Death worship and huge maps

from Elemental Forums

From what I have observed so far, death mages with the aforementioned perk lategame are pretty much walking gods. Once you have 6+ death nodes and a decent level mage character your dirge and howl (if you took water) can level armies with 1 or 2 spells quite readily, this is not difficult to accomplish at all with the ability to convert any node to a death node. 

 

Not to say that a faction that focuses on having a powerful mage for their leader shouldn't be a force to be feared, my concern is two fold. Firstly the larger map size will elevate their power to absurd amounts  currently I have seen mid 30 ticks on dirge quite readily and that is over 300 dmg to an entire army with a spell that has no cast time. Granted most fights don't last 10 rounds, but then again most units don't have over 60 hp. Secondly if this is intended, then why is it restricted to empire mages with a specific faction perk? I honestly don't mind having powerful lategame mages, however I don't think limiting it to such a specific set of conditions is good for gameplay.

 

Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.

10,292 views 7 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

Valid points. Horrific Wail, Dirge, Howl. All of these can become broken in the right conditions. I think the problem lies in the way scaling doesn't take into account the map sizes, as you discuss. On a tiny or small map, these are non issues, but on a large (or soon to exist super large) map, such abilities scale perhaps too well.

 

I like to provide fixes for problems, otherwise it's just bitching in my opinion. The fix is to make spells scale via a fraction based on map size selection, i.e. +1 damage per shard divided by mapsize. And put scalars into the mapsize variable. Having worked with the xml for the spells extensively, I don't think the implementation would be that difficult (obviously a complete revision of formulas would be necessary, but it's just grindy editing really). There is no variable currently in the game to call for mapsize, so it cannot be fixed by a modder alone. However, if stardock gave me the mapsize variable, I'd be happy to rebalance the entire CoreSpells.xml for them to scale properly, or if they weren't interested I would eventually do it even if it was just for myself.

 

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

Well, there are a few things that should be done to address this IMO, nerfing the scaling of spells in general when there are only a few select spells that are OP to an extreme when stacking magic damage + spell mastery is unnecessary although would work.

 

1) Easiest way to fix this would be to replace spells that do raw damage to entire armies with strategic spells or tactical utility spells/debuffs.

 

2) Remove ability to convert shards OR grant it for all other magic schools. IMO all mages should be able to specialise in their chosen element so I would personally go for the latter.

 

3) Make it so all elements have spells worth specializing for, as it stands at the moment the only elements that would be worth stacking shards for is death and fire from what I can see.

 

Ashes of the Singularity II
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

Or you could make the spell resist skills actually useful on armies, and maybe add a couple of more? (the 4th or 5th conclave level should have some sort of level scaling etc. +10 Spell Resist is nothing)

Lets try improving stuff that isn't viable enough before nerfing everything okay? ;)

 

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

Agreed, buffing magic resist and other elements would be ideal.

 

edit: Reasoning is armies that stack magic resist should be _good_ against mages not just get wrecked slightly slower. Also there should be other options for pure mage chars aside from death/fire.

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

One of the reasons why Ceresa is broken, even on small maps she can easily hit like a freight train. I think just scaling down most spells well do the trick but i think shard conversion being available to all factions also makes sense.

And yes spell resistance could use a buff.

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

Agree entirely with the OP and have made similar posts before. In that list of spells you should also include Wither: with enough death shards you can reduce pretty much any trained unit stack down to zero attack and therefore its possible that a single spell can effectively take out the entire stack. I've used this tactic to win on Insane difficulty levels.

There are two separate but linked issues here:

1. The convert shard ability is too strong. It allows you to 'break' the game by boosting the mentioned spells to extreme levels. If you applied this ability to other magic schools you'd get similar game breaking effects (eg dodge bonuses from evade that make units unhittable). This ability should either be removed or have a reduced effect, eg you need to convert three shards to gain one death shard power. Then there's a real trade-off between conversion and keeping the shard, at the moment it's a no brainer to convert.

2. Spells like Dirge of Ceresa and Contagion are over-powered. Doing substantial damage to every unit, every round for 10 turns, means they are so much more effective than any other damaging spell. A fireball will basically do 3 times the damage of a contagion spell to each unit. However, you're lucky to get three or four units with a fireball, whereas contagion will get all 9 and then damage them for up to ten rounds. Again, it's a no brainer to use contagion. I think dirge and contagion should be further reduced in the damage they do.

Reply #7 from Elemental Forums Top

Oh yeah, definitely a few other spells aside from the ones I have mentioned.

 

The convert shard ability is too strong but only because death spells scale so well with it and they have such easy access to them. Lowering the scaling or tying the scaling to a different thing (ie level and have shards for mana reduction) for the destroy army spells and giving all factions the ability to morph nodes would largely fix this.