Balancing the blesses

[Meglobob]

It depends on the nation you are playing, as to what lvl9+ bless is best.

However, blood, death and air blesses are weak compared to the others. With certain nations they do have there uses, a air bless with shadow vestels possibly for example.

Death bless however may be very powerful, someone hinted that a sacred mage blessed with D9 who cast a battlefield wide damaging spell got the 350% affliction chance on every unit effected. Is this true?

I have not tested it yet but if true would make death bless excellent.

[Evilhomer]

I would rather have s9 and/or w9 on my vestals, i think air is not as good on them. In fact air is probably the weakest bless overall.

[B0rsuk]

I think fire bless is so strong because it's a perfect synergy. It increases chance to hit and damage dealt. It's stronger than just sum of the components.

Air9 bless is verrry strange. In my opinion it's not useful enough. It's basically a combo piece, because otherwise very few enemies can deal lightning damage. (does Smite/Holy Avenger deal lightning damage ? I'm trying to figure out hot to build a priest assassin). If I had a chance, it would replace Air9 with +3 precision. Sounds much more widely useful to me. It would be nice for casters and archers as well. And it fits air very well, too.

I don't like the idea of sacred troops because they often can deal with everything on their own. Wasn't this game supposed to be about combined arms, at least partially ?

Blood bless.... tell me, what distinguishes extra strength from simple +damage bonus of Fire or Death ? Not only is the blood bless weaker, but also bland. In theory, some units can throw javelins further (sun warriors), and commanders could use Fire Bola better. But the difference would be pretty marginal, I think.
Blood9 is a joke. You buy a (typically expensive) sacred unit and hope for it to die ? For a chance of cursing your enemy ? Because then your other units may hurt enemy more instead of simply killing them ? Ridiculous. It should either be made automatic (no MR), or replaced with Horror Mark.

I'd love to see sacred unit price scale depending on bless strength. This is because without a strong enough bless, sacred units are often not worth the price. I would like to use Black Hunters, but with 125 price and no bless it's ridiculous.
Does anyone know - once the rider is gone, does the Black Hunter still collect his large amount of money ? I mean, it's an animal...

[Teraswaerto]

There are big differences between the damage increase you get from Blood, Death and Fire. Flaming weapons cause an additional 6 armor piercing fire damage. It is not added to weapon's own damage roll. Death weapon works like Flaming, except not fire damage, armor negating and MR negates.

Protection, magic resistance, fire resistance all interact differently with the damage bonus from the bless. Imagine casting Weapons of Sharpness on units with +strength or units with an extra 6 damage armor piercing attack. Of course, the actual damage increase it biggest with fire almost always, as it also increases attack skill, but you can take some Fire for +attack, not always go to 9.

Blood is not that great a path IF you are just thinking about the bless, but for some nations taking high Blood on your pretender is still a good idea because Blood magic in general is so powerful. Blood 9 is weak though, as you don't need it that high for spells.

[Sombre]

I actually like Borsuk's idea about precision. It would make sacred battlemages a lot more interesting, that's for sure.

I also agree that the bonus you get at blood9 is pretty silly. I'd prefer to see something like a watered down blood vengeance based on morale or mr (obviously watered down quite a lot).

[thejeff]

The blood 9 bless is one of the worst. It's a little more useful if you apply it to one of the cheap mass-produced sacreds, flagellents or jaguar warriors (are there others?), instead of the standard expensive capital only units.
Still probably not worth it, though.

I wouldn't use Air on Shadow Vestals. They're ethereal and have shields. Arrows aren't a great threat. Again that's for the cheap unshielded sacreds, so they can survive to close and do damages. Astral's the same way. Practically doubles the lifespan of a flagellent, does almost nothing for giants.

Death does work with arrows, so I'd assume it works with spells as well. I had fun with W9D9 Ancestor Vessels. 2 volleys of affliction & fear causing arrows a round until they reach your lines, then they still face serious heavy cavalry.

Fire is nice, but it isn't always the best. With the heavier units, survivability is more important than more damage, so Water, Earth and/or Nature dominate.

