Dark Side Spell Analysis Part 2: Order Magic
Surprisingly, no Order Spell has been removed compared to Warriors of the North. Well, sort of. Dragon Slayer has been dumped and replaced with the more general Titan Slayer, but this is more of a buff and reframing of an existing Spell than an actual removal.
One interesting point is that Runic Word is actually in the code as an Order Spell, but it's commented-out, suggesting that they'd long planned to dump Rune Magic as a school but had originally intended to keep Runes as a mechanic, and changed their mind fairly late in development. The other Rune Magic Spells that weren't co-opted are also still in the code, but they've been shunted off to their own section, not commented-out within the other schools, suggesting they were held onto only for just-in-case purposes, rather than with any intent to use them in this game. Indeed, Runic Word even has code for Warlock benefiting it!
Axe of Magic
Crystal Cost: 2 / 5 / 8
Mana Cost: 5 / 12 / 18
Level 1 Statistics: Damage: 100; Axes: 1
Level 2 Statistics: Damage: 200; Axes: 2
Level 3 Statistics: Damage: 300; Axes: 3
Hits a single enemy unit for Physical damage.
For whatever reason, its Magic Crystal and Mana costs have been somewhat increased past the first level, further ensuring it's not really worth using when you could just use Ghost Blade or Chaos Missiles or any number of other Spells.
I'd recommend you never bother even learning it.
Lightning
Crystal Cost: 7 / 10 / 20
Mana Cost: 15 / 25 / 35
Level 1 Statistics: Strikes one target
Level 2 Statistics: Bounces to additional targets twice
Level 3 Statistics: Bounces to additional targets four times
Hits a single target for 100-200 Magic damage, with a 15% chance to Shock. Higher Levels of the spell will also 'bounce' to additional targets.
Inexplicably, its damage has been changed to no longer rise with Level. As such, it's now horribly, horribly bad, only vaguely useful at Level 1 if you get it reasonably early and absolutely not worth Leveling at all.
Healing
Crystal Cost: 1 / 2 / 3
Mana Cost: 3 / 2 / 1
Level 1 Statistics: Healing/Damage: 50, Duration Reduction: 1
Level 2 Statistics: Healing/Damage: 150, Duration Reduction: 2
Level 3 Statistics: Healing/Damage: 250; Duration Reduction: Infinite
Targets a single allied organic non-Dark unit or a single enemy Dark unit. Allied Light or Neutral organic units are healed, though dead units cannot be recovered this way, while enemy Dark units take Magic damage instead. Inorganic units cannot be targeted at all. Reduces the duration of Bleedand Plague when targeted on an ally. Damage is equal to half the healing value.
Switched to a Light/Dark distinction, and no longer binary on purging negative effects. (Though it doesn't affect Poison anymore, either) It also now only uses half its number when doing damage, for whatever reason. The above describes the 'basic' version of the Spell: there's a Quest to upgrade it to a Dark-compatible version. You shouldn't learn Healing directly yourself, as its base version is borderline useless and critically once you've turned in three Healing Scrolls you're taught the Dark Heal Spell without having to burn a Magic Crystal on it.
The Dark version will heal any organic ally or harm any organic aligned enemy. (ie it won't hurt Neutral units or Vikings) Other than this and having a modified animation, it's identical to the regular version.
In practice, its primary use is purging Bleeding to prevent casualties. The nuking capability is more general than in prior games, but it's also much weaker; 50 Magic damage was already worse than Flaming Arrow's 70 Fire damage, but now that it's 25 Magic damage it's just pathetic. Healing has always had a favorable growth factor relative to most damage Spells, gaining twice its base damage instead of roughly its base damage, but where in prior games that meant Level 3 Healing did 250 Magic damage to Undead vs Level 3 Flaming Arrow doing 210 Fire damage, in Dark Side it means doing 125 Magic damage to non-Neutral enemies. Notice that Lightning will roll better than that 75% of the time. (While now being awful, it should be emphasized)
So unless it's vitally important the damage is cheap, Healing just isn't good as a nuke Spell in Dark Side.
The healing, meanwhile, runs into two problems: first of all, it takes until at minimum partway through Monteville to be able to get the Dark version of Heal. Second of all, Dark Side's early game has fairly accelerated Leadership growth in general compared to prior games. The combination of the two means there is a very narrow window in which non-resurrecting healing is particularly valuable. If you take advantage of early-game Red Dragons, you might get some real use out of it, maybe, but overall? Healing is mostly good for purging Bleeding.
Which makes it unfortunate that it merely reduces the duration of Bleeding prior to getting it to Level 3. The Level 1 and 2 versions are nearly useless most of the time.
A 7-tile circular region becomes affected by a rain of holy light, healing allied units each turn (Including immediately upon casting), while inflicting Bleeding on enemy creatures. Later turn activations act with an Initiative of 2.
Life Light has been completely overhauled into something far more coherent with the name in the .txt file: Holy Rain. It's cheaper past the first level, lasts multiple turns, heals multiple times, and instead of scaring off Undead it causes enemies to Bleed, which being percentile damage+max Health reduction is amazing. The actual healing is worse up-front than in the previous games, but since it activates multiple times that's misleading, and it's cheaper, and mass-Bleeding is, again, amazing. (Not to mention the healing was never all that useful of an effect by the time you got it in prior games)
It's also been given a Dark counterpart...
Dark Shroud
Crystal Cost: 4 / 8 / 16
Mana Cost: 10 / 10 / 10
Level 1 Statistics: Healing: 40, Bleed Power: 8%, Duration: 2
A 7-tile circular region becomes affected by a rain of evil stuff, healing allied units each turn (Including immediately upon casting), while inflicting Bleeding on enemy creatures. Later turn activations act with an Initiative of 2.
... though while the game will insist these two Spells care about the Light/Dark divide, in actuality their animations are the only difference. You might as well pick whichever you prefer the animation for and focus on it.
One caveat on the healing: the game is a bit weird, and if there's multiple injured units being healed by Dark Shroud/Life Light at the same time, the healing will sometimes be no more than the weakest healing being provided. Uninjured units don't 'count', but if you have an Imp stack missing 5 Health sitting next to an Archdemon stack missing 500 Health, you can end up only healing 5 Health on the Archdemons. This is a fairly obnoxious, weird limitation if you're trying to use either Spell primarily as a healing Spell, but honestly they're both far better used to inflict mass Bleeding, with any healing that happens being treated as a bonus, so it's not a big deal, just something to keep in mind when you're considering your moves.
And another example of Dark Side's weird bugginess in action.
I have no idea what causes it to sometimes have this glitch and other times not. I've yet to find the pattern to it.
But that's not too bad, as mass Bleeding is amazing no matter which class/character you're playing as, and most of the time healing a unit is a bonus.
Summon Phoenix
Crystal Cost: 10 / 15 / 20
Mana Cost: 20 / 25 / 35
Level 1 Statistics: Summons: Young Phoenix
Level 2 Statistics: Summons: Mature Phoenix
Level 3 Statistics: Summons: Ancient Phoenix
Summons an allied Phoenix in a chosen tile. The tile must be adjacent to an allied unit. You may only have one Phoenix on the field at a time.
The Spell itself is completely unmodified from Warriors of the North.
One interesting point is that Runic Word is actually in the code as an Order Spell, but it's commented-out, suggesting that they'd long planned to dump Rune Magic as a school but had originally intended to keep Runes as a mechanic, and changed their mind fairly late in development. The other Rune Magic Spells that weren't co-opted are also still in the code, but they've been shunted off to their own section, not commented-out within the other schools, suggesting they were held onto only for just-in-case purposes, rather than with any intent to use them in this game. Indeed, Runic Word even has code for Warlock benefiting it!
Axe of Magic
Crystal Cost: 2 / 5 / 8
Mana Cost: 5 / 12 / 18
Level 1 Statistics: Damage: 100; Axes: 1
Level 2 Statistics: Damage: 200; Axes: 2
Level 3 Statistics: Damage: 300; Axes: 3
Hits a single enemy unit for Physical damage.
For whatever reason, its Magic Crystal and Mana costs have been somewhat increased past the first level, further ensuring it's not really worth using when you could just use Ghost Blade or Chaos Missiles or any number of other Spells.
I'd recommend you never bother even learning it.
Lightning
Crystal Cost: 7 / 10 / 20
Mana Cost: 15 / 25 / 35
Level 1 Statistics: Strikes one target
Level 2 Statistics: Bounces to additional targets twice
Level 3 Statistics: Bounces to additional targets four times
Hits a single target for 100-200 Magic damage, with a 15% chance to Shock. Higher Levels of the spell will also 'bounce' to additional targets.
Inexplicably, its damage has been changed to no longer rise with Level. As such, it's now horribly, horribly bad, only vaguely useful at Level 1 if you get it reasonably early and absolutely not worth Leveling at all.
I have no idea why Dark Side made this change. Lightning was always difficult to find good opportunities to use it past the early game; it didn't need to be nerfed. This is just bizarre.
Healing
Crystal Cost: 1 / 2 / 3
Mana Cost: 3 / 2 / 1
Level 1 Statistics: Healing/Damage: 50, Duration Reduction: 1
Level 2 Statistics: Healing/Damage: 150, Duration Reduction: 2
Level 3 Statistics: Healing/Damage: 250; Duration Reduction: Infinite
Targets a single allied organic non-Dark unit or a single enemy Dark unit. Allied Light or Neutral organic units are healed, though dead units cannot be recovered this way, while enemy Dark units take Magic damage instead. Inorganic units cannot be targeted at all. Reduces the duration of Bleed
Switched to a Light/Dark distinction, and no longer binary on purging negative effects. (Though it doesn't affect Poison anymore, either) It also now only uses half its number when doing damage, for whatever reason. The above describes the 'basic' version of the Spell: there's a Quest to upgrade it to a Dark-compatible version. You shouldn't learn Healing directly yourself, as its base version is borderline useless and critically once you've turned in three Healing Scrolls you're taught the Dark Heal Spell without having to burn a Magic Crystal on it.
The Dark version will heal any organic ally or harm any organic aligned enemy. (ie it won't hurt Neutral units or Vikings) Other than this and having a modified animation, it's identical to the regular version.
In practice, its primary use is purging Bleeding to prevent casualties. The nuking capability is more general than in prior games, but it's also much weaker; 50 Magic damage was already worse than Flaming Arrow's 70 Fire damage, but now that it's 25 Magic damage it's just pathetic. Healing has always had a favorable growth factor relative to most damage Spells, gaining twice its base damage instead of roughly its base damage, but where in prior games that meant Level 3 Healing did 250 Magic damage to Undead vs Level 3 Flaming Arrow doing 210 Fire damage, in Dark Side it means doing 125 Magic damage to non-Neutral enemies. Notice that Lightning will roll better than that 75% of the time. (While now being awful, it should be emphasized)
So unless it's vitally important the damage is cheap, Healing just isn't good as a nuke Spell in Dark Side.
The healing, meanwhile, runs into two problems: first of all, it takes until at minimum partway through Monteville to be able to get the Dark version of Heal. Second of all, Dark Side's early game has fairly accelerated Leadership growth in general compared to prior games. The combination of the two means there is a very narrow window in which non-resurrecting healing is particularly valuable. If you take advantage of early-game Red Dragons, you might get some real use out of it, maybe, but overall? Healing is mostly good for purging Bleeding.
Which makes it unfortunate that it merely reduces the duration of Bleeding prior to getting it to Level 3. The Level 1 and 2 versions are nearly useless most of the time.
Oh, and as a bonus it has the all-too-common 'thing that claims to purge Plague doesn't actually do so' issue.
It at least has Defiler boost both its healing and damage?
Resurrection
Crystal Cost: 10 / 15 / 25
Mana Cost: 10 / 20 / 30
Level 1 Statistics: Recovers Health: 200; Target's Level: 1-2
Level 2 Statistics: Recovers Health: 400; Target's Level: 1-3
Level 3 Statistics: Recovers Health: 600; Target's Level: 1-4
Targets a single allied non-Dark organic unit, restoring health to the unit. 'Overflow' healing will resurrect dead members of the unit if it has suffered casualties in the current battle. Can even target corpses, restoring a fallen stack to functionality.
As with Healing, you can get a Dark version of the Spell that works on basically anything (Yes, even Plants) and doesn't demand Crystals for that first level. Otherwise, its mechanics haven't really changed.
Getting the Dark Resurrection Quest done usually takes until you're closing in on the end of the game, unfortunately. As such, where in prior games it was possible to get lucky with an early Resurrection Scroll changing things from quite early on, in Dark Side you basically always end up only getting a hold of it when you're so far into the game it's not so important a utility.
This is further exacerbated by the extremeness of class/character differences; if you're playing Daert, your Intellect will be massive enough for Resurrection to undo shockingly significant casualties, but you won't care because a turn spent undoing casualties is a turn not spent killing things with your mind, and your army is too tiny to really contribute. If you're playing Neoline or to a lesser extent Bagyr, your army will be massive and prone to getting into the thick of things to potentially take casualties, but you won't have the Intellect to properly support Resurrection.
As such, while the raw changes to Resurrection seem like Dark Side should be its best entry in the series, in practice it's probably its worst.
Dispel
Crystal Cost: 1 / 2 / 5
Mana Cost: 5 / 5 / 5
Level 1 Statistics: Removes most effects on a friendly target.
Level 2 Statistics: Removes most effects on a friendly or enemy target.
Level 3 Statistics: Removes most negative effects on a friendly target or all positive effects on an enemy target.
Targets a single unit, removing some portion of effects on the unit. Burn, Freeze, Bleeding, and Poisoning are unaffected.
No longer works on the damage time over effects. Which sucks, since those were the main effects you wanted to be able to Dispel on a consistent basis.
Heroes that use Phantom are also nearly nonexistent in Dark Side, making it much less useful to get to Dispel 2.
It's still useful to have Dispel at times, and it's sufficiently cheap on Magic Crystals it's probably worth leveling whenever you can just in case, but you won't use it nearly as often as in prior games.
Life Light
Crystal Cost: 4 / 8 / 16
Mana Cost: 10 / 10 / 10
Level 1 Statistics: Healing: 40, Bleed Power: 8%, Duration: 2
Level 2 Statistics: Healing: 80, Bleed Power: 16%, Duration: 3
Resurrection
Crystal Cost: 10 / 15 / 25
Mana Cost: 10 / 20 / 30
Level 1 Statistics: Recovers Health: 200; Target's Level: 1-2
Level 2 Statistics: Recovers Health: 400; Target's Level: 1-3
Level 3 Statistics: Recovers Health: 600; Target's Level: 1-4
Targets a single allied non-Dark organic unit, restoring health to the unit. 'Overflow' healing will resurrect dead members of the unit if it has suffered casualties in the current battle. Can even target corpses, restoring a fallen stack to functionality.
As with Healing, you can get a Dark version of the Spell that works on basically anything (Yes, even Plants) and doesn't demand Crystals for that first level. Otherwise, its mechanics haven't really changed.
Getting the Dark Resurrection Quest done usually takes until you're closing in on the end of the game, unfortunately. As such, where in prior games it was possible to get lucky with an early Resurrection Scroll changing things from quite early on, in Dark Side you basically always end up only getting a hold of it when you're so far into the game it's not so important a utility.
This is further exacerbated by the extremeness of class/character differences; if you're playing Daert, your Intellect will be massive enough for Resurrection to undo shockingly significant casualties, but you won't care because a turn spent undoing casualties is a turn not spent killing things with your mind, and your army is too tiny to really contribute. If you're playing Neoline or to a lesser extent Bagyr, your army will be massive and prone to getting into the thick of things to potentially take casualties, but you won't have the Intellect to properly support Resurrection.
As such, while the raw changes to Resurrection seem like Dark Side should be its best entry in the series, in practice it's probably its worst.
Dispel
Crystal Cost: 1 / 2 / 5
Mana Cost: 5 / 5 / 5
Level 1 Statistics: Removes most effects on a friendly target.
Level 2 Statistics: Removes most effects on a friendly or enemy target.
Level 3 Statistics: Removes most negative effects on a friendly target or all positive effects on an enemy target.
Targets a single unit, removing some portion of effects on the unit. Burn, Freeze, Bleeding, and Poisoning are unaffected.
No longer works on the damage time over effects. Which sucks, since those were the main effects you wanted to be able to Dispel on a consistent basis.
Heroes that use Phantom are also nearly nonexistent in Dark Side, making it much less useful to get to Dispel 2.
It's still useful to have Dispel at times, and it's sufficiently cheap on Magic Crystals it's probably worth leveling whenever you can just in case, but you won't use it nearly as often as in prior games.
Life Light
Crystal Cost: 4 / 8 / 16
Mana Cost: 10 / 10 / 10
Level 1 Statistics: Healing: 40, Bleed Power: 8%, Duration: 2
Level 2 Statistics: Healing: 80, Bleed Power: 16%, Duration: 3
Level 3 Statistics: Healing: 120, Bleed Power: 24%, Duration: 4
A 7-tile circular region becomes affected by a rain of holy light, healing allied units each turn (Including immediately upon casting), while inflicting Bleeding on enemy creatures. Later turn activations act with an Initiative of 2.
Life Light has been completely overhauled into something far more coherent with the name in the .txt file: Holy Rain. It's cheaper past the first level, lasts multiple turns, heals multiple times, and instead of scaring off Undead it causes enemies to Bleed, which being percentile damage+max Health reduction is amazing. The actual healing is worse up-front than in the previous games, but since it activates multiple times that's misleading, and it's cheaper, and mass-Bleeding is, again, amazing. (Not to mention the healing was never all that useful of an effect by the time you got it in prior games)
It's also been given a Dark counterpart...
Dark Shroud
Crystal Cost: 4 / 8 / 16
Mana Cost: 10 / 10 / 10
Level 1 Statistics: Healing: 40, Bleed Power: 8%, Duration: 2
Level 2 Statistics: Healing: 80, Bleed Power: 16%, Duration: 3
Level 3 Statistics: Healing: 120, Bleed Power: 24%, Duration: 4
A 7-tile circular region becomes affected by a rain of evil stuff, healing allied units each turn (Including immediately upon casting), while inflicting Bleeding on enemy creatures. Later turn activations act with an Initiative of 2.
