Warriors of the North Rage Analysis
Something worth noting right away: all the following damage values are without ranks in the Favorite of the Valkyries Medal, which can ultimately raise damage by 35%. If you're diligent about spamming Valkyrie Abilities, all the attacking Rage skills here are a fair bit more lethal than listed, and even if you're not obsessive you'll realistically be doing more damage than this past the early game.
Also note that while you start the game with access to Rage, you can't gain Rage experience until Christa joins up with you. I don't really get why personally, given the game just goes with a global Rage experience meter instead of tying Rage experience to your Valkyries. Regardless, your ideal focus prior to getting Christa should thus be on trying to finish off stacks with Viking Vortex, as this advances a Medal that increases experience yields for Rage. If there's no chance of actually finishing off a stack, you probably shouldn't bother, prior to Christa coming along; might as well lean on Rage passively boosting crit chance.
Maximum experience level for Rage is level 60, which feels a little low. There's too many things to dump Rage levels into, and it's very possible to hit maximum Rage level when you're still a fair distance away from actually beating the game. It also ends up with... other problems, but I'll get to those.
One semi-unique quality of Rage moves in Warriors of the North is that the vast majority of them are plot-locked, rather than level-locked. The Legend plot-locked sets of Rage moves, but I tend to forget to count that because the context was very different -among other points, each Spirit of Rage had their own set of levels and could only apply their level-ups to their moves, so while Lina and Reaper's actual moves couldn't be accessed until around halfway through the game you didn't have any oddities like 'because you dumped a bunch of experience into Zerock, you couldn't adequately level up Reaper's Soul Draining'. As my example might suggest, I think Warriors of the North plot-locking moves is... a bit of an issue.
Though while we're on the topic, where in Armored Princess a Rest period was how long until you could use any of your Rage moves again, Warriors of the North switches over to a system more like The Legend's, except different. Four of your moves are tied together, rather like a Spirit of Rage's set of four, but the other five Rage moves time down by themselves, their Rest period only affecting the move you just used. This is a huge improvement in my opinion, as the 'Rest=no Rage moves' mechanic was considerably restrictive to the design space of Rage moves, making a Rest period greater than 1 a brutal flaw that was difficult to make an acceptable disadvantage. Warriors of the North's model makes it okay to have moves that are powerful and not spammable, forcing the player to put some thought into when the best time to use them is. (Admittedly, the answer is usually 'as soon as you can', but there's still more nuance here than with Armored Princess' equivalents like Lava Call, where the only valid answers were 'never', 'only if you're going to immediately use Awaken Dragon', and 'if you're confident you'll finish the battle before next turn')
Viking Vortex
Basic
Physical
damage to all units around a targeted open tile. Units below Level 4 have a chance of being knocked back one tile.Damage: 70-80
Rage: 4
Rest: 1
Knockback chance: 20%
Your basic Rage attack. Where in the previous games your first Rage attack was a weak single-target attack, in Warriors of the North it's even weaker than that, except it can hit multiple targets, with it actually having higher total damage if you're hitting even 2 targets. You do, in fact, start the game with Viking Vortex; it's also the only Rage skill you start with, unlike Armored Princess.
I especially appreciate that it starts at a Rest of 1, allowing you to spam it every turn so long as you're keeping up on Rage generation.
Damage upgrades
Damage 1 Upgrade: Damage: 100-120, Rage: +1, Rest: +1, Knockback chance: 30%
Damage 2 Upgrade: Damage: 160-240, Rage: +2, Rest: +1, Knockback chance: 40%
Damage 3 Upgrade: Damage: 320-400, Rage: +3, Rest: +1, Knockback chance: 50%
Damage 4 Upgrade: Damage: 640-720, Rage: +4, Rest: +1, Knockback chance: 60%
Damage 5 Upgrade: Damage: 1000-1150, Rage: +5, Rest: +1, Knockback chance: 70%
Damage 6 Upgrade: Damage: 1500-1700, Rage: +6, Rest: +1, Knockback chance: 80%
It's really annoying to me that you never reach 100% chance of knockback.
