Site Searching: What do you use?

[Edi]

Or The Demon Gate.

I tend to rely greatly on the various radar spells, usually to the exclusion of all else if it is an option. However, after I made the magic site DB (available at Arryn's site), I've drastically changed strategy. 70% of sites or thereabouts are lv 1, and a surprising number of the very good ones fall also into this category (they just tend to be rare). Lv 2 mages can find around 85 to 90% of any existing sites, so using mages with greater path levels is a complete and utter waste of a resource that could be spending its time in far better pursuits.

Furthermore, of the lv 3 sites, only Cave of Clouds, Crystal Garden, Grove of Evergreens, Iron Cliff, Weeping Stone and Well of Pestilence are common, and even of those Cave of Clouds has terrain restrictions.

ALL other non-rare lv 3 sites except the Hidden Monastry are unique, regardless of rarity. Well, except for a couple of underwater sites, but there are so few of those anyway that it is not a big deal and basically only affects Atlantis and R'lyeh anyway. Of the rare ones, there are about ten non-unique sites, but the odds of finding any rare site are pretty low compared to the common and uncommon ones, so it is foolish to count on them, and there are more rare lv 1 and lv 2 sites anyway.

Searching for Lv 4 with expectation to find is stupid. All of those sites are rare, all except the Temple of Time are unique and half of them are restricted to a single terrain type.

By far the best type of site searchers are rainbow mages like the Tien Chi Celestial Master, the independent Enchantresses and others that have multiple randoms. Using anything above lv 2 (except for the holy path) is outright stupid unless you know for a fact that there is a specific site in a province (the only lv 3 or above that can be detected by unrest is The Demon Gate, and there are several that modify scales, but they are harder to see, especially if you have points in that scale to the same direction).

There is a very, very good reason why all the radar spells (except death and astral, which require just one path level) are lv 2 spells. Use them, people, or you will be wasting your more significant mages (path lv 3 or above) idling half the time (moving from one place to another) and not doing much useful with them the other half.

Edi