Death vs. Fire bless
 

I've been trying out Mictlan recently, and I discovered something odd. Maybe I'm misinterpreting the results, but it seems that a Death-9 bless is more effective on my Eagle Warriors than a Fire-9 bless. I haven't tested it rigorously, but it seems like they cut through enemy troops like butter with the death-9, and only beat up on them a bit with the fire-9.

I did this as an experiment with a "cheap bless" strategy. Taking a MA Prince of Death pretender only costs 364 pts to get to Dominion-10 Death-9, while getting a Fountain to Dominion-10 Fire-9 costs 547 pts, a lot more.

Does it make sense that a 2-AN MR attack would be more effective than an 8-AP attack, especially without the bonus +4 to hit? Note that this is against knights and other heavily armored indys in single-payer, not against chaff (which I imagine fire to be much more effective against) or MP-SCs (high MR would probably stop the Death Weapons easily)

Re: Death vs. Fire bless
 

Well, you tested it and it works for you. It sounds plausible, against high-protection, low-MR troops.

High magic resistance would stop Death Weapons, but not the extra afflictions.

Re: Death vs. Fire bless
 

The thing about it also is that AN weapons ignore shields, this in many cases is as significant as punching through the armor itself and is often better than the +4 attack bonus for fire (the defender still has the defense penalty from the shield but no protection!). It wouldn't surprise me at all if a death bless does better on average in LA against heavy infantry and knights while fire does better in the lighter armored, less shield using EA. Another thing many people overlook is the extra damage from a blood bless can be better than either one sometimes as well.

Re: Death vs. Fire bless
 

dont forget that the affliction part of the death bless also works for bless mages casting AOE spells.

Re: Death vs. Fire bless
 

Eagle warriors have two low-damage attacks IIRC, and knights are size 3 so are easily swarmed. It's not surprising that the death bless does relatively well in this situation because:

1.) The 6 AP fire attack won't often hurt high-Prot knights.

2.) The Eagle Warrior's weapons (daggers?) also won't often hurt knights. Thus, fire bless is relatively impotent in this situation.

3.) Death weapons do something like 2.7 points of damage on average, when they get past MR. (Vs. Prot 17 knights it's like a Damage 19 attack.) Baalz says they ignore shields--I haven't tested it, but it's probably true given how shields are supposed to work. That helps offset the -4 to attack, relative to fire bless, since the daggers don't do anything to the knight anyway. I'm AFG, but 3 Eagle Warriors will probably hit 2 knights through their shields 3 or 4 times per turn for 8-11 points of damage, which kills one knight per turn (and causes about 2 afflictions per turn). Plus the occasional lucky dagger strike that actually does damage, call it 0.3 per turn. Fire bless will hit just as often, and will ALWAYS hit with a dagger, but breaks through the Prot much less often. I'd be surprised if it were more than 2 or 3 HP damage per turn.

So yeah, Eagle Warriors vs. knights would rather have Death bless than Fire bless because they don't need the boost to Attack, and they can't get through the armor with their natural weapons or with fire weapons. Fire bless would stack better with Strength of Giants, though. However, death bless helps mages and death magic is more fun than fire magic, IMHO, so I might take a death bless even if I didn't expect to fight knights with eagle warriors.

-Max

Re: Death vs. Fire bless
 

I think that death bless is very good for cheap sacreds that you can amass. My games with mictlan convinced me that for jags and eagles death bless is very, very good. However, they both need a boost to attack to be able to counter high defense (and vine shield) SC's. With D9 bless a normal SC doesn't really need to be killed - hitting several times is enough and even if you lose the fight it will be victory.
From what I played and experienced an imprisoned D9W9F4 PoD is splendid for EA\LA Mictlan in many aspects. And your scales won't be that bad with him...

Re: Death vs. Fire bless
 

Hmmm, I think the damage done by death weapons is higher than the average implies because the variation is capped at 0 damage on the low end which is close to tie while there's no upper cap. If you hit twice and there's a difference of 10 between the attacker and defender's rolls both times but the winner is reversed, you deal 0 and 12 damage - it's a bit misleading to think of it as 2.7 damage per hit. Of course this doesn't take into account the MR check, but I guess my point is that 2AN damage is more than it sounds when you're talking about a lot of rolls. Look at it this way, if you hit twice, figure MR is gonna fail once, and you're gonna roll 0 damage once...then that means every other eagle warrior lands a kill or at least significant damage - not bad at all against heavily armored troops.

I also again want to point out the ignoring shields is almost always *at least* as good as +4 attack against any troops with shields, and often quite a bit better. Against units with tower shields (not common in indies, but much more so against real opponents) it's more than twice as good.

