Helheim advice

[Olive]

OK, I'll try again. Maybe I've got a wrong impression because I played them poorly in MP.

[MaxWilson]

Originally Posted by Olive

Maybe a minor Air bless (4-5-6) would help, as Hangadrotts with A4 able to forge air boosters / staffs of storms are sorely missed (1/160 chance).

You can always just Empower an A3 to start the bootstrapping. It costs what, 60 gems? Expensive but maybe cheaper than putting A4 on your pretender.

-Max

[thejeff]

Or take the Astral bless and use a Ring of Wizardry to boost one to forge the first Air booster.

[MaxWilson]

Possible, but Helheim doesn't have an easy time scraping up 40 pearls (30 w/ hammer). An A4 item will cost 25 air gems (17 w/ hammer). Since the whole point is to forge multiple air boosters and/or Staff of Storms, an initial 60 gem investment to get the ball rolling seems affordable to me. With a starting Air income and lots of mages who can search manually, and/or cast Auspex, you shouldn't have trouble scraping up 100+ air gems over the first couple of years anyway.

Of course, if you've *got* the pearls, Ring of Wizardry is always a good investment...

-Max

[archaeolept]

yah a4 is nice to take... it doesn't fit in w/ my need for a vicious bless though

[Kheldron]

I've got a game going with a W6E9 bless and it works just fine.

E9 is for me a no brainer as it gives helhirding a 0 fatigue which works wonder with long fights and skele spam...which happens to be so easy to use with helheim.
I got niefelheim quickly out of the game just because I could win the fatigue race.
That's one of the reason I didn't go for more than W6. I don't relish having my fatigue doubled by quickness and going from +3def to +4 wasn't worth the points.

I remember reading somewhere that if you manage to stay alive and standing long enough, you'll eventually win. That's the point of a 0 encumberance + 22def unexperienced, your opponent will eventually either fall under your blows or his own weight.

[Kheldron]

and an E9 bless is just uber when you have an easy access to earth as the prot bonus counts double with legions of steel or bracers of prot.

[MaxWilson]

Originally Posted by Kheldron

I remember reading somewhere that if you manage to stay alive and standing long enough, you'll eventually win. That's the point of a 0 encumberance + 22def unexperienced, your opponent will eventually either fall under your blows or his own weight.

Just watch out for swamps and extremely hot/cold dominion.

(Unfortunately, you can't see the temperature of a province before you attack it, unless it's in your own dominion. This is why Niefelheim, to me, is a more stressful nation to play than Ashdod or Lanka, even though the cold aura rocks.)

-Max