mobs can't hit me.
There's definitely a reason to play them now.
Starting with a +20 dodge on your Sov is pretty impressive, yeah.
Now it's time to buff Mancers, Urxen and Tarth.
+1 Dodge per level might be a little more balance, imo...
I'm only a couple hours into it my game, the dodge on the sov is nice - I'm still getting hit, but he can tank quite a bit.
so far
20 for wraith
5 for lucky
5 for weathered shield
6 for evade w/no air shards
Its working well, will occasionally die to a nasty crit but my 2nd champ was another wraith so I have those 2 running around on horses and they can usually ping pong most small and occasional medium mobs by themselves. I have one of those tears of cyndrum (+3 health on kill), which stacks with the wraith ability - so each kill is +6 so far - which really helps.
Might be OP when I start churning out some dodge monks, but really... that's ok
The +1 per level stuff is always kind of meh to me, how many champs usually get over lvl 10, how many over lvl 15 and that's during the course of a whole game. Same with troops, I would assume most troops on a successful army get up to lvl 5 or 6 (not quite sure how fast they level).
Maybe +10 AND +1 per level, but +1 per level is too low I think.
Depends on how you play. I can't remember the last time my sovereign did not get to above level 20, and I often have level 30+ heroes.
I am just balancing it against other racial... +1 dodge per level can be offset by +1 acc per level.
But if you need a dodgy sovereign, Just go PotA and pick up acrobat (you will need D1-3 as pre-req).
Using a Warg as a hero mount adds 10 dodge as well, so consider that as a combat option. You can always keep a horse (in your backpack) for long distance moves on the strategic map but you're usually limited to the speed of slower troops in your stack so a warg is good enough in most situations.
JJ
Oh, I wonder what happan with "lucky" in create faction? I wonder if it's gave 2 to 3 more of dodge?
With this, I will give wraith one more try (always quitted my previous wraith games, can you imagine? )
I am of the camp that it is not necessary to nerf everything. With that said it can be argued that a choice that is so overwhelmingly obvious doesn't necessarily need a nerf for the sake of OP - but for the idea that no other choices make sense. Again, i haven't got a lot of troops yet so I'm not sure. Sov with 20+ is a fun option.
Per level would be the way to go imo.
+20 constant is better -- +1/level is weak initially, and becomes overpowered later when you do not need it (i often get into the level 30-40 range)
Anyways, i think the wraiths and resoln deserve some play, to find out the things that really need fixing -- it's usually a bad idea to change gameplay purely based on how the numbers sound instead of how the game plays.
Note also that if dodge on wraiths is too much, it might be that other effects which benefit dodge need to be nerfed, or perhaps some rare accuracy boosting skills are needed for champions.
So I've played a bit more on my dodgy wraiths. I think its powerful, and may need to recant my stance on overpowered. I've taken lately to just keeping my faction up enough to avoid a dogpile, and focus on mobility and exploration.
I've got about 8 cities, about mid way through the civ tech and 1/3 through warfare and 1/4 through magic - Masons, mounted/blacksmithing, tireless march.
1 dedicated fortress with 3 essence now starting to pump out dodgy troops - basic sindarin staffs, no other EQ really, + hit points and 2x +dodge traits. They're coming out at 30+ dodge - maybe even 40. Weak, but cheap and dodgy and with a counterattack.
Til this point I've been doing treaties and even paid off a couple larger factions to avoid war. I've been exploring/playing with bound elementals, a few champions and my sov.
My goal is to build 2 armies of "Dodgy Staffers" and "Glass Bows" (shortbow, nothing else, +initiative, +attack traits) and see how they do. Weak in general, but if the enemy is missing a lot of I can pepper them with arrows.
My Sov has been fun to play with - about 60ish dodge, only 20 or so attack, about 15 defense and 45 hp I think. He can solo most mobs that don't crit often, have nasty DoT's or spells. Picking and choosing my battles has let him get up to lvl 15 and he's a mini tough guy. He can still drop to the big crit, spells/elemental damage, or mass poison - but with his wraith +3 on kill, he does pretty well.
With that said, I'm not sure he's all that much more powerful than any other beefed up melee hero with high defense/moderate dodge. In most games that I build a super champion, I usually duo - one mage/ranged and one melee. I save a bit more mana than normal with this guy, but he definitely still gets hit.
Even the 40 dodge troops - to get that dodge I sacrifice other items (although honestly i still frequently take dodge traits). They still aren't super troops, they don't hit all that hard. I'm hoping that in 9v9 fights they stay alive long enough to win through attrition... at least until i get a bit further down the warfare tree.
Teh few I've used are great against low level critters, but REALLY slow against higher lvl and still die.
I think war is about to break out, since I'm going to instigate it. So I'll get a better feeling once that's done.
If you are looking to win through attrition, try getting some spell mastery and using dirge!
I'm a level/luck away from contagion. Not sure I have dirge. Custom cheesy race: Wraith, vuln to magic, master scout, enchanters, binding, lucky. Think that's it.
Lack of mobility really bugs me - so master scout is a default
Enchanters is surprisingly powerful - scrying pools and even the +dodge staffs
+dodge from lucky is good synergy
Binding is surprisingly useful on "dense" magic, I'm sure it would be much less so on any other setting. Have 9 total shards at this point. Lots of good scouts - those 4 move elementals are nice..