The Rest increases are actually kind of interesting in Warriors of the North, with leveling Viking Vortex actually involving a bit of strategic thought. Do you want to level it up and push for a rank in Action Rage to avoid the Rest period? Are you okay with temporarily putting up with a Rest greater than 1 in exchange for the power boost now? Or would you rather level something else up because being able to spam it is important to you? These are all valid choices, and which one you take will depend in part on class and RNG-derived circumstance. It's a lot more interesting than how Rage leveling worked in The Legend and Armored Princess.
Control upgrades
Control 1 Upgrade: Rest: -1, Friendly Fire: 80%
Control 2 Upgrade: Rest: -1, Friendly Fire: 55%
Control 3 Upgrade: Rest: -1, Friendly Fire: 20%
Notice that you've got 6 Rest ups from damage upgrades, 3 Rest downs from Control upgrades, and then Action Rage will bring it back down to a Rest of 1 if you max it.
Rage upgrade
Rage 1 Upgrade: Rage: -5
Yeah, there's one upgrade to reduce the Rage cost one time. I don't really get it, but you might as well take it.
Final stats
Damage: 1500-1700 Physical
Rage: 20
Rest: 4 (1 with Action Rage maxed)
Knockback chance: 80%
Friendly Fire: 20%
Against a single target, this is pretty clearly worse than Crushing Blow was; only a chance of knockback, only knocks back 1 tile, costs the same, does less damage.
That's fine, though, as it's actually pretty rare for enemies to be positioned so that you can't catch multiple of them. The only major complication is when you're forced to choose between maximizing targets vs arranging optimal knockback scenarios. (ie where three units are arranged so that hitting all three is possible, but will potentially push two of them toward your forces, where if you want to push them away you can only hit two)
Viking Vortex is my second-favorite stab at a basic attacking Rage move in the series. It's versatile, but not overly-powerful, and it stays relevant for a surprisingly long time. It's actually respectable at damage output -for one thing, Warriors of the North doesn't have plot-induced Leadership bonuses, and so in turn its early game stays low-Leadership for a longer period of time. In The Legend and to a lesser extent Armored Princess, the plot-derived Leadership boosts were sufficiently significant to the early game pacing that there's a limited window in which your basic attacking Rage move(s) aren't inadequate compared against the size of actually-dangerous battlegroups.
And even once you reach the point where Viking Vortex's damage is never going to be good enough again, the knockback remains useful (If, irritatingly, never fully reliable) and if you max out Action Rage it also becomes a decent 'filler' move in situations where you can't use or don't want to use any of your other Rage moves just yet but you also don't want to have the Rage opportunity for the turn go to waste. 20 Rage is eventually a minor burden no matter your class, and with a Rest of 1 it won't interfere with the three Rage moves it shares a cooldown with.
It's extremely well-designed, and I love it.
Ice Blades
Basic
Generates a curving 3-tile wall which, when attacked in melee, reflects a percentage of the damage taken in the form of Ice
damage. This wall is immune to Spells.Basic
Rage: 6
Rest: 2
Health: 150
Defense: 10
Damage reflection: 10%
Surprisingly, Ice Blades' damage reflection is actually scaled to the damage the attacker rolled, rather than the Health they took off the wall. This means even totally un-upgraded Ice Blades can be do a surprising amount of damage even very late into the game, because even severe overkill gets hit by the full reflection value. It's by far the best wall in the series, bar the debatable case of Dark Side's 'wall'... but we'll get there when we get there. Indeed, while I still prefer to minimize upgrades on Ice Blades this is primarily because of the Rest increases involved, and even that's not too huge a problem. (Well, that and there's just not enough Rage levels to go around)
Also note that while Brontor spikes no longer reflect damage from eg a Fire Breath initiated on an adjacent unit, Ice Blades absolutely will murder your Black Dragon that melted it through some poor Thorn. Only actual ranged attacks/ranged Talents are safe to use on it. And... not even all of them. I've had Goblin Shaman take reflected damage from their regular ranged attack, bizarrely enough. No idea why.
