I suck with Pythium ... please help!

[Arryn]

Cainehill said:
The main problem with False Horrors is that there is apparently a bug (documented by Arryn I believe), because the priests _never_ cast Sermon of Courage to counteract the fear.

The logic which IW appears to have encoded is to cast Sermon/Fanaticism if units take damage (1+ points), not if units take morale losses.

Another test that someone should make is to equip Horror Helms on non-combatants sent into the enemy ranks and see if effects similar to FHs occur (with enemy priests failing to cast Sermon/Fanaticism).

There's nothing "wrong" (unbalanced) with the FH spell. The problem is in the anti-morale loss spells. If I'm correct in my observations.

[Truper]

Arryn said:

There's nothing "wrong" (unbalanced) with the FH spell. The problem is in the anti-morale loss spells. If I'm correct in my observations.

I have to disagree. Compare FH to any other battlefield summon. FH has a lower path cost than anything but Animate Skeleton, Animate Dead or Will o' the Wisp. The undead summoning spells have 3 and 2 times the fatigue repectively, and I doubt we'll argue much about the relative effectiveness of a Skeleton as compared to a False Horror. Which may be fair enough, since we're comparing Enchantment 1 to Alteration 6.

Let's compare to Will o' the Wisp. Conjuration 5 vs Alteration 6. WotW gets you 2 Wisps, which share many properties with False Horrors, but costs 100 fatigue as opposed to 10 and a gem .

Now compare to Summon Lesser Air Elemental. This to me is a most interesting comparison, since our hypothetical Seraph would have his choice. 2A, 100 fatigue and a gem. Supposing our Seraph is carrying a gem. Should he spend it to summon a single Lesser Air Elemental and pass out in the process, or should he cast Quickness and spend the next 12 rounds or so summoning 2 Horrors per turn?

The fear aura on the Horrors is just complicating the argument, IMO. Remove it entirely, and they'll still rout you nearly as fast as before, through the "death of a thousand cuts" effect - the Horrors are skilled, if not strong.

Lastly, it doesn't really matter that False Horrors only have 1 Hit Point and under the right circumstances can be easily killed, since my entire argument is that it doesn't matter how many you kill since they will just keep coming throughout an entire battle.