... though while the game will insist these two Spells care about the Light/Dark divide, in actuality their animations are the only difference. You might as well pick whichever you prefer the animation for and focus on it.
This is another case where you can turn in three copies of the Light version of the Spell to be taught the Dark version. In this case, the only practical benefits are quest advancement, saving 4 Mana Crystals, and that Dark Shroud advances a Medal while Life Light does not. That's enough to be worth pursuing it, but much less of a payoff than some of these Quest-learnable Spells.
Note that unlike the other four cases of turning in Light Scrolls to learn a Dark Spell, you don't simply upgrade the Light Spell into an omnicompetent version of itself; Dark Shroud is a distinct Spell in its own right, with its own graphic and place in your Spellbook. It's also worth noting that Life Light is considered by the game to be a fairly ridiculously high-value Spell, and as such the Scrolls are rare: it may take a long time to actually get Dark Shroud via Quest, and unlike the other Light-to-Dark-from-Quest Spells, Dark Shroud is very useful the instant you learn it. Given all these factors, it's worth considering learning Dark Shroud manually if you luck into its Scroll early on, instead of trying to save on valuable Magic Crystals at the cost of spending much of the game without Dark Shroud. Particularly since Dark Shroud is one of the better ways to build progress on one of your Medals: the earlier you get started on such Medals, the better.
One caveat on the healing: the game is a bit weird, and if there's multiple injured units being healed by Dark Shroud/Life Light at the same time, the healing will sometimes be no more than the weakest healing being provided. Uninjured units don't 'count', but if you have an Imp stack missing 5 Health sitting next to an Archdemon stack missing 500 Health, you can end up only healing 5 Health on the Archdemons. This is a fairly obnoxious, weird limitation if you're trying to use either Spell primarily as a healing Spell, but honestly they're both far better used to inflict mass Bleeding, with any healing that happens being treated as a bonus, so it's not a big deal, just something to keep in mind when you're considering your moves.
And another example of Dark Side's weird bugginess in action.
I have no idea what causes it to sometimes have this glitch and other times not. I've yet to find the pattern to it.
But that's not too bad, as mass Bleeding is amazing no matter which class/character you're playing as, and most of the time healing a unit is a bonus.
Note that the 'Bleed Power' is relative to the base Bleed strength, meaning that Level 3 Life Light/Dark Shroud at base actually takes the baseline 5-10% damage and reduces it to less than a quarter. Fortunately, this is boosted by Intellect and the Wight Skill; at Rank 3 Wight and 68 Intellect, the Bleed will be just as strong as base Bleed, and then grow stronger from there. Daert will trivially shoot well past 68 Intellect in the mid-to-late-game.
Also note that the duration for Life Light/Dark Shroud's field effect is boosted by the Defiler Skill and standard Intellect-based duration extension. Battles in Dark Side tend to be short enough 4 turns is already plenty, but hey.
Bless
Crystal Cost: 3 / 3 / 10
Mana Cost: 10 / 10 / 20
Level 1 Statistics: Duration: 2 turns
Level 2 Statistics: Duration: 3 turns
Level 3 Statistics: Mass; Duration: 3 turns
Affected units always roll for maximum damage on all attacks. (Melee or ranged) Cannot be applied to Dark or inorganic units.
Bless is now barred from being cast on any Dark units, instead of Undead in specific.
... but it's another Spell you can turn in three copies of its Scroll to be taught a Dark version for free. At that point it can be cast on anything that isn't a droid, Cyclops, or Spell-immune. And yes, it still affects Talents, just like in Warriors of the North.
And it's not at all unusual for you to find 3 Bless Scrolls in a single shop, so you can easily get the Dark Bless done quite early in the game -I've had runs where getting a hold of the guy who kicks off the Quest is what delayed me from getting Dark Bless instead of the need to get three Scrolls.
It's not particularly useful for Daert, but it can be pretty amazing on Neoline, especially since she has strong incentives to use some of the more randomized units in the first place; Blood Priestesses, for example, very much appreciate always getting their high roll.
Titan Slayer
Crystal Cost: 3 / 3 / 25
Mana Cost: 5 / 10 / 25
Level 1 Statistics: Bonus Damage: 20%; Duration: 3 turns
Level 2 Statistics: Bonus Damage: 30%; Duration: 4 turns
Level 3 Statistics: Bonus Damage: 30%, Mass; Duration: 4 turns
Affected units gain bonus damage against Level 5 units.
Dragon Slayer's replacement, which applies to everything Dragon Slayer did and more. Huzzah!
I've personally never used it, but I can imagine a real person doing so, particularly when fighting eg a battlegroup made entirely of Black and Ice Dragons. It's not like you've got many other options in that scenario, after all.
Bless
Crystal Cost: 3 / 3 / 10
Mana Cost: 10 / 10 / 20
Level 1 Statistics: Duration: 2 turns
Level 2 Statistics: Duration: 3 turns
Level 3 Statistics: Mass; Duration: 3 turns
Affected units always roll for maximum damage on all attacks. (Melee or ranged) Cannot be applied to Dark or inorganic units.
Bless is now barred from being cast on any Dark units, instead of Undead in specific.
... but it's another Spell you can turn in three copies of its Scroll to be taught a Dark version for free. At that point it can be cast on anything that isn't a droid, Cyclops, or Spell-immune. And yes, it still affects Talents, just like in Warriors of the North.
And it's not at all unusual for you to find 3 Bless Scrolls in a single shop, so you can easily get the Dark Bless done quite early in the game -I've had runs where getting a hold of the guy who kicks off the Quest is what delayed me from getting Dark Bless instead of the need to get three Scrolls.
It's not particularly useful for Daert, but it can be pretty amazing on Neoline, especially since she has strong incentives to use some of the more randomized units in the first place; Blood Priestesses, for example, very much appreciate always getting their high roll.
Titan Slayer
Crystal Cost: 3 / 3 / 25
Mana Cost: 5 / 10 / 25
Level 1 Statistics: Bonus Damage: 20%; Duration: 3 turns
Level 2 Statistics: Bonus Damage: 30%; Duration: 4 turns
Level 3 Statistics: Bonus Damage: 30%, Mass; Duration: 4 turns
Affected units gain bonus damage against Level 5 units.
Dragon Slayer's replacement, which applies to everything Dragon Slayer did and more. Huzzah!
I've personally never used it, but I can imagine a real person doing so, particularly when fighting eg a battlegroup made entirely of Black and Ice Dragons. It's not like you've got many other options in that scenario, after all.
Though unfortunately where Dragon Slayer scaled its boost with Intellect, Titan Slayer does not, so that hurts it. It at least benefits from Warlock, allowing it to reach a maximum boost of +39%.
Magic Armor
Crystal Cost: 8 / 12 / 20
Mana Cost: 15 / 20 / 30
Level 1 Statistics: All Resistances: 20%; Duration: 2 turns
Level 2 Statistics: All Resistances: 25%; Duration: 3 turns
Level 3 Statistics: All Resistances: 30%; Duration: 4 turns
Sets a single allied unit's non-Astral ()resistances to a specific number, except for those resistances higher than that number, which are instead unaffected. Cannot be applied to Undead.
The name has been changed, presumably because the idea of our Dark heroes being backed by Christian-y divinities seems a bit off, but the mechanics are familiar. It's even barred from being applied to Undead still, unlike a lot of other discriminating Order Spells in Dark Side.
It's worth noting a Quest on Aralan calls for a Magic Armor Scroll. It's... a completely ignorable Quest, but if you're shooting for 100% completion you might consider holding onto a Magic Armor Scroll to make that Quest go faster.
Magic Armor remains held back by its high cost, failure to synergize with innate resistances, and to a lesser extent the continuing inability to apply it to Undead, but it's worth noting it actually now stacks favorably with external boosts to resistances, including your resistance-boosting Medal, the Lab Coat (A piece of Clothing you're guaranteed to be able to buy that boosts all resistances by up to 20 points), and Bagyr's unique Skill for raising all his unit resistances. As such, you can actually get some pretty high resistance values against eg Ice damage using Magic Armor; don't completely forget it exists.
Magic Armor
Crystal Cost: 8 / 12 / 20
Mana Cost: 15 / 20 / 30
Level 1 Statistics: All Resistances: 20%; Duration: 2 turns
Level 2 Statistics: All Resistances: 25%; Duration: 3 turns
Level 3 Statistics: All Resistances: 30%; Duration: 4 turns
Sets a single allied unit's non-Astral ()resistances to a specific number, except for those resistances higher than that number, which are instead unaffected. Cannot be applied to Undead.
The name has been changed, presumably because the idea of our Dark heroes being backed by Christian-y divinities seems a bit off, but the mechanics are familiar. It's even barred from being applied to Undead still, unlike a lot of other discriminating Order Spells in Dark Side.
It's worth noting a Quest on Aralan calls for a Magic Armor Scroll. It's... a completely ignorable Quest, but if you're shooting for 100% completion you might consider holding onto a Magic Armor Scroll to make that Quest go faster.
Magic Armor remains held back by its high cost, failure to synergize with innate resistances, and to a lesser extent the continuing inability to apply it to Undead, but it's worth noting it actually now stacks favorably with external boosts to resistances, including your resistance-boosting Medal, the Lab Coat (A piece of Clothing you're guaranteed to be able to buy that boosts all resistances by up to 20 points), and Bagyr's unique Skill for raising all his unit resistances. As such, you can actually get some pretty high resistance values against eg Ice damage using Magic Armor; don't completely forget it exists.
Note that Warlock affects it; Level 3 Magic Amor backed by Rank 3 Warlock gives you 39% global resistances, not 30%. Defiler also boosts its duration, allowing it to reach a duration of 5 turns.
Though conversely it no longer scales with Intellect; neither its resistances nor its duration go up with Intellect. So that's a bit of a loss compared to Warriors of the North.
This is probably its high point in the series, though.
Battle Cry
Crystal Cost: 3 / 12 / 20
Mana Cost: 5 / 10 / 15
Level 1 Statistics: Initiative: +1; Adrenaline/Frenzy: +5%, Duration: 2 turns
Level 2 Statistics: Initiative: +2; Adrenaline/Frenzy: +10%, Duration: 3 turns
Level 3 Statistics: Initiative: +3; Adrenaline/Frenzy: +15%, Duration: 4 turns
Increases Initiative of all allied units. Orcs and Demons generate additional Adrenaline/Frenzy by a percentage from combat.
Now it affects the new Frenzy mechanic on Demons, though instead of providing up-front Adrenaline/Frenzy it somewhat boosts the amount generated at a time. For units that are going to get into the thick of things, this is probably actually more useful, but for fueling units not getting into the thick of things it's a bit of a downgrade. In any event, this is probably the most useful it is in the entire series, and for Orc and Demon armies opening a battle with it is a really good idea if you're not playing Daert.
Somewhat lessening its importance is the overhaul to Onslaught and the addition of Foresight. Specifically, since Onslaught scales down over turns instead of vanishing instantly even at Rank 3, where in prior games it was often really important to cast Battle Cry on the first turn so you'd retain Initiative advantage on the next turn as well, late in Dark Side you'll often hold onto Initiative advantage all the way to the third turn. And if you kill all the enemies who have high enough Initiative for you to care by that time? Well, never mind Battle Cry then.
As an aside, just as with Sacrifice, there's a late-game Quest that calls for giving up a Battle Cry Scroll. If you're an obsessive completionist, you should hold onto a Battle Cry Scroll for that Quest so you don't have to go hunting for which store they're in later.
Battle Cry
Crystal Cost: 3 / 12 / 20
Mana Cost: 5 / 10 / 15
Level 1 Statistics: Initiative: +1; Adrenaline/Frenzy: +5%, Duration: 2 turns
Level 2 Statistics: Initiative: +2; Adrenaline/Frenzy: +10%, Duration: 3 turns
Level 3 Statistics: Initiative: +3; Adrenaline/Frenzy: +15%, Duration: 4 turns
Increases Initiative of all allied units. Orcs and Demons generate additional Adrenaline/Frenzy by a percentage from combat.
Now it affects the new Frenzy mechanic on Demons, though instead of providing up-front Adrenaline/Frenzy it somewhat boosts the amount generated at a time. For units that are going to get into the thick of things, this is probably actually more useful, but for fueling units not getting into the thick of things it's a bit of a downgrade. In any event, this is probably the most useful it is in the entire series, and for Orc and Demon armies opening a battle with it is a really good idea if you're not playing Daert.
Somewhat lessening its importance is the overhaul to Onslaught and the addition of Foresight. Specifically, since Onslaught scales down over turns instead of vanishing instantly even at Rank 3, where in prior games it was often really important to cast Battle Cry on the first turn so you'd retain Initiative advantage on the next turn as well, late in Dark Side you'll often hold onto Initiative advantage all the way to the third turn. And if you kill all the enemies who have high enough Initiative for you to care by that time? Well, never mind Battle Cry then.
As an aside, just as with Sacrifice, there's a late-game Quest that calls for giving up a Battle Cry Scroll. If you're an obsessive completionist, you should hold onto a Battle Cry Scroll for that Quest so you don't have to go hunting for which store they're in later.
Note that Warlock boosts the Initiative increase, resulting in a maximum of +4 Initiative.
Peacefulness
Crystal Cost: 3 / 3 / 3
Mana Cost: 5 / 7 / 10
Level 1 Statistics: Damage: -30%; Health: +20%; Adrenaline/Frenzy: -5%, Duration: 3 turns
Level 2 Statistics: Damage: -30%; Health: +35%; Adrenaline/Frenzy: -10%, Duration: 4 turns
Level 3 Statistics: Damage: -30%; Health: +50%; Adrenaline/Frenzy: -15%, Duration: 5 turns
A single unit -ally or enemy- has its HP increased while its Damage is decreased. Orcs and Demons additionally generate less Adrenaline/Frenzy by a percentage.
Peacefulness provides less Health below the final level, and the Adrenaline subtraction has been shifted to a reduction in generation rate, while also being extended to Frenzy. This makes it something to use as a pre-emptive measure to make a Demon or Orc less threatening, rather than a way to immediately shut off access to a Talent on Orcs. In the case of Demons the distinction isn't super-important, since Frenzy isn't directly manually spent anyway, and since Adrenaline Levels aren't a thing anymore anyway the change is less striking than you might think when it comes to Orcs, too.
I'm not sure why the Health scaling was adjusted, though. Maybe to make Priestesses of Blood a little less abusable?
Peacefulness
Crystal Cost: 3 / 3 / 3
Mana Cost: 5 / 7 / 10
Level 1 Statistics: Damage: -30%; Health: +20%; Adrenaline/Frenzy: -5%, Duration: 3 turns
Level 2 Statistics: Damage: -30%; Health: +35%; Adrenaline/Frenzy: -10%, Duration: 4 turns
Level 3 Statistics: Damage: -30%; Health: +50%; Adrenaline/Frenzy: -15%, Duration: 5 turns
A single unit -ally or enemy- has its HP increased while its Damage is decreased. Orcs and Demons additionally generate less Adrenaline/Frenzy by a percentage.
Peacefulness provides less Health below the final level, and the Adrenaline subtraction has been shifted to a reduction in generation rate, while also being extended to Frenzy. This makes it something to use as a pre-emptive measure to make a Demon or Orc less threatening, rather than a way to immediately shut off access to a Talent on Orcs. In the case of Demons the distinction isn't super-important, since Frenzy isn't directly manually spent anyway, and since Adrenaline Levels aren't a thing anymore anyway the change is less striking than you might think when it comes to Orcs, too.
I'm not sure why the Health scaling was adjusted, though. Maybe to make Priestesses of Blood a little less abusable?
Admittedly Warlock boosts the Health bonus, resulting in the maximum possible boost actually being +65% Health.
In any event, I've... personally never bothered. Priestesses of Blood can generate infinite troops from infinite summons, making efficiency per se a luxury rather than any kind of necessity, and the Adrenaline/Frenzy-slowing mechanic is largely irrelevant in its offensive uses. You almost never fight Orcs, and you fight Demons only slightly more often than that, giving you little opportunity to try to leverage it.
Alas.
Dragon Arrows
Crystal Cost: 2 / 3 / 4
Mana Cost: 3 / 4 / 5
Level 1 Statistics: Gives Dragon Arrows: 1
Level 2 Statistics: Gives Dragon Arrows: 2
Level 3 Statistics: Gives Dragon Arrows: 3
Grants a single allied archer-class unit (Bowmen/Bowmasters, Elves/Dark Elves, Hunters/Rangers, Skeleton Archers) charge(s) of the Dragon Arrows Talent. This Talent is a ranged attack that entirely ignores the target's Resistance and ignores 30% of the target's Defense, and regardless of the user's own range will never suffer damage penalties from being fired too far. The base damage is derived from the unit's base damage. The damage type is Astral.
Dragon Arrows no longer scales its count to Intellect, which is a pretty heavy nerf to it, though it probably hurts more that Dark Side overall shifts the pressure of what's good to use to units that aren't actual bow users. It also starts cheaper and ends more expensive, instead of having a flat cost, though you're still getting more Dragon Arrows for your Mana.
On the plus side for Dragon Arrows, Skeleton Archers are by far their best abuser, and you're guaranteed early supplies of them. On the minus side, your options are functionally sharply limited since Elves/Dark Elves and Hunters/Rangers take so long to gain access to and Bow Masters don't get long-term lifetime supplies if we don't count abusing Sacrificing.
As noted previously, Amazons have code for being able to benefit from Dragon Arrows, but are not properly tagged to be targetable with it, so Dark Side has no new Dragon Arrows abusers.
In any event, I've... personally never bothered. Priestesses of Blood can generate infinite troops from infinite summons, making efficiency per se a luxury rather than any kind of necessity, and the Adrenaline/Frenzy-slowing mechanic is largely irrelevant in its offensive uses. You almost never fight Orcs, and you fight Demons only slightly more often than that, giving you little opportunity to try to leverage it.
