Re: Mass-produced Reanimating Priests: Exploit?
 

So, after campaigning against the Life after Death exploit, I found myself in a position to abuse it in my current game. However, I found that without Foul Vapors, its actually quite difficult to kill off your own mages. Quite difficult!

The poison cloud will work ... it seemed about 50% of the time, assuming you could make the battle last long enough. However, half the time, the mages/priests would just get wounded/afflicted and run away. And the mages who stayed and were converted to soulless often recieved 2-3 afflictions anyway due to the slow damage pattern of poison.

To really make this trick work, you need a single spell which will (more or less) instantly kill friendly mages. Unless someone can think up how to do this, then I would consider this trick more of a curiousity, rather than an exploit.

Re: Mass-produced Reanimating Priests: Exploit?
 

Communion + Phoenix Pyre + Breath of Winter? :p

Re: Mass-produced Reanimating Priests: Exploit?
 

I doubt BoW would kill your mage (and thus cause the chain-reaction) in time.

I wonder tho... if you could call a horror or something.

Re: Mass-produced Reanimating Priests: Exploit?
 

That's Ritual of Rebirth, not Life After Death.

It's probably simplest to use Rain of Stones. You won't kill them all but you'll kill a lot of them--repeat until you have enough. Earthquake x2 would be an (inferior) alternative, if you have them cast a lot of spells to build up fatigue first.

-Max

Re: Mass-produced Reanimating Priests: Exploit?
 

Heh, yeah you could script them to knock themselves unconscious with fatigue while sitting in some killing zone. Have them all cluster together and knock themselves out with their own poison/frost clouds ...

"Pass the Kool-Aid, Ipobar. See you after we all come back in our more enlightened forms. Praise be to Wafflestomper!"

Re: Mass-produced Reanimating Priests: Exploit?
 

The trouble with Rain of Stones is if you do it once you won't kill enough to bother with. If you do it too much you'll kill off the newly soulless mages.

You need something they become immune to. Poison and Cold are the obvious choices.

Re: Mass-produced Reanimating Priests: Exploit?
 

Just put them in a tight group and have another mage cast berserk on them http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Re: Mass-produced Reanimating Priests: Exploit?
 

Finally, a use for bog-beast spam... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Re: Mass-produced Reanimating Priests: Exploit?
 

Re: Mass-produced Reanimating Priests: Exploit?
 

Rain of Stones / Earthquake, or any other battlefield wide spell of that nature is very difficult to use because it relies on the AI choosing to spend gems. You cant ensure you will get a combat like that if you assume you are restricting yourself to nuetral province attacks to trigger the battle (horrors, GRs, etc).

Knocking mages out works, BUT as I said before, the damage pattern of poison is such that you are almost guaranteed to get multiple afflictions. The optimal way to carry out this tactic would be to kill them all in one blast, using no gems (except for items).

And btw, Soul Vortex doesnt work, either. Its slow, like poison, but beyond that, mages have good MR so they resist it a lot.

Given how often we have all had mages killed off by AI mistakes, it's really surprising how hard it is to kill them off intentionally. If anyone can find a good way to do it, let me know.