More LA R'lyeh and spellcasting questions

[Corwin]

Aleph said:
Returning to the original post, and taking a cue from another post on the top page.

2. Dreams of Rl'yeh has special uses against an enemy pretender, for when killing him just isn't enough (again, especially against immortal pretenders who aren't all that impressed by getting killed). You can use spells that age, curse, horror mark, or disease your opponent. Granted, you'll want your script to be something like "Horror Mark, Soul Slay" so that if you get a non-pretender you'll off them relatively quickly, but you can inflict severe nastiness on a pretender through Dreams. Remember too, that although Dreams allows an MR check to resist, once you're in it your MR is halved, so that horror mark is pretty much guaranteed to stick.

I disagree with this strategy. I did about 100 experiments on Astal assasination spells few days ago as a R'leyh in a test game, gathering statistic when it makes sense to use it and wehn it doesn't. That included casting spells on pretenders.

The thing is, once you lured pretender god into your dream, killing him with soul slay is a piece of cake, since his MR is halved. Why would you want to horrormark or curse him or whatever, when you can just kill him quickly?

With even basic +4 penetration items R'lyeh's Astral 5 or astral 6 StarSpawn mage can kill anything with one, or very rarely 2 soul slay casted, once thier MR is halved. With bottle of water to distract opponent or to distract his summons, it is a pretty much bullet proof strategy, even aginst pretenders who carry gems to do battle summons.

Now luring pretender into the dream is a very difficult task. Most of pretenders have 20-ish, sometimes high 20-ish MR, which makes it extremely hard to beat even with +penetration items. If, on top of it, they add a single MR amulet on his pretender, it would make casting astral assasin spells on him a complete waste of gems.

[Aleph]

Why use it instead of Soul Slay? Because I specifically stipulated using the strategy against immortals. If they are horror marked enough, their life will become 1. Take 1 step away from capital 2. Get killed by horror, increase horror marking. 3. Wake up in capital. 4. Repeat with larger horror.

I'll admit, it's hard to do. But the OP was asking about when Dreams is better than Mind Hunt IF you know your opponent doesn't have astral mages (quick aside - if you know your opponent doesn't have astral mages, you can also be pretty such he doesn't have an antimagic amulet). This is one such situation.

[Nick_K]

In Dom2 most pretenders had MR18, with a few (Rl'yeh ones IIRC) with 20. Pretenders MR varies with dominions strength. If a pretender is in enemy dominion he is much more vulnerable to spells that are MR-resistable.

[Corwin]

Nick_K said:
In Dom2 most pretenders had MR18, with a few (Rl'yeh ones IIRC) with 20. Pretenders MR varies with dominions strength. If a pretender is in enemy dominion he is much more vulnerable to spells that are MR-resistable.

True, but when pretender is in his own dominion, his MR increases, making him much harder to kill with these assasin astral spells. And in competitive MP games you will see enemy pretenders fighting/travelling in their own dominion most of the time, since they became much easer to kill even in the small enemy dominion due to big drop in hitpoints and worse physical stats. Not to mention high enemy dominion.