Alas.
Dragon Arrows
Crystal Cost: 2 / 3 / 4
Mana Cost: 3 / 4 / 5
Level 1 Statistics: Gives Dragon Arrows: 1
Level 2 Statistics: Gives Dragon Arrows: 2
Level 3 Statistics: Gives Dragon Arrows: 3
Grants a single allied archer-class unit (Bowmen/Bowmasters, Elves/Dark Elves, Hunters/Rangers, Skeleton Archers) charge(s) of the Dragon Arrows Talent. This Talent is a ranged attack that entirely ignores the target's Resistance and ignores 30% of the target's Defense, and regardless of the user's own range will never suffer damage penalties from being fired too far. The base damage is derived from the unit's base damage. The damage type is Astral.
Dragon Arrows no longer scales its count to Intellect, which is a pretty heavy nerf to it, though it probably hurts more that Dark Side overall shifts the pressure of what's good to use to units that aren't actual bow users. It also starts cheaper and ends more expensive, instead of having a flat cost, though you're still getting more Dragon Arrows for your Mana.
On the plus side for Dragon Arrows, Skeleton Archers are by far their best abuser, and you're guaranteed early supplies of them. On the minus side, your options are functionally sharply limited since Elves/Dark Elves and Hunters/Rangers take so long to gain access to and Bow Masters don't get long-term lifetime supplies if we don't count abusing Sacrificing.
As noted previously, Amazons have code for being able to benefit from Dragon Arrows, but are not properly tagged to be targetable with it, so Dark Side has no new Dragon Arrows abusers.
Also note that the Defiler Skill can add up to one additional charge to Dragon Arrows. This is consistent with Dragon Arrows historically using the duration-extension logic for adding additional duration, but still unusual.
Fit of Energy
Crystal Cost: 6 / 6 / 6
Mana Cost: 14 / 17 / 20
Level 1 Statistics: Gives Action Points: 1, Level: 1-2
Level 2 Statistics: Gives Action Points: 2, Level: 1-3
Level 3 Statistics: Gives Action Points: 3, Level: 1-4
Grants a single allied unit additional Action Points. If its turn was over, it gets an additional turn to use these Action Points.
Fit of Energy's cost has been reduced below the final level, though not by a lot: you're still getting more AP per Mana when upgrading it. It also now has a Level limitation, which is a bit more surprising to me. Was there a trend of higher-level units being better at abusing Fit of Energy in prior games that I overlooked?
Personally, I only rarely used Fit of Energy in prior entries, and I'm not sure I've ever cast it in Dark Side.
Fit of Energy
Crystal Cost: 6 / 6 / 6
Mana Cost: 14 / 17 / 20
Level 1 Statistics: Gives Action Points: 1, Level: 1-2
Level 2 Statistics: Gives Action Points: 2, Level: 1-3
Level 3 Statistics: Gives Action Points: 3, Level: 1-4
Grants a single allied unit additional Action Points. If its turn was over, it gets an additional turn to use these Action Points.
Fit of Energy's cost has been reduced below the final level, though not by a lot: you're still getting more AP per Mana when upgrading it. It also now has a Level limitation, which is a bit more surprising to me. Was there a trend of higher-level units being better at abusing Fit of Energy in prior games that I overlooked?
Personally, I only rarely used Fit of Energy in prior entries, and I'm not sure I've ever cast it in Dark Side.
Do note that Warlock can add an additional action point. Gifting 4 action points is that bit more flexible/mobile than 3.
Helplessness
Crystal Cost: 1 / 2 / 4
Mana Cost: 2 / 4 / 6
Level 1 Statistics: Defense: -30%; Duration: 3 turns
Level 2 Statistics: Defense: -45%; Duration: 4 turns
Level 3 Statistics: Defense: -60%; Duration: 5 turns
Lowers a single enemy's Defense by a percentage.
Never touched by any game in a direct sense.
Helplessness
Crystal Cost: 1 / 2 / 4
Mana Cost: 2 / 4 / 6
Level 1 Statistics: Defense: -30%; Duration: 3 turns
Level 2 Statistics: Defense: -45%; Duration: 4 turns
Level 3 Statistics: Defense: -60%; Duration: 5 turns
Lowers a single enemy's Defense by a percentage.
Never touched by any game in a direct sense.
That said, Warlock can raise the Defense penalty to up to -78%, and Defiler can extend its duration to a maximum of 6 turns.
Summon Phoenix
Crystal Cost: 10 / 15 / 20
Mana Cost: 20 / 25 / 35
Level 1 Statistics: Summons: Young Phoenix
Level 2 Statistics: Summons: Mature Phoenix
Level 3 Statistics: Summons: Ancient Phoenix
Summons an allied Phoenix in a chosen tile. The tile must be adjacent to an allied unit. You may only have one Phoenix on the field at a time.
The Spell itself is completely unmodified from Warriors of the North.
But where previously the Phoenix got a halved boost from summon-boosting Skills, Puppeteer in Dark Side provides its full boost!
Anyway, stat time!
Young Phoenix
Level: 3
Leadership: 1
Attack/Defense: 15 / 10
Initiative/Speed: 5 / 5
Health: 200
Damage: 40-60 Fire
Resistances: 80% Magic, 80% Fire, -100% Ice
Talents: None
Abilities: Flight, Firestorm (Melee attacks and counterattacks not only hit the target but enemies to the side, and have a 70% chance Burning everyone. No friendly fire), Immune to Fire (80% Fire resistance, cannot be Burned), Magic Immunity (80% Magic resistance, spells don't effect the unit), Rebirth (The Phoenix can, once, revive after a delay. Resurrecting is not possible if a unit is occupying their corpse's space, and the act of resurrecting consumes their entire turn)
The unit is also unchanged from Warriors of the North. This includes being inorganic.
Mature Phoenix
Level: 4
Leadership: 1
Attack/Defense: 40 / 30
Initiative/Speed: 6 / 6
Health: 400
Damage: 70-100 Fire
Resistances: 80% Magic, 80% Fire, -100% Ice
Talents: None
Abilities: Flight, Firestorm (Melee attacks and counterattacks not only hit the target but enemies to the side, and have a 85% chance of Burning everyone. No friendly fire), Immune to Fire (80% Fire resistance, cannot be Burned), Magic Immunity (80% Magic resistance, spells don't effect the unit), Rebirth (The Phoenix can, once, revive after a delay. Resurrecting is not possible if a unit is occupying their corpse's space, and the act of resurrecting consumes their entire turn)
Also untouched.
Ancient Phoenix
Level: 5
Leadership: 1
Attack/Defense: 60 / 50
Initiative/Speed: 7 / 7
Health: 800
Damage: 140-240 Fire
Resistances: 80% Magic, 80% Fire, -100% Ice
Talents: None.
Abilities: Flight, Firestorm (Melee attacks and counterattacks not only hit the target but enemies to the side, and have a 100% chance of Burning everyone. No friendly fire), Immune to Fire (80% Fire resistance, cannot be Burned), Magic Immunity (80% Magic resistance, spells don't effect the unit), Rebirth (The Phoenix can, once, revive after a delay. Resurrecting is not possible if a unit is occupying their corpse's space, and the act of resurrecting consumes their entire turn)
Also unchanged.
Personally, I've never used Summon Phoenix in Dark Side, but that's in part commentary on the fact that I've never lucked into the Scroll early enough. If you were to find it early -which is entirely possible, as there's an Ore Cart in Dragandor during what I think of as the 'prologue' portion of the game that can have any Scroll in the game- it could certainly be quite useful for any character/class.
Call of Nature
Crystal Cost: 4 / 8 / 12
Mana Cost: 20 / 30 / 40
Level 1 Statistics: Level up to 2; Troop Leadership: 30%
Level 2 Statistics: Level up to 3; Troop Leadership: 50%
Level 3 Statistics: Level up to 4; Troop Leadership: 70%
Summons a random animal stack into a tile adjacent to an existing player unit. The stack can act on that turn.
Call of Nature has been subtly overhauled. Now the Leadership is a percentage of your own, as I noted about summons back in Chaos Magic, and also Werewolves have been cut from the list of summons. Here's the exact list from the .txt file:
bear,bear2,bear_white,graywolf,snake,snake_green,snake_royal,griffin,griffin2,dragonfly_fire,dragonfly_lake,hyena
Which is just 'the list from Warriors of the North and Armored Princess, minus Werewolves'.
Of course, summons of this sort outright increase the stats on the units by a percentage in cases where you would summon more than your Leadership can support (And Call of Nature isn't bugged to not use this logic), so Call of Nature has been further modified by that. Call of Nature has always been a solid Spell, but in Dark Side it's astonishingly powerful, with Daert in particular able to, in the late game, basically crush entire armies with a single Call of Nature if you care to. It's pretty ridiculous, and I suspect is a casualty of insufficient playtesting.
It's also your go-to Spell option for generating fodder to Sacrifice up more troops via Priestesses of Blood, so once you've got it you can largely ignore quantity limitations on units if you're willing to spend time on such shenanigans.
Avenger
Crystal Cost: 7 / 10 / 15
Mana Cost: 15 / 20 / 25
Level 1 Statistics: Damage: 160-240, Duration: 4
Level 2 Statistics: Damage: 290-430, Duration: 5
Level 3 Statistics: Damage: 415-625, Duration: 6
A single target ally is granted a buff which decrements by one turn each time the unit takes damage from any enemy unit via any means. (Except for over time effects like Burning) The injuring unit is retaliated against by Magic damage.
Avenging Angel has been given a new name and Spellbook graphic, because you're playing Team Mordor and so angelic support is obviously inappropriate, but its actual mechanics are unchanged.
Anyway, stat time!
Young Phoenix
Level: 3
Leadership: 1
Attack/Defense: 15 / 10
Initiative/Speed: 5 / 5
Health: 200
Damage: 40-60 Fire
Resistances: 80% Magic, 80% Fire, -100% Ice
Talents: None
Abilities: Flight, Firestorm (Melee attacks and counterattacks not only hit the target but enemies to the side, and have a 70% chance Burning everyone. No friendly fire), Immune to Fire (80% Fire resistance, cannot be Burned), Magic Immunity (80% Magic resistance, spells don't effect the unit), Rebirth (The Phoenix can, once, revive after a delay. Resurrecting is not possible if a unit is occupying their corpse's space, and the act of resurrecting consumes their entire turn)
The unit is also unchanged from Warriors of the North. This includes being inorganic.
Mature Phoenix
Level: 4
Leadership: 1
Attack/Defense: 40 / 30
Initiative/Speed: 6 / 6
Health: 400
Damage: 70-100 Fire
Resistances: 80% Magic, 80% Fire, -100% Ice
Talents: None
Abilities: Flight, Firestorm (Melee attacks and counterattacks not only hit the target but enemies to the side, and have a 85% chance of Burning everyone. No friendly fire), Immune to Fire (80% Fire resistance, cannot be Burned), Magic Immunity (80% Magic resistance, spells don't effect the unit), Rebirth (The Phoenix can, once, revive after a delay. Resurrecting is not possible if a unit is occupying their corpse's space, and the act of resurrecting consumes their entire turn)
Also untouched.
Ancient Phoenix
Level: 5
Leadership: 1
Attack/Defense: 60 / 50
Initiative/Speed: 7 / 7
Health: 800
Damage: 140-240 Fire
Resistances: 80% Magic, 80% Fire, -100% Ice
Talents: None.
Abilities: Flight, Firestorm (Melee attacks and counterattacks not only hit the target but enemies to the side, and have a 100% chance of Burning everyone. No friendly fire), Immune to Fire (80% Fire resistance, cannot be Burned), Magic Immunity (80% Magic resistance, spells don't effect the unit), Rebirth (The Phoenix can, once, revive after a delay. Resurrecting is not possible if a unit is occupying their corpse's space, and the act of resurrecting consumes their entire turn)
Also unchanged.
Personally, I've never used Summon Phoenix in Dark Side, but that's in part commentary on the fact that I've never lucked into the Scroll early enough. If you were to find it early -which is entirely possible, as there's an Ore Cart in Dragandor during what I think of as the 'prologue' portion of the game that can have any Scroll in the game- it could certainly be quite useful for any character/class.
Call of Nature
Crystal Cost: 4 / 8 / 12
Mana Cost: 20 / 30 / 40
Level 1 Statistics: Level up to 2; Troop Leadership: 30%
Level 2 Statistics: Level up to 3; Troop Leadership: 50%
Level 3 Statistics: Level up to 4; Troop Leadership: 70%
Summons a random animal stack into a tile adjacent to an existing player unit. The stack can act on that turn.
Call of Nature has been subtly overhauled. Now the Leadership is a percentage of your own, as I noted about summons back in Chaos Magic, and also Werewolves have been cut from the list of summons. Here's the exact list from the .txt file:
bear,bear2,bear_white,graywolf,snake,snake_green,snake_royal,griffin,griffin2,dragonfly_fire,dragonfly_lake,hyena
Which is just 'the list from Warriors of the North and Armored Princess, minus Werewolves'.
Of course, summons of this sort outright increase the stats on the units by a percentage in cases where you would summon more than your Leadership can support (And Call of Nature isn't bugged to not use this logic), so Call of Nature has been further modified by that. Call of Nature has always been a solid Spell, but in Dark Side it's astonishingly powerful, with Daert in particular able to, in the late game, basically crush entire armies with a single Call of Nature if you care to. It's pretty ridiculous, and I suspect is a casualty of insufficient playtesting.
It's also your go-to Spell option for generating fodder to Sacrifice up more troops via Priestesses of Blood, so once you've got it you can largely ignore quantity limitations on units if you're willing to spend time on such shenanigans.
Avenger
Crystal Cost: 7 / 10 / 15
Mana Cost: 15 / 20 / 25
Level 1 Statistics: Damage: 160-240, Duration: 4
Level 2 Statistics: Damage: 290-430, Duration: 5
Level 3 Statistics: Damage: 415-625, Duration: 6
A single target ally is granted a buff which decrements by one turn each time the unit takes damage from any enemy unit via any means. (Except for over time effects like Burning) The injuring unit is retaliated against by Magic damage.
Avenging Angel has been given a new name and Spellbook graphic, because you're playing Team Mordor and so angelic support is obviously inappropriate, but its actual mechanics are unchanged.
It's also, possibly accidentally, had its base damage substantially improved -doubled prior to Level 3, and a bit more than doubled at Level 3!
Also note that Items that boost Lightning damage still apply to it, that Warlock can give it a maximum duration of 8, and oddly where previously Creation (ie the 'boost helpful Spells' Skill) boosted its damage now Defiler boosts its damage. (ie the general damage booster Skill)
In real terms this is probably its worst game, because Dark Side is so dramatic in class differentiation. Daert will have hilariously strong Avenger damage, but his armies are tiny and weak and he's better off nuking everything to death with direct attacking Spells like Fire Rain. Bagyr and Neoline are much more open to having their units get into the thick of things with enemies, but their Avengers will be pathetically weak.
Oh well.
I personally skip learning it. 7 Magic Crystals is pretty painful, and it's still not great.
Power of Night
Crystal Cost: 3 / 3 / 25
Mana Cost: 5 / 10 / 25
Level 1 Statistics: Bonus Damage: 10%; Duration: 3 turns
Level 2 Statistics: Bonus Damage: 20%; Duration: 4 turns
Level 3 Statistics: Bonus Damage: 20%, Mass; Duration: 4 turns
The unit's base attack and damaging Talents does additional damage against Of The Light units. It cannot be cast on Elves, Dwarves, Humans, or Vikings. At Level 1 it also cannot be cast on Neutral units.
The primary actual change is that Snow Elves don't exist to take extra damage and be invalid as beneficiaries. The secondary change is that Vikings are no longer in the list of things it boosts damage against, for whatever reason.
In theory, this is a nice general buff in damage. In practice the damage is too low; if the target doesn't have resists, Chaos Weapon is better, and I already laid out how Chaos Weapon isn't even that good. Alas. It does benefit from Warlock so its true maximum boost is +26%, but... doesn't change the point.
A single target non-Dark ally will, for a number of turns, block up to a small amount of damage per hit against them. There is additionally a per-cast cap on its ability to block damage, which consistently works out to 5 times the per-block amount. Inorganic units are ineligible. At Level 3, casting Warded Healing on a unit already benefiting from Warded Healing will simply add the maximum block potential to the existing supply of block, where at lower Levels it will reset it to the listed amount, wasting any remaining block amount.
The in-game description of Warded Healing really sounds like the target takes damage and then is healed, but in actuality it outright prevents some damage before anything happens. This makes Warded Healing always useful, no matter what unit you're considering casting it on, unlike the basic Healing Spell, as it can prevent casualties, or even fully block damage if the attack was weak enough relative to Warded Healing.
As with Healing, Warded Healing is a Spell you shouldn't learn manually -especially since its basic Crystal cost is quite high- and should instead take advantage of the Quest to turn three copies in and get it upgraded to working on everything. Unlike Healing, it can be surprisingly useful for a surprisingly long time; Daert in particular may actually consider using it in the mid-late game if it would be useful to get a unit into a dangerous position but you'd prefer to minimize its casualties, as he can get it blocking several hundred damage per activation.
In real terms this is probably its worst game, because Dark Side is so dramatic in class differentiation. Daert will have hilariously strong Avenger damage, but his armies are tiny and weak and he's better off nuking everything to death with direct attacking Spells like Fire Rain. Bagyr and Neoline are much more open to having their units get into the thick of things with enemies, but their Avengers will be pathetically weak.
Oh well.
I personally skip learning it. 7 Magic Crystals is pretty painful, and it's still not great.
