enemies.

So Hadriex does not play this combination to its full potential.

[Anskiy]

That being said, you are right to point out that the combo is very weak, and I daresay this is thanks to the Chaos portion not supporting the other half very well. Like I said, Chaos commons are pretty crappy, and I really see no use for them except for Flame Blade and Fire Bolt in 95% of games I play. Fire Elemental and Warp Creature gain some niche uses in some games, the former really mostly because of Stoning Immunity and sometimes Weapon Immunity, and the latter only in conjunction with strong hero based strategies, except getting that strong hero is the hard part!

IMO you definitely need to rethink the common spells and redo their implementation. If you want something simple, change Hell Hounds to get 6 attack, 6 fire breath, and mountaineer. Right now they are heckin' wimps, failing to do much of anything to any target besides trash regular units before dying horribly.

[Suppanut]

I think Shatter is sound good in theory, but it is weaker than other resistance roll curse and has no late game potential at all as by late game there is no pure normal unit that shatter could make a good difference.
Disrupt should deal damage on the tile it cast on too.
I would prefer fire elemental to do more fire damage and do fiery things such as fire breath, and immolation than just a mass without heat as it is. Although that would make it is too good to stay at common level, it is not wrong for elemental unit to be uncommon.
Perhaps wall of fire should also have effect of vanilla metal fire included in it too?
Should corruption generate single sum of casting skill equal to area trade bonus when it cast?
Chaos channel fire breath should be +4 fire breath instead of just set fire breath to 4.
Blazing March is not good enough to be rare spell, it should be uncommon spell.
Amplifier effect is not good enough to put on hero but it would be very good if you put it on summon creature.
I think Hellhound should have its own niche, why don't make as fast as cavalry and has mountaineer?
Perhaps a spell to recharge ammo?

[Hadriex]

Actually I tend not to use dispel wave on map often as the AI rarely stacks enchantments the way I do and, as the AI had more resources then I do I find dispelling to be a losing game unless it's either critical (right before I hit a city) or I feel I can do far more damage then the cost of the dispel.

You got my number on the other two points though.


I do have a couple small ideas that may help early chaos.

Expand corrupted tiles into their own terrain type with an effect over the battlefield similar to node auras. Effects could include: Poisons are more difficult to resist, certain creatures like hell hounds receive bonuses (would be written into the creature 'corruption affinity' or some such), or even a scattering of tiles that damage non-flying units that start their turn in them.

I could even see players corrupting their own cities in an emergency.


Disrupt: Currently this spell is only useful when attacking an enemy city. This means in 90% of battles it is a dead spell. What if it had a second function?

I propose a stun effect, similar to ice bolt. But with a save to negate it.

This mean if you target wall, it breaks the wall. If you target a troop, it's save vs. stun. If you target a troop next to a wall you get both effects.

It's small, and inferior to spells like web. But early game when you have few spells researched it could turn a battle by knocking a flying unit down for a turn or shutting down a slinger or suchlike. It even combos with warp creature and fate mastery.


Focus magic: I can't help but feel that we've got a spell that enhances fire breath, and chaos has an early unit with 4 fire breathing figures. But no way for the two to actually work together. Focus magic is just too expensive to waste on a hell hound. You'd be better served to summon more hounds. If you do decide to make hell hounds a larger more potent spell, you may pump the number of figures to make this combination more attractive. Though i'm dubious it could ever really work.

[Seravy]

I tried to organize the spells in a spreadsheet to see exactly how bad it is and it's not looking good.
I'm afraid there really should be some more synergy added to make up for this deficiency, but I'm lacking ideas for the time being.

   

I wonder how much better other realm pairs would do.  Most spell combos I can think of involve rare or very rare spells but at least they probably don't have that many very similar spells?

[Hadriex]

Spreadsheet, good idea.

You make a really good point about the water elementals and fire giants.


If you want to make a second spreadsheet to compare this against try Nature/chaos.

[Seravy]

Chaos Nature would be something like this I think

   

7 overlapping spell pairs instead of 11.
1 "dead' spell instead of 5 and even that 1 is already among the overlapping spells anyway.
7 synergies instead of 1.

Definitely quite a big difference there.

[Anskiy]

Chaos-Nature does have decently good synergy, especially if you lean into Chaos Channeled troops. Its biggest drawback is the lack of resistance boosting effects, and mediocre resistance on its units. Chaos Surge and Survival Instinct do exist, but are by no means guaranteed, and are exceptionally late spells anyway.

[Seravy]

If we could remove 3 redundant spell pairs or dead spells and add 3 synergies or something like that, the problem could be solved. We shouldn't go overboard as this combination of realms is still the strongest in the late game so it shouldn't be above average in the early game as well.

So here is a bit of brainstorming :

Fire Bolt vs AEther Sparks

Fire Bolt is the baseline damage spell in the game, we can't change it.
I don't remember what reason we had for adding AEther Sparks to the game. I guess Psionic Blast was too expensive and wasteful to use on enemies with low armor?
Halving enemy ammo and MP with this is the only thing Sorcery can do against such units until Magic Immunity, now moved up to very rare. Which might be quite inadequante honestly, but we should remember that protection from magic damage is Nature's speciality, not Sorcery's.

Either way, AEther Sparks might be a spell worth rethinking.

