Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

So, there seems to be a marked preference for heavy fire blesses over death blesses on this forum. This confuses me greatly.

Fire 9: +6 AP damage +4 attack
Death: +2 AN damage + disease (resistable) + 350% afflictions

Fire pro:
More total damage
Attack bonus helps melee troops

Fire con:
Heavily armored targets won't take all that damage
Bless does nothing for sacred mages
You invested in an F9 mage

Death pro:
AN damage
Disease (good against thugs/SCs and tough units like giants which you might not kill)
Afflictions can cripple tough units (seeing a chest wound pop up is my most favorite result of an attack ever)
+Afflictions works on sacred mages (ie, applies to their spells).
You invested in a D9 mage

Death con:
AN damage and disease are resistable

So, the extra damage is most useful against regular line troops, which are unlikely to resist the death damage anyway. In my mind, this makes the 6AP unresistable vs. 2AN + disease resistable comparison a wash.

Then ability to apply the +afflictions chance (and its a rather large one) to sacred caster spells is amazing (and many nations have sacred casters - recruitable, summonable, or both). This means the death bless remains effective into the late game, while the entire fire bonus becomes increasingly less useful.

Then once you consider that a D9 caster is arbitrarily better than an F9 caster, I can't see ever going for an F9 bless unless you have absolutely no sacred mages (or the D9 bless is prohibitively more expensive for your available chasses).

Is there something i'm missing here?

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

A horde of F9-bless sacreds pouring across a battlefield at you is far, far more worrying than a horde of D9 blessed sacreds. The F9 bless is about smashing opponents relatively quickly and early. You might have a "better" magic path late on, but some people may have decided having an empire 2-3 times larger even more beneficial.

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

Why? Its the early game, AN will be much better against the indies that are actually tough to beat (eg, Knights) because it ignores their armor, and any that survive a hit or two will likely be crippled. For normal units, F9 vs. D9 seems to be a wash. So little to no advantage in the early game. Resistable doesn't mean much against you average independent units.

Of course, i even mentioned this in the OP. How is F9 substantially better early? Be specific.

Please tell me how a F9 bless turns into an empire 2-3x larger? I'm not seeing it.

Consider MA Marignon D9E9. First, its a great mage blessing, and most of your mages are sacred. Second, its great for knights of the chalice (D9 for kill speed, E9 for protection/reinvig). And its not terrible for flagellants (the D9 is useful at least). So its truly multipurpose. It also doesn't really hamper your expansion speed at all. (I've been testing with a Dom 6 D9E9 imprisoned Cyclops and sending out expansion parties on turns 3,6,8,10, etc....). It expands consistently through most non-elephant indies with no KotC losses (the first party is weaker, and should choose easier targets). Without interference by other players it can hit 20 provinces in the first year most of the time.

I doubt a fire bless would do better with them specifically. And I'm not sure i'd believe a fire bless nation would do much better. (In fact, the only way I can see to substantially improve on this would be to have a good expansion non-bless or rainbow bless army with an awake SC pretender).

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

Why do people favor the fire bless?
1. +4 attack is huge, often more important than the extra damage
2. The affliction bonus is weak.

I'd guess that a F9 bless gives about twice the offensive power of a D9 bless.

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

When do you need 2x the offensive power? And at what stage in the game is it 2x the offensive power?

Also, 350% afflictions is not weak against regenerating sacred giants (think ashdod) or similar, where your best hope is to inflict some crippling debilitations like chest wounds to reduce their effectiveness and ultimately fatigue them out. Nor is it weak when your mage pops in to cast firestorm/earthquake/etc... Or poison cloud...

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

Quick question, I've always been a little confused by the Death Bless. Does the Affliction bonus affect all damage, including ranged weapons and spells? Does the +2AN damage bonus at D9? I *think* I've noticed that the Affliction bonus works for all damage, but the AN damage only applies to melee weapons, but I wanted to be certain.

If either of those affects do apply to all damage, I'd say that's a pretty good bargain. Of course, I also think it'd be situational (as so many things are), but in general I'd think being able to do long-lasting damage to high-HP units would be preferable.

