Re: Great Boar of Carnutes autosummoning
 

If you give them the bracer of protection then they do have armor, so the earth bless will give you protection (and you can use legions of steel on them, but good luck getting the caster to target you). And druids can cast divine blessing with a crystal shield, which you want anyway to cast strength of boars for your javelins. So I think the bless can still be viable for them.

Re: Great Boar of Carnutes autosummoning
 

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Re: Great Boar of Carnutes autosummoning
 

The bracers give you the armor. Double them up if you need more protection and aren't as concerned about MR or elemental resistances.

It very easy to get an H3 priest. Multiple ways.

Crystal shield
Communion Master with 2 slaves
Communion slave with master casting PoTS
PoTS on a single druid

Also, even if the E bless wasn't that great for the boars it works pretty well for the other things your fielding. E bless is great for all of your sacred mages, and it's probably the best bless for the boar warriors to leverage. And even if you don't give the boars a pair of bracers, the reinvig is still very worthwhile. They have a pretty decent berserk protection as is, but trampling brings fatigue up pretty quickly without the E-bless.

Re: Great Boar of Carnutes autosummoning
 

I still wonder if it is worth to 5 additional e gems to buff them up.

And the E bless helps, but not much, trample gives fatigue for each square trampled, so even at e9 you stay neutral for 2 attacks each turn. (And you get haste by the national nature spell).

Perhaps better is the owl quill, you get 0 enc that way. (But you still get some fatigue from trampling, if berserked). But you lack the paths for that. The only reliable source of that is either the pretender or conj 8.

If only you had the national mages to cast the earth armor buffs on them. (Then you would be able to get 25 protection with the berzerk, no need for bracers then).

Personally, I would go for something like e4n4, or no bless at all, scales are probably better.

(All using CBM)

Re: Great Boar of Carnutes autosummoning
 

The extra protection of the bracers actually goes a pretty long way to making them more survivable. Difference between 15 and 21 body protection. They actually die pretty fast without it.

I also definitively wouldn't get the high bless just for the boars. They'd never be worth it. But once you add in the recruit everywhere druids, and recruit everywhere Boar warriors of CBM it starts to be worth it. And EN is really the only bless that works well for all three of them.

Re: Great Boar of Carnutes autosummoning
 

Like I said, it looks to me that the bless is overkill. They can expand without going e9 (from e4 -> e9 is a lot of points). And the additional points can be used to get better scales (better scales -> more gold -> more forts -> more mages). If you want more protection, your druids are superb earth casters.

It is a tradeoff, in the late game I think I'd rather have the additional mages, and not the +2 reinvig on my mages.

Re: Great Boar of Carnutes autosummoning
 

I agree a scales build is still probably an optimal path to take. I'm just arguing that a bless is not a completely crazy way to go given what you can deploy with it.

Re: Great Boar of Carnutes autosummoning
 

Ow we are all in general agreement here, gong from e4 -> e9 is just an implementation detail ;).