[Shovah32]

I personally prefer W9S9 to F9W9 on these guys. Firstly, it's cheaper. You can take an oracle and doing that lets you get high dominion and decent scales along with your bless.

Secondly it really increases their survivability. Unlike what Renojustin said, it helps against more than one arrow volley: not every warrior is going to get hit in the first volley. I would also say it helps their survivability more while in combat - sure, F9 lets them kill stuff quicker, but with their high defence they almost never get hit so that twist of fate bonus really helps.

I'd also disagree about S9 being worse in battle. Sure, F9 can be devastating against non fire-resistant enemies, but even Flame Storm from a F9 caster can be stopped with some counter magic. As a test, I put 100 Mictlan Warriors against a F10 Flame Storm caster. With Army of Gold, I lost less than 20 warriors from the first casting, and a total of 41 from two castings in the same battle. And any enemy who knows you have fire magic will have his thugs/SCs protected against it.

Where-as if you have a few penetration boosters on your Oracle even Master Enslave(ring of wizardry, ring of sorcery, eye of the void and either a crystal coin or spell focus gives a total of +6) can have a big penetration bonus on it, such as the +6 I mentioned. Even with antimagic up, alot of armies can be enslaved by that.

Your oracle with those items also gets +8 penetration on enslave mind, that's enough to get rid of alot of thugs/SCs who haven't pushed their MR up far enough - you could either astral travel your oracle in with a big enough shield of troops to protect him while he does his work(25 gems total - worth it to kill alot of thugs/SCs), or simply teleport him in along with a small number of thugs/SCs(golems are great) to protect him.

And of course, having an S9 pretender can completely screw any plans your opponent had for a thug/SC with astral magic(golems, for example).

Looks like Jazzepi beat me to my main point(note to self - don't leave for half an hour mid-post) but I guess it's still valid.