Power of Night
Crystal Cost: 3 / 3 / 25
Mana Cost: 5 / 10 / 25
Level 1 Statistics: Bonus Damage: 10%; Duration: 3 turns
Level 2 Statistics: Bonus Damage: 20%; Duration: 4 turns
Level 3 Statistics: Bonus Damage: 20%, Mass; Duration: 4 turns
The unit's base attack and damaging Talents does additional damage against Of The Light units. It cannot be cast on Elves, Dwarves, Humans, or Vikings. At Level 1 it also cannot be cast on Neutral units.
The primary actual change is that Snow Elves don't exist to take extra damage and be invalid as beneficiaries. The secondary change is that Vikings are no longer in the list of things it boosts damage against, for whatever reason.
In theory, this is a nice general buff in damage. In practice the damage is too low; if the target doesn't have resists, Chaos Weapon is better, and I already laid out how Chaos Weapon isn't even that good. Alas. It does benefit from Warlock so its true maximum boost is +26%, but... doesn't change the point.
Note that the anti-Light damage is based on internal tagging separate from the explicitly-listed Of The Light Ability. This is thus one of the cases where the internal tagging being wrong on a few units can theoretically matter -a Darkwood Ent will take bonus damage from a unit boosted by Power of Night, for example, even though it's supposed to be a Dark unit.
Power of Light
Crystal Cost: 3 / 3 / 25
Mana Cost: 5 / 10 / 25
Level 1 Statistics: Bonus Damage: 10%; Duration: 3 turns
Level 2 Statistics: Bonus Damage: 20%; Duration: 4 turns
Level 3 Statistics: Bonus Damage: 20%, Mass; Duration: 4 turns
The unit's base attack does additional damage against Of The Dark units. It cannot be cast on Traitor Humans, Zwerg, Dark Elves, Orcs, Demons, or Undead. At Level 1 it cannot be cast on Neutral units.
The primary change is that Lizardmen and Undead Lizardmen are gone and have been replaced by the Dark versions of Light races.
Power of Light
Crystal Cost: 3 / 3 / 25
Mana Cost: 5 / 10 / 25
Level 1 Statistics: Bonus Damage: 10%; Duration: 3 turns
Level 2 Statistics: Bonus Damage: 20%; Duration: 4 turns
Level 3 Statistics: Bonus Damage: 20%, Mass; Duration: 4 turns
The unit's base attack does additional damage against Of The Dark units. It cannot be cast on Traitor Humans, Zwerg, Dark Elves, Orcs, Demons, or Undead. At Level 1 it cannot be cast on Neutral units.
The primary change is that Lizardmen and Undead Lizardmen are gone and have been replaced by the Dark versions of Light races.
Though it has the same underlying points as Power of Night: Warlock can raises its boost to +26% at maximum, its damage bonus is applied based on internal tagging (And so it won't actually give bonus damage against eg Orc Shaman because they're not properly tagged as Of The Dark internally), and the new minor point of not being castable on Neutrals at Level 1.
Curiously, the .txt file refers to 'Dark Vikings', even though Vikings are not made part of the Light/Dark division of the game. It makes me wonder if they'd intended to have the player convert Vikings to the dark like they do Humans, Dwarves, and Elves, and ended up dropping the concept, and missed the reference in this particular Spell's coding. And if so, I'm curious as to why it was dropped: it honestly wouldn't surprise me to learn that they struggled to properly Dark-ify the Viking art style, as they have such an unusual art style compared to the rest of the game. Or it could just be the general rushed-ness of the game in action.
Regardless, the Spell itself is borderline-worthless in the player's hands in Dark Side, as you'll almost always be using an army that can't even make use of the Spell and you'll only occasionally face foes the Spell benefits you for fighting.
Last Hero
Crystal Cost: 1 / 3 / 5
Mana Cost: 5 / 7 / 10
Level 1 Statistics: Target's Level: 1-2; Duration: 3 turns
Level 2 Statistics: Target's Level: 1-3; Duration: 4 turns
Level 3 Statistics: Target's Level: 1-4; Duration: 5 turns
A single targeted ally takes no damage from effects for the duration, with each hit suffered reducing the duration of Last Hero by 1 turn. Once Last Hero runs out, all the damage that was blocked by Last Hero comes back. Additionally, the unit has unlimited retaliations.
Last Hero has been mugged from Rune Magic, and critically it's finally been made genuinely worth considering: delaying damage with no trade-off aside the casting per se is genuinely worth considering, especially if eg you're fielding Warrior Maidens, where timing of casualties actually matters!
Curiously, the .txt file refers to 'Dark Vikings', even though Vikings are not made part of the Light/Dark division of the game. It makes me wonder if they'd intended to have the player convert Vikings to the dark like they do Humans, Dwarves, and Elves, and ended up dropping the concept, and missed the reference in this particular Spell's coding. And if so, I'm curious as to why it was dropped: it honestly wouldn't surprise me to learn that they struggled to properly Dark-ify the Viking art style, as they have such an unusual art style compared to the rest of the game. Or it could just be the general rushed-ness of the game in action.
Regardless, the Spell itself is borderline-worthless in the player's hands in Dark Side, as you'll almost always be using an army that can't even make use of the Spell and you'll only occasionally face foes the Spell benefits you for fighting.
Last Hero
Crystal Cost: 1 / 3 / 5
Mana Cost: 5 / 7 / 10
Level 1 Statistics: Target's Level: 1-2; Duration: 3 turns
Level 2 Statistics: Target's Level: 1-3; Duration: 4 turns
Level 3 Statistics: Target's Level: 1-4; Duration: 5 turns
A single targeted ally takes no damage from effects for the duration, with each hit suffered reducing the duration of Last Hero by 1 turn. Once Last Hero runs out, all the damage that was blocked by Last Hero comes back. Additionally, the unit has unlimited retaliations.
Last Hero has been mugged from Rune Magic, and critically it's finally been made genuinely worth considering: delaying damage with no trade-off aside the casting per se is genuinely worth considering, especially if eg you're fielding Warrior Maidens, where timing of casualties actually matters!
Do note that the bug where a Furious unit becomes Passive if you cast Last Hero on them remains present.
Winter's Dance
Crystal Cost: 5 / 7 / 10
Mana Cost: 10 / 15 / 20
Level 1 Statistics: Damage: 45-65
Level 2 Statistics: Damage: 95-135
Level 3 Statistics: Damage: 145-210
Does Physical damage to all units in a circle, with the center being safe.
Another Spell mugged from Rune Magic. Its actual numbers and whatnot are unchanged, but it no longer ignores Spell immunity. Its presence is most notable for being another strike against Axe of Magic: why do decent Physical damage to a single target for far too much Mana when you could hit multiple targets for only slightly more Mana, ending with overall more damage and also getting more chances for things like Bleed-from-crit? If you're hitting even two targets, Winter's Dance will probably roll high enough to beat Axe of Magic, and if you hit three Winter's Dance is winning, period.
Winter's Dance
Crystal Cost: 5 / 7 / 10
Mana Cost: 10 / 15 / 20
Level 1 Statistics: Damage: 45-65
Level 2 Statistics: Damage: 95-135
Level 3 Statistics: Damage: 145-210
Does Physical damage to all units in a circle, with the center being safe.
Another Spell mugged from Rune Magic. Its actual numbers and whatnot are unchanged, but it no longer ignores Spell immunity. Its presence is most notable for being another strike against Axe of Magic: why do decent Physical damage to a single target for far too much Mana when you could hit multiple targets for only slightly more Mana, ending with overall more damage and also getting more chances for things like Bleed-from-crit? If you're hitting even two targets, Winter's Dance will probably roll high enough to beat Axe of Magic, and if you hit three Winter's Dance is winning, period.
... well, its numbers are supposed to be unchanged, but due to bugs it actually uses Avenger's Level growth rates, which are worse than its own numbers; as such, it levels more poorly than in Warriors of the North.
It tends to fall away in relevance as your options expand -if you've got Fire Rain in particular Winter's Dance is nearly entirely displaced- and because of it leveling poorly, but it can be surprisingly useful for a surprisingly large chunk of the early-to-midgame, depending on your luck with Scrolls.
Shelter
Crystal Cost: 3 / 3 / 3
Mana Cost: 4 / 7 / 10
Level 1 Statistics: Duration: 3 turns
Level 2 Statistics: Duration: 6 turns
Level 3 Statistics: Duration: 9 turns
A single target ally is rendered innocuous: for the duration of the Spell, enemy units won't deliberately target the unit. If the unit performs an attack, the Spell will break, and each time a unit could have attacked the Sheltered unit but did not, the Spell's duration is reduced by 1.
I don't really get Shelter. It's basically a kind of nerfed Invisibility that happens to be a lot more interesting than Invisibility, which doesn't really matter because Invisibility is still in the game.
You're not going to actually use it, is what I'm saying.
Shelter
Crystal Cost: 3 / 3 / 3
Mana Cost: 4 / 7 / 10
Level 1 Statistics: Duration: 3 turns
Level 2 Statistics: Duration: 6 turns
Level 3 Statistics: Duration: 9 turns
A single target ally is rendered innocuous: for the duration of the Spell, enemy units won't deliberately target the unit. If the unit performs an attack, the Spell will break, and each time a unit could have attacked the Sheltered unit but did not, the Spell's duration is reduced by 1.
I don't really get Shelter. It's basically a kind of nerfed Invisibility that happens to be a lot more interesting than Invisibility, which doesn't really matter because Invisibility is still in the game.
You're not going to actually use it, is what I'm saying.
This isn't even getting into the buggy point that its duration reduction is bad about deciding a unit could've attacked the Sheltered unit even though it couldn't have.
It does at least work on Eyeless creatures, unlike Invisibility, so that's... something?
Creation
Crystal Cost: 3 / 5 / 7
Mana Cost: 8 / 12 / 16
Level 1 Statistics: Target's Level: 1-2; Charges: 1, Adrenaline: 15
Level 2 Statistics: Target's Level: 1-3; Charges: 2, Adrenaline: 30
Level 3 Statistics: Target's Level: 1-4; Charges: 3, Adrenaline: 45
A single target ally gains charges to all its charge-based Talents. If used on an Orc, the Orc instead immediately gains Adrenaline.
It's Gift from The Legend, but cheaper and stuff. It's kind of ridiculous.
I'd complain about the exploitive stuff it opens up, but Dark Side has much more accessible and general exploits like Blood Priestesses. I've actually cast Creation only a bare handful of times across my runs, and not because I was restraining myself from abusing brokenness. It's just not that relevant when I can do crazier stuff.
Creation
Crystal Cost: 3 / 5 / 7
Mana Cost: 8 / 12 / 16
Level 1 Statistics: Target's Level: 1-2; Charges: 1, Adrenaline: 15
Level 2 Statistics: Target's Level: 1-3; Charges: 2, Adrenaline: 30
Level 3 Statistics: Target's Level: 1-4; Charges: 3, Adrenaline: 45
A single target ally gains charges to all its charge-based Talents. If used on an Orc, the Orc instead immediately gains Adrenaline.
It's Gift from The Legend, but cheaper and stuff. It's kind of ridiculous.
I'd complain about the exploitive stuff it opens up, but Dark Side has much more accessible and general exploits like Blood Priestesses. I've actually cast Creation only a bare handful of times across my runs, and not because I was restraining myself from abusing brokenness. It's just not that relevant when I can do crazier stuff.
Do note that Warlock boosts both the charges it adds and the Adrenaline it gives to Orcs, resulting in a maximum of +4 charges and +58 Adrenaline. Also note that if used on a unit that you've cast Dragon Arrows on before, it will give additional Dragon Arrows charges.
Empathy
Crystal Cost: 3 / 6 / 9
Mana Cost: 3 / 6 / 9
Level 1 Statistics: Duration: 3, Damage Transferred: 10%
Level 2 Statistics: Duration: 6, Damage Transferred: 20%
Level 3 Statistics: Duration: 9, Damage Transferred: 30%
Picks a target allied unit and a target other unit, friend or foe: a percentage of the damage dealt to the first unit is transferred to the second unit instead. Cannot be Dispelled.
As with Thread of Life etc, Empathy's in-game description claims that you select two allies, and in actuality you can and should use it to shunt damage to an enemy instead.
Mind, Empathy isn't a great Spell even with that point, but it can be useful if you're trying to use a unit to tank with Orc Shield anyway, extending how far the Shield goes while adding a bit of damage to an enemy.
Strictly speaking, Spirit Talkers can do the same effect, but this isn't a particularly problematic point for Empathy. Empathy has superior transference past the first level if you have any ranks in Warlock, as well as at level 3 even if you have no ranks in Warlock, and Spirit Talkers aren't amazing. If Goblin Shaman were still around, that'd be a lethal issue, but as-is you're a lot more likely to use Empathy than Thread of Life.
Empathy
Crystal Cost: 3 / 6 / 9
Mana Cost: 3 / 6 / 9
Level 1 Statistics: Duration: 3, Damage Transferred: 10%
Level 2 Statistics: Duration: 6, Damage Transferred: 20%
Level 3 Statistics: Duration: 9, Damage Transferred: 30%
Picks a target allied unit and a target other unit, friend or foe: a percentage of the damage dealt to the first unit is transferred to the second unit instead. Cannot be Dispelled.
As with Thread of Life etc, Empathy's in-game description claims that you select two allies, and in actuality you can and should use it to shunt damage to an enemy instead.
Mind, Empathy isn't a great Spell even with that point, but it can be useful if you're trying to use a unit to tank with Orc Shield anyway, extending how far the Shield goes while adding a bit of damage to an enemy.
Strictly speaking, Spirit Talkers can do the same effect, but this isn't a particularly problematic point for Empathy. Empathy has superior transference past the first level if you have any ranks in Warlock, as well as at level 3 even if you have no ranks in Warlock, and Spirit Talkers aren't amazing. If Goblin Shaman were still around, that'd be a lethal issue, but as-is you're a lot more likely to use Empathy than Thread of Life.
A couple things to note: firstly, the Spell's logic breaks entirely if you get the transfer rate to 100% or more, resulting in it ceasing to transfer damage. As it actually scales with Intellect, it is entirely possible for this to happen; when you're playing Daert particularly it's easily possible you'll end up with the Level 3 or even Level 2 version simply ceasing to function. A Daert run may wish to skip leveling it, even if you're fond of using it, simply because the higher-Level versions will stop working at some point and Magic Crystal counts are an actual limitation in Dark Side. This is particularly unfortunate given that ideal usage is to have the transfer rate very, very close to 100%, and thus be at the point that just a little more Intellect can suddenly break your Spell. You can just cast lower-Level versions, of course, but dropping from 97% transfer rate to 51% because your Intellect pushed your 97% to 102% is a huge drop in effectiveness.
Second, it should be noted that Empathy specifically splits damage after all other modifiers have gone through. Say you have Empathy at 50% transference and cast it on a Red Dragon stack, while having enough resistance boosters the Red Dragon stack has 95% Fire resistance; if you then have your Red Dragon stack pick a fight with a Black Dragon stack, what will happen is both units will take an equally-sized tiny amount of damage. As such, if you're wanting Empathy to act as a kind of damage source (Such as by using it on a summon you hurl to its death), you'll actually want to not boost the recipient's resistances.
Warded Healing
Crystal Cost: 8 / 12 / 18
Mana Cost: 5 / 10 / 20
Level 1 Statistics: Block Total: 50, Individual Block: 10, Duration: 3
Level 2 Statistics: Block Total: 125, Individual Block: 25, Duration: 4
Warded Healing
Crystal Cost: 8 / 12 / 18
Mana Cost: 5 / 10 / 20
Level 1 Statistics: Block Total: 50, Individual Block: 10, Duration: 3
Level 2 Statistics: Block Total: 125, Individual Block: 25, Duration: 4
Level 3 Statistics: Block Total: 200, Individual Block: 40, Duration: 5
A single target non-Dark ally will, for a number of turns, block up to a small amount of damage per hit against them. There is additionally a per-cast cap on its ability to block damage, which consistently works out to 5 times the per-block amount. Inorganic units are ineligible. At Level 3, casting Warded Healing on a unit already benefiting from Warded Healing will simply add the maximum block potential to the existing supply of block, where at lower Levels it will reset it to the listed amount, wasting any remaining block amount.
The in-game description of Warded Healing really sounds like the target takes damage and then is healed, but in actuality it outright prevents some damage before anything happens. This makes Warded Healing always useful, no matter what unit you're considering casting it on, unlike the basic Healing Spell, as it can prevent casualties, or even fully block damage if the attack was weak enough relative to Warded Healing.
As with Healing, Warded Healing is a Spell you shouldn't learn manually -especially since its basic Crystal cost is quite high- and should instead take advantage of the Quest to turn three copies in and get it upgraded to working on everything. Unlike Healing, it can be surprisingly useful for a surprisingly long time; Daert in particular may actually consider using it in the mid-late game if it would be useful to get a unit into a dangerous position but you'd prefer to minimize its casualties, as he can get it blocking several hundred damage per activation.
Note that Defiler boosts the block potential, both the total cap and the per-activation amount. Also, an oddity that is unlikely to come up in normal play is that if a given block manages to be greater than the full damage of a given hit, the game will actually remember fractional damage absorbed by Warded Healing, where usually the game endeavors to avoid fractions in final/visible-to-the-player numbers.
Ball of Lightning
Crystal Cost: 5 / 10 / 15
Mana Cost: 8 / 14 / 20
Level 1 Statistics: Damage: 100-200 Duration: 2
Level 2 Statistics: Damage: 200-400 Duration: 3
Level 3 Statistics: Damage: 300-600, Duration: 4, Target Redirection
Generates a high-flying ball of lightning that once per turn attacks a single enemy for Magic damage with a 10% chance to Shock the target.
It's (almost) literally Ball of Lightning/Mista's Lightning, the Rage moves, except now it's non-percentile damage. Like the Armored Princess Ball of Lightning, it attacks on the first turn it's out. Unlike the Rage moves of prior games, it pursues a particular target relentlessly and vanishes if that target is wiped out... until you've got it at Level 3, at which its initial target being destroyed causes it to switch to picking a random target per turn until it times out.
