Brainjuggler

Join Date 10/2012

Faction skill balance

I love the new faction skills, they add essential depth and variety. But some of them need some adjusting, IMO:

Rush: a great skill, your melee troops rush to the front lines

Double Strike: another great skill on paper (I admit I haven't tested it yet )

Flame Tongue: this one is lacking. In my last game it never did more damage than standard attacks. Up the damage to level x2 or so, add the burning effect, but remove the unit multiplier. Might need to increase the cooldown, too.

Soul Spark: mana cost is way too high, especially early game its just unusable. I want this to be a spammy-kiting skill: drop the cooldown to 1 turn, remove the unit multiplier, lower the cost to around 3, have it deal something like 1 damage per level plus one per shard. Then you can run around the field, slowly shocking your enemies to death, which strikes me as the glass-cannon magic-focused Amarian-style.

Wraith Touch: A great idea, perfect for the race that doesn't heal, but currently it deals far too little damage/healing (is it my imagination or does this only heal, deals no damage at all?). It needs to be at least level x2, possibly at a range of ~3, maybe reduce the cooldown.

Fortify: very useful skill, and requires smart tactics when deciding where to place it

Guarded Strike: good but not great...kinda undecided on this one

Berserk: needs a buff. If I'm going to forego all the new skills LH added then it better be worth it. Add 1 attack per 1-2 levels or something.

My two cents.

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Berserk really doesn't need a buff, it's crazy strong early on and still powerful towards the end, get some warg riders with axes and+3 move trait you will pretty much reach most of the enemy units in the first turn and do a buttload of damage.

Tip: use berserk after moving your units will take an extra move towards the enemy.

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Berserk AI just needs to be more aggressive i find it going into a defensive stance or moving away far too often.

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Alstein

Join Date 07/2004

+55

Double strike is awesome, but the weakness of Tarth's other blood trait in this game balances it out. (those extra troops means you get a sand golem early using it will lower the attack of your stack)

Wraith touch is underpowered

Soul Spark I think is fine, but the mana cost is too high.

Berserk would be good if the double move on activation could be usable by the AI.

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last game I played as Magnar so i had the opportunity to play around with quendar blood / flame tongue. i think it's not very useful as it is.

possible improvements might be:

a) more damage: maybe add the flame damage on top of the base weapon damage - so it's always better than the basic melee attack?

keep the damage calculation but give it a range (maybe 3-4 tiles, similar to throwing knives), so it would be useful as a secondary attack to do some damage when your melee units don't have a target in striking range at the end of their turn.

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Alstein

Join Date 07/2004

+55

I'll say this: Strike Gattison+ Double Strike+ Cooperation or Longbows= Dead militia on first turn.

Tarth getting a Lvl 3 Fortress is pretty much an auto-win. That said, they have serious unrest issues, so they have to pretty much go on a razing spree.

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Quoting Alstein,

reply 5

That said, they have serious unrest issues, so they have to pretty much go on a razing spree.

That's the reason why I don't play them. Sad really as I like the idea of their play style.

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Alstein

Join Date 07/2004

+55

It's annoying. The nerf to clerics/shrines hurts them. We really need some more anti-unrest buildings high up on the tech tree

Entertainment should give another unrest building.

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Wraith Touch and Flame Tongue are awesome! You guys just aren't leveling your units high enough. My units were doing 56 damage with Flame Tongue.

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Quoting Chubberz,

reply 6

Quoting Alstein, reply 5
That said, they have serious unrest issues, so they have to pretty much go on a razing spree.

That's the reason why I don't play them. Sad really as I like the idea of their play style.

Just make a custom faction.

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Quoting Trojasmic,

reply 8

Wraith Touch and Flame Tongue are awesome! You guys just aren't leveling your units high enough. My units were doing 56 damage with Flame Tongue.

Not until late game you weren't, and therein lies the problem. The unit multiplier makes both skills amazing lategame but useless early game. Starting militia units will deal a whole 3 damage with these skills. Say you get them 3 more levels (not trivial) and upgrade them to groups, then they'd deal 16 damage. Now we're getting somewhere but by this point we could make swordsmen groups with offense over 40.

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Quoting Trojasmic,

reply 8

Wraith Touch and Flame Tongue are awesome! You guys just aren't leveling your units high enough. My units were doing 56 damage with Flame Tongue.

if your trained units need to be high level to make the racial skills worth using, I wouldn't call them awesome to be honest. trained units are essentially cannon fodder - sure you can have a stack of elite units and if you play carefully they will probably survive most of the game and reach high levels. but on the other hand, with the new swarm mechanic that can instantly wipe out frontline units before you can even do something, i'd prefer a racial that is also useful on newly built units.

i can see why they gave the quendar an ability that scales with level - after all, the quendar race has the slaves attached as a "sub race" and they are pretty much designed as the pawns you sacrifice to protect the more valuable actual quendar units. but still, i think flame tongue would be a lot more useful with a bit more range, so it would basically act as a free (and more powerful) throwing knive for your trained units

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Quoting Raptarius,

reply 1

I agree with this. I have been playing a Trog campaig, and have been loving berserk as it is. Yes, that double movement is amazing for getting to their back line quicky. Obviously, since you don't have control of them, you should be close to the back line archer/mage than the melee units you passes up before going berzerk.