Re: Death vs. Fire bless
 

do not forget that the afflictions too can incur damage and stat penalties, often which can be more meaningful than extra damage and attack of a fire bless; even against swarms of normal troops.

additionally, a death bless is typically more accessible, and death typically is tons more useful on a pretender than fire, IMHO.

Re: Death vs. Fire bless
 

So how did Death go from the worst bless to like the 4th best bless?

Re: Death vs. Fire bless
 

why should blesses be ordinal?

Re: Death vs. Fire bless
 

Bless effects can't be judged.
It all depends on what unit is to be blessed.

A water bless for Nifel giants is ok. But they will fatigue faster and actually be less effective in larger battles where an earth and or nature bless is much more effective.

On the other hand a water bless is superb for a unit like EA TC's sacreds when an earth and or nature bless is not as good for this unit.

Re: Death vs. Fire bless
 

Don't lie. You are just trying to confuse people so that they don't see that an A10 bless is always the strongest.

Re: Death vs. Fire bless
 

1.) That's why it's something like 2.7 instead of just 2. IIRC, of course. I ran a simulation to figure out exactly how much average damage 2 AN does but it was more than a year ago. A forum search for MaxWilson and "death bless" should turn up my posts.

2.) Don't tower shields give +7 to def? Ignoring shields is somewhat worse than twice as good as +4 to attack.

-Max

Re: Death vs. Fire bless
 

Are you certain about this? I was under the impression that the F9/D9 effects were secondary weapon effects, so only were applied upon a successful strike of the primary weapon. In other words, the to-hit probability doesn't change.

Re: Death vs. Fire bless
 

I think what he's saying is, since the damage completely *Negates* shield protection as well, then even a shield hit will do damage every single time - thus an opponent with a large shield and heavy armor will more consistently take more damage from small AN hits than from large AP hits.

Re: Death vs. Fire bless
 

Cleveland is saying that the initial attack must hit for the AN effect to even be considered, so shields do matter.

I'm not sure myself, but I'm inclined to believe Cleveland is right. This does probably only affect melee weapons though. Blessed bows might work strange, much like poison arrows.

Re: Death vs. Fire bless
 

Only the Parry addition to Defense matters in that case, against the unit's normal damage, which works against Fire bless as well; the shield's Protection, however, is completely nullified against the Death bless damage, making it more useful against shielded troops than Fire bless as Baalz explained.

Re: Death vs. Fire bless
 

But that's the point, imagine it like this. Opponent with 7 parry, 14 prot shield, and 18 armor. Your unit consistently hits for ~20. so when you get a clear hit, you're doing 2+2AN. When you hit the shield, which is quite often, you are still doing 2AN. In other words, on shield hits, you are still getting half of your typical damage on that opponent. In contrast, your Fire blessed friend is hitting a bit more often, but hits that shield just as often, and when he does, he has to roll 32+ to do -any- damage at all.

That's how shield hits work, isn't it? It's technically still a "hit", with the prot value of the shield added to the prot value of the armor. So if you are doing AN damage, a shield is useless, it is just encumbering your foe, and limiting their damage capacity. Obviously, it still has value if it's only a Death bless, and not an AN weapon, but still.

And then all of those little 2+ hits are causing Afflictions of course, wearing down your poor foe.

Re: Death vs. Fire bless
 

OK I follow you.
I was unintentionally thinking about effects upon dmg, not upon hit.

Re: Death vs. Fire bless
 

While you are right secondary effects only applied with a successful strike of the primary weapon (verified using -ddddd), you are wrong about the to-hit probability thing.

A hit can be an armor hit or a shield hit. In both cases, primary weapon hits. Fire bless secondary attack is an AP attack, so shield matters. A shield hit is as good as a no hit for most cases. This is especially true for a kite shield with its huge protection bonus. So your fire bless secondary attack pretty much requires an armor hit to work for heavily shielded opponents.

Death blessed secondary attack however, ignores protection. So it does not matter if you hit a shield or an armor. Therefore, its actual chance to do damage is greatly improved.

Re: Death vs. Fire bless
 

How can I be right about the 1st and wrong about the 2nd?

I said that the secondary F9/D9 effect is only called upon a successful Attack roll of the primary weapon. If the primary weapon is not AN, then the primary weapon must defeat the shield parry, so the to-hit probability for the secondary F9/D9 attack does not change.

I suppose people are confusing the Attack and Damage rolls. My comments were specifically referencing the Attack rolls. Baalz stated that AN weapons ignore shield parry during Attack roll, and therefore implied that the D9 bless will produce a successful Attack roll more often against a shielded opponent than the F9 bless. While he's 100% correct that AN Attack rolls ignore shield parry, the F9/D9 damage are SECONDARY EFFECTS, and therefore do no have Attack rolls...only Damage rolls. Your to-hit probability (i.e. the probability of a successful Attack roll) doesn't change with a D9 bless.