Ball of Lightning
Crystal Cost: 5 / 10 / 15
Mana Cost: 8 / 14 / 20
Level 1 Statistics: Damage: 100-200 Duration: 2
Level 2 Statistics: Damage: 200-400 Duration: 3
Level 3 Statistics: Damage: 300-600, Duration: 4, Target Redirection
Generates a high-flying ball of lightning that once per turn attacks a single enemy for Magic damage with a 10% chance to Shock the target.
It's (almost) literally Ball of Lightning/Mista's Lightning, the Rage moves, except now it's non-percentile damage. Like the Armored Princess Ball of Lightning, it attacks on the first turn it's out. Unlike the Rage moves of prior games, it pursues a particular target relentlessly and vanishes if that target is wiped out... until you've got it at Level 3, at which its initial target being destroyed causes it to switch to picking a random target per turn until it times out.
Oddly, though you can set its initial target to be an Object, the Level 3 random-target behavior will never select an Object as a target. Also, Defiler affects its maximum duration, but the game can get confused; the maximum duration backed by Defiler should be 5 turns, but a Ball of Lightning can end up buggily lasting a lot longer than that. As for Ball of Lightning's Initiative, it's 10, much like the prior Rage-based lightning balls. Also note that Items that boost lightning damage do absolutely include Ball of Lightning.
Ball of Lightning is probably one of Order's best relatively direct damage Spells in Dark Side as it's reasonably affordable and the fact that it strikes multiple times per cast means its listed damage per hit is misleading, especially as you level it and your Intellect climbs, extending its duration and thus number of hits, all with no risk of friendly fire or the like. I'm quite fond of it on a design level: it's the first damaging Order Spell that's really good and worth using without pushing into Chaos' dominance over damage-on-demand.
Ball of Lightning is probably one of Order's best relatively direct damage Spells in Dark Side as it's reasonably affordable and the fact that it strikes multiple times per cast means its listed damage per hit is misleading, especially as you level it and your Intellect climbs, extending its duration and thus number of hits, all with no risk of friendly fire or the like. I'm quite fond of it on a design level: it's the first damaging Order Spell that's really good and worth using without pushing into Chaos' dominance over damage-on-demand.
Also boosting its effectiveness is that, like Avenger, the game actually doubles its base damage; ostensibly its base damage should be half the above numbers. This would've made it weaker per-hit than Lightning initially, instead of its current state of being very much purely better than Lightning out the box.
How practicable it is in real play depends a bit on luck. If you get a hold of Ball of Lightning early in the game in a Daert run, it can be a staple damage Spell for a fairly large chunk of the game, including being one of your better options for your first cast in a turn so long as your Higher Magic rank is equal or greater than your Order Magic rank, particularly once it's Level 3 where it'll just jump targets if the original target dies. On the other hand, if you eg find Rain of Fire hours before you ever spot Ball of Lightning, or you only get Ball of Lightning late in the game when Daert can expect to routinely finish a battle in 1-2 turns on Spellslinging alone, Ball of Lightning is more or less completely worthless to you. It's also of dubious use for non-Daert characters in general.
Still, I very much appreciate Dark Side coming up with an attacking Order Magic Spell that isn't a clone of some other Spell and doesn't completely undermine Order being the weakest school for offensive magic. It's really well-designed, and it's just an unfortunate casualty of Dark Side having serious problems in other realms. It's one of the better examples of what Dark Side could have been if the developers had been allowed to polish it.
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Next time, we wrap up Spells with Distortion Magic.
'cause Rune Magic is gone. I already mentioned that. It's not missed, really.
How practicable it is in real play depends a bit on luck. If you get a hold of Ball of Lightning early in the game in a Daert run, it can be a staple damage Spell for a fairly large chunk of the game, including being one of your better options for your first cast in a turn so long as your Higher Magic rank is equal or greater than your Order Magic rank, particularly once it's Level 3 where it'll just jump targets if the original target dies. On the other hand, if you eg find Rain of Fire hours before you ever spot Ball of Lightning, or you only get Ball of Lightning late in the game when Daert can expect to routinely finish a battle in 1-2 turns on Spellslinging alone, Ball of Lightning is more or less completely worthless to you. It's also of dubious use for non-Daert characters in general.
Still, I very much appreciate Dark Side coming up with an attacking Order Magic Spell that isn't a clone of some other Spell and doesn't completely undermine Order being the weakest school for offensive magic. It's really well-designed, and it's just an unfortunate casualty of Dark Side having serious problems in other realms. It's one of the better examples of what Dark Side could have been if the developers had been allowed to polish it.
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Next time, we wrap up Spells with Distortion Magic.
'cause Rune Magic is gone. I already mentioned that. It's not missed, really.
First of all i appreciate all the analysis. Even I with my over a decade of KB Knowledge and experience learned a thing or two for them.
ReplyDeleteI have noticed too many inaccuracies and mistakes throughout all your Dark Side analysis to correct them all, but i'll try to chip in with some corrections here and there.
Regarding Power of the Night- It does not do extra damage against Vikings. Also it's not just "base attacks", it includes even talents, which makes particularly the level 3 mass version more worthwhile.
I assume Power of the Light also is not just "base attacks" and affects talents as well, albeit haven't tested it/
Also was good of Ghoul King to note the annoying bug with Dark Shroud whereby it only heals for the amount that it requires the unit with the least amount of Hp to heal. I was also surprised to discover that despite Dark Shroud claiming to only affect Light and Neutral units, it was constantly causing bleeds in the undead fight i had, namely to the zombie. I would have to test it against all Dark creatures to be sure, but it seems that it causes bleeds to everything. That being said the Bleed is of pretty low value to a levelled Orc despite the contention that Ghoul King made "as mass Bleeding is amazing no matter which class/character you're playing as". It's an overall decent spell, but not in the same galaxy as Chaos Breath or Empathy (the two strongest spells in Dark Side, even above the blatantly broken Call of Nature that shouldn't be abused or even used in my view)
DeleteSpeaking of Empathy, Ghoul King wrote "Mind, Empathy isn't a great Spell even with that point, but it can be useful if you're trying to use a unit to tank with Orc Shield anyway, extending how far the Shield goes while adding a bit of damage to an enemy."
This is a disappointing take of someone who doesn't realize how powerful empathy is in Dark Side. A few points about it: At level 3 Empathy, even a lackluster caster in Orc can have it last for ~9 rounds, effectively the entire battle. Even if it's one of those rare super long out of your league battles, the cost is on the low side so recasting it deep into the fight should still be possible. Second, it can't be dispelled or removed in any way (short of the connected unit dying. The solution is simple= place it on the enemy unit that will absolutely die last/most hp, and it will thus last the entire battle). While this means that the players Empathy can't be stopped which is obviously amazing, it means you have to watch out for the rare enemy Spirit Talker with their thread of life, because even if you dispel it from your linked unit or their unit or both, your unit will still take damage if you focus their linked unit. So basically it can't be stopped through conventional means. Third and finally, the reason Empathy is so strong is that it stacks incredibly well with high resistances (which Orc in particular can reach insane high's in this department due to their BloodLust Level 3 adding +15% resistance, on top of Lab Coat or Trainer's Jacket which adds +20%, and the Guardian medal for +7, so they can have a baseline of 42% to all resistances on their units, not factoring in up to 5% extra resistance from Great Artifacts to a Race, nor the Foresight resistance bonus on round 1/2/3, and ofcourse the units innate resistances) and high defenses and hp, since reducing incoming damage after all those other reductions by 60%+ from Empathy is profound and synergizes heavily with regeneration, Shaman's dancing axes or heal totem, the previously mentioned Dark Shroud etc. Depending on Intellect and Warlock skill level it can easily reach over 70% or 80% even on an Orc, and reach near invulnerability to a unit on a Mage Hero, basically like a permanent Last Hero with no downside that CAN'T be stopped........... hence the strongest spell in the game in competition with Chaos Breath.
The spell is so bonkers, that Ghoul King needs to be called out for his unfortunate and ignorant take of it (much like he was rightfully called out on Chaos Breath thankfully). It's a little bamboozling how someone with some respectable amount of KB game knowledge can be so off regarding the two strongest spells in KB Dark Side. Hopefully he can amend his analysis on them, and perhaps try them out properly in the future so he will understand why they reign supreme.
Speaking of Resistances and Ghoul King's inaccuracies, here is another one regarding Magic Armor.
Delete"This is, however, probably it's least relevant game. In addition to the Guardian Dark Keeper Medal lowering its value, in Dark Side you're guaranteed two different Clothing Items that can provide up to +20 to all resistances. (Yes, including Astral) With one of those upgraded and equipped, Level 1 Divine Armor does nothing for your units. With Dark Keeper maxed out as well, Level 2 Divine Armor is worthless and Level 3 is only adding 3% to your resistances"
Maybe Ghoul King shoulda actually cast the spell once before providing "analysis" on it. If he did, he would know that the way Magic Armor works is that it alters a units INNATE resistances. That means that it doesn't get overridden by Lab Coat/Guardian Medal etc. So lets say a unit had 0 to all resistances and was wearing Lab Coat and had Guardian 3 medal = 27% to all resistances. If one then cast a Level 3 Magic Armor on that unit that granted 30% resistance, it would actually cause that unit to go from 27% to all resistances to 57% to all resistances, not just to 30% as Ghoul King mistakenly wrote.
However if Magic Armor Level 3 worth say 30% is cast on a unit with innate 30% Physical Resistance and 30% Fire Resistance like Dark Knight, it won't improve either of those resistances whatsoever, just the other resistances.
That all being said the spell still isn't amazing and it's hampered by its high mana and crystal cost, but a Mage can certainly get good use out of it in conjunction with spells like Target, Empathy, and Time Shift to bolster all those durations.
Dark Shroud is causing Bleeding to all Undead that i faced including Ghosts, Pirate Ghosts, all Vampire Variants, Black Knight, Zombies, but it is not causing Bleeding to the Bone units like Skeleton Archers (likely Skeleton as well albeit didn't test it) and Bone Dragon. I didn't test against Necromancer but i'm pretty sure it will work against him as well.
DeleteStill will need to test Dark Shroud against Demons and Orc's, but i see no reason why it shouldn't affect all of them once we know the game description is inaccurate.
Retesting Magic Shield... yes, to my surprise, it does stack with stuff like the Lab Coat. I know I tested this before. Weird. I'll need to update that description.
DeleteRetesting Empathy... um, no, it's even *worse* than I thought. If you break 100% damage transfer (Which a late game Daert can absolutely do) it straight-up stops doing ANYTHING. I'm similarly confused why you're talking as if it goes well with high resistances -retesting shows that it splits the final damage, where eg at 50% transference the victim will take exactly the same damage as the unit passing on the damage, even if that means both take 11 damage because you've got 95% resistance on your unit and so only 22 damage would've made it through. I'll need to update its description to include a warning about it ceasing to function if you get its transfer rate too high... but it's still a lackluster Spell.
Retesting Chaos Breath, I certainly hadn't realized it could give effectively infinite Speed at high ranges. Could be a neat-if-unreliable way to breath additional life into the slow melee units that struggle to matter the further you get.
The Dark Shroud thing is actually something I stumbled into a while ago, got partway through testing, then life got in the way and I completely forgot to actually follow up on it. That said, now I've retested more thoroughly and... turns out Life Light and Dark Shroud are completely identical! So that's going to require a description update.
Will need to test Power of Light/Night in a bit, but I'll note that them boosting against Vikings comes straight from the actual code listing out what they apply against. If they don't boost damage against Vikings, that's some manner of bug... which would be completely unsurprising from Dark Side, of course.
Well i have only cast it with an Orc in which it doesn't reach 100% transfer so it doesn't literally break/bug the spell. So then due to the games buggines the level 3 version is only amazing on Orc/Demonesses. However even Vampire should be able to cast a lvl 1 or lvl 2 version of it that doesn't reach 100% transference, so what i said about it still applies. Only caveat you need to add to Empathy in the analysis is to not cast a version of it at 100% if you are a Vampire so that it doesn't become useless.
DeleteI'll explain why high resistance is amazing w/ it, although it should be obvious. If a unit with no resistance and no empathy would have taken 100 physical damage, then with empathy at 60% on it would take only 40 damage. If the same unit also had 50% physical resistance, then it would only take 20 damage. If the unit had 95% physical resistance, then instead of taking 5 damage, with empathy it would take only 2 damage. So basically empathy works in a similar vein to Archmage's Magic Shield or Jarl's enchanted armor which can take half damage from any source. So high defense and resistances benefit alot from Empathy since it allows them to further mitigate the damage. This matters alot on tier 5 units with high resistances like Ogre (especially if playing as an Orc, or a late game demonesses if using both broken pieces of 20% resistance armor, Lab Coat and Trainer's Jacket, since once one reaches such high resistance peaks and already having the max defense reduction over the enemy, ways to further mitigate damage are a huge boon), since they can reach the max defense over the target for 1/3rd damage no issue, and can reach the 80's or above in resistances, so to then be able to further reduce the damage by 60%++ can make the difference between surviving against attacks from 10's of thousands of Thorn Hunters, or losing an Ogre.
The point of empathy isn't the damage it does to the split target (That is completely irrelevant), it's the fact that it acts as a super Archmage/Wizard "Magic Shield", the fact that it basically lasts all battle with it's 9-10+ turn duration, and the fact that it can't be dispelled. Again regarding the mage 100% transference issue the workaround would be to cast lower levels of it which surely wont reach 100%. If you can't understand why having such a massive unstoppable damage reduction lasting all battle on a crucial unit (think a Targetted one, or one going up against multiple enemy melee stacks of over 100k Leadership) is good, then you need to restudy the basics. One thing you wrote about it that was wise was how well it works with Orc Shield, so i'll try to illustrate its efficacy by bring up Orc Shield. If let's say a unit had 1000 hp worth of orc shield on them and then had an empathy with 50% on them, that orc shield would now require 2000 damage for it to be depleted instead of the 1000 it would normally without empathy on (and as you mentioned Orc's Shield is much better than Glott's Armor of old, since it factors in defenses and resistances, allowing it to last much much much longer than the old Glott Armor did per point of shield value), so it effectively doubles the shield (ofcourse it does much more than that, since even when the shield depletes, the empathy remains and would keep reducing damage).
"but it's still a lackluster Spell" You should really test it out more to understand why you are so off base on this. The key synergy's with it are tier 5 units, but it still would go amazingly well with Orc Shield on a lower tier hard hitting unit, say Orc Veteran (who gets alot of utility from Orc Shield since it makes his evasion more relevant as a pseudo damage reduction since it will likely reduce the total incoming damage of many incoming attacks if one or two of them are being dodged) who gets Empathy on it.
I mean, for one thing having to drop to a lower level version is only a partial escape of the bugginess -it still means that raising your Intellect can actually slash the effective damage reduction you're getting because you were casting a 98% transference version and are now having to drop to merely a little over 50%. For another, if you can cast Empathy with the kind of high transfer rate where it starts getting really impressive, you're probably in the stage of the game where you can stomp most armies without them ever getting a chance to attack in the first place, at which point Empathy is... nice if you still want to focus on melee units you like? I guess?
DeleteStone Skin is going to be better damage reduction against Physical attackers unless you're either bumping up against the resistance cap or are hitting the really high transfer rates on Empathy. With stuff like the Lab Coat, Magic Armor will also be better unless you've got really that high transfer rate. You can combine Empathy with these of course, but 'Empathy can be combined with Spells better than it' doesn't change the part where Empathy is generally inferior to these workhorse Spells. This is why I focused on the damaging component as relevant; because if all you want is damage reduction, there's better Spells for that job; you have to be caring about the damage to justify casting it before its superiors.
Or, again, have the kind of really high transfer rate that generally goes hand in hand with your character being broadly insanely overpowered, but... 'this Spell is overpowered when you're already past the hard parts of the game' is not a great sell.
Part 1-
DeleteYou are struggling to grasp empathy's sheer power. If it's any solace, you have alot of company since very few know of its power.
Yes the mage has to try to dodge the bugginess aspect of reaching the 100% transference/invulnerability. I have yet to do a Vampire run of Dark Side (historically i always do mage runs in all my KB Impossible games, but this is the first time another class can actually compete with mage, largely due to BloodLust 3 on Orc with it's prodigal 15% to all resistances), but i'm sure this should be easy enough with item/artifact manipulation. Once intellect starts blowing up so that you can't keep level 3 version of empathy just under 100%, that's fine, because it means the level 2 version will hover around the 60% mark (and climbing with Warlock 3 skill and ever increasing intellect) like the other classes. However there will still be a silver lining for the mage, since then he only has to cast a 6 mana version of the spell, freeing him to get more spell combo's off with Higher Magic. It's ofcourse Mage/Vampire himself who can get the most mileage out of empathy (even level 2 version) when combined with other spells like Target (12 mana for the level 3 version) so 6 mana from level 2 empathy plus 12 from level 3 target= 18, still under the threshold for Higher Magic Level 3, allowing for the completion of the trifecta with something like Magic Armor level 3 or whatever or a disable or damage spell or summon etc, since the main combo of empathy and target is achieved and the enemy is neutralized and already defeated if done properly.
",if you can cast Empathy with the kind of high transfer rate where it starts getting really impressive, you're probably in the stage of the game where you can stomp most armies without them ever getting a chance to attack in the first place" This is a flawed argument. If it's early game-early mid game where the bulk of the challenge is, Empathy at level 3 on the Mage would not have yet reached the 100% bug point (or can be worked around to be below 100%), so in fact this is where Empathy is at it's ABSOLUTE PEAK when it's granting a unit in the 80%'s or 90%'s in additional damage reduction.