And yes, the reflected damage has a real damage type attached to it; Ice Blades will in fact punish Demons harder than most units, and be shrugged off by stuff like Ice Dragons.
The wall itself is actually classed as an Ice Creation, has 25% Physical resistance, 50% Poison resistance, 80% Magic and Ice resistance, and -100% Fire resistance. If you're not aggressively upgrading its durability, these resistances are unfortunately largely a disadvantage, reducing how much damage it does without preventing enemies from one-shotting it, but if you are upgrading its durability then it actually has pretty solid potential to delay Poison, Ice, and Magic damage attackers. (Too bad you heavily fight Undead; only Ghosts and Cursed Ghosts are particularly wallable, and only if you keep its Rest down so you can layer Ice Blades walls, given they're fast and can ghost right through regular terrain) The Fire weakness, meanwhile, gives it impressive damage potential against most Fire damage attackers; conveniently, the Snow Falcon is the only Fire damage attacker with serious Ice resistance. Though... a lot of Fire damage attackers are difficult to really wall off...
Also, when I say that Ice Blades is immune to Spells, that's in the sense that eg Black Dragons are immune to Spells; most Spells can't target or damage the wall, but stuff like Death Star actually can destroy it. So don't thoughtless try to combine it with those Spells. Fortunately, the game's damage prediction accurately informs you of whether you're about to smash the Ice Blades or not so it's not a big thing, but you can run into it as a problem if you set down the wall in expectation that it'll be immune to your following Sonic Boom or the like and whoops it's not. So keep this in mind.
One kind of weird, situational use for Ice Blades is that you can set them down where a Zlogn is and this will immediately destroy the Zlogn, without damaging the Ice Blades. If for some reason you really don't want your units changing their formation, or aren't even able to get them out of reach of a Zlogn in time for some reason, you can drop Ice Blades down to provide protection and destroy the Zlogn in one go. That's more use than any prior wall has had!
By a similar token it can be used to clear Traps, such as if Trapper has placed them in an inconvenient location, though unlike with Zlogn the Trap will actually do damage to the Ice Blades wall in the process, most likely destroying it.
Ice Blades is also nearly unique in that it's one of your only Rage moves actually acquired through leveling. It also shares Rest periods with Viking Vortex: if you use Viking Vortex when it has a Rest of 2 turns, you won't be able to use Ice Blades until that Rest period is over, rather like how the Spirits of Rage system in The Legend meant a given Spirit using a move would bar you access to all four of their moves: after all, conceptually Ice Blades and Viking Vortex are both supposed to be things Olaf himself is doing.
Health upgrades
Health Upgrade 1: Health: 250, Rage: +2
Health Upgrade 2: Health: 500, Rage: +3
Health Upgrade 3: Health: 1000, Rage: +4, Rest: +1
Health Upgrade 4: Health: 2000, Rage: +5, Rest: +1
Health Upgrade 5: Health: 5000, Rage: +6, Rest: +1
I quite like that every Health upgrade doubles or more than doubles the Health amount. It goes a long way to help keep Ice Blades relevant if you want to focus on them.
Defense upgrades
Defense Upgrade 1: Defense: 20, Rage: +4, Damage Reflection: 20%
Defense Upgrade 2: Defense: 30, Rage: +4, Damage Reflection: 30%
Defense Upgrade 3: Defense: 40, Rage: +4, Damage Reflection: 40%, Rest: +1
Defense Upgrade 4: Defense: 50, Rage: +4, Damage Reflection: 50%, Rest: +1
It's fairly important to take the Defense upgrades if you're serious about using Ice Blades for its damage reflection property. Which is a bit weird, given Defense lowers the damage the enemy does.
If you're even slightly serious about Ice Blades, you should probably take at least the first upgrade, since it'll double the damage reflection.
