Balancing Wrathful Skies

[Tuidjy]

What he means, I think, is that in the late game, Wrathful Skies is a fact of
life, and almost everyone is immune to it. As for me, I do not think that
Wrathful Skies is what needs to be balanced. Instead, I would allow protection
spells to stack. Thus a casting of 'Storm Warriors' and 'Gaea's blessing' would
make your troops immune. I think that anyone who can stack two mass-protection
spells deserves to laugh at elemental damage.

I understand that, because of the way protection spells are coded, making them
stack is no easy task, so I have little hope for Dominions II... but still
expect that Illwinter will at least look into it for Dominions III.

If people really feel that Wrathful Skies is a problem in Dominions II, which
is agruable at best, I think that the way to balance would be significantly
reduce its power. Why? Because we have Fire Storm, which is a much harder
spell to cast. Instead of homogenizing the two spells, why not have Fire Storm
as the much more powerful spell, and Wrathful Skies as a more common, but less
effective alternative?

How weak do I think Wrathful Skies should be? The average damage on a tough
troop(30hp) should be neutralized if the unit has 50% shock protection and
regeneration. With Storm it would still be double that.

But once again, I do not think there is anything wrong with Wrathful skies.
There are enough air nations, indy mages, and alternative methods of clearing
the battlefield of wimps...

Nerfing whatever works for the sake of the mythical beast called 'Balance' is a
certain way to a boring game. The choice between removing a feature and adding
a counter should be very easy to make.

[Huzurdaddi]

Wrathful skies makes armies a waste of resources very early in the game. Many find that this "ruins" the game since so many unit types become irrelevant so quickly.

I personally find that a nice A7 casting requierment ( and a similar bump to all battlefield spells ) works quite nicely. It still possible to cast the spell, but it is very expensive to get a caster than can do it.

[The_Tauren13]

From what I've heard, in Dom I national troops were too good and spells too weak. Now, it appears in attempting to balance it out in Dom II they've overshot the mark, and troops are useless and spells too strong. So, hopefully, they have something else in mind for Dom III (kinda like halving all income from Dom I in Dom II) that will balance things.

[atul]

The_Tauren13 said:
From what I've heard, in Dom I national troops were too good and spells too weak.

I think one big problem in Dom 1 was that the battlefield spells such as wrathful skies were totally negated by the 100% immunity protection spells granted. And when all the battlefied-wide protection spells were nerfed to grant only 50% protection while BF-wide damage spells were left as they stand...

And in addition to that, wrathful skies has the perk of being lightning damage - armour negating and stun.

[Verjigorm]

I'm a big proponent of spells that counter others. WS may be too strong/too easy to cast, but adding say a battlefield version of dispel or changing the dynamic of battlefield enchants--maybe working them like globals so that only the most powerful one(s) can exist at a single time would be interesting. In such cases spells like Gaia's Blessing that place an effect on all friendly units could be changed from Battlefield enchants (spells that produce effects on a cyclical basis) to Mass enchants (spells that create a durable effect).

[jeffr]

As has been said in this thread, in order to compete, you must field a force that can survive Wrathful Skies. This forces everyone to use the same small subset of units (lightning immune leaders and units). The great variety of unit types present in the game (and therefore, in my opinion, a lot of the flavor) is rendered meaningless.

Even if Wrathful Skies was more difficult to cast, the ability to build gem producing items combined with the superiority of certain summoned units, makes national units unviable. Similary, unit producing items (i.e. soul contracts) product the same effect. Why have any unit except a devil (assuming you have any units at all, you could just field leaders) ?

The game is deep and it is a shame that MP is reduced to a few units and strategies. I'm not very experienced, but from what I have seen and what I have read this is true.

But, I've heard a lot of good possible solutions that would make more units viable. I would love to see large armies of both National and Summoned troops backed up by mages and not just mage armies and SCs.

Regardless, I'm having a blast It's good to see Illwinter here discussing this stuff. It bodes well for Dom 3.