Are most magic spells worthless?

Spells can be pretty powerful in the game, but you need to know how to use them. I suggest you play a bit more.

For example, Cull the weak is a treasure. Dd you notice that the faction that has it can produce extremely cheap and maintenance free slaves? Plus the spell gives you 20 mana which you can use on flame dart, fireball or something else that does a ton of damage on higher levels. Think of the slaves as healing + mana potions with legs

Yea, some spells could use some tweaking, but they're not useless.

Although, I agree with you on cull the weak. Killing one unit for 20hp seems underpowered when I can find/purchase up potions and food that can heal just as much (or more) for fairly cheap.

But I guess it's a good "last resort" spell.

Cul the weak is good on slaves and nearly dead units, but it's crap else.

Healing is totally underpowered, ..agreed that most spells are u-p, and then some OP (shrink, blindness...). Overall balance is pretty poor...

Paragon useless? Try broken.  As in so overpowered that it makes the game trivial.

Cull the weak? It lets Magnar take on challenges other sovereigns fear even 5-10 levels later.  It's all about whom you cull. Hint: the weak.

Heal? It may be a little bit underpowered, but it scales with shards, and I have had high initiative dedicated healers who kept everyone alive against dragons.

Yeah, play a bit more.

Most of the things that scale with shards are obviously underpowered in the beginning, but vastly improve with a few.

I've been playing death a lot recently:

Wither - basic spell, -2 attack is moderately useful in the beginning.  -10 atk starts to get you somewhere.

Curse - basic spell - when it hits (might have to shadowbolt a few times) that wildlands critter is a few hits from death. 

Can't remember name - all hits = critical hits.  Don't even need curse at that point, demolishes pretty much anything. Moderately high mana cost.

Infection plus any of the above = infect the entire enemy army.  Fantastic for large fights.  Mana cheap too.

Dirge/Contagion/Wail - with enough shards/levels they are very powerful.  Problem is that usually by round 2 (or 3, sheesh) they're not mana efficient since half the mobs are dead.

Blindness - basic spell - With some dodge, this is almost as good as crowd control.

There are quite a few spells I never use - i.e. kill.  Who has 200 mana for a single target with only a % chance?  Now, if it only took 10% of mana for a failed attempt...

All the unit buffs, and city buffs - most are no brainers with some being more preferential than others.

Gilden just chased me with a 600 hp army, I got away by freezing the army.  Getting re-inforcements in those 3 turns - rushing upgrades to the outpost and slapping him back to the stone age.  Then proceeded to decimate his empire while he recovered.  He tried to retake a city - freeze, rinse, repeat.

Even with the tip of the iceberg above, its definitely useful.   I've been playing a melee/defender SOV with a bit of death magic and its been great.

I agree.  spells are not underpowered or trivial.  used well they give you a decisive edge needed to tackle the larger monsters or units faster and earlier than you normally would be able to.

Shrink is the best spell in the game, quickly followed by Blind, Haste, Heal, growth, and most of the others.  I've used Paragon as well but sparingly....

Healing is more useful when your units and champions have some armour and can take a bit of punishment instead of spontaneously gushing blood before the enemy even hits them.

As for the Kill spell... you can bring that mana cost down further for one thing.  In the later stages of the game if you have ridiculous amounts of mana and good spell mastery, it can cut short a fight that could otherwise have been costly for you.

The thing that many people miss about "Cull the weak" is that Magnar can train troops so cheaply that the worst city with 87% unrest can pop one per turn.  So you can have a death mage gather as many as he can, lead them in battle against something trivially weak, and effectively get 20mana per turn from that city.  Even in the early game.  That twenty mana is an insane boost to any fire mage... and guess who is both a death and fire mage? And in late game, when that wildling village pops a few trashy units?  It just popped 60-100 mana.

There's such combos to be had!  One that comes to mind is Destiny's Gift + Paragon.

If you're in defensive battles you can use Cull the Weak on militia. I feel guilty using it it's such an effective way of acquiring mana if you're hosting lots of inferior armies.

The more accurate complaint would be that most spells are situational. As everyone already beat me to saying, cull the weak and paragon are both useful to the point of being overpowered, in the right circumstances. There are situations where a single spell turns the game around for you, but there are also situations where a few dozen very specialized spells do you no good, and you're better off just meleeing something.

I think every school could use more bread & butter spells - mediocre, but cheap and no cooldown damage/healing/etc. spells to get you through the trivial combats, the ones where you don't have a slave to sacrifice, or an overpowered multi-paragon'd champion to be your bodyguard, or enough mana to dramatically blast them all into oblivion. Then it would be more viable to play a mage who actually relies on magic all the time, rather than using it as an occasionally overpowered utility.

That's just my preference though, magic is definitely useful as is, it's just useful in very.. specific ways that you have to plan for. Being a caster is less about casting lots of spells, and more about finding/creating the uncommon opportunities where it's actually worthwhile or even overpowered to spend your limited mana on a certain spell. The rest of the time, you'd best have a sword handy.

I love the shadowbolt and Dirge of Ceresa.... those are nasty when you get them leveled up by using them frequently. Both have gotten me out of some nasty situations.

Oh and don't forget the "Kill" spell. That is dangerous man.

hehe very well put!

thanks for some of the suggestions, though I still don't understand how a spell like heal can be useful especially at higher levels

Because high level champions don't necessarily have a lot of hit points. You can make them very tough to damage though, so the odd heal is all that is needed to keep them killing everything in sight.

Even for normal units, while it will rarely win you battles otherwise lost, the odd heal spell is the difference from a unit dying or ending up the battle heavily wounded instead, with more experience and quick to heal.

Heal's great if you can secure the shards for it. A fast mage hero or henchman focusing on healing spells can keep a warrior champion going for some time in fights against dragons and other big monsters.

One of the few things I have dared to mod so far is the cast times and cooldowns on spells that were otherwise not very attractive. Storm (?) in the Air spells lost its cast time as to me its downside is its randomness; Drain Life doesn't have a cast time any more but does have a longish cooldown (three turns currently), as I saw its main purpose as being a sort of emergency heal - Shadow Bolt, Dirge and the rest are Death Magic's proper damage-dealers. Waiting a turn and possibly ending up dead for the effort ain't so much fun.

Speaking of which, Death/Fire is a good "bread & butter" combo as alternating Bolts & Darts can finish off most things, once you pick up the traits and gear to bring the mana costs under control. This is pretty easy, many champions have Water magic for Mantle of Oceans, Affinity pops up quite often for a "rare" trait, and the caster's robe (the name of which I have forgotten) is fairly common too.

I don't know if every school needs a nuke, but it would be nice if Kingdoms could field a heavy damage-dealing caster of the kind that Magnar, Ceresa and their ilk can become, so maybe at least one other school needs a reliable single-target damage spell. Fireball, Blizzard and the various Death spells have multi-target damage covered.

And add me to the list of people who love Cull the Weak. Fantastic spell for all the reasons already mentioned.