horror mark on pretender

[Graeme Dice]

If horror marking or cursing doesn't make you seriously question whether you want your pretender fighting a particular battle or not because of the consequences, then it is powerful enough. If they can be mostly ignored, as horror mark was in previous versions of Dominions, then the spell might as well not be cast. It should be a dangerous effect, and it should be unremovable so that you have to deal with the effects.

[thejeff]

If a Thaumaturgy 1 spell that any S2 mage can cast can render a Pretender permanently useless, that seems a bit ridiculous to me.
Why should a regular mage with an easy to learn spell, be capable of that.

If the intent is to make SCs shortlived against any nation with Astral, then it seems to have worked.

If Horror Mark spamming becomes the default way of dealing with SCs then it's probably overpowered.

[PDF]

Graeme Dice said:
If horror marking or cursing doesn't make you seriously question whether you want your pretender fighting a particular battle or not because of the consequences, then it is powerful enough. If they can be mostly ignored, as horror mark was in previous versions of Dominions, then the spell might as well not be cast. It should be a dangerous effect, and it should be unremovable so that you have to deal with the effects.

Ok, if it is meant to be a big nasty dangerous spell, but in this case it shouldn't be a lowly Thau1, S2, fat20 (!) cantrip...
It isn't fun for me to envision a pretender cowering against a group of Sages (with 1 pearl each)

[Twan]

Personally I prefer strong effects you can remove at big cost over unremovable effects that have a 0,0001 random chance to trigger a total defeat. I support ways to do anything by magic, including rituals to remove horror marks, diseases, curses, etc... But I also would like to see horrors strike more often.

[Taqwus]

An astral or blood artifact that had a chance of

* counting the total horror mark strength within the province
* doubling it, and using a certain min threshold if otherwise below
* randomly redistributing that strength on units within the province, biased somewhat towards those that were already horror-marked

would be suitably perverse and dangerous.

[Shovah32]

I would make it both astral and blood, also aswell as targeting those already marked it would have a slightly higher chance of hitting some-one with astral magic.

[Nerfix]

Perhaps an early Astral/Blood spell that is a surefire way to horror mark someone AND a magic resistable early Thaum spell + surefire later Thaum spell?

[Fate]

What about an Astral/Blood spell that transfers all horror marks from the target to the caster? (do I use my expensive Astral/Blood mage to save my pretender?)

Maybe with an increased chance of either getting attacked by horrors during the ritual?

[SalsaDoom]

Regardless of the magical psuedoscience behind horror mark, it does permanently make SC pretenders worthless, and its cheap and easy to cast. This is wrong in my opinion -- the spell horror mark doesn't even require any gems to cast, its so low that just about any dippy mage could cast it in short order..

I'm with Twan and thejeff here.

--SD

Edit: Also that sometimes games can run -very- long makes anything permanent to a pretender extremely powerful, and rather annoying.

[Graeme Dice]

SalsaDoom said:
Regardless of the magical psuedoscience behind horror mark, it does permanently make SC pretenders worthless, and its cheap and easy to cast.

Could somebody post the stats of the horrors that attack your pretender?