Lightning bolt vs Psionic Blast
These are both iconic, realm defining spells that shouldn't be changed. The different tier and type of immunity they can be countered with at least makes them different enough that keeping them isn't really a problem as long as more synergies are added on other spells.

Shatter vs Confusion
As Shatter costs only half as much as Confusion, but is restricted on targets, i feel both spells have a room in gameplay. Shatter in particular has been a lifesaver on my Chaos playthroughs, allowing gargoyles to defeat units that would otherwise deal too much damage to them. We probably shouldn't change these spells however, adding minor side effects might work.
Also, it can even be said Warp Creature already has synergy with Confusion, albeit that combo is mainly useful against lairs.
What is Confusion had a higher probability to roll "switch sides" if the unit has more than one debuff? I can't help thinking that a spell named "Confusion" should reward playing Chaos one way or another.

Chaos Channels vs Flight
These are both essential spells for their realm and we shouldn't change their core function.
While gaining additional buffs if Flight is granted by Chaos Channells sounds good on paper, in reality many units in the game fly and thus this would buff the spell globally without anyone caring about casting Flight to trigger the effect.

Fire Elemental vs Phantom Beats
These probably don't step on each other's toes as much as it sounds as they have vastly different cost and damage output. Good as is.

Warp Creature vs Vertigo
As Vertigo is Sorcery's only direct stat debuff, it's essential to keep it in the game. I don't think adjusting the spell would do much as it already almost completely renders the target worthless in combat.
Warp Creature should probably be moved to the "has synergy" category with Confusion.

Hell Hounds vs Nagas
While Nagas are a critically important source of early game poison damage required to maintain global balance, Hell Hounds don't serve any specific purpose beyond being the only real "baseline" common summoned creature with no special properties. I do believe the unit is strong enough for the summoning cost, but maybe we could come up with some ability that gives it additional synergy with Sorcery magic somehow? (Yes, Focus Magic comes to mind but I don't see how a 80 MP buff could be made to work well on a cheap 40 cost creature)

Fire Giant vs Water Elemental
As the two realms being average at summoning magic, both having a generic baseline uncommon ranged creature makes some sense. Water Elemental already has Fire Immunity which provides synergy with Inner Fire, maybe Fire Giant could get some minor tweaking that could make it stronger when Sorcery magic is available?
What if it had resistance to ranged magical damage, the one type of damage Sorcery has no good solution against at this tier? (Resist Elements or Elemental Armor effect, this could also discourage using magicians and indirectly makes disabling arrow damage better. I think Resist Elements might be too weak but Elemental Armor too strong for this, though.)

Animate Ammo vs Guardian Wind
Not much I can think of can be done for this pair, fortunately they do have a slightly different purpose, one is used in combat to counter fewer, more powerful units, while the other when a few powerful units on the player's side is facing a large number of bowmen. Probably good as is.
Maybe if Animate Ammo could also destroy rock type ammo? (if it doesn't already, I don't remember)

Flame Blade vs Focus Magic
These spells while similar, have completely different secondary effects, so it's good as is.

Disrupt vs Phantom Warriors
As Disrupt is generally considered underwhelming, I see a good potential here.

Let's say we remove Disrupt and add a new combat enchantment "Impermanence". This would buff melee normal units with Wall Crusher, however we can also make the spell buff combat summoned creatures specifically. That's a narrow enough effect that the casting cost could stay low (5-7 MP) but it would massively buff Phantom Warriors, a high figure count, illusion damage attacker. The buff could be either 1 attack and 1 defense, or 2 attack, or possibly 2 attack but minus 1 defense.
This would also create some synergy for Nature (buffed Boars), a slightly improvement for mono Chaos (stronger Fire Elemental, if we choose the plus 1 armor option), however what worries me is that this buff would possibly be too powerful on zombies, the one combat summon we absolutely do not want to make stronger, at least not by that much. (although maybe Chaos can already buff the attack strength of zombies? I think Flame Blade is not allowed on summons so it can't?)
I think the 1 attack, 1 defense option is safest (best for Fire Elemental, not overly powerful for zombies) but it might not be as great for Phantom Warriors (going from 0 to 1 armor doesn't do much and for the damage output, gaining 2 attack would be more appropriate if the goal is to create a major synergy.)
However, Blazing March already enables the phantom warrior buffing combo and stacking both might be way too good?

Corruption, Raise Volcano
Maybe if Aura of Majesty made AI wizards completely ignorant to these spells, they could be more useful. Corruption, not so much, but Volcano as an economy spell, definitely.
Corruption buffing certain units is a nice idea I already considered, unfortunately it's not AI friendly (AI does not know when and where to corrupt before attacking) and none of the Sorcery creatures would make sense to receive a buff from Corrupted lands. It could serve as a way to buff Chaos individually but not the two realm pair.

Immolation
I don't think much can be done about this, we don't want to add a new high armor Sorcery summon.

Fireball
I don't see how this could be made relevant either, especially if we do go through with the Phantom Warrior buffing spell which would make them outclass most direct damage spells, even Lightning Bolt.

Resist Magic
If we manage to make Fire Giants relevant, this becomes an essential spell to keep them safe.

Spell Lock
I don't see a way to make this better for Chaos.

Edit : What if Impermanence gave Wall Crusher to corporeal units and the attack buff to Noncorporeal units instead? All three Sorcery summon are nonCorporeal. It also enables the buff through Wraith Form but otherwise doesn't affect many creatures in the game. It also eliminates the problem of buffing zombies.