Control upgrades
Control Upgrade 1: Rest: -10, Rage: -10
Note that you can't be offered this until its Rage cost is at least 30, and its Rest period is at least 4. Also yes, it's -10 Rest. Seriously. That seems unlikely to be intended, especially because the underlying mechanics mean that this puts undue emphasis on timing; if you wait until Ice Blades has its Rest period as high as it will go, this will then drag it down to 1, whereas if it's offered and you take it as soon as it's at 4 Rest and then add 3 more Rest increases afterward the game doesn't 'remember' the -10 Rest technically putting it in the negatives, and will in fact increase the Rest period.
Final stats
Rage: 32
Rest: 1 (If you properly time the Control upgrade)
Health: 5000
Defense: 50
Damage reflection: 50%
Though I said Ice Blades is probably the best Rage wall in the series, this comes with the caveat that it's in the worst game in the series for caring about walls. I've been over faster combat ad nauseam, of course, but it also directly competes with an option that ends up covering the wall role incidentally while dishing out serious damage to enemies. It's still surprisingly useful early in the game, particularly for the Viking given you're likely to get Action Rage early as the Viking, but in the long haul it tends to get displaced by...
Lord of the North
Basic
A tile is targeted. All tiles around that tile (But not including that tile) take Ice damage, with empty tiles having a chance to spawn Ice Spikes.
Basic
Rage: 15
Rest: 3
Damage: 220-380
Radius: 1 tile out. (6 tiles affected)
Ice Shards: 6
Ice Spike chance per tile: 20%
The 'ice shard' mechanic is an odd mechanic whereby each tile is hit by a number of 'ice shards' for the base damage value. The process for this is that the game distributes shards evenly among all tiles until it finds itself with a number of shards that does not fit cleanly into its strike zone, at which point it decides at random which tiles get an 'extra' shard; that is, at base it always hits each tile once, but if you get the first shard upgrade (Which adds 50% more shards), then half the tiles will get hit twice.
One kind of weird, situational use for Ice Blades is that you can set them down where a Zlogn is and this will immediately destroy the Zlogn, without damaging the Ice Blades. If for some reason you really don't want your units changing their formation, or aren't even able to get them out of reach of a Zlogn in time for some reason, you can drop Ice Blades down to provide protection and destroy the Zlogn in one go. That's more use than any prior wall has had!
By a similar token it can be used to clear Traps, such as if Trapper has placed them in an inconvenient location, though unlike with Zlogn the Trap will actually do damage to the Ice Blades wall in the process, most likely destroying it.
Ice Blades is also nearly unique in that it's one of your only Rage moves actually acquired through leveling. It also shares Rest periods with Viking Vortex: if you use Viking Vortex when it has a Rest of 2 turns, you won't be able to use Ice Blades until that Rest period is over, rather like how the Spirits of Rage system in The Legend meant a given Spirit using a move would bar you access to all four of their moves: after all, conceptually Ice Blades and Viking Vortex are both supposed to be things Olaf himself is doing.
Health upgrades
Health Upgrade 1: Health: 250, Rage: +2
Health Upgrade 2: Health: 500, Rage: +3
Health Upgrade 3: Health: 1000, Rage: +4, Rest: +1
Health Upgrade 4: Health: 2000, Rage: +5, Rest: +1
Health Upgrade 5: Health: 5000, Rage: +6, Rest: +1
I quite like that every Health upgrade doubles or more than doubles the Health amount. It goes a long way to help keep Ice Blades relevant if you want to focus on them.
Defense upgrades
Defense Upgrade 1: Defense: 20, Rage: +4, Damage Reflection: 20%
Defense Upgrade 2: Defense: 30, Rage: +4, Damage Reflection: 30%
Defense Upgrade 3: Defense: 40, Rage: +4, Damage Reflection: 40%, Rest: +1
Defense Upgrade 4: Defense: 50, Rage: +4, Damage Reflection: 50%, Rest: +1
It's fairly important to take the Defense upgrades if you're serious about using Ice Blades for its damage reflection property. Which is a bit weird, given Defense lowers the damage the enemy does.
