some balance questions

[apoger]

>1 Resistances are harder to come by. Most items no longer provide 100% resistance. Resistances are important to supercombatants

Most items?
Rings of frost/fire/tamed lightning seem to offer the same immunity as before.
The elemental armor gets a user all the immunities.

What items are we talking about?


>2 While mages where a good counter against supercombatants, their site searching and forging of magical items where also a vital part in decking out supercombatants. So if mages are harder to come by this will also affect the effectiveness of the supercombtants, not only the effectiveness of counters against them.

A bit harder to make items versus a massive lack of counters... still comes out in favor of the super combatants.

Also plenty of super combatants need few if any items.


>3 The high end bloodsummons are more expensive, there are demon combating spells and items.

While the blood summons are higher cost, you must also account for the fact that the gold economy is much weaker in Dom II. As such everything is more expensive, the blood summons are only keeping pace.

In Dom I blood magic was completely out of hand. In Dom II the non-blood nations can't get into blood easy since they can no longer use SDR's, however the blood nations are just as abusive if not more. I have found blood hunting easier in Dom II than Dom I. I predict it will be a major issue in multiplayer.

I only have the demo so I can't check items well. At level 4 construction there are no anti-demon weapons. The only anti-demon spell I can find is 'banish demon', but that requires blood skill, so not much help there. Might I ask what demon items and spells you are refering to above?


>4 Fire shields and astral shields are slightly toned down.

Slightly being the operative term.


>5 Some units commonly used as supercombatants now has additional suspectibilities. Such as Arch Devils taking extra damage from cold etc.

1- Arch Devils were never popular super combatants.

2- If an AD had a ring of frost...


>6 And Lastly if the magically endowed pretender is the supercombatant that is fielded it is not so bad, first of all he is expensive to loose,

This is the crux of why the situation is bad.
Players will need to use super pretenders to compete. When they encounter each other one will die. It's not just expensive, it's NOT FUN. Players will lose their pretender and quit in frustration. We play for fun. The trend I anticipate is not fun (super combatant battle arena).


>secondly he is only one,

One good super pretender is enough to steam roll independent provinces and powerfull enough to blow away 95% of conventional armies.

One is enough.
One is needed.
In multi-play without your 'one' I predict a swift demise.


>thirdly it is ever so much more appropriate with a pretender supercombatant actually able to cast a few spells compared to the magically impaired pretenders often encountered in dom 1.

It depends how you look at it.

If you think of your pretender as a person that walks around a battlefield and zaps troops, then yes a pretender with magic is a sight to see.
However the "impaired" pretender with little personal magic are 'magical' or 'divine' by virtue of their ability to mold the world by their dominion. That's plenty "godly", in my opinion.