Conceptual Balance Mod 0.9

[Graeme Dice]

quantum_mechani said:
You may not have- in the mp games I have played, it is the most frequently abused and complained about battlefield spell, after skelly spam.

If people are complaining about bladewind and raise skeletons, then they, quite frankly, need to learn to play better. Bladewind is absolutely useless against heavy infantry, while skeletons are absolutely necessary to the balance of death magic nations.

As for the other evocation 'nerfs', look carefully, more spells were boosted than nerfed. Again, the effort here is to improve diversity, it is much easier to meet halfway than try to buff up every spell to the level of the best ones.

The thing is that the spells that were nerfed weren't even that good. Thunderstrike for example, kills six people per mage per normal combat unless you have an air 4 mage, are carrying around 20 gems worth of a staff of storms so that you can cast storm power, or have a communicant horde with all the attendant vulnerabilities. Bladewind gets cast twice at most (Summon earth power and bladewind in drain 3 costs about 134 fatigue for a master smith), and might kill ten to twenty people per mage. And that's if the opposing force is a typical AI army of 200-400 unarmoured troops.

I think, that in all the games of Dom2 I played, that the total number of spells I cast on the battlefield that required gems comes to a total of less than 50. Battlefield spells that require gems are not fun, they are a chore. I cast summon lesser air elemental twice with Caelum before I realized it was useless. Water elemental summons were cast a total of about 10 to 15 times in two different games as Atlantis. Summon sharks got cast once. Four vapors was cast once. I used wrathful skies about a dozen times. Rigor mortis got cast twice. Darkness was about six times. Soul drain was a single time, as was firestorm. Hellfire had a half dozen casts, but that's because demonbred are mobile enough to shuttle their own slaves. Rush of strength got cast once, as did the similar spell for demons. Summon imp had a bunch of casts from blood mages defending their hunting provinces, but that's about all. The micromanagement required to shuffle gems around just isn't worth the relatively minor effects most of those spells have. Then there's the fact that site searching spells must remain the most effective way to search for magic until such time that Illwinter decides to add automatic searching with mages.