I think they're pretty well balanced. At least they all have uses, even if some are more niche than others.

[B0rsuk]

Death bless and arrows
Does it really work ? I mean, you can perforate light infantry anyway. As for heavies, especially with shields, they're not likely to get more that 2-4 damage anyway. We know affliction chance is based on damage dealt compared to creature's max health. So 2 damage arrow isn't very likely to cause an affliction. How much does death compensate for this ?

Replacements for Blood9
1. I'd call it Pain Mirror. It would work much like Blood Vengeance, except it mirrors damage instead of redirecting it. Sacred unit still takes damage, it's just likely to cause automatic harm to attacker.

2. Hp increase ! For example max(3, totalhp/5). It would be roughly +15 percent extra health, or +3 hp, depending on which is higher. It would feel a bit like Earth bless, except it would help against some spells/poisons more. In cases where totalhp/5 is more than +3, it wouldn't matter much anyway because big high hp creatures usually have low protection.

3. How about Rotting instead of Curse/Horror Mark ? It wouldn't work at all against many creatures, but would cause serious harm to most living creatures.

Gandalf: unless it's a Horror Mark, Shroud of the Saint wouldn't be of much use on an assasin. I think regular Curse really isn't all that scary on a regular commander, or even priest or mage. He's not likely to go into melee.

Maxwilson: very interesting research. Also thanks for the Python code, I'm trying to learn the language because it puts fun back into programming for me.

Keep in mind that Fire/Death damage probably interacts much better with multiple attacks, because each attack gets +6 damage. As far as I know +1str = +1 damage, potentially.
Also, some of weapons have'strenght of the wielder not added' property. This is actually quite common. All kinds of sacred animals and cavalry have hoof, bite, peck etc attacks. Then there are strange wieldable weapons which don't benefit from extra strength. (20+6ap Lance is an overkill...)
Why is Sling a 'strength not added' weapon, anyway ?

Is the Lance wasted if it doesn't hit ? If true, Fire bless would be even more valuable.

I think that Fire reacts especially well with Water. Fire is a synergy with itself. Water is +50 percent attacks on average, and each of these attacks will get +6ap.

I would look into Earth bless, too. How about
+4 for units with 15+ protection total
+5 for units with total prot between 10 and 15
+6 for units with total prot between 1 and 10*

* total 0 prot means the unit doesn't wear any armor so Earth bless won't help.

[Evil Dave]

thejeff said:
Death does work with arrows

It does? Hm. Then either it's buggy, or the description is wrong, 'cause the description says:

Death Weapons (2 an+mr damage)
All enemies hit by a melee weapon will suffer extra damage from the death bless effect if they fail a magic resistance roll. The damage is magical and will be effective versus ethereal beings.

[Ygorl]

Do Death weapons make the base weapons magical? Flaming weapons are not magical, only the wimpy fire strike is, so a fire bless is not useful against high-protection ethereal dudes. Depending on how Death works, that could make it better in some cases... Teraswaerto alluded to cases where a blood bless could be better than a fire bless. A water bless is especially nasty - with more than one or two blessed guys whacking at high speed against an enemy, the multiple-attack defense reduction will often do more to help them hit than the +4 to attack. Think, e.g., of Warriors of the Five Elements... With a water bless, each gets three attacks per turn; that's nine attacks coming out of a single square, for an average defense reduction per attack of -8 (divided amongst the number of different targets, of course). Ozelotls are even scarier.

I do wish blood had a slightly more interesting level-9 bless. Mostly, though, I think things are good; which blesses make sense is hugely a matter of circumstance (Air-9 isn't a terrible idea if you know you'll be starting next to Caelum, eh?) - yeah, yeah, blah blah blah...

[normalphil]

Life drain would fit as a B9 bonus (blood-drinking/soul drinking weapons, people), but it'd be far to powerful.

The problem that I have with the existing B9 bless is that it just doesn't make sense. At all. I'd like it to be something that fit with the magic path. Anything at all, no matter how trivial otherwise.