Communion Master/slave
 

Does it really raise magic skills in battle?

While other spells raising magic levels (like Power of the Spheres and so on) are noticeable, if you keep an eye on you mages, you'll notice the paths raised.
With communion, you don't see them raised.
And slaves get a lot of fatigue, so I suppose magic paths aren't raised and so spells are casted at full fatigue, while with 4-6 slaves you should get +2 in all paths, and fatigue should be far lesser.

Re: Communion Master/slave
 

Communion does work in raising skill levels, it is just not displayed. You can easily test this with Pythium default theme with spells a few level beyond your Arch Thurgs's path.

Regarding fatique, this is how I understand it:
While the increase in path does reduce casting fatique, you must note that each slave also get charged their basic spell casting encumberance when the master casts a spell in addition to the fatique distributed from the actual spell. So if the fatique from the spell, after skill reduction, is say 40 and there are 4 slaves, each slave would get 10 + casting encumberance per casting of this spell.

This means, casting multiple low fatique spells with masters would apear to worn the slaves out quicker than expected, due to accumulating encumberance fatiques. Oh, and Masters also get their basic spell casting encumberance fatique per casting, but none from the actual spell fatique, which is distributed among the slaves.

Hope I am remembering correctly.

-Gateway103

Re: Communion Master/slave
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">It's not quite like this, since I've seen a shaman based communion, where each had a spell casting encumbrance of 5, take only 1 or 2 fatigue from each member for each casting of a spell.