If you're even slightly serious about Ice Blades, you should probably take at least the first upgrade, since it'll double the damage reflection.
Control upgrades
Control Upgrade 1: Rest: -10, Rage: -10
Note that you can't be offered this until its Rage cost is at least 30, and its Rest period is at least 4. Also yes, it's -10 Rest. Seriously. That seems unlikely to be intended, especially because the underlying mechanics mean that this puts undue emphasis on timing; if you wait until Ice Blades has its Rest period as high as it will go, this will then drag it down to 1, whereas if it's offered and you take it as soon as it's at 4 Rest and then add 3 more Rest increases afterward the game doesn't 'remember' the -10 Rest technically putting it in the negatives, and will in fact increase the Rest period.
Final stats
Rage: 32
Rest: 1 (If you properly time the Control upgrade)
Health: 5000
Defense: 50
Damage reflection: 50%
Though I said Ice Blades is probably the best Rage wall in the series, this comes with the caveat that it's in the worst game in the series for caring about walls. I've been over faster combat ad nauseam, of course, but it also directly competes with an option that ends up covering the wall role incidentally while dishing out serious damage to enemies. It's still surprisingly useful early in the game, particularly for the Viking given you're likely to get Action Rage early as the Viking, but in the long haul it tends to get displaced by...
Lord of the North
Basic
A tile is targeted. All tiles around that tile (But not including that tile) take Ice
damage, with empty tiles having a chance to spawn Ice Spikes.Basic
Rage: 15
Rest: 3
Damage: 220-380
Radius: 1 tile out. (6 tiles affected)
Ice Shards: 6
Ice Spike chance per tile: 20%
The 'ice shard' mechanic is an odd mechanic whereby each tile is hit by a number of 'ice shards' for the base damage value. The process for this is that the game distributes shards evenly among all tiles until it finds itself with a number of shards that does not fit cleanly into its strike zone, at which point it decides at random which tiles get an 'extra' shard; that is, at base it always hits each tile once, but if you get the first shard upgrade (Which adds 50% more shards), then half the tiles will get hit twice.
A side effect of this mechanic is that Lord of the North's damage is actually much more swingily random early in a run than late; when you're at exactly 50% more shards than tiles, your maximum damage on a tile is almost three times your minimum damage. When you're at maximum upgrades, every tile is reliably hit exactly 3 times, so that only the innate damage variance matters. (Which admittedly has maximum damage nearly twice minimum, but still)
Also, the damage numbers you'll see in-battle will inevitably be lower than the base numbers imply, because for some reason Lord of the North is one of two Rage moves that reference Olaf-the-unit's stats -Olaf standing off to the side of the battlefield is in some sense a real unit!... a real unit that has 0 Attack and is not affected by Olaf's Attack stat. So Lord of the North is always suffering a Defense penalty. The heck?
Lord of the North is your third Rage move acquired through leveling, and this includes that Rest periods are shared between it, Viking Vortex, and Ice Blades. Acquiring Lord of the North tends to make this a lot more relevant, in fact, since it starts from a Rest of 3 and is unlikely to ever be pushed down to a Rest of 1; it's easy to get used to spamming Viking Vortex, and end up caught off guard when using Lord of the North locks you out of Viking Vortex for a few turns. Even if you've played the game many hours already and really ought to know better!
Lord of the North itself starts out pretty difficult to justify using, with a limited and somewhat awkward strike zone -it doesn't effect the center tile- and a fairly high price for when you're likely to get it. It'll also probably be competing with Christa's Gift as far as actual damage output goes, not to mention ability to stall individual enemies, and losing in both cases.
Nonetheless, once you've leveled it... it's really good. One of the best Rage moves in the entire series, and a ton of fun to use.
