[Lazy_Perfectionist]

My apologies. I did not intend to put words in your mouth. I did not intend to claim you had a stance on Abysia, but in hindsight, I agree that it clearly came out that way.

I'll rewrite that section.

As a primary bless strategy, there are a lot of problems with an air bless. As you've said, there are ways to get around it. There are also ways to circumvent twist fate.

I'll provide an example from a nation I'm familiar with, Agartha. The Ancient Ones really are not a good bless chassis until Darkness is castable, but then blesses are kind of moot. Most blesses are a bit of a waste on them, compared to other nations. But being as I'm not familiar with many nations, they will have to serve as my example.

Twist fate will protect them from one attack. With forty hitpoints, that one attack isn't likely to be significant. With a defense of ten, and a parry of only two, they're going to be hit rather easily by missile and melee attacks unless you've got a secondary bless up. A simple chaff screen or group of slingers will quickly dismiss Twist Fate, unless support spells or secondary blesses are in place.

Body Ethereal, or versions of luck can make them more effective, though you are drastically limited by your national mages.

An air bless, on the other hand, has a permanent affect, fully effective immediately without requiring support spells (which you might not have the mages for) such as body ethereal to reach maximum potential, and has no practical fatigue cost. It also presents capabilities you are unable to reproduce using national mages. Your national mages can boost mr in smaller, less effective capacity via iron will or lead shields, or later on in Army of Lead. Unfortunately, Agartha has nothing approaching the effect of Twist Fate, but they do have a few other ways to prevent attacks from hitting now that cave forts and provinces are properly darkness-ing battles.

If you have a high air bless on Agartha, then you can be more aggressive in your use of Blade Wind. This is especially handy because you have such low precision, Darkness or not. Any level of Blade Wind won't protect your Ancient Ones from friendly fire to the point where you don't need to take precautions, and the cost of the higher levels is way too much as well. But there are specific opportunities- worthwhile ones- to a pretender with air magic. In the case of a titan, you may find a staff of Elemental Mastery useful. The Flying Carpet or Winged Shoes will have a dramatic effect on the mobility of your map-move 1, expensive, capital only Oracles. And it achieves that at construction four, not in any unique item. Anyways, there are a few reasons to take air, and while the effect of an air bless alone is not enough to take air, there are situations where the combined value of a low-middling air bless is higher than that of Astral magic on non-oracle/sacred statue pretenders.

And there are opportunity costs to the sacred statue. Astral magic has a lot of expensive temptations. And it can be tough to get your pearl economy off the ground. You cannot manually move around searching for astral sites, though you may get lucky- probably so in the site rich early age- and find a site with the side effect of producing the pearls necessary for steady (and slow, with only one caster) Arcane Probing. On the positive side, Astral pearls are easier to convert to and from- and Probing costs a low two pearls. If you're unlucky at finding sites, though, forty gems can easily be wasted. It doesn't happen often, but it happens, and even when it doesn't, I really don't like the inconvenience. I'd be more interested in bootstrapping a blood economy off of a pretender.

There. I doubt that was any more convincing, but hopefully less troublesome. I really didn't intend to put words in your mouth, and I hope this straightens things out between us- though we'll still be on opposite sides of this debate.

I kind of was unfocused in this post, but here I have a specific question for you. Focusing solely on a 50% air shield and twist fate - none of the other effects considered - what bless would you rather have on Agartha? Leave the MR boost out only for the moment, because while it is worthy of consideration I'd like to save that for later, please. I don't have much energy left tonight.