No love for Holy??

[Trumanator]

Why is it that Holy power is so hard to boost? You can't communion, the only item that specificall boosts holy power is the artifact sword whose name escapes me, and while the crystal shield works if your priest is also a mage, you often want them doing magely things. I'm considering modding in a "Staff of Holy Power" if its possible.

[thejeff]

You can communion. Or more accurately, if you can communion it will raise your Holy level. A Crystal Matrix will work.

Those with astral magic can also boost holy with PotS.

All that said, I'd expect on a game balance level it's hard to boost because there's less need to. Nations are divided/balanced partly based on how strong the priesthood is, so making it easy to boost would weaken those differentiations.

Also there is less need for boosters. No ritual magic, a small range of spells that don't have a fatigue cost anyway.
Plus there is no gem equivalent to forge items with, so you'd have to balance any such item around another path of magic.

[rdonj]

Well, I can't say for sure it's the reason but holy has a pretty huge power curve. A h1 priest is nearly useless, h2 starts providing tangible benefits, h3 priests can bless entire armies by themself and throw attack spells, and h4 priests can embolden every unit on the battlefield. Since you don't need any research for priest spells, the only thing that limits a priest is their level. I guess another reason would be that a priest has their place in the pantheon of the faith, and you don't really get especially powerful priests - every priest of the same level is viewed with the same level of holy authority.

[Jazzepi]

I'm pretty sure that if a priest has at least one magic path besides Holy, you can boost their holy level with crystal shield.

H4 is ridiculous for certain nations. I'm using a H4 Epoch for Bogarus in Archaen and the +2 morale to everyone makes him amazing. He's also a great preacher.

I'm actually really impressed by how preaching works, I used to think it was a lot less effective.

Jazzepi

[Trumanator]

Does it make sense to mass priests in a province and start preaching, or do you usually just put one or two in the crucial provinces.

[Jazzepi]

Priests can only preach up to their level. So a level 1 priest can only raise dominion to level 1 positive.

It's more useful for clearing out bad dominion.

Jazzepi

[DeathDaemon]

Originally Posted by Jazzepi

Priests can only preach up to their level. So a level 1 priest can only raise dominion to level 1 positive.

It's more useful for clearing out bad dominion.

Jazzepi

+2 for a temple, so going from a big negative to +3 dominion can take quite a few H1 priests

[Jazzepi]

Originally Posted by DeathDaemon

+2 for a temple, so going from a big negative to +3 dominion can take quite a few H1 priests

Yeah but it's still better then dominion spread naturally into negative dominion, which is far less likely to happen.

Jazzepi

[Gandalf Parker]

For lurking newbies:
Dont downplay the priests. They are easy to overlook but the name of the game is Dominions for a reason.

[thejeff]

Only one level higher for a temple, according to the manual.

Still mostly useful for getting rid of enemy dominion.

Actually then manual says "Preaching can only raise dominion as high as twice the level of the priest", so a H1 should be able to raise dominion to 2, 4 with a temple.
Is that right? Going from memory it doesn't seem to match when the game tells me preaching won't work.