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Old May 23rd, 2008, 01:25 PM

MaxWilson MaxWilson is offline
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Default Re: Death Magic on the Battlefield

Quote:
Renojustin said:
A lot of you have been concentrating on the negatives of Shadow Blast, one of the very best spells in Death. It's an incredible spell, though, and deserves a lot of play.

You can research it relatively quickly and one or two powerful death mages casting this three or four times each during an appropriate battle will do more damage than any other level 5 spell in the game.

1 death gem... come on. It's one gem for a massive effect. Stop complaining about the gem cost; it's negligable. Equipping one D2 mage with a skull staff is more expensive than having two mages cast Shadow Blast a few times each in a big fight and taking out up to 200 enemies. Skellyspam = 30 skeletons maybe; Shadow Blast x 3 = 100 dead foes. I know how I will script MY death mages in midgame.

Have you tried this? Because I don't think it will be as cheap as you think. Say you've got two D4 casters. I project that getting each of them to cast Shadow Blast four times in a battle will take somewhere in the neighborhood of 25-30 gems. I had an E9 Cyclops yesterday blow 6 gems casting Earthquake. The spellcasting AI, for some reason, likes to use huge numbers of gems, which makes Shadow Blast a fun niche spell for defending the laboratory and surprisingly good on D2 mages, but not as good as Cloud of Death for powerful mages. (D9 Cloud of Death covers almost 20 squares and does 19 AN damage! Best scalability in the game.)

-Max
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