"Stone Skin is going to be better damage reduction against Physical attackers" Wrong. Empathy is soooooo much better than Stone Skin it's almost comical, not even factoring the -initiative from stone skin which is usually not ideal. There may not even be a situation where Stone Skin ever reduces more damage than empathy, even if one is solely facing physical damage (it would have to involve a situation where the defense boost from stone skin mattered enough to also add tangible damage reduction, and even then it wouldn't it wouldn't reach empathies level. Ofcourse this would be a completely moot point if the unit that its being cast upon is say a tier 5 that already has 60 defense over the attackers its facing, cause then it's just ~40% physical damage resistance versus the all encompassing 60-70%+ damage reduction of empathy). I'm willing to see if you can concoct a test where stone skin ever outperforms empathy, but it doesn't exist. This isn't even factoring in the fact that empathy lasts drastically longer than stoneskin, doesn't have a negative initiative penalty, can't be dispelled by the myriad witch hunters/lake faeries/hero's that cast dispel, and any side benefits from proccing damage triggers on the empathied enemy (such as wasting a rune of defense on vikings among others).
Part 2-
Delete"Magic Armor will also be better" You really shouldn't even be mentioning magic armor being better than anything after your analysis of it. Regardless you’re still wrong, there are 0 situations where Magic Armor is ever even close to equal empathy. It's basic math- Magic Armor level 3 adds something like ~30% resistances to all. Even on a unit with 0 innate resistances where it's getting its full effect, that would still only be half or less the damage reduction that a ~60% + level 3 empathy would do. Come on bro, this is really basic stuff. Take some time to experiment and test things yourself so you can understand why you are off.
" You can combine Empathy with these of course" No, it's those that maybe get combined with Empathy (particularly on Mage). What you need to understand and are failing to, is that Empathy is THE premier damage reduction spell in the game. Everything else is subservient. Once you understand that and why, it will all make sense.
"doesn't change the part where Empathy is generally inferior to these workhorse Spells" I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that after seeing my points above you will realize how incorrect this statement is.
"if all you want is damage reduction, there's better Spells for that job" No such spell exists. That spell is Empathy. It doesn't ever get better than it for damage reduction and never will. Think of it like a Last Hero that never expires and can't be stopped (which would be crazy broken) and you would be much closer to understanding its actual power than you currently are at, since it's much closer to that than your flawed perception of it. Remember a mage that has empathy at 99% IS that Last Hero situation all but literally, just with upside like triggering adrenaline/frenzy etc, which taking 0 damage doesn't do.
"you have to be caring about the damage to justify casting it before its superiors" This statement doesn't mean anything. Ofcourse one cares about damage reduction, which is exactly why Empathy in those situations is the #1 spell. If it's a situation where none of your units are ever getting damaged anyways, then sure Empathy isn't needed. Whoop de do, there is no point to be made about battles where your units aren't ever taking damage. Yes those will be won without losses, shocking i know..
"have the kind of really high transfer rate that generally goes hand in hand with your character being broadly insanely overpowered" It requires Order Magic 3 and minimal crystals and mana for it to be powerful on any character (60%+) even with minimal intellect, and lasting atleast 8 turns even without hitting the 20 intellect threshold. This is very far from the "overpowered"state of a character. In theory any of the hero's can get to Order 3 in the teen levels, before even having to begin fighting in portland if one properly dodges enemies and loots the islands etc (Yes an unfair but common thing, and an unfortunate design flaw of Dark Side, which has much more lootable stuff than even previous games before fighting is mandated). I only mention this point to show that this level of power can be achieved right after the mandatory early game fights, and that as soon as one has free reign if they WANTED they COULD beeline to Order 3 and have access to a powerful empathy. Ofcourse most don't in favor of Learning and other boosters to set them up for later in the game, but even if one delays Order 3 it can still be acquired comfortably in the 20's even on Orc, still in the early game or early mid game. But few know about Empathy's sheer power, and if people stumbled upon your otherwise informative analysis, they would still be left in the dark due to your own perception and writings of it that i'm trying to enlighten.
Part 3-
DeleteI haven't (yet) done much in the way of screenshots to show the True Power of Empathy, but here is one such example from my most recent battle. Its with an Orc in the late game with Empathy 3 and Warlock 2 so empathy is at a formidable 72% (Remember Mage/Vamprie can reach this at the beginning of the game). Here is an enemy hero casting Armegeddon, and you will notice a bunch of units taking 400 to 800 damage. The Ogre with at the time about 64% astral resistance since it was round 3 and the final tick of Foresight which bolstered astral by 7%) and Empathy on him took less than 100 damage by comparison. This is how he looked on round 4 and you can see the damage from Armegeddon - i.imgur.com/Cbj2gNM.png
What this means in practical terms is simple- The Ogre on a powerful Orc is invulnerable. Not even Armegeddon will do anything to it (nor the burn which can be shrugged off and ignored), and no unit can threaten it. That the power of high resistances and empathy (and ofcourse things like Dark Shroud which your rightfully praised, and the incredibly broken in Dark Side Shaman that can spam Dancing Axes and Totems of Life for healing, complete the circle of invulnerability since an Ogre will never be lost).
I... really don't think you understand how resistance stacking works. Say you have the Lab Coat maxed (+20), are Bagyr with maxed resistance from his Bloodlust skill (+15), and that's it; no Medal, no other Items boosting Physical resistance, no Great Artifacts spent into resistance boosting. If you cast Stone Skin Level 3 at its base value of +40%, your unit jumps from 35 to 75 resistance, which is to say it more than doubles their actual durability if I completely ignore the Defense boost. (Because instead of taking 65% you take 25%, noticeably less than half what you were taking) If you instead use Empathy with a transfer rate of 60%, it... works out to almost the same increase in durability if we ignore Stone Skin's Defense boosting, which we shouldn't, so actually Empathy is behind.
DeleteThis just gets more true the more resistance boosters you add until you're hitting the hard cap of 95% resistance. Adding 40% to 35% more than doubles your durability. Adding 40% to 65% to hit 95% means you take seven times as much damage to kill. For Empathy to match that second increase, it has to reach 85% transfer rate! As Empathy handles its math at the end, there aren't 'magic number' points from Empathy's perspective to change this calculation; Stone Skin's effective boosts go up the more Physical resistance you already have until the cap kicks in. Empathy's effective boost is defined purely by its transfer rate value.
By a similar token, Magic Shield actually stacking with external boosters means it gets much the same sort of benefit, and unlike Stone Skin it affects every damage type so there's no pointing to how rare it is for Dark Side battlegroups to be purely Physical damage. Going back to the prior 35% value and adding in Dark Keeper being maxed gets us to 42%, where adding 30% takes you from 58% damage taken to 28% damage taken; more than doubling how much damage you'd take to die, and the numbers get better as you add in other external resistance boosters -furthermore, Magic Shield benefits from Warlock, so with Warlock maxed Level 3 Magic Armor actually provides +39% resistance, turning that earlier 42% into an 81% and thus dragging you from 58% damage taken to 19% damage taken, almost tripling your effective durability. Empathy has to get to at least 66% transfer to compete with those numbers, which were deliberately conservative -I'm still excluding Great Artifact boosts and the potential for other Item-based resistance boosts and Foresight's resistance boost, none of which will shift the balance toward Empathy until, again, hitting the actual resistance cap.
And yes, the hard part of Dark Side is its early game. That is exactly why I find Empathy lackluster; wacky nonsense like a 96% transfer rate isn't going to be doable until you're solidly in the territory of being able to mash through everything in 2-4 turns with little or no chance for the enemy to attack, at which point defensive boosts of any kind are difficult to care about; I don't need to turn an Ogre into a super-tank when I can just vaporize the enemy army before melee combat gets a chance to start, and in fact the Ogre would be better as something ranged or at least faster.
DeleteAs in, I'm literally halfway through an Impossible Bagyr run right now, and I'm regularly taking on stacks rated as at least Lethal and ending the battle by no later than turn 4, with no chance for most groups to fight because I wipe out or disable every ranged unit before it can act and then do the same to the melee units before they can get in reach. Introducing Empathy to my current strategy would do literally nothing of use, even if I had it at over 90% transference.
Similarly, you keep bringing up Empathy lasting 9 turns easily, and... again, I regularly stomp the enemy in 4 turns. Anything beyond 4 turns is not a meaningful advantage if the battle is only 4 turns long.
If Empathy were backported to Armored Princess, with its slower battles and great weighting toward summon spam, it would probably be one of the best Spells in the game. Dark Side simply offers too much overwhelming offensive power to care, though.
Very good, you found the narrow situation whereby Stoneskin against solely physical damage (which is extremely uncommon in Dark Side what with 1) dragon armies that feature fire and cold 2) human armies w/ magic damage galore, and fire and ice from burning and freezing status effects from bowman arrows (Admittedly the arrows themselves now deal just physically damage sadly) 3) Elf based armies that feature magic and poison, 4) demon based enemies which feature fire damage from imps and Archdemon Firestorm 5) spider based neutrals that have ice, poison and fire 6) snake based armies that have poison, 7) Undead based armies that have poison, magic, cold 8) Dwarven armies that are by and large physical but still have Alchemist and Engineer that deal alternative damage types 9) Orc based armies that feature shaman or spirit talker dealing magic damage and cold damage. Only very few army compositions are solely physical damage like Amazons, and even then once factoring in Heroes or Gremlins alternative damage is commonplace) can somewhat compete with Empathy depending on the exact values that both are providing. This ignores the other advantages of Empathy though (undispellable/counterable, much longer duration, protection from all types of damage, no initiative penalty, situations where one is close to reaching the physical resistance cap such as that a late game Orc or Demoness (using both +20% resistance armor and factoring in Foresight and +5% physical resistance from Stone Skin Spell used in Nazeemus the Blind ritual etc) will find themselves in, and ofcourse the significant portion of the game where a Mage will be able to have Level 3 Empathy in the 80's and 90's, and then later on when a mage will be able to have even Empathy level 2 in the 70's and above. The defense boost from Stone Skin will only rarely come into play though.
DeleteRegardless I have always been a fan of Stone Skin, and while it's still occasionally a viable spell in Dark Side, it's nowhere near as relevant as it was in past games.
"furthermore, Magic Shield benefits from Warlock, so with Warlock maxed Level 3 Magic Armor actually provides +39% resistance" Same argument can be made for Empathy which even on a pitiful ~20 intellect Orc can reach ~80% damage reduction from Empathy level 3. This still trumps Magic Shield even on units with no innate resistance, but the most common units to get buffs are things like Ogre's or Knights who have innate resistance, in which case Magic Armor does alot less than one hopes. There are almost no situations where Magic Shield outclasses Empathy, even putting aside its much higher mana cost (so less powerful in the hands of a Mage with Higher Magic relative to the cheap and spammable Empathy which can theoretically even be cast 4 times in a round if using the level 2 version to protect nearly the entire team), much higher crystal cost, and it's significantly lower duration, and the fact that it's vulnerable to the myriad dispels from armies featuring witch hunter (very commonplace), lake faries (also commonplace) and hero's that cast dispel (once again not uncommon).
"Empathy has to get to at least 66% transfer to compete with those numbers" With Warlock 3 i'm not sure it's possible for Empathy level 3 to be below 66% unless one has sub 10 intellect, so again it always more than competes, it Triumphs. But yes Magic Armor can sometimes act as a poor man's empathy (except it's much more expensive in every way, so not really a "poor man's" solution), just strictly worse.
sigh
DeleteI deliberately gave numbers that *favored* Empathy. I explicitly said this.
Fine, we'll run with your 80% transfer rate scenario, never mind that you yourself said you currently only have 72% as a late-game Bagyr, making it pretty strange for you to suddenly shift to using 80% as your claimed number.
Meanwhile, we'll return to maxed Lab Coat (20% global resistance), maxed Bloodlust (+15%), maxed resistance Medal (+7%), and furthermore add maxed Foresight (+21%), and then cast Magic Armor with Warlock 3. We thus on turn one go from 63% total resistance to the hard cap of 95% (Because our total should actually be 102 -note that this means that on turn 2 we're still at 95%), and thus our units take... 18.5% of the damage they were taking before we cast Magic Armor. Huh, look at that, a superior reduction to your 80% transfer rate. (Where the unit takes 20% of the damage they would take if you cast nothing at all) And that works on every damage type, so that's not an escape hatch for your argument.
"But Empathy lasts way longer!" I'm sure you're going to say yet again, never mind that, again, battles in Dark Side rarely last more than 4 turns, and thus this doesn't matter.
"But Empathy can't be dispelled!" True, but Witch Hunters are primarily restricted to the very early portion of the game and are never THAT common, Lake Fairies are trivial to disable any number of ways, and... I'm honestly not sure I've ever seen a Hero cast Dispel. Crucially, the AI is very, very dumb in its usage of Dispel in Dark Side, exacerbated by general weird behavior, where these Dispels are very likely to be aimed at something you don't care about and that very possibly literally didn't matter. Sure, they COULD Dispel your Magic Armor, but it's not actually very likely. This at least is a real advantage of Empathy's, but... it's minor. It's also misleading, because there are several conditions it still breaks under, such as a unit being Sheeped (Or recovering from being Sheeped) or Thread of Life being used on one of the targets. None of these is as common as Dispel, but pressing Empathy as impossible for the AI to stop as an absolute rule is simply wrong.
"Empathy is dirt-cheap!" This is true, and very important to Bagyr and Neoline, as they don't get Daert's completely insane Mana economy. Of course, this returns to; why build a super-tank when you can kill everything dead much faster? Bagyr's Bloodlust at least actively rewards using a melee unit that's tanking hits, but... Orc Shield and good resistance is generally already plenty to keep a stack untouched. Daert especially has zero reason to bother; your units don't need protection if you just kill or disable everything that can hurt them before danger actually reaches them.
And... you've primarily engaged with the resistance math part of this discussion, which you're just flatly wrong about. You haven't actually tried to give a reason why building a super-tank is actually desirable, which is honestly 80% of why I don't care about Empathy's hypothetical upper limits; rapidly taking the enemy apart is far superior in Dark Side to turtling up. I explicitly said earlier that my current Bagyr run would get zero benefit out of Empathy if I DID have it at the really high transfer rate, and you've not responded to that at all, which is frankly far more important than whether Empathy competes with Stone Skin and Magic Shield -all of them are limited in Dark Side.
Part 1-
DeleteYeh cause I don't have warlock 3 on my Bagyr (only 2), but if i did, Empathy would be ~80%. You mentioned magic armor with warlock 3, so using warlock 3 numbers is when Empathy can reach the roughly 80% metric even at just a lowly ~20 intellect level.
"We thus on turn one go from 63% total resistance to the hard cap of 95%" The issue with this is that units like Ogre already have 10% innate resistances to all but astral, so they are starting with all resistances on turn 1 at atleast 73% to all besides astral, then factoring 5% resistance from Great Artifacts > 78%, then factoring in Nazeemus the Blind Stone Skin ritual 83% to physical, 78% to everything else besides astral at 68%. Then you have to factor in that Ogre starts at atleast 10 Adrenaline for an additional 2% to all resistances (and ultimately up to 10% to all resistances including astral, albeit this interacts positively with Magic Armor since it's not considered "innate" resistance unlike his base 10% to all resistances besides astral). Suddenly eventhough Magic Armor completes all his resistances to 95%, there is what's called "diminishing returns" on the extra resistance. If instead of taking 150 damage from a physical attack that would do 1000 damage when Ogre has 85% physical resistance, one then bumps it up to 95% and he is only taking 50 damage from that 1000 physical damage attack, that is "only" decreasing the damage by 2/3rd's or 66.6%. Empathy provides better reduction than that.
"note that this means that on turn 2 we're still at 95%" Yes Magic Armor provides a bit more juice as Foresight bonus starts wearing off, i won't deny that.
""But Empathy lasts way longer!" I'm sure you're going to say yet again, never mind that, again, battles in Dark Side rarely last more than 4 turns, and thus this doesn't matter." This is a relevant point. The most difficult battle I had in Dark Side was accidentally stumbling into the guard in Inselburg defending the Helvedia portal (something you touched on in your Analysis, which i respect), without any rage potions or preparation, all at level 25 with just 10k leadership. This is the aftermath of the battle (note it says 90 shamans but that was due to Phantoms, it was 50 shamans just like 50 Archmages with both at 200 leadership with no discounts for my exactly 10k leadership milestone)- i.imgur.com/RQn7aVz.png
Note this wasn't a no-loss playthrough which i've done before successfully on Impossible in all the other KB games (this is my 1st Dark Side run after a hiatus from KB), albeit it was one of the only battles i had losses in, and also i never reload battles like you mentioned in your analysis since i consider that cheating (only times i reload are if i get caught by the deadly Max Rage reduction bug in Dark Side, then i'll find a save, hopefully one battle previously, before it has struck).
In a battle like this, the most difficult of battles possible in Dark Side (i'd wager atleast 99% of players would have lost here), when magic is severely limited (i was fortunate to have the amazing Succubus signet which doubled my mana from like 42 or so to 82, on top of the crucial +1 speed which allowed me to maneuver all around the deadly battlefield and take advantage of the amazing Death Totems and Ogre's guaranteed stun talent), having an empathy that costs 6 or 9 mana and lasts ~9 rounds, would be a HUGE boon. Magic Armor can't even remotely compete in this situation with its short duration and exorbitant mana cost. Yes on all these easy 2-4 round battles the duration doesn't matter much, but it still is a relevant point that Empathy has an incredible, unstoppable duration on top of its dirt cheap mana cost.
Part 2-
Delete" but Witch Hunters are primarily restricted to the very early portion of the game and are never THAT common" In my game they were incredibly common, probably the enemy i faced most overall, and extremely dispel happy.
"Lake Fairies are trivial to disable any number of ways," There are numerous tough elf battles (particularly if one is trying to break into Alara early to get access to the gatekeeped Orc Scouts or other "special" units), and while one may be able to hamper Lake Faries movement, their dispel is a serious threat.
