[Chris Byler]

Originally posted by Scott Hebert:

quote:

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Originally posted by djtool:
I've used them for making ivy crowns and pumping out vine men.

This is actually not a bad use for them, either, considering the poison immunity of the Vine Men (they ARE poison immune, right?)

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Yep. And a mixed formation of vine men, manikins and longdead/soulless/corpse men is less vulnerable to banishment - some of the banishment is wasted on the vine men. The whole mess is still immune to poison and unroutable, so back them up with some poison slingers and have fun.

However in order to actually mix them in formation you need a commander with some decent normal and undead leadership, which usually means a Sauromancer with sceptre of authority for me. You can fake it by putting two squads in the same place in setup, but they may not mix as evenly so banish will still be able to target concentrations of undead.

Regarding the Keeper of the Tombs, however, I personally prefer the Keeper over the Shaman. While the Shaman may be the more useful mage outside of combat, the Keeper is a Holy-2 Mage, and I don't want to count the number of times I try to build Temples with Shamen.

Building temples is a Hierodule's job. What does the Keeper do that the red Sauromancer doesn't do better? (You can ask that kind of question about a lot of cheap national mages - but the Shaman has an answer.) The Shaman gives C'tis some flexibility - astral is a path that they don't otherwise have (except through randoms - and a Sauromancer with his random in astral should be leading a communion of shaman if he appears on the battlefield at all) and is useful even at low levels.

Please change the Keeper to 1 Fire, 1 Death, 1 Astral. Appropriate and useful (although still probably not as useful as the Shaman - no access to Relief or healing spells, can't forge supply items; but still usable as a communion slave, researcher, forger or site scryer).

Really, though, the Shaman IMO is the backbone of C'tis's research. A magic scale makes sense with C'tis anyway (fatigue help with Raise Dead and the like is really good for the Sauromancers).

One final way to get Shamen to forge +path items is to cast Forge, which requires some earth gems and an Earth pretender. Earth is far better on a survivability front than Astral, and lends itself well to a Shaman-rush Communion.

The other nice use for the Shaman is to Forge the basic nature items like Wineskins that you probably don't want your Sauromancers to be busy with.

The Shaman also provide some supplies just by being there. Minor but handy.

Really, I think their roles as relief casters and supply providers (both for their own nature magic and supply items they forge) are easy to underestimate. Although you could argue Desert Tombs needs them less, they don't have less need for Arcane Probing, communion slaves and cheap sacred researchers. If the Keeper's not going to be sacred he could at least be a point better researcher than the Shaman.