You need to select Death Worship for your factions to have the Dirge of Ceresa, but that is just a souped up Contagion spell which costs 40 mana (for a Mage) and can be cast in 1 turn rather than the 2 turns Contagion takes. Instant casting is very useful and does a lot of damage before the enemy move if you have a high initiative Sovereign. The damage of both spells depends on how many death shards you have but carries on for 10 turns.
A similar mass damage spell based on Death and Water magic is Horrific Wail. That depends only on the level of the caster and not the number of death shards so is good later on once your champions get higher level.
I'm not sure how useful your high dodge monk type units will be as they won't do much damage if armed only with a staff. Perhaps you could give them some extra damage with amulet flames and amulet of frost but then they start getting expensive.
Yeah, so far I'm pretty underwhelmed with the cheap dodgers. They seem to get hit an awful lot for having 50 damage and other than dodge they really don't have any other damage mitigation. The supporting bows are weak against anything with defense and the staffs aren't packing enough of a punch to knock out most mobs before a crit lands. The +3 on kill for them is a bit nice as well - at least for trash mobs. My troops are essentially trash mobs against high level critters though.
Sov is still doing ok, but 1 unit can only do so much.
Oddly - I'm on an ecomental XXL map with 14 total empires and I haven't found a single crystal or iron ore yet. So NO ONE has high defense. I've explored most of the map too, really weird. I have 50 metal from a quest and 60 crystal from 2 packs of ophidians.
Armies that are only good against trash can be fine if you have a high powered champion to go out and conqueror cities. But with this strategy you need some way of keeping the pace up, because your only real defense is the spearhead offense of your champion.
(But this is a surprisingly good defense, in part because of the resource limitations involved in building good units, and also the lack of an ability in the AI to form useful situational goals.)
I created a custom Wraith faction w/ Lucky, intending to make a crazy-OP army of dodging warriors. So far however I haven't been particularly amazed. Sure, you can get the dodge rate really high with the right combination of traits, equipment and mounts, but it takes a long time to get everything together, and low health still makes combat dangerous. I think they're balanced fairly well now.
My current OP wraith unit is my level 22 sovereign, with:
6 moves, 3 attack, 5 defense, 42 hit points, 22 initiative, 97 accuracy, 26 dodge, 8 crit chance, 0 cold resist, 50 fire resist, 0 lightning resist, 0 poison resist, 40 spell resist, 144 spell mastery.
Of course, this intimidates no one, not even the AI.
And, ironically, my most dangerous opponent has been a custom pariden sovereign I built, which the AI is totally underusing. (With only 144 spell mastery on my part, that sovereign's 76 spell resist -- in part thanks to discipline -- means my spells sometimes fail, and both sovereigns are impulsive, and that one has a significantly higher initiative than this one... but for example, the proper approach should be to flame dart me, since I do not have the health to survive a half-strength flame dart, and no one has ever flame darted me.)
Also, when I have played pariden, I have made significant use of strategic map spells, but not once have I been frozen, or tremored or pillar of flamed, or fire stormed, or tornado'd or tidal waved or howled... and these are all useful for rescheduling a battle so that appropriately strong units can take action, or cancelling it so that they do not have to. I suspect that a part of the problem, though, is that the AI knows that I liked using destiny's gift a lot in 1.02 and using that in 1.1 would be a serious mana drain -- in 1.1 I think I would stick to celerity for a caster (if you do your battles right, and have sufficient initiative you almost never get hit) and stick to a "10% of gross mana" rule for permanent buffs (except in a rare situation where the permanent buffs would put me over some kind of threshold needed to survive and win a critical battle).
Resoln looks to me more like mid to late game nukers that units needing dodge. With 10 Death Shards and sovereign specced for spell damage/mastery and generally death magic, Dirge of Ceresa can wipe out normal mobs in one to two hits, touch of entropy insta-kill anything for over 300 damage and the summonings from death shrines are awesome free scouts with 3 moves. The only thing that could pose any problems are units with magic immunity.
Or a war that has a greater number of fronts than you have death mages that can cast dirge...
Note also that only some of your shards will be inside cities with essences, so a human player faced with resoln would have on their list of priorities "destroy death altars/shrines/temples" (with the usual "cost/benefit" thing that we use to pick our opportunities). And you only need 1 attack and 1 hp to take an unprotected outpost or resource (I do not think pioneers can take outposts, can they? I mean if you have not imbued them with any attack...)
Also, note that shadow bolt is relatively cheap (in terms of mana cost for a death mage), so you need to make sure that you arrange your battles such that they cannot be won by shadow bolt, and you need to arrange for them to be over quickly because some other spells can also be devastating in a prolonged battle.
But all of the above assumes a warlock resoln, and a summoning resoln poses a different set of problems. Remember that summoning bonuses apply to your entire faction. Also, keep in mind that those grave elementals love to snack on pioneers. Also, some of the most powerful resoln spells (like wither/blood sigil) do not care about spell resistances, and of course death magic can get really bad in a prolonged battle (but it's life that can prolong battles, so during early game, before resoln has gotten a sovereign with life magic to surrender, this might not be such a big deal).
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