(another small question, in case anyone knows: what does the Blood9 blessing's Death Curse or whatever do?)

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

This is the correct answer. The +4 to attack means that your sacred units hit far more often which greatly increases the average damage per attack.

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

Not true, vs 10 mr you have a roughly 50/50 chance of having the hit negated. So against most things the death bless damage is only about half as good as it looks, and even less effective against high mr targets.

So, while the death bless certainly has some advantages, the damage output is not really comparable.

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

First about the death bless, The AN damage is MR resistible, so thugs and SCs will laugh at it, also to cause afflictions you have to cause damage first something SCs and thugs are good to avoid. (Usually a fire bless wont make a difference against an SC too, but it never hurts)

Also for comparison if sacred units would fight against each other. (Lets assume the sacreds have 10 for all their values)

The D blessed unit will attack with 10 Att against 10 Def, so it would have a 46% chance to hit.
And on every hit a 46% chance to beat the enemies MR to do 2 AN damage.

The F Blessed unit will attack with 14 Att against 10 Def which gives the F blessed unit a 76% chance to hit.
And on every hit there will be a 100% chance to do 6AP damage.

Off course death has also the affliction chance, but usually you either kill your enemies or they will kill you, maimed dead people are not more dead than ordinary dead people.

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

I grant that the F9 is better melee vs. melee. But it loses elsewhere by large margins.

Useless on sacred mages
F9 is a crappy level 9 path compared to D9
Not nearly as good against high protection units (because AP doesn't totally ignore armor).

Basically, in the following situations I would always want the D9 bless:
(1) You have sacred mages with good AoE combat spells. (Fire, Death, Water, Air, Earth, possibly Nature - ie, virtually any good mage)
(2) You have opponents with powerful units (giants or equivalent), especially blessable ones.

Lets consider case 2 a little more in-depth.

Powerful units like that will tend to appear in smaller numbers. This mean multiple attacks per such unit, and thus increasingly better chances to hit.

Blessable ones probably have an Earth bless and a nature bless (liek E9N6), and often strong base protection. Sometimes they even have strong defense. Because of this, the effect of cumulative attacks is more powerful than the F9 bonus to attack overall. Further, the AP damage is far less useful because it doesn't ignore the armor.

Much of the time your best bet is to fatigue them out so you can start racking up criticals. This means an improved chance to inflict something like 'lost an eye' which makes their attack value lower helps, and chest wound is amazing. Especially when they regenerate, the +affliction chance can really turn combats around.

While it'll happen a low proportion of the time, the AN damage totally ignores that high protection, which means 2AN is actually better than 6AP, even if it happens less often.

Even against SCs/thugs, they'll fail that resistance roll with some frequency - its just a matter of making enough attacks. And they'll tend to have enough defense/protection that the F9 bless won't be that noticeably efficient.

Generally, i think the F9 bless, when its actually better mathematically, just tends to be overkill. Ie, its extra power you *didn't need*. And if the +to hit is the really relevant part, an F4 minor bless is a lot less expensive and half as good - far better value for your points. And F4 is all the fire your pretender will ever need as a spellcaster.

Finally, I have this suspicion that, if the unit with the D9 bless has penetration gear, that'll apply to the AN+disease resistance check, so could work for sacred thugs/SCs of your own. But I don't know that.

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

This is almost certainly not the case. Death bless is simply another weapon effect (even modable as such), and it has been well documented those are not aided by penetration gear.

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

As far as both blesses go, remember that the bless weapon (whether fire or death) replaces any secondaryeffects from equipped (or intrinsic) weapons when the bless comes into effect, which means you won't get area damage from brands with a blessed SC if you have sacred SCs (such as Hinnom, Ashdod, Fomoria) etc) or thugs (the glamour nations, Lanka etc).

So if your strategy is based on thugging with national troops in the mid/late game, your best bet would be F8 for the +4 attack. D8 is more useful in what possibilities it opens up for you and sacred mages will benefit from the affliction bonus, slight as it is.

