hm that soulslay really works quite nice
i didn't experiment too much until now with battlefield spells that was a fault and i will do now
so are there any good other astral battlefield spells (preferred without gem costs , doing areadamage without mrcheck ) ?
a modification to your soul slay strat which comes to my mind and i will try now
the pythium theurgs can be produced everywhere , are sacred + cost 150 gems . so they cost only about 45% upkeep of the arco mystics + can be massproduced .
unfortunately they are only astral 2 .
but if you really need them early on you can at least mind burn with them and you can empower them quite cheap to astral 3 via forging
so all in all you can field the same number like arco mystics and pay only half of the upkeep .
pythium has a superior gem income to arco and for the saved upkeep you could either field the double number of mindburners/soulslayers or build some arch theurgs which are either due to superior magical equipment like penetration increasing equipment compared to the theurgs high mr resistance creatures ( like scs ) slayers or they cast via communion empowered air spells
what do you think ?
only problem perhaps is that at battles longer than 5 turns since the pythium mages are priests too they probably cast many crappy priest spells instead of casting soul slays , orb lightnings and so on
but for the first 5 rounds they will do more damage at same upkeep costs + are better massproduceable