The Shroud no longer works on Pretenders! Used to in Dom1 - maybe the description should note that?
The shroud would still be great for some supercombatants though, especially for Ice Devils. Their base armor of 15, up to 20 in the cold, so the armor effect is icing. Getting regeneration, Beserk + 3, 50% poison res, and possibly other bonuses too (reinvig seems like a good choice and a Great Mother allows this) and you have a supercombatant that only takes 5 gems of equipment. I hacked a map and made an Ice Devils (I got Nycafor) with just the shroud, and he was really nasty even with the new tweaks to reduce supercombatants.
Ermor, well we'll have to see about. If Ashen Empire costs them enough so they have a slighly similar number of design points available, then they won't be too bad. If not, an Ermor Shrouded Ice Devil (or similar) would still be ridiculous. I forgot about the lack of healing for the undead Knights, though I wonder if undead creation rates were affected because of that (seem to get more with C'tis undead kings, not sure on dominion creation effects at all).I guess there is a lot of unknowns with Ermor right now...
But anyway, I still think that lowering the incremental costs of magic paths will be tricky (and may not be needed). You can't just blindly grab specials and expect them to pay off, but some of them may be powerful enough and will likely be abusable already. Two more weeks until the full Version!
I can't wait to play Pythium with an Earth +4 mage, too
[ November 01, 2003, 19:41: Message edited by: geo981010 ]