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

+4 attack vs. magic resistable attack is almost a no brainer for me.
AP/AN are nice but destruction and the like can make the difference insignificant.
I never saw a disease effect of D9 bless, only the affliction bonus.
The only drawback of fire is fire-resistant beings like Ashdod giants or abysians. On the other hand it's great vs. Niefelheim. Even then, +4 AP helps a lot.
I doubt the additional 2AP attack by mages has much effect except on lowish damage aera of effect or battlefield-wide spells, but I'd rather have the fire boost early on than rely on that small bonus late game.
In my experience, good F9 sacred troops cut through indy knights like butter, D9 don't.

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

You don't get an additional 2AN damage on spells with mages from D9 - that's only for weapons. You just get a huge increase in the affliction chances.

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

It seems like 2AP and 2AN are acronyms that are used interchangeably. Is there a difference?

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

Armor piercing (AP) damage reduces armor but does not eliminate it entirely. Armor negating (AN) damage totally ignores all armor.

LDiCesare
To say the only drawback of fire is fire resistant units is naive. You invested an obscene number of points into *F9*, which isn't any more useful than F6, or really, F4. And you could have generally had D9 instead, which is much more useful.

Also, let me know how F9 works against E9N6 blessed giants with multiple bracers sometime. I imagine it does nothing or close to nothing, because even with the AP it probably can't get through the protection, and whatever little bit that does get through just gets regenerated immediately.

I'll grant mathematically F9 does more damage vs chaff. You don't usually need more damage against chaff. Its chaff because it dies in droves. So I'm looking for a situation you'd actually care that you had F9. And no, assuming Att 10 vs. Def 10 is stupid - most sacreds are better than average on attack, and the Att N vs. Def N comparison is where the fire attack bonus matters the most, so you're just stacking the floor in favor of fire.

Knights - counter example when i have time.

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

AP = Armour Piercing, which means the protection value is halfed for the purposes of calculations.
AN = Armour Negating, which means the protection value is ignored for the purposes of calculations.

There is a big difference between AP and AN. With AN obviously being better than AP.

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

It has worked quite well for me vs. Ashdod despite their partial fire resist. So no, it's not close to nothing. However, 2AN magic that hits less often and that can be resisted is nothing.

As for the fact that D9 is more interesting than F9, yes indeed, but then don't give your thread a title comparing blesses but comparing paths. To me a Death bless is mostly worthless whereas a Fire bless is very good. If I pick high Death magic on a pretender, it's to open Death magic, not for the bless, whereas I'll only pick high Fire for the bless.

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

Squirrelloid - how many sacred units are required to conquer a province? Could you believe that 6 is enough? I was never good at that part of the game, and it obviously depends a lot on the unit, but some unit/bless combinations can get by with really few units. Fire 9 and/or Water 9 are the most useful blesses here, because they force the enemy to rout faster.

That's also what makes F9 useful against chaff - you don't have to recruit as many sacred units to win the battle. On turn 5, you may have 5 armies conquering independent provinces every turn, without mercenaries, and the sacred troops will help you in your first war against almost any nation. High death isn't as useful at that point.

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

The benefits of D9 Bless are not just that it makes sacreds better damage dealers but not as good as F9, but when your Pretender finally does make the scene he can do crazy crap like cast Utterdark as his first action. In that sense, he is far superior to a F9 pretender in winning the game.

It all depends on whether winning the game or winning battles is your goal.

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

Death 9 is a crappy bless. The only one that's worse off the top of my head is B9. Considering death has great boosters along with the easily accessible skull staff, I can rarely think of a reason to take it. D8 is at least usable for sacred mages but still very subpar. F9 routs indies significantly faster than D9 which is all you care about anyway. Not to mention, they have a better chance of actually hitting other sacreds than a death bless.

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

Both air and blood are very near in their uselessness as a bless.

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

A4 is actually pretty decent for certain troops like flags, jags. A9 is useless most of the time but if you're dueling Caelum, it's pretty nice as well.

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

I agree that a D9 pretender is a lot better on the battlefield than an F9 pretender. However, I think you are underestimating the difference +4 attack makes to kill speed (F8 is nearly as good as F9), and overestimating how good D9 bless is for mages.