Re: Death vs. Fire bless
 

But an attack stopped by a shield parry is still a hit and can even do damage. It's just that the Shield protection is added in to the regular armor protection so even AP damage is unlikely to get through. The AN attack hits the shield, but ignores it's protection.

If you examine debugging output, you should see damage being rolled for a shield parry.

Re: Death vs. Fire bless
 

So a death bless negates the armor value of shields? That explains a *lot*.

It also means that archers with a death blessing would deal catastrophic damage to opponents. Are there any blessable archers in the game?

Re: Death vs. Fire bless
 

No, the 2AN damage part of the death blessing doesn't apply to archers or spells. Only the extra chance of afflictions counts.

LA T'ien Ch'is Ancestor Vessels are heavy cavalry archers and very nice with a death bless.

Re: Death vs. Fire bless
 

Just to be clear since there seems to be a bit of confusion about what I said, what I meant is just what Jim said...the vast majority of times a shield hit is *effectively* a miss (causes no damage) for a fire bless but *effectively* a hit for a death bless (causes 2AN damage). So *effectively* a death bless ignores the shield defense, and thus any time the shield defense is greater than 4 it's *effectively* better than the attack bonus for a fire bless. I guess I was a bit ambiguous, I think of a "hit" in this context as an attack which causes damage.

Re: Death vs. Fire bless
 

Gotcha. Sorry for misinterpreting.

An interesting, lesser known effect of the D9 bless is that Death Weapons cause disease directly. The weapon "bless death" (wpn #448) calls its own secondary effect "Disease" (wpn #143), which doesn't seem to check MR and gives the target the Diseased affliction...in addition to the +350% chance of other afflictions.

Of course the targets are only affected by disease if they fail the original MR roll, so it's not as devastating as it sounds. But it'll make your opponent think twice about sending his elephants against your lowly flaggies.

Re: Death vs. Fire bless
 

EA Kailasa's Yavana Archers

until now thought completely useless. I think A10D9 might work with them.

they could work quite nicely by themselves, or with chaff if necessary; and Kail has no shortage of chaff to choose from http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

No need to rush for Gandharvas or Arrow Fend, you could get Celestial music fast. D9 blessed longbow archers with the high precision of the Yavanas firing twice a turn, you could place em so far to the back, and with a little chaff to stall stuff, they would empty their quivers. anything left alive would get killed by them in melee once they were finally reached.

Re: Death vs. Fire bless
 

i think they said this D bless doesn't apply to archers http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...s/confused.gif

Re: Death vs. Fire bless
 

i know F bless doesn't, so D bless may not either. not too sure.

that's a pity though, because it means Yavana Archers would remain mostly useless.

Re: Death vs. Fire bless
 

Death Weapons from Death 9 only affects melee weapons. Improved affliction chance from D9 (350%) works for melee, missile, magic and perhaps other sources of damage as well if there are any. I'm not sure about fire shield.

Re: Death vs. Fire bless
 

the fact that the D9 damage is AN synergizes well with the increased affliction chance though. if they are protted to hell, then you might get the AN damage through, if they are MR to hell, then you might get normal damage through, either way, you can probably get some afflictions through.

and even with minimal damage infliction, if you start getting some afflictions on, anything becomes a lot less of a threat.

wonder how F8D9 might stack up to F9W9, especially considering the gain in design points. something with higher armor and low defense, that wouldn't benefit from the weak effect of water.

Re: Death vs. Fire bless
 

Dammit you guys! I JUST started an EA game, and now you've got me all curious to try Kailasa. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif Maybe I'll do some SP tinkering to work it out.....

Was just playing with pretenders a bit - I do think N4 is pretty useful for Kailasa. Though, I suppose you could just plan to mass buff with Ethereal/Luck by the time it really matters.

Also, their recruitable anywhere sacred, is not the archer, so this somewhat complicates the issue. While I'd agree that the Death bless is still very viable for them, the fact that most of your sacreds would be full time melee, kind of changes the rest. I was looking at a Master Lich with 6A/9D/4N which seemed pretty viable as far as retaining decent scales as well.

However, overall it seems like you are best off trying to use blockers to eat arrows. That being the case, the Air could be dropped altogether, to give them a bigger Nature bless which could be enough to keep the archers up (you should have at least some protective buffing going on before things get really hairy), and also provide a lot more benefit to the melee.