"'im honestly not sure I've ever seen a Hero cast Dispel" I can link multiple times it happened from an Impossible Lp's of my friend "NoFairFight" or Boris that i have done collabs with in the past. It's not every hero fight ofcourse, but a decent amount have access to Dispel and use it atleast somewhat effectively (especially if Dispelling Phantoms and the like)
"It's also misleading, because there are several conditions it still breaks under, such as a unit being Sheeped" Which is why i said "So basically it can't be stopped through conventional means" in regards to enemy spirit talkers. Since there is a workaround with Sheep. It's good that you know this to, but the reality is that it's a really narrow case. Also its irrelevant if one casts Empathy on their own Ogre or Tier 5 unit, because then not even Sheep workaround exists (as long as the player isn't dumb enough to cast Sheep on the enemy unit they linked with Empathy. A.I hero can't Sheep their own unit ofcourse)
"but pressing Empathy as impossible for the AI to stop as an absolute rule is simply wrong." No it's correct, atleast if the unit on your side that you are Empathying is a tier 5. Only if its a tier 4 and they also have access to Sheep Level 3 can Empathy be stopped. So it is an absolute rule for your own tier 5 units, a little less absolute for tier 4 units and below.
"This is true, and very important to Bagyr and Neoline, as they don't get Daert's completely insane Mana economy." No it's just as relevant for even Vampire, maybe even more so, due to it's incredibly favorable interaction with Higher Magic due to it's cheap mana cost. Don't try to downplay it.
"why build a super-tank when you can kill everything dead much faster" It's a perfectly viable strategy to create a super tank to ensure a no loss victory in battles. And it always has been in KB. I'm not denying that pretty much every battle the enemy can easily be blitzkrieged to death in 1-2 rounds (often with enemy getting no actions at all especially with things like Orc Chieftain Drain and other disables).
"Orc Shield and good resistance is generally already plenty to keep a stack untouched." Yes I'm aware. In spell form Empathy acts as the invulnerability spell for melee units (Albeit Chaos Breath can take on a similar role).
"Daert especially has zero reason to bother" If anything he has the most reason to bother. Target level 3 + Empathy level 2 (if the cap has already been reached on level 3 version) still fits in Higher Magic Level 3, allowing yet another super expensive cast (or perhaps something like Stoneskin or Magic Armor to complete the invulnerability if needed), and it neutralizes all the most deadly ranged units/griffins and other flyers and the like, short of tier 5 units (which is why Chaos Breath exists)
"you've primarily engaged with the resistance math part of this discussion, which you're just flatly wrong about." I'm not wrong about the resistance math part. I conceded that you found the extremely narrow situation whereby StoneSkin can add potentially slightly more staying power against solely physical damage.
Part 3-
Delete"You haven't actually tried to give a reason why building a super-tank is actually desirable" Umm, Target has been a Staple of KB. The idea of using a super tank has always existed in KB. It's why Chaos Breath is considered so powerful at the highest levels, because in conjunction with something like a land based Ancient Vampire, one can defeat stacks that are exponentially larger due to abusing it's regen and the huge Max Hp created by Chaos Breath (not to mention the hundreds of attack/defense to reach the max difference in those departments).
" rapidly taking the enemy apart is far superior in Dark Side to turtling up" No one said anything about Turtling up. In the screenshot i shared of Ogre, he had just casually mauled a stack of ~35 Archdemons with 150 defense over a couple rounds, taking basically no damage, and Empathy allowed him near immunity from any of the hordes of units nearby that might attack him, as well as the Armegeddon that was cast by a late game hero with ~18 intellect. One can use Empathy offensively, and in fact that is sorta the preferred method, where it acts a variant of an Orc Shield in spell form. Ofcourse Chaos Breath can perform a similar role (it can do everything after all).
"current Bagyr run would get zero benefit out of Empathy if I DID have it at the really high transfer rate" This is just wrong. You haven't tried it and utilized it in situations where it would provide benefit. This doesn't mean that the game on impossible can be won without Empathy being cast, since it clearly can be (it probably can be won with no spells cast). That doesn't detract from Empathies merits and sheer power.
"more important than whether Empathy competes with Stone Skin and Magic Shield" It doesn't compete, it's the Superior Spell, and by a serious margin. But as i said, it's possible that literally 0 spells are needed to win on impossible (Vampire aside since he does need spells. Bagyr's Rage and army is so powerful that spells are usually an afterthought at best)."
Ok so we have gotten to the point where "no spells matter" type arguments are being made and "battles are so short" anyways. I'm not really denying those realities, it's unfortunate that Dark Side isn't more in the vein of Armored Princess (which i will likely go back to shortly, with my first time playing Crossworlds, after i beat the last ~5% of Dark Side i have remaining), where you are right that Empathy would be super super bonkers in. It's more from that lens and perspective where I realize that Empathy is the real deal. i concede that spells overall, especially to an Orc, mean very little in Dark Side. I am a Mage player though at my core, so I can appreciate how powerful Empathy is since damage mitigation, sheer tankiness, and resistance and the like are my forte. And no kb game trumps Dark Side in that department with the heights one can reach (it's a pity that Dark Side has so many flaws and bugs and is ultimately a cakewalk, so that those things don't matter as much as they should. Arguably though part of why it's so easy is that a super broken Lab Coat with joke gremlins fights are all but handed to you on a sliver platter super early in the game. Also in general Gremlin fights could be a serious challenge in previous kb games, but overall in Dark Side they are a joke).
I give you credit for amending your initial review of Chaos Breath to highlight some of it's myriad strengths. Hopefully you can at some point give Empathy similar treatment, even if it it's not your preferred playstyle, to let others know that it's a monster in terms of damage mitigation on an important unit and that it shouldnt be underestimated, and that is has a really cheap crystal and mana cost and can be used and abused to good effect early.
tbh I beat the Helvedia guards early (Sub-Level 30 like you're describing) off primarily Jealousy and assorted percentile effects, with... it's been years so I don't recall if it was no-casualty or just really low casualties, but it was pretty easy. Jealousy, Orc Strike, and Flames of Passion are honestly the real gamebreakers of Dark Side, letting you take on a wide variety of armies with zero casualties even when they have literally twenty times your Leadership, simply because they all auto-scale with no Leadership sanity checks or anything.
DeleteNnnno, Daert does not care about supertanks. You don't cast a cheap Empathy as your first Spell in a turn. You do tens of thousands of damage with Chaos Missiles if you want an economical first cast, or use Fire Rain to spread around damage. If late-game Daert's units are being attacked at all, you're probably playing badly... and also his army taking casualties basically doesn't matter unless you're wanting to do no-loss as a point of pride... in which case you can just be smarter about using death blasts and disables. Spell-immune units are the only circumstance Daert might care, and that has the problem that the Spell-immune units A: are all a pain to predict/manipulate into targeting the right unit and B: can't be targeted by Empathy and so if you're fighting a wall of Black Dragons and/or Ice Dragons Empathy is also worthless. I'm not 'downplaying' Empathy in regards to Daert -it has no place in his arsenal, and wouldn't even if his Intellect rising insanely didn't break it.
Lake Fairies can be Blinded, Sheeped, Feared (They won't use Dispel while under Fear), put to sleep very reliably by Beholders... I'm not talking slowing them down, I'm talking not letting them take an action at all. At which point their Dispel is irrelevant. And honestly, letting them Dispel something is itself often advantageous -they don't move when doing it, so it's a cheap way to delay them. They're one of the least threatening components of Elf armies in Dark Side; between Preparations, the ease of disabling them, and their obsession with Dispel, they can often be more or less ignored for 3+ turns, which is to say you only have to pay attention to them when you're nearly done with the battle anyway.
Yes, my current Bagyr run would gain nothing from adding Empathy to the process. There is no point to using Empathy when you can kill everything without being attacked in the first place. Empathy could be thirty times as good as you're making it out to be and it would still be irrelevant. No, modifying my army composition to try to leverage it wouldn't be an improvement. Among other points, you keep focusing on Level 5 units as recipients, and Level 5 units are inherently... bad. They are inferior at damage output to lower-Level units and always have been; their per-head durability is their primary advantage and who cares if you don't let your units get attacked in the first place? Orc Chieftains at least have their completely insane Drain spam... Ogres are just lackluster in Dark Side. If you are trying to make a nearly-invincible unit, a Level 4 unit is basically always going to be better at killing things while not really losing anything of substance if you're going to these kinds of lengths.
DeleteI'm still not hearing a reason a super-tank is inherently desirable, either. You don't need it to get no-casualty wins, and in fact it'll just be slower than killing and disabling things so they don't get to attack in the first place. I keep pointing to the superiority of offense in Dark Side because defensive boosting is just the long, slow route to no-casualty wins, with no actual advantage. If you enjoy a melee-focused strategy just because they've always suffered in these games, cool, but 'Empathy lets me make melee viable' is not 'Empathy is one of the best Spells in the game' like you keep pressing.
I'm also not really sure why you're going 'Mage player perspective=reason to praise Empathy'. The Mage has always been a blaster caster who nukes threats down. Armored Princess' Mage is sufficiently hamstrung at nuking things she ends up leaning on support Spells, including protecting-your-troops Spells because her army never stops mattering, but in the other three games you just kill enemy armies with your mind, your army existing as a support apparatus to your Spellslinging rather than a fighting force in its own right.
I don't see myself giving Empathy an overhaul to make it sound good and cool, because the more you talk it up the more it emphasizes that it's... not good. You need huge resistance stacking AND a high transfer rate for it to pull ahead of the competition at raw damage reduction (Which means saying things like 'you can get Empathy 3 online early!' is something of a lie-in-spirit because no, you can't get to the conditions where Empathy 3 is actually GOOD that early, it requires a ton of further Rune investment and so on that pushes its viability to later in the game), Dark Side is fundamentally a game where damage reduction is laughable a tool when it's so much more effective to not be attacked in the first place (Because everything dies before it can try), and even once you've got it online... well, by that point you've already got the ability to trivialize almost any fight via several other tools. 'It eventually becomes a gamebreaker' doesn't really stand out in a game filled with gamebreakers, especially not when several others are gamebreakers from much sooner. (eg Jealousy)
Part 1 of 2
DeleteYes i didn't mention that i had yet to get Orc Strike Lethality upgrade, flames of passion it was just at 10%. So if those had been further along, the battle would have been alot easier. Jealousy took over a stack of 450~ bowman instead of the much deadlier ~1250 stack (on the plus side i got off some Pain Mirrors for basically the only time in that run that were killing like ~50 Knights a pop since they had bopped the 450 )
" letting you take on a wide variety of armies with zero casualties even when they have literally twenty times your Leadership, simply because they all auto-scale with no Leadership sanity checks or anything." Right i had yet to reach that threshold of power, which is why facing a battle of over 6x my leadership was a challenge. What i meant is that with the exact equivalent setup i had that vast majority of players wouldn't win the battle.
"You don't cast a cheap Empathy as your first Spell in a turn" I am sure that Target+Empathy is a perfectly strong and viable path to Vampire play even in Dark Side. Yes i understand that he can brute force some armies with sheer damage though due to the outrageous Archmage +intellect bonus. So too is a supertank via Chaos Breath a perfectly viable strategy to be used by Mages such as the aforementioned ancient vampire. Just because you weren't aware of these strategies and don't like them yourselves, doesn't mean they aren't viable (if likely optimal).
"it has no place in his arsenal, and wouldn't even if his Intellect rising insanely didn't break it." I have already addressed the intellect "Breaking" issue countless times. A level 2 version would become sufficiently strong and rising once the level 3 version reaches the 100% mark. You aren't the judge of deciding what "has a place " in a mage's "Arsenal". I feel like I have given you to much credit quoting some of your analysis that were poignant in other places and Lp's. Clearly your ego has already gotten the better of you.
"Lake Fairies can be Blinded, Sheeped, Feared" Yeh thanks i know how to deal with Lake Faries.
"I'm not talking slowing them down, I'm talking not letting them take an action at all. At which point their Dispel is irrelevant" When one doesn't dedicate a spell towards disabling them (which btw can be dispelled by the other lake faries assuming there are multiple stacks which has happened before..) and instead relies on rage for things like Dark Cloud to lessen the threat of their melee prowess in huge numbers, it is then where their dispel can still be a nuisance.
"Among other points, you keep focusing on Level 5 units as recipients, and Level 5 units are inherently... bad. They are inferior at damage output to lower-Level units and always have been;" Don't lecture me on Tier 5 units, as if i don't know that lower tier units have the premier damage output in the game.
"If you enjoy a melee-focused strategy just because they've always suffered in these games, cool, but 'Empathy lets me make melee viable' is not 'Empathy is one of the best Spells in the game' like you keep pressing" I'll admit this is one of your better points. Yes in a melee centric playstyle which this game encourages (Relative to previous entries anyways), with Bagyr and an Orc army as the primary recipient of that melee style, that is where Empathy shines brightest and can claim to be in contention for one of the best spells.
Part 2 of 2
Delete"Armored Princess' Mage is sufficiently hamstrung at nuking things she ends up leaning on support Spells, including protecting-your-troops Spells because her army never stops mattering, " AP is considered by most to be the Zenith of the KB series, so my lens and assessment are primarily through that as the baseline as opposed to Legend or Wotn/Ice and Fire.
"it requires a ton of further Rune investment" Getting Order Magic to level 3 is not much of a stretch, even for an Orc, Admittedly this is the rare game that getting Chaos Mage to 3 before Distortion to 3 (the usual go to) is a thing due to Chaos Breath, Sheep (regardless of your critique of it it still stands as the best disable for tier 4 and below units in the game, and one timeshift later and the unit is fully out of commission), Chaos Missiles, Messenger of Death and a few others is a thing. Order Magic has the broken Call of Nature (which i shy away from since its just too overpowered, not in a good way, in a gamebreaking way), Resurrection, Creation, and ofcourse Empathy as the main reasons to go for it.
"'It eventually becomes a gamebreaker'" It's crazy powerful on mage before he hits the 100% bug for the level 3 version (then it cools off a bit till the level 2 reaches solid heights). If a unit is going to be taking damage (whether it's Orc Shielded or otherwise), Empathy more than pulls its weight. Ofcourse this is largely moot if one is just playing a heavy range/summon spam army that hardly ever takes damage and hardly engages in melee with otherwise potentially vulnerable units. I do agree that the caveat for Empathy being a top tier spell is that in those cases it's not necessary, and it only shines if your units are in melee and taking damage.
But ok we have reached the endpoint of discussion on Empathy. It's fine if you don't update the entry. My view of you has been taking a hit from some of your most recent comments, and i'd rather not dwell on that too much and instead focus on the fact that you did some overall good work with your analysis.
I... am having a hard time caring. You've been relentlessly, gratuitously rude from second one, repeatedly insulting me to my face. If me slowly losing patience with relentless rudeness has caused you to view me more dimly... oh no? You clearly didn't have much respect for me in the first place.
DeleteI'd try to respond to your points, but it's just... difficult to care in the face of this.
"Retesting Chaos Breath, I certainly hadn't realized it could give effectively infinite Speed at high ranges." Chaos Breath does many many things, and yes one of them is that it can act as a super haste (way beyond the +2 speed from haste). I'll share a couple screenshots that feature Chaos Breath, and note this is on a lowly Orc caster with barely over 20 intelligence, and it's still a monstrous spell. Also take not that it can't be dispelled which is almost always a positive thing for the player (so Witch Hunters/Lake Faries enemy heroes can't get rid of it). On the other hand it can't be extended by Time Shift since it's not considered a buff or debuff, which is kinda a bummer.
ReplyDeleteHere is from the first time i cast it on an enemy dragon - i.imgur.com/V9LFTQ5.png . So besides crippling it's attack/defense/speed and crit chance, the important thing if casting it on an enemy, is that it can act as a Super Pygmy in terms of reducing its Hp and max hp (potentially drastically). Also pygmy is only capped at tier 4 units with its level 3 version, meanwhile even a level 1 version of Chaos Breath can affect tier 5 units.
Here is another one whereby the enemy hero's stack of over 5k Forest Fairy gets reduced to both 1 speed (so a better slow) and more importantly to the minimum of 1 Hp - i.imgur.com/zg7kjOK.png
So that isn't too much different than "destroy target non-magic immune unit" since it effectively does that to an enemy unit frequently.
The main utility of Chaos Breath though is on one's own units ofcourse. It can improve attack, defense, crit chance, speed, and importantly max hp
Some examples-
1) Just an average cast with it- i.imgur.com/dYEEqhh.png
2) Here is Orc Chieftain with it's max hp raised from it's 740 to over 5000, allowing it to get a Blood Rage boosted Power of The Horde that did it's full 97,500 Hp in damage to a huge stack of 367 ents, wiping them out - i.imgur.com/y9xLN2O.png
3) Here is versus enemy dragon hero, where a ton of traps were in the way of Ogre (sadly traps in Dark Side really hurt your own melee armies more than the enemy, atleast as an Orc. A vampire/mage i'm sure still appreciates it. This makes diversions past level 1 highly suspect even if the missing turn aspect would be greatly appreciated. If i could turn off my traps, I would), but Chaos Breath delivered the 15 move speed to allow my Ogre to one shot the stack of dragons (note Ogre's Heavy Hand is working correctly, Ogre's Chieftain's however is not working whatsoever and is 100% bugged)- i.imgur.com/jRMTRC5.png
Here is what i call "Limit Testing" of Chaos Breath, on a seemingly lowly Dark Forest Dryad- i.imgur.com/ZMCtKTs.png
DeleteSo we see her movement shoot up to effectively infinite, her defenses cross the 100 threshold, and her hp went from 25 to 169, or nearly 400,000 max hp.
Her resistances which are the base 42% to all from BloodLust 3, Lab Coat, and Guardian Level 3. Then add a +5% to physical from using Stone Skin with the Nazeemus ritual (slightly edges out using Magic Armor for +1% to all resistances), and 21% from Foresight Level 3 on turn 1- i.imgur.com/6RaBNZS.png
And then we see how she fares taking attacks from 65 griffins and 534 snakes, note this is with Spirit Talkers Thread of Life/Empathy which is only 20% (ofcourse he easily could have wiped out the attackers with his prodigal attack, albeit that discussion is for another comment whereby i explain why Spirit Talker is actually the Premier ranged unit in Dark Side, unlike your lackluster rating of it)- i.imgur.com/KkniyII.png
So we see that 65 Griffins could only muster 33 damage. As an aside that means that the Griffin stack would have needed to be over ~750,000 Griffins or 60 million leadership worth of griffins to have wiped out the Dryads in one attack. Yes 60 Million.