-Max

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

As an aside: as an SP player, winning battles is *much* more fun to me than winning the game. Winning the game just means I have to start a new one (with less micro, yay!) but winning battles means 812 out of 940 enemy units killed. :) Far more satisfying.

-Max

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

Squirrel, try literally *hundreds* of comparisons of blesses as I have - and a D9X9 bless is nowhere near as effective as a F9W9 - for a ton of reasons.

1. To purchase an X9Y9 blessing you are almost certainly going with the 3year plan on the pretender. So any advantages of the D9 path vs the f9 path is deprecated by the long delay before it arrives.

2. Death is an easily boostrappable path; and the bootstrap mechanism is well known. So sure, having a D9 mage year three is good.

But if you really want it, the odds are you can have it by year 3 without a pretender.

3. F9 makes your units able to hit ethereal (etc) units.

4. F9 scales. Sure, its only +6ap. But its for *each* attack.

So when you compare, an F9 hitting 76% of the time vs 46% for a death bless.. you hve to realized it gets exacerbated with multiple attacks. Jag warriors have 3 attacks iirc. Eagle warriors 2...

Whereas the death bless hits.. 46%... much slower ramp up.

Now combine that with a 50% quickness bonus.. its just scaling that fire bless much faster.

5. You asked when does the ability to kill more chaff faster matter.... it matters very very much.

My typical mictlan build builds an expansion group every turn. It costs 235 gp. 7 jags and a mictlan priest. You trample the average 30-60 strength indy.

You simply cannot do that with a death bless.


6. Plus - you have good synnergy with thugs/scs. A simple cheap armor - and you have now thug enabled many SCS - many chassis *need* those pluses to hit - from the golems, to the colossal fetishes to Agartha Oracles...

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

I have some thoughts and questions about several things stated in this thread.

1) Calahan clarified AP vs AN with .

So now I don't understand LDiCesare's statement 2) While in melee combat it is always true that as Edi has pointed out, I have found that blessed archers stack with a death bless. If you bless Asp Archers (Tomb Kings) with a heavy death bless it stacks with intrinsic Asp bow so that you still get the Asp poison effect while simultaneously gaining crippling and afflicting effects of the Death bless. It appears that the Death bless stacks with both spells and non-melee weapons, but the Fire bless only works for melee and replaces any equipment special effects.

3) I feel that the Fire bless is still better since you cause fire damage every time you hit, but you don't cause an affliction (let alone 3.5 afflictions - instead you are only 3.5 times more likely to cause a single affliction) every time you hit with the Death bless. In addition your number of hits with the Fire bless are higher as previously pointed out in this string.

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

The D9 bless has two parts.

1.) 2 AN + Disease (MR check required) secondary effect that gets put on any melee attack, possibly replacing any other secondary effect that you have (e.g. the area effect of a Shadow Brand will get overwritten by the 2 AN).

2.) x4.5 normal chance of afflictions (i.e. +350%) on any damaging effect produced by the blessed unit.

Only part #2 of the death bless works with spells and arrows.

-Max

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

I havent had time to look through everything posted here so forgive me if this has been mentioned, but Death Bless has one very specific advantage over fire bless.

Death bless works with Ranged weapons or at least the affliction part and Fire bless does not work at all.

Take a nation like LA TC with their Ancestor Vessels and give them a D9 bless and watch in awe at the speed at which they deliver afflictions to your enemies. Couple that with a W9 bless for double the fun and they are in a world of hurt before they ever reach your ancestor vessels who are still extremely capable of pouring out the pain in melee range when that time comes.

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

well actually there is a bug with archers and W9, they don't actually shoot twice. :(

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

The thing with the affliction bonus is that a lot of the time you expect to be killing targets you hit with damaging battlefield spells, and when you don't and they get an affliction quite often it isn't particularly damaging within that combat - disease for instance.

The creatures you want to afflict are the thugs and SCs for the most part, and typically they aren't going to be hurt much by the big area effect spells you throw down on the battlefield.