Okay, I'm getting carried away! To sum up, yes I agree that Kailasa is a good example of Death potentially being better than Fire. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif

Re: Death vs. Fire bless
 

In my first MP game I chose a pretender with D10 (as Eriu) in hopes of leveraging the affliction bonus on Rituals with the caster wearing the Shroud of the Battle Saint (seeking arrow, leprosy) and for the additional penetration my pretender would get casting undead mastery. The game was great fun but I didn't seem to see the dramatic D10 affliction multiplier I expected.

-SSJ

Re: Death vs. Fire bless
 

Yeah, this is what I wrote up as my preferred usage of yavannas long ago.

The other interesting thing, is these archers make the fire and flee order interesting. On offense, its pretty self explanatory. Multiple successive F&F waves.

On defense, Keep high ration of leaders to archers. Concede the territory, but keep the force intact.

Re: Death vs. Fire bless
 

Because the Death blessing 2 AN attack requires a MR check to be successful, and the Fire blessing 6 AP attack doesn't, it seems that the Fire blessing would be of better use in a wider range of situations.

For instance, SCs and thugs, or any valuable troops, attacking you would always have to use Fire resistance or be eaten alive. In early and even mid game, that can be quite problematic for a lot of nations.

Against Death bless effects, these units already have high MR nearly by definition. So already, Fire works better against the troops that really matter. The only unit that a Death bless would work better against would be high protection, shielded units with low MR. And that window of opportunity will not last long, because MR is easily buffable through Earth and Astral magic.

Therefore, the affliction chance for your casters is likely the most useful effect from a Death bless, for many nations overshadowing the +4 Attack bonus from the Fire blessing. Death is also cheaper for many of the applicable pretender chassis. To me, it appears that that might be for a reason!

Re: Death vs. Fire bless
 

That's the thing, those sacred troops also have the Affliction bonus. Against units of singular power, you are not relying on the damage boost - but the non-resistible Eye-Arm-Nose-and-Toes loss. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif

As you pointed out, obviously an experienced player will endeavor to have FR on their thugs/SCs if you have a Fire bless, but they can MR all they want to, there is no Affliction Resistance.

Re: Death vs. Fire bless
 

That turns out not to be the case. A 6 AP Fire attack does minimal damage to a thug with 22 Prot (on the order of 0.2), and a thug going up against a fire bless is going to be relying on Prot instead of Def. It does force him not to have fire vulnerability, so no naked liches or raksharajahs.

-Max

Re: Death vs. Fire bless
 

Well, actually yes there is. High HP, regeneration, high Defense, and high Prot all contribute to affliction resistance. SCs are designed pretty much by definition to be immune to armies, and if the army can't do any damage, +350% of 0 afflictions is still zero. This is why Cursed SCs can still prosper under the right circumstances.

-Max

Re: Death vs. Fire bless
 

my question here is probably covered before...

but how is fire weapon damage factored?

my guess is it is factored against protection separately from normal damage. correct?

does it have its own DRN roll? so the fire weapon does AP damage 6 + DRN?

Re: Death vs. Fire bless
 

Yes, yes, yes.

Re: Death vs. Fire bless
 

But remember, the armor has an opposed DRN. Fire weapons do (6+DRN)-(Prot/2+DRN), before accounting for fire resistance/vuln. Thus they are weak against high-Prot units.

-Max

Re: Death vs. Fire bless
 

excellent!

any thoughts on where (or if) a high enough strength might make a weak blood bless potentially more useful than a strong fire bless? Consider the extremely high protections and usage of fire resistance common with SCs. I think the challenge in this is to find a unit with high enough attack to remain powerful _enough_ against normal squads of units when using a blood bless (relative to a fire bless), but that would benefit more from higher strength against thugs and SCs.

Re: Death vs. Fire bless
 

Yeah, the blood bless is really good at two points.

1 - when your units strength + weapon damage = (more or less) the defenders protection, and both are fairly high. Say, a jaguar warriors with an obsidian sword against Ulmish infantry. +4 damage is really significant when you're hitting for 0-2 damage. A fire bless on the other hand is just doing 6 + DRN damage against 10 + DRN protection, so it doesn't land that often.

2 - when the extra damage puts you over the point of being likely to kill the defender in one hit. Say, a Lanka Palashanka vs heavy infantry with a 12 protection buffed with legions of steel to 16. Again, a fire bless is not going to do too much, but the blood blessing makes it fairly likely that the main hit will do 26+ damage, outright killing the human infantry.

Re: Death vs. Fire bless
 

Related to #1: another time Strength boost is useful is when some of the Prot is coming from shields. Bashanites have attack 11 and do 26 damage, which means against Ambibate Noble Warriors with Defense 15 (counting shield) they hit only rarely. Shield hits vs. Prot 27 also usually don't do much, but if the Bashanites have +4 Strength for SoG the shield hits do 3-4 damage apiece, and the "real" hits one-shot them.

-Max