Damage upgrades
Damage 1 Upgrade: Damage: 320-550, Rage: +4, Ice Spikes chance: +6%
Damage 2 Upgrade: Damage: 450-780, Rage: +5, Rest: +1
Damage 3 Upgrade: Damage: 600-1000, Rage: +6, Ice Spikes chance: +6%
Damage 4 Upgrade: Damage: 800-1300, Rage: +7, Rest: +1
Yeah, I don't get why it alternates between either increasing the Rest period or adding to the Ice Spike spawn chance. What?
Obviously this means that the first upgrade and the third upgrade are especially useful.
Area upgrade
Area 1 Upgrade: Rage: +10, Radius: 2 tiles out (18 tiles affected), Ice Shards: 18
Straightforward enough. Note that it still doesn't hit the center tile.
Shard upgrades
Shards 1 Upgrade: Rage +4, Shards: +3, Ice Spikes: +6%
Shards 2 Upgrade: Rage +5, Shards: +3, Ice Spikes: +6%, Rest: +1
Shards 3 Upgrade: Rage +6, Shards: +3, Ice Spikes: +8%
Shards 4 Upgrade: Rage +7, Shards: +3, Ice Spikes: +8%, Rest: +1
Shard upgrades Other
Shards 1 Upgrade: Rage +4, Shards: +9, Ice Spikes: +6%
Shards 2 Upgrade: Rage +5, Shards: +9, Ice Spikes: +6%, Rest: +1
Shards 3 Upgrade: Rage +6, Shards: +9, Ice Spikes: +8%
Shards 4 Upgrade: Rage +7, Shards: +9, Ice Spikes: +8%, Rest: +1
Yes, there's two 'lanes' of Shard upgrades. The second one is the one referenced once you've taken the first Area upgrade, and in fact it's retroactive: if you take the first two ranks of the first set and then take the first Area upgrade, the +6 Shards you've got turns into +18.
Rest upgrade
Rest 1 Upgrade: Rest: -1.
Yes, there's only one Rest down. Lord of the North does benefit from Action Rage, so that helps, but you still end up with 3 Rest with all the Rest downs; with Warriors of the North's fast pace of combat, it's not unusual for you to get only one use of Lord of the North in a given battle.
Final stats
Rage: 69
Rest: 6 (3 with maxed Action Rage)
Damage: 800-1300 Ice (2400-3900 in practice before Defense penalty)
Radius: 2 tiles out. (18 tiles affected)
Ice Shards: 54
Ice Spike chance per tile: 60%
Once you've got Lord of the North's area of effect increased and some of its other upgrades partially bought, it becomes an astounding option for dishing out damage while walling enemies off totally incidentally. The fact that it does Ice damage makes it highly reliable since the vast majority of units have little or no resistance to Ice, the fact that the Ice Spikes are each separate targets can badly stall melee enemies, and while its damage is, in the extreme long haul, not keeping up, there's a pretty decent chunk of the game where its damage is legitimately impressive. It's a fantastically versatile skill, especially if you're running Snow Elves since a portion of them can further leverage the Ice Spikes, and while its behavior is heavily influenced by randomness you'll rarely feel either clearly screwed over or clearly granted a boon by the RNG, so it serves to help break up the repetitiveness of some fights instead of being a frustrating form of RNG.
The high Rest period is really its primary flaw, particularly if you're not the Viking; if you leave Action Rage at Rank 1, Lord of the North's long Rest period can be seriously inconvenient in longer fights, and yet it's also sufficiently high that just maxing Action Rage doesn't help you get off a second use in shorter fights. (Contrasting with how Viking Vortex can be pushed down to 1 Rest via maxed Action Rage while having an inconvenient 3 Rest if Viking Vortex is maxed out and you've only got 1 Action Rage rank)
One minor irritation once you've got Lord of the North's radius upgraded and its Ice Spike generation rate fairly high is that a first-turn Lord of the North targeted to hit a typical enemy formation is perfectly placed to potentially ruin all the Trapper Traps that were spawned near enemies. Since Ice Spikes will trigger Traps and be destroyed by them, this can lead to situations where tossing out Lord of the North ends up clearing a path for the enemies where if you'd done nothing they'd have walked right into Traps.