I trialled the D9 bless a few times in MP games and I can't think of a single major battle where it made the decisive difference

F9 on the other hand makes a huge difference in a lot of battles - above all due to the +4 attack. It means you hit most of the time against normal troops, and means you have a chance against thugs! When you are trying to swarm a high defence thug or SC with sacred troops the +4 makes a huge difference.

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

Not only does the fire bless scale itself up, but the death bless does not scale itself in terms of both atk and MR. MR checks are always vs 10. So if you're fighting chaff with MR 10 and you're comparing the death bless, it looks better than if you're fighting with and against sacreds with stats of 14 across the board. If your 14-stat sacred goes up against an enemy 14-stat sacred, the ammount you hit for either bless will be the same as the 10-stat chaff battle, but the ammount the death bless AN damage hits will be far less.

There's one massive advantage to the death bless however, and that is that AN damage ignores the effect of shields. This can have the effect of, for practical purposes, reducing the enemy def+parry by more than the fire bless's atk bonus. However, it is only for the AN part of the damage, and only if the MR check is passed. So a death bless might be better for low-damage sacreds like Jaguar Warriors against low-MR enemies like humans, but once either the MR scales up (nonhumans typically) or the damage you're doing with the regular weapon exceeds the bless effect extra damage, the fire bless becomes better again.

While you guys are right that affliction chance on ranged and spells is nice, I find that it doesn't matter in the long run. To get into another battle with the same units, you typically have to lose. And if you're fielding mages and you lose, you've usually lost far more than the extra afflictions gain you. Its useful for hit-and-run battlefield-wide spells like Rain of Stones or Earthquake, but I wouldn't base a pretender design choice around those. Not to mention that even the most elite troops are killed in one to two hits by spells they aren't immune from. So typically you don't just damage your enemy with spellcasters.

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

jaguar warriors are low damage sacreds?
Besides, how does an AN negate the effect of shields? You still have to score a hit for the secondary effect to go off; you're still down +4 on the chances to hit in the first place, and I hardly see how 2 pts of damage MR can really be considered massive.

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

There's little point in investing in either D or F bless without good, offensively minded sacreds (Jags come to mind.) If you have more defense-oriented sacreds either bless is a waste compared to E/N/W for them, as you're not really playing to their strengths.

Since you're fielding somewhat fragile sacreds you're going to want to ramp up your kill speed to the max to cut through chaff as quickly as possible while the arrows and evocations rain down, and F beats D in that case hands down, just test it if you have any doubts. You're basically trying to play to your strengths here, instead of force-fitting a role on troops they have no business being in.

A D bless doesn't really change the math of if putting your sacreds vs an SC is a good plan...if they can kill it with a D bless they'll kill it with F bless most of the time too, and if they can't kill it you're going to be on the losing end of the exchange with a pile of dead sacreds compared to a beat-up but alive SC. If the D bless is really that much of a deterrent a good opponent will fall back behind a chaff screen and blast some holes in your sacreds from afar while your D blessed guys struggle to kill the chaff quickly. The D bless also has a harder time against PD, forcing you to raise your raiding squad size, which is one of the areas that sacreds shine at come mid-game once the evocations start getting too hot and heavy.

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

AN damage doesn't ignore shields.

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

I think his point was since AN ignores protection, it doesn't matter if the attack is parried or not because the extra protection from the shield is irrelevant.

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

They're low damage in that each attack itself is low damage. Obviously jags do a ton of damage, but each individual attack isn't a big one like, say, a giant like the Unmarked sacred.

My point is that a "shield hit" still counts as a hit. For most purposes, it acts like a miss since the added protection is significant. But in the case of AN damage, the added protection is irrelavent. Stuff like Gate Cleavers, Death Blesses, Dusk Daggers, all hit and do damage through shields.

Squirrelord has it right, except "parried" is a different term used for arrows, which doesn't involve protection at all.
reference: http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=39853


I'm not saying a death bless is better in melee than a fire bless, but it has that single point in its favor. The MR resistable part really kills it.

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

Tests carried out by Micah recently suggest a shield parry in melee can do something to negate AP and AN damage from a weapon like the dusk dagger or sword of sharpness.

