Re: Helheim advice
 

OK, I'll try again. Maybe I've got a wrong impression because I played them poorly in MP. :)

Re: Helheim advice
 

You can always just Empower an A3 to start the bootstrapping. It costs what, 60 gems? Expensive but maybe cheaper than putting A4 on your pretender.

-Max

Re: Helheim advice
 

Or take the Astral bless and use a Ring of Wizardry to boost one to forge the first Air booster.

Re: Helheim advice
 

Possible, but Helheim doesn't have an easy time scraping up 40 pearls (30 w/ hammer). An A4 item will cost 25 air gems (17 w/ hammer). Since the whole point is to forge multiple air boosters and/or Staff of Storms, an initial 60 gem investment to get the ball rolling seems affordable to me. With a starting Air income and lots of mages who can search manually, and/or cast Auspex, you shouldn't have trouble scraping up 100+ air gems over the first couple of years anyway.

Of course, if you've *got* the pearls, Ring of Wizardry is always a good investment...

-Max

Re: Helheim advice
 

yah a4 is nice to take... it doesn't fit in w/ my need for a vicious bless though :(

Re: Helheim advice
 

I've got a game going with a W6E9 bless and it works just fine.

E9 is for me a no brainer as it gives helhirding a 0 fatigue which works wonder with long fights and skele spam...which happens to be so easy to use with helheim.
I got niefelheim quickly out of the game just because I could win the fatigue race.
That's one of the reason I didn't go for more than W6. I don't relish having my fatigue doubled by quickness and going from +3def to +4 wasn't worth the points.

I remember reading somewhere that if you manage to stay alive and standing long enough, you'll eventually win. That's the point of a 0 encumberance + 22def unexperienced, your opponent will eventually either fall under your blows or his own weight.

Re: Helheim advice
 

and an E9 bless is just uber when you have an easy access to earth as the prot bonus counts double with legions of steel or bracers of prot.

Re: Helheim advice
 

Just watch out for swamps and extremely hot/cold dominion.

(Unfortunately, you can't see the temperature of a province before you attack it, unless it's in your own dominion. This is why Niefelheim, to me, is a more stressful nation to play than Ashdod or Lanka, even though the cold aura rocks.)

-Max