I also love fortify, and love the strategy needed for its use. And though I have used wraith stike well before, against a banshee and I had no other management damage, so used counterspell to interrupt banshee's one spell, and then wraith touch to do the damage. But I agree, it doesn't scale well.

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All the Dmg abilities need a buff its true, there are bigger fish to fry though.

I really dislike rush it seems OP and blah. Rush is just dumb when used with fast cavalry units. AI never gets high initiative units so I get first strike and can pick my targets. Killing anything and everything before its first turn.

My biggest problem with rush though is that it doesn't improve with levels. All racial skills should get better as the unit levels.

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Double strike + luck = Double damage units, use spears or axes for the melee and the fight is generally over by the time you have used your unit abilities.

As for unrest just get an extra fort with lots of food early and focus on growing it to get prison and that throne for the -40% unrest empire wide.

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The more I play the more I dislike the unit multipliers on these skills. They are vastly underpowered for heroes and vastly overpowered for trained units, especially late game (a lvl 15 Magnar will deal 15 damage with flame tongue while a lvl 5 company will deal 30). I suggest re-balancing them around unit levels or attack values or shard count or things that scale better over time.

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Guarded Strike needs to do 100% damage IMO. Even on a defender sov with all the +def while defending traits it's not a very useful skill, it does a lot less than half damage usually because of the defense mechanic, it's barely better than just passing your turn, and in the situations where you might need to defend with a unit you are usually better off having them run away first.

Double Strike and the other weapon skills need some work, currently I think all of them convert all damage to physical, which sucks when you especially want that extra elemental damage from rings and special weapons (banshees). I'm actually not sure if they convert it or just ignore elemental damage completely.

Rush is crap with the new smaller maps. You either already have the movement to reach the enemy in one turn (especially with charge and/or mounts), or you can't reach the ones you want even with rush due to the enemy front line blocking you.

Wraith Touch needs to do significantly more damage, perhaps double or triple it but only have it heal half the damage done for balance.

I haven't played with the others yet.

Quoting Brainjuggler,

reply 15

You mean like nearly every other attack in the game?

A level 5 company with lightning hammers will do 84 damage btw, add say an extra 36 from double charge, multiplied by 2 with the +100% damage blunt special. So no I wouldn't say a 30 damage flametongue is overpowered.

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Quoting Sanati,

reply 16

You mean like nearly every other attack in the game?

A level 5 company with lightning hammers will do 84 damage btw, add say an extra 36 from double charge, multiplied by 2 with the +100% damage blunt special. So no I wouldn't say a 30 damage flametongue is overpowered.

Yes, like many other attacks, I don't like how the multipliers scale. A company gets a x6 multiplier on flame tongue, a hero never gets more than x1. If you can trick out your company as above then the skills are useless, another balance issue.

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Update: been playing with Altar and Rush is a great skill early game, but it fades a bit once you get mounted units and whatnot. Yet another example of scaling.

I also tested Double Strike - its pretty awesome and scales much better than other skills. If I wanted to be really picky I might suggest the accuracy penalty be a percentage instead of a flat 30.

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Quoting Brainjuggler,

reply 18

Rush is a great skill early game, but it fades a bit once you get mounted units and whatnot. Yet another example of scaling.

Not true. Once you unlock cavalry and high dmg weapons rush become monstrous. Rush, horses, cleave and impale combine to allow you set up perfect Aoe skills that murder whole armies before they can hit back.

Quoting Brainjuggler,

reply 18

I also tested Double Strike - its pretty awesome and scales much better than other skills. If I wanted to be really picky I might suggest the accuracy penalty be a percentage instead of a flat 30.

Ya, I wish more skills were like double strike.

Quoting Sanati,

reply 16

Guarded Strike needs to do 100% damage IMO.

Agree

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Borg999

Join Date 02/2006

+59

Quoting ,

quoting post

I love the new faction skills, they add essential depth and variety. But some of them need some adjusting, IMO:

Flame Tongue: this one is lacking. In my last game it never did more damage than standard attacks. Up the damage to level x2 or so, add the burning effect, but remove the unit multiplier. Might need to increase the cooldown, too.

I completely agree with this.

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I like the ideas of reducing mana cost on Soul Spark and increasing damage of Guarded Strike to 100%. The others are fine in my opinion.

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I'm testing these mods ATM:

Flame tongue: 1.25% attack

Soul Spark: 3 mana, 2 turn CD, level +3 damage

Wraith Touch: level x3 damage

Guarded Strike: 100% damage

no unit multipliers on any of them

So far is a big improvement, but I might have overpowered some of them. Will continue testing.

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