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

Let's be fair--F9 bless doesn't really scale either. For an unit with attack 10, a +4 bonus is huge vs anyone with a shield (def 14). (+160% damage? Something like that.) For a hypothetical elite unit with attack 15 already, the bonus would be much more modest (+40% or so), and vs. chaff without shields like Ulmish infantry it would be negligible since you're hitting all the time anyway.

In theory, if you're dueling someone high-Prot but low-Def (like Ulm), a D9 bless would be better than a F9 bless. I've also found that a E9D9 bless works okay against knights and heavy inf in general, since the 2AN attack ignores shields[1]. (This was as Helheim, whose sacreds have great endurance and multiple weak attacks.)

-Max

Note: I'm not advocating a D9 bless--I take it because it's fun, and because I like having a D9 spellcaster, not because the bless is good.

[1] Or so I have always believed. If Micah has tested it otherwise, okay.

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

I think a D9F4 bless could be superior to a F9 bless (or F9D4) because +2 attack is already quite good...
Of course it depends on the nations a lot, and also on the game size/number of opponents (e.g. D9 > F9 argument is moot for blitzes).
So:
Death > Fire for sacred mages and archers.
Fire is better for low attack or high damage sacreds where extra damage is less important than extra hits.
Fire is also probably better in EA than LA due to better armor in LA.

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

Entirely as Max said.

If your sacred has generally fairly average non-bless stats and is attacking fairy average opponents, F9 will cause damage-dealing at up to twice the rate D9 will.

D9 gets you a far better magical Pretender and other situational benefits, but if your tactic is an explosive early expansion using sacreds, you'd take the F9 bless.

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

Or to express things another way... what bless and pretender paths you want depends more on your nation (and its sacreds) than on the perceived relative power of the blesses. Arguing that one is generally better than another seems silly, as statements like "any time you take a X9 bless, Y9 would be better" are just begging to be proven false.

In my experience, Dom3 is not a game that bears generalisations well.

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

You, Sir, are demonstrably wrong!

Sorry. I couldn't resist the meta.

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

I have always wanted to use a fire and flee strategy to try out a death raiding strategy.

Just time and time (and time and time) I cannot make it effective. Whether going with blessed monkey archers, or commanders armed with bows of war - it seems that character actions are too valuable to waste trying to run an attrit strategy.

Ie, just better to try to win.

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

I am willing to duel any moderately skilled dominions player to prove the premise that F9W9 is better than D9W9. I will play La Mictlan to prove the premise.

Moderate being defined as non hall of fame.

Any race is fine - any other design options, so long as the opponent has (at least) D9W9.

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

What I love about this game is that the blesses are so "all in" balanced that debating them can go on for many forum pages. One can argue that even a "weak" B9 or a9 bless can be mitigated by air and blood's spell power and flexibility.
My $0.02, ;)
-ssj

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

Why W9? D9 synergises better with ranged sacreds and mages, which aren't many n LA, and W9 is worthless for mages and archers.
I wonder whether D9 increases the affliction chances of Pythium hydras' poison clouds. I think D9E8 or D9N4 with Pythium are better than D9W9 for instance...
Also, do you think a F9 bless will help you if your opponent picks Abysia?

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

Well, if your plan is "on turn 35 I toss down an Utterdark so big that it won't go down even if an S9 is in this game and people alchemize and pool thier available gems, and then anyone without 10K gold in the bank and/or doing Blood in a serious way for the last 25 turns will be worthless by turn 40", then wasting Death gems or even Astral gems on boosters is just you not doing your plan as well as you could and increasing your risk of failure. Even with Hammers or other Forge bonuses, those gems are better spend in your Utterdark if you've decided that's how you are going to win the game.

The fact that a D9 also helps your sacreds in combat is just a bonus.

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

With all respect K, that's an argument like saying a sledgehammer is better than a chainsaw at felling trees because the sledgehammer is better at breaking rocks.

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

Lol. I rate the magic I put on a Pretender on how likely it is to let me win the game and the potential Bless is just one part of that.

To use another tree analogy, you need to see the forest for the trees to play this game. Focus only on how a thing lets you win individual battles and you will probably not win the game.