New to Dom 3

[Nikelaos]

d9 isn't a particularly good bless, since the death weapons damage is MR negateable (i think), as for blood 5 you don't need the extra strength when you are using another offencive bless.

water 9, fire 9 is commonly used, though a case could be made for astral 9.

You'll need to rely on mages later on, especially with large hordes, aoe spells work wonders. Check out the blood spell Hellfire, castable by all sun priests. It gives 100 fatigue (lots) but has an extremely wide area of effect (4 groups of aoe3, or 3 groups of aoe4 I forget), a few sun priests can cause a little bit of havoc with that spell

you also have the spell reinvigoration, which basicly means you chop up 1 blood slave and get rid of all the fatigue from hellfire. That's all I'll say, experiment and see what other spells work.

[sffrrrom]

Yeah, I was getting pieces of that on my own, but just not putting it together. I took Blood and Death on my pretender because I was trying to be kind of thematic I guess. And I got the Hellfire Rejuvenation combo, but hadn't produced enough Sun Priests to take advantage of it. I might just try a straight F9W9 Pretender with some fairly vanilla faction next and just try to keep it simple.

[thejeff]

Originally Posted by sffrrrom

I might just try a straight F9W9 Pretender with some fairly vanilla faction next and just try to keep it simple.

The F9W9 imprisoned pretender works for Mictlan because they have good cheap recruitable everywhere sacreds, plus sacred summons. (And even then it's a great bless against the AI, not so much against other players. It gives maximum killing power, but not much for survivability. A good player will use blockers, archers and spells to slaughter the jaguars before they reach anything important.) Since most nations don't have such good sacreds they won't benefit as much from it, so it's not worth it for them. Or they'll have few big tough sacreds who benefit more from being made even harder to kill.
Essentially you can't take a build for one nation and throw it onto another one.

[RadicalTurnip]

The easiest nation I learned on was Niefelheim. They're great with a Earth-9 Water-9 or Earth-9 Nature-9 or, my favorite, Earth-9 Water-6 Nature-6. They go into battle and their cold-aura just kills almost everything. Anything else out there gets killed by the giant axe. Because they're so big and have so many HPs, their protection lets them live a few rounds, and their regeneration lets them recoup back up to full (and reduces afflictions). This nation is also good for learning how to kit-out thugs. It's a bit expensive, though, so I would recommend Order 3.