Demon Pretenders

[Cainehill]

Originally posted by En Forcer:
Now here's a thought...

What about giving an amulet of focus and a rune smasher to a priest? And maybe a druid's eye as well?

Does the penetration value apply to holy spells?

Yep. Hence a H5 priest gets better effect using banishment / smite demon than the lesser ones. Also, communion can help (especially for Pythium) and the items you mention.

Sadly - those items are also very important to many unholy priests, as their undead for some reason want to resist their beneficial spells, many of which magic resistance negates easily.

[Thufir]

Originally posted by Boron:


hm that never happened to me so far .

there is one banishment order : smite demon .
but it "only" does 15+ an damage .
mr saves though .
so either you were very unlucky and lost your mr save throw a couple of times which is very rare or perhaps only your imps routed and your pretender fled and it looked like he got banished ?
because demons are almost "immune" to smiting even "fodder" demons like devils or fod's have about 16 or 17 mr which makes them hard to hit with smite demon .

Going back over the battle, it's a little hard to tell exactly what happened. There were two banishment spells going off in succession and a bunch of longbowmen in the vicinity (though it looked like they were targeting other troops). Looking closely at the combat, there was a puff of blood as Moloch disappeared - I don't know if thats an indicator that he was killed by physical damage. OTOH, he disappears the exact moment the second banishment spell is displayed, which might be an indication that he was banished.

FWIW, banishment affects undead and demons, it says damage 7+ (armor negating), in the case where it is resisted. Since Moloch had 17hp, on the round prior to death, I at least know it was not the failed saving throw damage (alone) that killed him.

Originally posted by Graeme Dice:

quote:

---

Originally posted by Thufir:
If this is the case I'm wondering how people cope with undead/demon pretenders, as this seems to be a very serious vulnerability...

A magic resistance of 18 makes it very so that a "MR negates" spell will succeed about 8% of the time. A pretender's MR increases in friendly dominion, and with appropriate equipment you can bring it up to more than 25. This will make all MR negates spells succeed only around 1% the time. At that point, you are fairly safe.

---

So, perhaps then I just need to keep Moloch in a spellcasting only role until I can get his MR up to 25? What I had been doing was spellcasting for 5 rounds, then attacking, is this overly agressive for opening play? Or perhaps if I had a better attacking force with the pretender, there would've been less opportunity for any of the opposing troops (archer or priest) to target Moloch.

So the question then is whether Moloch is a reasonable candidate for engaging in combat, or should I instead just think of him as robust spell caster. Looking at his stats he has a great attack skill but def/prot/mr are not through the roof. Here's his stats:

HP 82
Pr 15
Mor 30
MR 19
Enc 1
Str 20
Atk 29
Def 15
Pre 2
Ldr 170

On the magic side, I had him as 9 Fire, 2 Water, I guess I had planned on him being something of a hybrid throughout the game, generally entering combat after turn 5. Is this still a viable strategy, perhaps after I get a chance to equip him? Or, do I need to back off on this, and either go to a different pretender, or focus on his magery?

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by Thufir:
FWIW, banishment affects undead and demons, it says damage 7+ (armor negating), in the case where it is resisted. Since Moloch had 17hp, on the round prior to death, I at least know it was not the failed saving throw damage (alone) that killed him.

It could have easily been the damage from a single casting of banishment. The damage from banish increases as the level of the priest increases, and there is still a comparison between two open ended dice rolls to determine exactly how much damage occurs.

So, perhaps then I just need to keep Moloch in a spellcasting only role until I can get his MR up to 25?

There's no need to do that. Like I pointed out, banish is unlikely to affect him, but it's still possible. If he only had 17 hitpoints, then he was probably in unfriendly dominion, so his stats would all have been lowered.

Looking at his stats he has a great attack skill but def/prot/mr are not through the roof.

The Moloch's MR is the same as all pretenders, his defense is better than any other than the ghost king, and his protection is better than anything other than the immobiles and the cyclops. You still have to be careful with him.

Is this still a viable strategy, perhaps after I get a chance to equip him?

There's nothing wrong with your strategy, you just got unlucky.