Holy 4 Prophet: useful?

[aaminoff]

Prophetizing either bumps you up 1 priest level or sets your priest level to 3. How useful is it to prophetize a H3 priest up to 4?

Benefits of H4 that I can think of
- H4 spells: fanaticism & word of power. Marginal benefit it seems to me.
- more temple checks when Preaching. Only useful when ordered to preach?
- are some spells more effective, eg banishment?

There are some nation-specific benefits, like Ermor, and some nations have specific Holy spells.

I'm looking at EA C'tis. Eventually I could use Life after Death or the mummy revivification spell to bring the prophet back as undead; if I do that do they then get access to the Reanimate order? That would be sort of cool, but it's way down the road.

Thanks for any info or advice.

[Torin]

Ashen empire ermor defenitely woth it as battlewide enchantments could affect over thousands of units. (good deal).

[MaxWilson]

The only reasons I can think you'd ever want an H4 prophet are for nation-specific spells or nation-specific reanimation (if your H4 is a demon/undead). You also get better Banishment as a fringe benefit, but fanaticism and Word of Power are indeed marginal.

-Max

[Ironhawk]

You can make an argument for an H4 priest with CTis. Thier troops have such low morale normally that Fanaticism almost seems worthwhile.

[Jazzepi]

I find fanaticism pretty useful.

Jazzepi

[Micah]

It takes a lot of troops in order to make fanaticism useful, since with 2 H3 priests you can fire off 3 sermons of courage plus a smite in the same 2 turns it takes for one H4 to cast a smite and fanaticism, so if your force is smaller than 3 sermons worth you're unquestionably better off with the 2 H3s, since they'll be laying down double the firepower for the rest of the battle in the case of smites, or almost double for banishment since it will scale with the extra level, but not enough to compare to 2 full H3 casts.

[Trumanator]

On the other hand though, H4 blood saccer = awesome. If you're LA Mari, H4 blood saccer INQUISITOR!

[P3D]

Banishment is H1, so you are getting penetration benefit only for H3 and H5.

[Agema]

I'm pretty sure that for banishment you get a larger AoE and more damage for each extra level of Holy, which makes it more powerful even for H2. I don't know about a bonus in terms of MR penetration.

[Sombre]

Yep, banishment gets better at every level. Not a penetration boost at every level though.