> a Sphinx doesn't kill fast enough with Astral
>Almost all my Sphinx's use fire and/or water in order to get fire shield and/or breath of winter. You can have both up at the same time BTW. It kills troops plenty fast, and the ability to teleport into and deal with the biggest enemy threat before it can move, is huge.
An Sphinx with 6 Astral and 3 water will be 238. Affordable but still expensive. You do expect a pretender of that cost worth its dime, right? Teleport is good but that's just the benefit of Astral. If it's too powerful, will raising the point cost of Sphinx 150 suffix? It's fixable.
>I see thunder ward gone.
>>It's there. Now you need only Air 2. You mean it only starts at 50%? And thus detrimental to game balance? May be. But I'll have to wait and see.
>Not only partial defense, but it only affects a handful of troops. It's not good enough to defend an army from wrathful skies.
True.
But if you argued from the other side, mages are now more expensive and less dispensible, storm no longer stop archers. Arrow Fend is not 100% (and never was) neither, right? My inclination is to wait and see how it turns out in the full game.
You can use this trick with an Air pretender. But then we will go back to the old arguments how much weights of the Pretenders or Scale Economy to the gameplay should be - it's better to be changeble as some game options.
>>Seithkona nether darts
>It's more than a trick. It's too potent.
>You have similar killer spells in other paths: "Flame Eruption", "Astral Fire".
>It's more than "nether darts".
>It's seithkona-nether darts.
>The siethkona are incredibly cheap and are very available. The combo is simple and cost effective. That's what makes it better than other spells.
This might be true.
I won't mind just Siethkona-Nether Dart alone. But with the new blessing effects on Woodmen and the wonderful new Woodman scouts, their extra national points, Jotun might become one of the most powerful nations.
One possibility is to limit Seithkona to capital only, like similar mages for Abysia. But again, the whole balancing issue need to tested in full MP games.
>Astral fire isn't something that any mass produced mages can cast.
>Flame eruption requires very close range. In Dom II this is much harder to get since armies start farther away from each other.
But Flame eruption is even more disruptive than nether darts. In theory, you could put the mages at the frontline and have a few hold commands for their guards, It works very well in Dom 1. But of course, most Fire mages are not as cheap as the Seithkona.
I need to test how well the spell AI handle the extra distance in Dom 2. Have anybody tried?
BTW, joke aside, nobody should complain Fire magic sucks because of how lousy the spell Fireball is. The true power of Fire evocation spells are at "Falling Fire" and "Flame Eruption". IMHO, Fireball is only level 3 and thus appropriately a low power spell. If you want to toast somebody, stick your mages near the frontline and see them use "Flame Eruption"
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