[llamabeast]

Okay, I played MA Ermor before and looked into this at some length (you're right, communion is really helpful for them). My conclusion is it's super-confusing, and in fact I was intending to do a writeup at some point of how it works, although there's another couple of posts in the forum with good explanations.

With, say, 4 masters and 8 slaves, all their levels are increased by 3, and you can think of the slaves as having their levels raised _in all paths_ (not just the ones they have). Then the fatigue it costs them depends on their own level in the spell in question.

As an example, imagine one of your communion masters is a Sorceress (A2S2), and casts Fog Warriors (A5, 300 fatigue). With the communion, she becomes A5, so the fatigue cost for her is 300/9 (her + 8 slaves) = 30-odd. So she's fine.

The slaves are effectively A3. Fog warriors is therefore two levels higher than they can cast, so they pay triple fatigue. So they take 3*300/9 = 100 fatigue.

This is an example of where communion isn't very helpful, but generally it's brilliant. Another feature of communion is that if one of the masters casts a self-affecting spell, it also affects all the slaves (but not the other masters). So, getting one master to cast Power of the Spheres makes your communion _much_ more efficient.

Hope that's helpful.

I've got some questions I don't know the answer to though, I wonder if anyone else does.

1) Can people join a communion at all different times? (I think they can).

2) If a communion gets a buff (e.g. power of the spheres), and then another mage joins in the following turn as a slave, does he get the buff? (I'm guessing not)

3) If a _bad_ one-person-only spell is cast on a master, does it affect all the slaves too? e.g. can you soul slay the whole lot in one go?