[Amorphous]

Originally Posted by Sombre

The task for which it was primarily intended isn't worth the investment and can't be made so. In order for people to make use of it, it therefore needs to be improved in other areas.

Has anyone ever used the imp axe to pillage? Apart from to test it?

I cannot say that I have used the axe, but then I am not that good at pillaging. However that may be, if the ability is worthless as you say, why even keep the axe in the game?

See above. It isn't possible to make repel worth the investment without breaking the item in terms of att and dmg. Also def has nothing to do with repel. If it had att 99 dmg 99 len 6 the repel would be better than awe 0 (anyone passing a non modified morale check will take 1 damage and ignore it, anyone else will take 1 damage and that particular attack they made will be stopped). Still worse than awe 1 though. If it had att 4 and dmg 15 (reasonable stats) then the repel would be much, much worse than awe 0. The actual attacking and doing damage with the weapon is always going to outweigh the repel side of it by miles, simply because of the way repel works.

Apologies, I did not mean to say that defence directly helps with repelling, but the defence helps when your opponents make their morale save. Also it lessens the defence difference with a shield.

Your bog standard shield has parry 4, defence -1 and encumbrance 1, increasing your total defence and parry value with 3. As a sort of standard measure I would say that increasing the defence of a 2-hander with 2 in comparison with a 1-handed variant makes them about equal. You get 1 less total defence and parry value, but since it is pure defence, the top is slightly better and you do get less encumbrance. Making the Enchanted Pike e.g. 3/4 in attack/defence would certainly make it an option over the Enchanted Spear and depending on how you value weapon length it should be in the match with the Enchanted Sword.

While I certainly agree with your assessment of awe as better than repel, I do not think it relevant in this case. None of the items we are comparing have it after all.

Also, repel is certainly not worthless. It is not something that lets you wade into mêlée at leisure, but it does help your defence.

A one handed weapon and a reinvig item take the same number of slots as the wraithsword (2) and are cheaper and better.

Throwing out anything that doesn't do /exactly/ what the wraithsword does while being cheaper and claiming that means the wraithsword has a use does not make sense. Nothing else does exactly what the imp axe does - does that mean it would be fine at 25 death gems and 6 research too?

Look, I keep having to repeat this over and over again: It is not cheaper if you do not have the relevant gems. No matter how many times cheapness is invoked, it still remains untrue in various cases of gem income distribution. A reinvigoration item for 5 nature gems costs you 20 death gems, if that are all the gems you have. A 1-hander is then at least another 5 gems.

I have never required exactly the same as lifedrain, I just require its rough equivalent. Let us examine the aforementioned Fomorian King with a water pick:

We do not have any earth and nature gems to spend on him (and no blood mages in sight either). Not because we do not have any such income, but because it is not good enough to provide for all the Kings and thuggish commanders we produce from our castles and want to be sent to the front in a thuggish capacity. We will be able to provide a lot of the Kings with earth or nature items, but not all of them. So let us put that huge income of death gems to use. 20 of them we convert to nature and a pair of Boots of the Messenger, which nets us reinvigoration 4. Let us further assume that we can scrape together 5 water gems for a Frost Brand for a total cost of 20 death and 5 water gems. So 4 attack and 2 defence from the brand and -1 defence and +4 parry for a total of 4/5 attack/defence. Encumbrance is 5 which translates to 8 for casting purposes. Net fatigue gain is 1 per turn. Casting Quicken self is not a good idea, as that would render the fatigue gain 6 per turn. The 28 fatigue you get from casting it is not easily reinvigorated either.

The other version is just putting down 25 death gems for a Wraith Sword. Attack and defence is 2/3 and encumbrance 4, 6 for casting purposes. Whenever he hits (for 34 damage, which is less than 41, but quite enough to hurt a lot of things), he is reinvigorated for 10. One hit every other turn is enough to get a better reinvigoration rate than the frost version and he is gaining fatigue slower. Now, the wraith version benefits greatly from casting Quicken Self. He would gain fatigue at a rate of 8 per turn, so as long as he manages to do a total of 4 damage over his 2 attacks in a turn, he is set. Quickening also means an improvement of attack/defence of 3/3, bringing the total up to 5/6, which is better than the other, and no shield hits to worry about. Direct damage is now 2x34 instead of 41, which means that for protection values of 27 and under it is as good as or better than with the Frost Brand.

Of course, this does not mean that the Wraith Sword is always a better choice even under the given gem-constraints. The frost version will still be generally better at clearing chaff non-resistant to cold and targets with protection values a bit higher than 27. Fielding troops and thugs with cold resistance against nations utilizing Frost Brands, Rime Hauberks and Breath of Winter should not be unusual though. And there are plenty of nations that do not have the capability of fielding legions of 30+ protection units.

Again, it is a question of gem-scarcity and solving a problem that actually exists. Getting reinvigoration is just not particularly cheap when you lack the needed supply of nature or earth gems or the paths and research for the right spells. And at least in my experience, thugs and SCs that accrue fatigue to quickly tend to die.