Balancing the blesses

[Morkilus]

Xietor said:
Fire is clearly the best bless. E9 is not one of the best. 4 prot? That means zip really. Especially when you are being hit by f9 blessed troops with 2 attacks.

N9 is also very good, mostly because regen plus berserk is very powerful.

Water is good on some units that need the quickness.

Air needs help, earth needs help, Astral 9 needs help. never play blood , so no input there.

D9 is "ok" but d9<f9 imho.

Why don't you play the game the way it is first, discuss what may or may not work with some experienced players and maybe win some MP games? You can't be taken seriously when you haven't even played with every path and come in here spouting suggestions for "improving" the game.

[Xietor]

I do not play blood for rp reasons, it has nothing to do with experience. And I have played a ton of mp games.

I also view that reply as a personal attack, rather than one addressing the merits of the argument.

[calmon]

Earth bless is fine! 4 protection is good for your sacred soldiers and 4 reinvigoration (E9) helps your sacred mages a lot. It may be not the best early game bless but in middle/late game the reinvigoration for your hordes of mages is often much more important than a fire bless on some of your troops.

[Foodstamp]

Addressing the fire 9 is obviously the best bless statement.

There are many situations where a nation would be served better by a different bless. A very obvious one that comes to mind is Niefelheim. I would argue that a fire bless is not needed on their sacred units. You would probably be better off with a water, nature or earth bless, or even a combination of these blesses.

This is an example of balance of blesses without taking into consideration the spell picks for each path which some people seem to be ignoring. If you cannot prove without a doubt that some blesses are overpowered compared to all the rest without taking spells into consideration, then surely you have no leg to stand on when comparing the blesses in the overall balance of the game.

[Evilhomer]

Fire is not at all clearly the best bless.... Mostly it depends on what nation and what blessable unit you have available - if you need to make generalisations i would probably pick water as the number 1 bless. The weakest blesses are probably death, air and blood.

Astral 9 doesn't need help either, for certain units the mr is very good (demonic/undead) -and its pretty cheep with an oracle chassis and twist fate is added gravy on top.

For some reason you list earth as one of the weakest blesses when it's clearly one of the best - 4 more protection is not bad at all and the reinvig will help alot on those heavy armor blessables you probably are using (aswell as helping sacred mages).

[Manuk]

I think blood is fine. +strenght make little units swarm better bigger units. combine with water 9 and multiple attacks-weak sacred and they will do some damage.

[UncleYee]

My feeling is that if we were to leave speculation out of this and run some sort of combat simulator, or a mod that lets two of the same nation go against each other with different blesses, F9 would win the lion's share of contests against any other single bless. But my feeling is also that in the absence of such clear proof, there's no reason for anyone to change his point of view.

[Meglobob]

It depends on the nation you are playing, as to what lvl9+ bless is best.

However, blood, death and air blesses are weak compared to the others. With certain nations they do have there uses, a air bless with shadow vestels possibly for example.

Death bless however may be very powerful, someone hinted that a sacred mage blessed with D9 who cast a battlefield wide damaging spell got the 350% affliction chance on every unit effected. Is this true?

I have not tested it yet but if true would make death bless excellent.

[Evilhomer]

I would rather have s9 and/or w9 on my vestals, i think air is not as good on them. In fact air is probably the weakest bless overall.

[Baalz]

Meglobob said:
Death bless however may be very powerful, someone hinted that a sacred mage blessed with D9 who cast a battlefield wide damaging spell got the 350% affliction chance on every unit effected. Is this true?

I have not tested it yet but if true would make death bless excellent.

Hmmm, I'm going to have to try that out. One thing I have found with the death bless is that the affliction bonus does effect missile weapons unlike the damage bonus for f/d level 9. If you have access to holy archers (they're fairly rare) a high death bless is pretty wicked as those little 1 and 2 point damages from the arrows make people's arms fall off! On top of the obvious advantage this gives you, you can imagine the uses for "fire and retreat"....