Paralyze vs Stellar Cascades

[samoht]

Please poke holes in this if I'm totally off base or just talkin crazy, but it could work as a poor man's paralyze or stellar cascade if you had enough priests that also had a point in astral, and then you could set enough of them to communion slave to boost the holy levels of the masters to H4, and script WoP for them.

Thats assuming you hadn't yet researched far enough, but for some reason had the critical mass of astral mages/priests located together.

Seeing as how WoP is zero fatigue, would that ever be worth doing instead of stellar cascade of paralyze? The communion masters could essentially keep that up all battle without causing any fatigue to anybody.

[Shangrila00]

Priest masters would still cause the basic encumbrance fatigue to each slave per casting. The big issue is that WoP is H4 while paralyze is S2, so with the same communion boost/base power, Paralyze will have +1 penetration. Also paralyze takes something out of the battle completely with a successful hit, WoP has a much shorter duration so you better be able to kill whatever you paralyze before it wakes up.

That said, if you have powerful priests with astral, yeah WoP spamming can be quite useful even after you get paralyze in CBM due to the aoe 1 that got added.

[Shardphoenix]

Priest masters would still cause the basic encumbrance fatigue to each slave per casting.

Add minor earth bless/Summon earthpower - and you can spam WoP until timelimit hits.

with the same communion boost/base power, Paralyze will have +1 penetration.

And Word of Power needs only 4 slaves for unlimited number of h2 masters.

[Shangrila00]

I decided to do some tests on the effectiveness of truly massed WoP. Some observations:

1) Mictlan priests are good for something other than research with the removal of SDRs after all. As the cheapest way of testing, I massed a ton of Mictlan priests, had 8 cast sabbath slave and the rest sabbath master, and spam WoP. A dozen priests spamming WoP paralyzed most of the AI army in 3 rounds. Sure a dozen real communioned mages spamming evocations would have destroyed the entire army in 3 rounds, but no way they wouldn't kill 8 b1 slaves in the process.

2) WoP was actually killing their targets. After paralyzing them once, further successful paralysis hits were doing hp damage. Only a few points at a time, but I had so many priests and so few regular troops that around 1/3 the AI troops ended up dying to endlessly spammed WoP before my troops could go and kill them. I didn't know paralysis damage did hp damage. Anyone know how exactly that works? I had a D9 bless on those priests, but I didn't think blesses worked on spells except for increased affliction chance.

3) For a supposed 100 precision spell, strange that it ended up paralyzing my jaguars a few times. How does that work?

Here's a question that I really don't want to replay a dozen turns to find out the answer to myself. My test was in magic 3 dominion (which probably helps explain why WoP was so effective), so the priests were at ~75 fatigue after casting sabbath. The enemy didn't last long enough for them to go unconcious. But had they been in neutral magic, sabbath should cost 99 fatigue, and the master priests would go unconcious with the first WoP they cast. Now, I know unconcious mages should recover 5 fatigue per turn they are unconcious, but is that recovery before or after they cast spells? Ie, since priest spells are guaranteed to generate less than 5 fatigue, will the priests cast every turn even if it was driven unconcious by the previous turn's casting, or will they spend every few turns unconcious not casting?

[samoht]

What kind of units were you using WoP against? Just some of the standard neutrals? Or anything with decent MR?

[Soyweiser]

100 prec spells are not special, 100 prec can still miss.

[Shangrila00]

Originally Posted by samoht

What kind of units were you using WoP against? Just some of the standard neutrals? Or anything with decent MR?

Yeah, enemies with 10 MR. And they were actually at MR 9 because of magic scales. According to the probability table, WoP would only have half the chance of connecting against MR 12 enemies, but those are pretty rare anyway. Against thugs and SCs, the whole idea is really massed spamming, and you'd have more Mictlan priests than pretty much anyone else'd have casters capable of spamming paralyze.

The idea is not likely to have a great deal of application for the most part. You need priest mages with either blood or astral, and almost all of those worth recruiting have better spells to cast. The basic Mictlan priest is rather unique in being able to cast almost nothing, but still likely to be around in massive numbers.

@Soyweiser, really? I though 100 precision was special, not being affected by negative precision spells and all. And even if it works as regular precision does, it should mean no deviation until range is > 95, which isn't even possible.

[Soyweiser]

You have seen the spells miss right?

[Shangrila00]

Originally Posted by Soyweiser

You have seen the spells miss right?

Umm, yes, as I said in the first post on the matter. The question is how 100 precision spells missing works. Cause under the precision formulas, there shouldn't be any deviation at possible ranges. So either the formula is wrong or it functions under different rules.

[JonBrave]

Originally Posted by Shangrila00

@Soyweiser, really? I though 100 precision was special, not being affected by negative precision spells and all. And even if it works as regular precision does, it should mean no deviation until range is > 95, which isn't even possible.

Originally Posted by Shangrila00

Umm, yes, as I said in the first post on the matter. The question is how 100 precision spells missing works. Cause under the precision formulas, there shouldn't be any deviation at possible ranges. So either the formula is wrong or it functions under different rules.

I know you guys are always right and I'm always wrong, but my precision formulae don't even seem to say that? The best I can see is that a 100 Precision spell deviates after 48 squares? Sigh....