Quote:
Xietor said:
Earth is obviously great for casters, but the 4 protection does not really help that much on low protection units. I like the theme of Earth, but would 8 protection put Earth on scale with Fire, water, and nature?
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Too much, IMHO. 8 Protection would make Earth far and away the best bless for too many units. Take the Niefel Giant, for example. 66 hit points, Prot 14, Def 13. Most units of the era have an Attack of no more than 12 and do not more than 15 points of damage per hit. They'll usually get in 1 or 2 swings because the cold aura freezes them solid. Say there are six of these opponents attacking per Niefel Giant. My Monte Carlo says they'll do about 11 points of damage per turn. A +4 water blessing would cut this to 7.3 points per turn. An E9 blessing as it now stands would cut this to 4.3 points per turn, in addition to keeping fatigue low to avoid crit-hits. An E9 blessing that give Prot +8 would cut this to 1.4 points per turn. It's true that an N9 blessing would also net 1 point per turn after counting 10 points of regeneration, but it wouldn't do anything about fatigue and it wouldn't scale as well. (Give each of those attackers 2 stars and it goes up to 12.75 - 10 = 2.75 points per turn for N9, and 1.5 for E9.)
Obviously this isn't true for low-Protection units. Interestingly enough, E9 appears to add to your armor protection and not to your basic protection, so it doesn't work at all on units without armor (Machakan spiders) and it doesn't completely stack with bonuses from Berserk. I suppose you could make it a natural Barkskin instead of a +4 armor bonus; I don't know exactly what the formula is but it makes Niefel Giants go from Prot 9 (14/8 head/body) to Prot 12 (17/12 head/body), so it would help the unarmored warriors without boosting high-end units much. Stoneskin would actually be more thematic than Barkskin but it might be too much. Either is better than a flat +8 to armor Prot.
-Max