PoD vs. VQ vs. Liches (was: Blood Arco mod)

[Scott Hebert]

Originally posted by PvK:
[QB] Interesting comparison of VQ and PoD. Thanks Scott.

You're welcome.

It still seems to me that VQ and PoD are apple and orange choices and so one doesn't out-do the other except for a player who is already decided on one play style. PoD is a phenomenal fighter, but is not immortal.

Having tried to follow the whole 'VQ-Castling' debate, immortality was seen as a crutch to avoid other issues, rather than something to count on. I can see how it allows suicide uses in-dominion.

So I compare VQ to Liches, and see more combined abilities for more points.

Currently doing my own comparison.

PoD is a superiority SC you try to keep alive, and may send breifly on strikes out of dominion. While VQ is a living-army-consuming defensive immortal SC, or just a middleweight but immortal SC for in-dominion defensive strikes, perhaps capitalizing on her immortality by letting her fight to the death repeatedly. Immortality and combo of strong built-in abilities is a very different thing from non-immortal but a great fighter. So again, they both look good to me, but in different ways.

Perhaps. I see apple-and-orange as 'different but roughly equal'. I don't see much equal in PoD vs. VQ. Is Immortality THAT much more important, and hence costly? (honest question here)

abilities. I think for this consideration it makes sense for VQ to cost more and perhaps be unavailable to Ashen and SG, since they have scads of points to dump into the VQ.

While a good argument, it's not the reason why IW removed it from Ermor (and I believe their reasons).

Minor items:
* Built-in Ethereal for the VQ means she can wear body armor. The PoD, unless I'm missing a trick, needs to choose between body armor and no ethereal, body armor and self-cast ethereal meaning he needs to have Astral power (with its risk or cost), or wear an astral cloak which offers no protection (and requires someone else to forge it). So it doesn't seem to me like it's just something that can easily be got by the PoD with no disadvantage compared to the VQ.

While the PoD doesn't have Ethereal, he DOES have a base protection of 12 vs. the VQ's 0. This to me is a plus to the PoD, since in MP at least people have to be crazy not to be using magical weapons against the VQ.

And, really, with the difference in point costs, you could probably make a PoD with 'good enough' Astral magic for the same cost as a VQ without. In fact, if you look at standard 'Ermor' scales (Magic-3, Luck-3, -3 everywhere else, Dominion 10, Ermorian Castle), the VQ has 205 points left for magic. The PoD, OTOH, has 424. This allows a PoD to take Astral-6 and still have more points (234) than the VQ. Whether this is 'good enough' to prevent Magic Duel death is up to you, but I believe that's the general benchmark.

* Seems to me Blood magic does have a good trick or two (or more?) for SC's, even if not commonly used.

Would you mind enlightening me? I haven't tried to use Blood magic in combat yet.

Scott