Re: Balancing the blesses
 

Earth bless is fine! 4 protection is good for your sacred soldiers and 4 reinvigoration (E9) helps your sacred mages a lot. It may be not the best early game bless but in middle/late game the reinvigoration for your hordes of mages is often much more important than a fire bless on some of your troops.

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

Addressing the fire 9 is obviously the best bless statement.

There are many situations where a nation would be served better by a different bless. A very obvious one that comes to mind is Niefelheim. I would argue that a fire bless is not needed on their sacred units. You would probably be better off with a water, nature or earth bless, or even a combination of these blesses.

This is an example of balance of blesses without taking into consideration the spell picks for each path which some people seem to be ignoring. If you cannot prove without a doubt that some blesses are overpowered compared to all the rest without taking spells into consideration, then surely you have no leg to stand on when comparing the blesses in the overall balance of the game.

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

Fire is not at all clearly the best bless.... Mostly it depends on what nation and what blessable unit you have available - if you need to make generalisations i would probably pick water as the number 1 bless. The weakest blesses are probably death, air and blood.

Astral 9 doesn't need help either, for certain units the mr is very good (demonic/undead) -and its pretty cheep with an oracle chassis and twist fate is added gravy on top.

For some reason you list earth as one of the weakest blesses when it's clearly one of the best - 4 more protection is not bad at all and the reinvig will help alot on those heavy armor blessables you probably are using (aswell as helping sacred mages).

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

I think blood is fine. +strenght make little units swarm better bigger units. combine with water 9 and multiple attacks-weak sacred and they will do some damage.

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

My feeling is that if we were to leave speculation out of this and run some sort of combat simulator, or a mod that lets two of the same nation go against each other with different blesses, F9 would win the lion's share of contests against any other single bless. But my feeling is also that in the absence of such clear proof, there's no reason for anyone to change his point of view.

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

It depends on the nation you are playing, as to what lvl9+ bless is best.

However, blood, death and air blesses are weak compared to the others. With certain nations they do have there uses, a air bless with shadow vestels possibly for example.

Death bless however may be very powerful, someone hinted that a sacred mage blessed with D9 who cast a battlefield wide damaging spell got the 350% affliction chance on every unit effected. Is this true?

I have not tested it yet but if true would make death bless excellent.

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

I would rather have s9 and/or w9 on my vestals, i think air is not as good on them. In fact air is probably the weakest bless overall.

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

I think fire bless is so strong because it's a perfect synergy. It increases chance to hit and damage dealt. It's stronger than just sum of the components.

Air9 bless is verrry strange. In my opinion it's not useful enough. It's basically a combo piece, because otherwise very few enemies can deal lightning damage. (does Smite/Holy Avenger deal lightning damage ? I'm trying to figure out hot to build a priest assassin). If I had a chance, it would replace Air9 with +3 precision. Sounds much more widely useful to me. It would be nice for casters and archers as well. And it fits air very well, too.

I don't like the idea of sacred troops because they often can deal with everything on their own. Wasn't this game supposed to be about combined arms, at least partially ?

Blood bless.... tell me, what distinguishes extra strength from simple +damage bonus of Fire or Death ? Not only is the blood bless weaker, but also bland. In theory, some units can throw javelins further (sun warriors), and commanders could use Fire Bola better. But the difference would be pretty marginal, I think.
Blood9 is a joke. You buy a (typically expensive) sacred unit and hope for it to die ? For a chance of cursing your enemy ? Because then your other units may hurt enemy more instead of simply killing them ? Ridiculous. It should either be made automatic (no MR), or replaced with Horror Mark.

I'd love to see sacred unit price scale depending on bless strength. This is because without a strong enough bless, sacred units are often not worth the price. I would like to use Black Hunters, but with 125 price and no bless it's ridiculous.
Does anyone know - once the rider is gone, does the Black Hunter still collect his large amount of money ? I mean, it's an animal...

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

There are big differences between the damage increase you get from Blood, Death and Fire. Flaming weapons cause an additional 6 armor piercing fire damage. It is not added to weapon's own damage roll. Death weapon works like Flaming, except not fire damage, armor negating and MR negates.

Protection, magic resistance, fire resistance all interact differently with the damage bonus from the bless. Imagine casting Weapons of Sharpness on units with +strength or units with an extra 6 damage armor piercing attack. Of course, the actual damage increase it biggest with fire almost always, as it also increases attack skill, but you can take some Fire for +attack, not always go to 9.

Blood is not that great a path IF you are just thinking about the bless, but for some nations taking high Blood on your pretender is still a good idea because Blood magic in general is so powerful. Blood 9 is weak though, as you don't need it that high for spells.

Re: Balancing the blesses
 

I actually like Borsuk's idea about precision. It would make sacred battlemages a lot more interesting, that's for sure.

I also agree that the bonus you get at blood9 is pretty silly. I'd prefer to see something like a watered down blood vengeance based on morale or mr (obviously watered down quite a lot).