Fire vs. Death heavy bless

[KissBlade]

Death 9 is a crappy bless. The only one that's worse off the top of my head is B9. Considering death has great boosters along with the easily accessible skull staff, I can rarely think of a reason to take it. D8 is at least usable for sacred mages but still very subpar. F9 routs indies significantly faster than D9 which is all you care about anyway. Not to mention, they have a better chance of actually hitting other sacreds than a death bless.

[Executor]

Both air and blood are very near in their uselessness as a bless.

[KissBlade]

A4 is actually pretty decent for certain troops like flags, jags. A9 is useless most of the time but if you're dueling Caelum, it's pretty nice as well.

[MaxWilson]

Originally Posted by Squirrelloid

So, there seems to be a marked preference for heavy fire blesses over death blesses on this forum. This confuses me greatly.

I agree that a D9 pretender is a lot better on the battlefield than an F9 pretender. However, I think you are underestimating the difference +4 attack makes to kill speed (F8 is nearly as good as F9), and overestimating how good D9 bless is for mages.

-Max

[MaxWilson]

Originally Posted by K

The benefits of D9 Bless are not just that it makes sacreds better damage dealers but not as good as F9, but when your Pretender finally does make the scene he can do crazy crap like cast Utterdark as his first action. In that sense, he is far superior to a F9 pretender in winning the game.

It all depends on whether winning the game or winning battles is your goal.

As an aside: as an SP player, winning battles is *much* more fun to me than winning the game. Winning the game just means I have to start a new one (with less micro, yay!) but winning battles means 812 out of 940 enemy units killed. Far more satisfying.

-Max

[chrispedersen]

Originally Posted by Squirrelloid

Armor piercing (AP) damage reduces armor but does not eliminate it entirely. Armor negating (AN) damage totally ignores all armor.

LDiCesare
To say the only drawback of fire is fire resistant units is naive. You invested an obscene number of points into *F9*, which isn't any more useful than F6, or really, F4. And you could have generally had D9 instead, which is much more useful.

Also, let me know how F9 works against E9N6 blessed giants with multiple bracers sometime. I imagine it does nothing or close to nothing, because even with the AP it probably can't get through the protection, and whatever little bit that does get through just gets regenerated immediately.

I'll grant mathematically F9 does more damage vs chaff. You don't usually need more damage against chaff. Its chaff because it dies in droves. So I'm looking for a situation you'd actually care that you had F9. And no, assuming Att 10 vs. Def 10 is stupid - most sacreds are better than average on attack, and the Att N vs. Def N comparison is where the fire attack bonus matters the most, so you're just stacking the floor in favor of fire.

Knights - counter example when i have time.

Squirrel, try literally *hundreds* of comparisons of blesses as I have - and a D9X9 bless is nowhere near as effective as a F9W9 - for a ton of reasons.

1. To purchase an X9Y9 blessing you are almost certainly going with the 3year plan on the pretender. So any advantages of the D9 path vs the f9 path is deprecated by the long delay before it arrives.

2. Death is an easily boostrappable path; and the bootstrap mechanism is well known. So sure, having a D9 mage year three is good.

But if you really want it, the odds are you can have it by year 3 without a pretender.

3. F9 makes your units able to hit ethereal (etc) units.

4. F9 scales. Sure, its only +6ap. But its for *each* attack.

So when you compare, an F9 hitting 76% of the time vs 46% for a death bless.. you hve to realized it gets exacerbated with multiple attacks. Jag warriors have 3 attacks iirc. Eagle warriors 2...

Whereas the death bless hits.. 46%... much slower ramp up.

Now combine that with a 50% quickness bonus.. its just scaling that fire bless much faster.

5. You asked when does the ability to kill more chaff faster matter.... it matters very very much.

My typical mictlan build builds an expansion group every turn. It costs 235 gp. 7 jags and a mictlan priest. You trample the average 30-60 strength indy.

You simply cannot do that with a death bless.


6. Plus - you have good synnergy with thugs/scs. A simple cheap armor - and you have now thug enabled many SCS - many chassis *need* those pluses to hit - from the golems, to the colossal fetishes to Agartha Oracles...

[Zentar]

I have some thoughts and questions about several things stated in this thread.

1) Calahan clarified AP vs AN with

AP = Armour Piercing, which means the protection value is halfed for the purposes of calculations.
AN = Armour Negating, which means the protection value is ignored for the purposes of calculations.
There is a big difference between AP and AN. With AN obviously being better than AP.

.

So now I don't understand LDiCesare's statement

I doubt the additional 2AP attack by mages has much effect except on lowish damage aera of effect or battlefield-wide spells, but I'd rather have the fire boost early on than rely on that small bonus late game.

2) While in melee combat it is always true that

As far as both blesses go, remember that the bless weapon (whether fire or death) replaces any secondary effects from equipped (or intrinsic) weapons when the bless comes into effect, which means you won't get area damage from brands with a blessed SC if you have sacred SCs (such as Hinnom, Ashdod, Fomoria) etc) or thugs (the glamour nations, Lanka etc).

as Edi has pointed out, I have found that blessed archers stack with a death bless. If you bless Asp Archers (Tomb Kings) with a heavy death bless it stacks with intrinsic Asp bow so that you still get the Asp poison effect while simultaneously gaining crippling and afflicting effects of the Death bless. It appears that the Death bless stacks with both spells and non-melee weapons, but the Fire bless only works for melee and replaces any equipment special effects.

3) I feel that the Fire bless is still better since you cause fire damage every time you hit, but you don't cause an affliction (let alone 3.5 afflictions - instead you are only 3.5 times more likely to cause a single affliction) every time you hit with the Death bless. In addition your number of hits with the Fire bless are higher as previously pointed out in this string.

[MaxWilson]

Originally Posted by Zentar

...poison effect while simultaneously gaining crippling and afflicting effects of the Death bless. It appears that the Death bless stacks with both spells and non-melee weapons, but the Fire bless only works for melee and replaces any equipment special effects.

The D9 bless has two parts.

1.) 2 AN + Disease (MR check required) secondary effect that gets put on any melee attack, possibly replacing any other secondary effect that you have (e.g. the area effect of a Shadow Brand will get overwritten by the 2 AN).

2.) x4.5 normal chance of afflictions (i.e. +350%) on any damaging effect produced by the blessed unit.

Only part #2 of the death bless works with spells and arrows.

-Max

[PsiSoldier]

I havent had time to look through everything posted here so forgive me if this has been mentioned, but Death Bless has one very specific advantage over fire bless.

Death bless works with Ranged weapons or at least the affliction part and Fire bless does not work at all.

Take a nation like LA TC with their Ancestor Vessels and give them a D9 bless and watch in awe at the speed at which they deliver afflictions to your enemies. Couple that with a W9 bless for double the fun and they are in a world of hurt before they ever reach your ancestor vessels who are still extremely capable of pouring out the pain in melee range when that time comes.

[Frozen Lama]

well actually there is a bug with archers and W9, they don't actually shoot twice.