[Turin]

Chazar said:

Question: Where exactly does the staff of storms-bearer retreat to after cloud trapezing?

umm why would you want to cloud trapeze in the middle of nowhere in the enemys mainland? I´d just let him pay upkeep for that army and wait till he moves it to my border and is a threat to me. It´s obviously no problem then to retreat.

to point out how ridicolously powerful wrathful skies is:
in the game "god is a bullet" c´tis invaded me with a force consisting of about 120 vine ogres 40 mages(lamia queens and shamans mostly), 50 longdead archers, 20 fairies and 4 tartarian titans. He has the gift of health up, so his troops were extra beefy even after entering my doinion.
So I did three things to greet him:
I cast flames from the sky(20 fire gems) , it killed 39 units.
I cast murdering winter(30 watergems) which killed 19 units

I cloud trapezed my wrathful skies caster in(4 air gems).
When the battle started 16 fairies,20 archers, 12 mages and a few vine ogres were already dead from the artillery spells. The battle lasted 5 turns(until his forces had reached my caster and triggered his ritual of returning) . During that short time wrathful skies killed 17 mages 23 archers and a few vineogres. His mages had mostly 15-20 hp due to the goh effect.

So the lvl 6 spell was far more powerful than the other two artillery spells(note that the battle resolved last, so there wasn´t as much to kill for wc) and it cost only 5 air gems.

What could c´tis do to avoid such a disaster?
1) Equip every mage with lighning immune items. This however is very expensive and it would hurt even more to lose them due to other battlefield killing spells.
2) only field scs like his tartarians. This however means the game winner is the one who has the better scs, which is pretty boring.

Of course your point is valid, that if you use wrathful skies in the worst way possible(aggressively while losing all the equipment) , then it might be a big gem investment.
This doesn´t prove however, that the spell is not overpowered.