We then see that the 534 Snakes are able to kill a single dryad. All of this is very interesting, but it also means that if a player casted Empathy (easily 60%++ at level 3) instead of the only 20% value from Spirit Talker, then the chaos boosted dryads with their reduced 14 leadership would have survived attacks from 65 griffins and 534 snakes without losing a single one. So thats ~20k in enemy leadership not being able to kill a single 14 leadership unit in that situation.
The point of this all is to showcase the amazing synergy of the three best things in Dark Side 1) Resistance. Resistance is king. Nothing compares to it, not even close. 2) Chaos Breath- The undisputed (among those of us at the highest level) best spell in the game with countless applications. 3) Empathy- It's the spell that makes ones unit effectively invulnerable with no downside and can't be countered and lasts forever.
Here was when i realized you were wrong about magic armor since an obstacle cast it on my Ogre, otherwise i would have relied on your analysis to save the crystals - i.imgur.com/oQom7dy.png
In the same way you were wrong about Magic Armor, you are wrong about Chaos Breath and Empathy.
Hmm. My main takeaway is honestly more the part where Chaos Breath can be used to mess up a key enemy even if it's immune to assorted tools for disabling targets and whatnot, most particularly high Level units you can't simply Blind, Sheep, etc. That gives it unique utility to potentially let you solve an encounter if one specific stack is the problem, where said stack is immune to your other tools. I'll certainly be updating its description in a bit.
DeleteChaos Breath is multi-dimensional and nearly all powerful regardless of the situation or use case. While it's usually best as a way to (significantly) bolster ones unit in the crucial departments of: attack, defense, speed, crit chance, hp (ofcourse the tier 5 units may not care much about the attack/defense, but they can really leverage going from the 600-700 hp range to usually atleast 2k to over 5k in hp, and the speed is especially useful for "slow" powerful tier 5 units), the fact remains that it can be used to cripple beyond belief any non-magic immune enemy, potentially setting it up to die instantly to a next attack that otherwise wouldn't have harmed it much. Ofcourse in Mage/Vampire hands it will frequently act as a super pygmy, allowing any following up damage/spell to kill even huge 6 figures worth of leadership stack (one can consistently turn a Dragon with ~800 hp into one with 30 hp... yeh). So again, by far the best spell in the game, and it isn't even close. And keep in mind nothing can stop it or interact with it in anyway, dispel and the like doesn't effect it. This is a characteristic that both it and empathy share, which is why they are sooo powerful, because they CAN'T be stopped. There is no solution besides death to the enemy.
DeleteThe comments in your Chaos magic analysis touched on some of the many (overpowered) synergies with it with things like regenerators on Ancient Vampires with thousands of hp etc, and i showed you how it makes Power of the Horde into an unmatched perfect range magic nuke (only slight downside is that there is a bug with Berserk halving on Power of the Horde, where even if it would be super overkill it may only "half" the unit sadly). It can even do wonders on lower tier units, but ofcourse it's at its best in many ways on tier 5. The more one uses Chaos Breath, the more one comes to appreciate it's power
I'll comment since there seems to be a recent discussion. Creation is ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NUTS. In one specific case: pirate ghosts. If you take at least one level of transmute, go into a fight with at least one friendly gremlin, you can have infinite money, crystals AND RUNES! See unlike armored princess (i think) transmute never stops giving you mana, and gremlins spawn infinite enemies, meaning infinite mana, meaning infinite pirate ghost chests, put on a movie (actually many movies, takes a long time) and you can max out your skills in one fight. Okay, that's unrealistic, but you get the point. Even without the inifinite exploit, once your army is good enough, you can kill all enemies save a single ranged unit or slow unit to kite with a flier, convert rage to mana, and you can have 40 charges of excavate on per battle before you run out of mana. This gets you a lot of money, crystals, runes and rare spell scrolls, which are all hard to find, and much needed considering more than one quest need half a million gold. In fact it's annoying to do this every time but i just fear missing out on the goods.
ReplyDeleteI tried to never abuse my creation/phantom of Pirate Ghosts past turn ten (set myself a limit otherwise they become obnoxious, and i also only used Pirate Ghosts for a few dozen battles of farming before ditching them), usually getting like 5-8 chests a battle in that window. However one time i had a battle go long and was still digging up chests with Pirate Ghosts and i missed like ~6-8 times in a row after having already got the most chests i did with them (probably over 10) and i got the feeling that there is some sorta cap on the sheer amount of treasure they can get in a battle (mana wasn't an issue, and yes there are many ways to generate infinite mana, one doesn't even need a friendly gremlin to do it, simple target+magic spring with 2 weakened enemy ranged units will suffice, among numerous other combos). I didn't go all in testing it to be absolutely sure, since it would never be relevant for me since I capped myself at round 10 for Pirate Ghost abuse, but I feel like there is a high chance that one can't get infinite chests with pirate ghosts in a battle, creation/phantom and infinite mana notwithstanding.
DeleteRegardless it's unnecessary to go to such extremes with Pirate Ghosts, even using them competently for a few dozen farm battles should load one up on runes/gold/crystals, and by end game my level 79 hero was effectively maxed on literally every skill possible. Dark Side as the game progresses is criminally easy, even on impossible, so one shouldn't get married to Pirate Ghosts for too long (it would be one thing if late game was really hard and thus the grind and handicapping oneself by using them and their requirements of constant creation/phantom would have a pay off, but it doesn't and it isn't hard, so it's futile).
I can confirm that Runic Word was cut relatively late. It even has proper Warlock skill interaction code. And as we both now know, a some of spells used in game have unfinished code for skill interactions.
ReplyDeleteI feels like Magic Axe struggles with it's place in the game for a long time and I don't understand why it never got any kind of rework or additional effect. And in DS it got raised costs of all things. I guess devs had more important things to do balance-wise, like buffing Blizzard.
Lightning damage doesn't scale with levels anymore. Higher levels only add bouncing and that's it. With low damage, low Shock chance and high mana cost, Lightning is really bad in this game.
Healing tries to but fails to actually affect Plague. How surprising.
Both healing and damaging parts are boosted by Defiler skill.
On Life Light - "...region becomes affected by a rain of holy light, allied units each turn..." - something is not right here.
While in the casting turn Life Light and Dark Shroud act immediately, in later turns they act at initiative of 2.
Them working the same way is bug, obviously. Both spells use the same script that in theory should behave differently depending on spell and targets but doesn't. Considering it already too much checks (a lot of them buggy) and yet not enough for all situations, it would be better to simply split it IMO.
While animations seem to work right upon casting, in later turns lingering Life Light uses dark healing animation instead of normal one; game fails to properly identify what spell of the two it is.
Healing numbers bug is caused by the way the spell works mechanic-wise; basically, it works with all affected units as one target; while heal/bleed distiction doesn't suffer from it, multiple units requiring different heal amount do - game just calculates lacking health on one and then add this number to all heal-able units whose health in not full. Life Light of previous games worked with each unit individually.
Both Life Light and Dark Shroud show Bleed power in their spellbook hints that you didn't mention - it's 8/16/24% at base and scales with Wight skill (of base numbers, rounds up) and Intellect. Those numbers are percent of normal Bleed damage - with level 3 spell and Wight skill a hero needs 68 Intellect so that Life Light's/Dark Shroud's bleed was as good as generic one. It is possible that this is an oversight and that the numbers were supposed to increase normal Bleed damage by X%, not set to X%. I don't know for sure through. That said, those spells still have internal level of 5 yet are nowhere close to Armageddon, Time Return or Blizzard. Having empowered bleed would give them atleast something.
Duration scales with both INT and Defiler skill.
Honestly, with all those bugs I feel more like half-rewriting those spell than just fixing something parts of them.
Unlike Dragon Slayer, Titan Slayer does not scale with Intellect. It scales with Warlock skill atleast, to the max result of +39%.
Magic Armor too doesn't scales with INT, only with Warlock skill. It also scales with "+ holy spells" items, which are not present in the game.
Duration scales with Defiler only, to the max result of 5 turns.
Level 3 Battle Cry has base duration is 4 turns, not 3.
It's initiative bonus scales with Warlock skill to the max result of 4.
Peacefulness health bonus is increased by Warlock skill to the max result of +65%.
Number of Dragon Arrows scales with Defiler skill (not Warlock, strangely enough) to the max result of 4 arrows.
It still ignores 30% of target's defense.
Description of Dragon Arrow-the-talent still says that is not affected by damage-increasing spells. Description is still wrong.
And like we already established, Amazons have the code for interacting with Dragon Arrows (and "Dragon Arrow" attack) but lack "archer" tag which make them untargettable by the spell.
Fit of Energy scales with Warlock skill to the max result of +4 action points.
Helplessness scales with Warlock skill to the max result of -78%.
Duration scales with Defiler to the max result of 6 turns.
While in WotN Summon Phoenix received halved bonus from Creation, in DS it gets full bonus from Puppeteer.
DeleteMature Phoenix has 40 attack and 30 defense, just like in WotN. You yourself wrote that he is untouched yet presented way lower numbers.
I too never got him early, but people who did sing such praises that I felt envious.
Avenger duration scales with Defiler to the max result of 8 turns.
While WotN Avenging Angel was boosted by Creation like a buff, DS Avenger is boosted by Wight like an attack spell. "+lightning spell damage" items help too, as usual.
It's damage is actually 160-240 on level 1, 290-430 on level 2 and 415-625 on level 3 - it's damage calculation script actually doubles base damage due to a thing that can possibly be a mistake.
Power of Night also can't be cast on Vikings. In addition, level 1 version can't be cast on neutrals.
It now deals additional damage if attacked unit tagged as 'Light', not based on it's race. Vikings are not, so the spell do nothing against them. It will boost damage against Mage Slayers and Darkwood Ents as those units wrongly tagged as Light ones.
Removal of INT scaling harmed the spell, yes. It scales with Warlock skill atleast, to the max result of +26%.
Level 1 Power of Light also can't be cast on neutrals.
This spell's too now deals bonus damage basing on check of attacked unit being tagged as 'Dark', not belonging to a specific race. So it won't increase damage against Mage Slayers, Darkwood Ents or Shamans due to their wrong/missing tags.
Just in case - 'casting' any of Power of... spells still checks for target's race.
It too scales with Warlock skill to the max result of +26%.
I am wondering about Dark Vikings myself - I don't think I saw any mention of them anywhere else.
Last hero still gives affected unit unlimited retaliations. Russian description still mentions it. Unit that already have such will still become unable to retaliate.
Description of the spell's effect (click on affected unit) still shows "...unit will recieve damage" instead of showing numbers.
DS Last Hero have some really '...what'-provoking stat calculation. It actually have specific numbers for percent of incoming damage that affected unit receives NOW and LATER. And higher spell levels 'increase' damage taken NOW and decrease damage for LATER but Warlock skill makes the exact opposite. And than final string just go "lol no, NOW is 0%, LATER is 100%", unless NOW damage is lower that 0%/LATER damage is higher than 100%" (which is impossible). And thus the previous calculations are pointless. Of course, 0% now and 100% later actually helps the spell a lot, so I think I'll leave it as it is now.
Also, remember our talk about it dealing damage at the end of combat? It is actually possible to prevent it, but than it will also prevent receiving damage on dispelling it, which will allow an exploit with casting Last Hero, enjoying invincibility and then dispelling it when duration is near end. This can countered by making the spell undispellable but it feels wrong to me. Alternatively, it should be possible to modify Dispel to trigger Last Hero LATER damage, but it may require editing every single spell/talent/ability that can remove Last Hero, so it's kinda feels like too much of a hassle. I just wanted to tell you.
In Russian version former Winter Dance is now Ice Blades. So, English version somehow kept name from the previous game yet renamed Necro Call for no reason?
This spell is bugged and wrongly uses damage growth numbers from Avenger - resulting in it's damage being 80-115 at level 2 and 115-170 at level 3.
If fixed, level 3 damage would be 145-210, not 145-205.
Just like in WotN, anything icy in this spell is purely visual. It is not considered to be an ice spell in any aspect and will not be boosted by "+ice spell damage" items.
Unlike Invisibiliy, Shelter is not ignored by Eyeless creatures. Also Shelter has internal level of 1 while invisibility's is 3, the former is easier to get.
DeleteIt can often reduce duration even if the enemy unit in question have not enough AP to get to Sheltered unit.
Creation is boosted by Warlock skill; both charges and and adrenaline count is increased to the max limit of 4 charges and +58 adrenaline.
Can be used to get tons of Dragon Arrows if one wants.
I find the fact that this ridiculous spell's internal level is merely 2 amusing.
As you correcly noticed, Empathy scales with Walock skill and INT. The latter is quite surprising considering how many spells lost their INT scaling.
Devs not putting limit on percent of transferred damage is strange too - ever since the Legend KB games used limit for INT scaling spells yet DS completely drops them.
Empathy script actually checks if the allied unit took atleast 1 damage after damage reducement from this spell and only then deals damage to the second unit. So high tranfer percent doing nothing is exactly what it should do according to script. Of course, such checks are present in a lot of mechanics for safety/stability reason. There really should be just limit for scaling.
Oh, and it's 100% that break the spell, not over 100%. So 99% is the highest working result.
Warded Healing should be Warding Healing. Or 'warded' works here too in English?
Either GoG version changed something, English description in confusing or you just misunderstood it but this spell:
1) blocks way less damage per hit: up to 10/25/40
2) does not have activation limit. Instead, it is limited by total damage limit it can block: 50/125/200. You listed those numbers as damage blocked per hit.
So the spell will block 5 maxed hits before collapsing. And even high level Daert can only hope for a few hundreds of blocked damage per hit.
Both blocked damage per hit and total damage limit are boosted by Defiler and by "+holy spell power" items, which are not present in this game. Considering it's a new spell, devs clearly planned to have those items here. Hm...
Anyway, when Warding Healing block damage below maximum per hit, it can absorb unrounded fractions. Easy to see with rage-gathering Orc Rage Skill.
Level 3 version have a special trait that is mention in-game (well, in the original version atleast) - if applied on unit that already has Warding Healing, old total damage limit will be added to the new on, not overriten. Like, target has remaining limit of 170. We cast level 3 Warded Healing with limit of 200 - now target's total damage limit is 370.
While it is not a bug, I find that remained total damage limit not being shown anywhere is rather inconvinient. It would be really easy to put in the effect descritpion and yet...
Just like Avenger, Ball of Lightning (just Ball Lightning in the original) has a thing in it's damage calculation that double it's base damage, so it's actually 100-200/200-400/300-600. At high INT it's damage becomes very nice. By far best in the game if we look on overall damage through all Ball Lightning's life.
DeleteShock chance does not scale at all.
Just in case, it is considered a proper lightning spell.
Level 3 version does not chose new target each time previous one was destroyed; once initial target is gone, Ball Lightning will chose new target each turn. It's choice is completely random, through it will never attack objects, even through an object can be chosen by player as initial target. I mean, Lightning will destroy this initial object, but afterwards will ignore any other.
This spell has the same internal level as normal Lightning spell, but is MUCH more useful. Through in this case it's normal Lightning whose internal level of 4 feels unwarranted.
Ball Lightning-the-unit has 10 initiative. It is also considered a barrier object and would trigger Siege attacks if it could be attacked. What.
Duration of it's existance is affected by Defiler skill. The max end result should be 5 turns, but may make game confused with reducing duration - and Lightning Ball may exist for many, MANY turns before finally disappearing.
Correction: got through everything, except I need to finish Ball of Lightning's update. Had a little more time than I thought I had when I made the prior comment.
DeleteWinter Dance - it uses Avenger 'damage growth' i.e. percent of base damage that is added on upgrading spell level, not Avenger 'damage' numbers. Winter Dance own damage growth is +110% of base per level, but it wrongly uses Avenger's +80%, so it's damage is worse than intended.
DeleteSo Winter's Dance damage is 45-65/95-135/145-210.
It is a pretty bad spell because of this. Compare it to Fire Rain, for example. On level 3 they have similar mana cost, but Fire Rain deals about twice damage, is half fire, hit one more tile and have a chance to apply Burn.
Ah. Corrected.
DeleteAlso finished updating the Ball of Lightning chunk.
And yeah, I don't get why Mage Pole Axe got nerfed by Armored Princess and then ignored for the rest of the series; it just barely had some niche uses in The Legend, and after that was very unlikely to be cast even once in a given run in a given game.
I'm not so sure Call of Nature is actually best on Daert. Scaling with leadership, Neoline's nearly 2x larger stack size and with boosted intellect will still get 300% stats or more. It's at least pretty similar power level, if you luck into getting Griffons with unlimited retaliations its not uncommon to see every enemy melee unit dead before turn 2 hits.
ReplyDeleteRegarding the Magic Armor quest in Aralan; if I remember it correctly, the dialogue mentioned it being at a specific location at the castle, you could simply pick it up and deliver it. The presence of this quest puzzled me (now that I think of it, is it to give off the impression that the "apprentice" role we are playing would include such a dynamic in its natural state?).
ReplyDeleteI have found three possible explanations:
A)There was some patching done after your run
B)There were bugs involved [not necessarily seperate from option A]
C)You didn't catch sight of the scroll [I guess this becomes more likely when you assume option B is occuring by default, with the darn shenanigans of Dark Side]
If the case is so, could you update the post? "could" also as in actual probability, with the user crisis going on. I wish you the best of management with that (At the bare minimum, in my opinion, your current username is dope as hell).
I don't remember such a reference, but I'll admit the shoddiness of Dark Side's translation lead to me often glossing a bit over the lines more than I usually do.
DeleteI did scour the castle quite thoroughly, though, so I'd be surprised if I genuinely just didn't spot the scroll.
As part of making sure posts don' get deleted when my old account gets deleted for inactivity, I'll be recreating most posts under this account, and will probably do a certain amount of updating old content as I go. So it might happen just for that reason.