In conjunction with Gudrida's Rage getting to spread Burns making it a very appealing first-turn choice, I often end up not using Lord of the North until the second turn, even if I have the Rage to use it the first turn, particularly if my entire army went before the entire enemy army.
Christa's Gift
Basic
Sets a gold pile in an open tile. Nearby enemies of a sufficiently low Level will be drawn to the gold pile, and upon grabbing it will suffer Physical damage and end their turn. Flying units take half damage. If an allied unit picks up the gold pile, the player acquires Gold and no damage is suffered, the unit simply ending their turn.
Damage: 300-600
Rage: 10
Rest: 1
Range: 1
Level: 1-2
Duration: 1
Note that, annoyingly, the Greed's Curse effect doesn't actually prevent AI Heroes from getting a casting opportunity when a unit's turn is consumed by forcibly taking the gold pile. It's a bizarre little oversight and can be incredibly frustrating in early Hero fights where you might think you've managed to avoid giving them a chance to inflict casualties with a Spell and nope.
A different behavioral oddity is that Pirate Ghosts treat the gold pile exactly like a chest, traveling an infinite distance to automatically grab it. This is particularly peculiar given that they're Level 3 and thus outside the base Level range of Christa's Gift. Very exploitable.
Lord of the North is your third Rage move acquired through leveling, and this includes that Rest periods are shared between it, Viking Vortex, and Ice Blades. Acquiring Lord of the North tends to make this a lot more relevant, in fact, since it starts from a Rest of 3 and is unlikely to ever be pushed down to a Rest of 1; it's easy to get used to spamming Viking Vortex, and end up caught off guard when using Lord of the North locks you out of Viking Vortex for a few turns. Even if you've played the game many hours already and really ought to know better!
Lord of the North itself starts out pretty difficult to justify using, with a limited and somewhat awkward strike zone -it doesn't effect the center tile- and a fairly high price for when you're likely to get it. It'll also probably be competing with Christa's Gift as far as actual damage output goes, not to mention ability to stall individual enemies, and losing in both cases.
Nonetheless, once you've leveled it... it's really good. One of the best Rage moves in the entire series, and a ton of fun to use.
Damage upgrades
Damage 1 Upgrade: Damage: 320-550, Rage: +4, Ice Spikes chance: +6%
Damage 2 Upgrade: Damage: 450-780, Rage: +5, Rest: +1
Damage 3 Upgrade: Damage: 600-1000, Rage: +6, Ice Spikes chance: +6%
Damage 4 Upgrade: Damage: 800-1300, Rage: +7, Rest: +1
Yeah, I don't get why it alternates between either increasing the Rest period or adding to the Ice Spike spawn chance. What?
Obviously this means that the first upgrade and the third upgrade are especially useful.
Area upgrade
Area 1 Upgrade: Rage: +10, Radius: 2 tiles out (18 tiles affected), Ice Shards: 18
Straightforward enough. Note that it still doesn't hit the center tile.
Shard upgrades
Shards 1 Upgrade: Rage +4, Shards: +3, Ice Spikes: +6%
Shards 2 Upgrade: Rage +5, Shards: +3, Ice Spikes: +6%, Rest: +1
Shards 3 Upgrade: Rage +6, Shards: +3, Ice Spikes: +8%
Shards 4 Upgrade: Rage +7, Shards: +3, Ice Spikes: +8%, Rest: +1
Shard upgrades Other
Shards 1 Upgrade: Rage +4, Shards: +9, Ice Spikes: +6%
Shards 2 Upgrade: Rage +5, Shards: +9, Ice Spikes: +6%, Rest: +1
Shards 3 Upgrade: Rage +6, Shards: +9, Ice Spikes: +8%
Shards 4 Upgrade: Rage +7, Shards: +9, Ice Spikes: +8%, Rest: +1
Yes, there's two 'lanes' of Shard upgrades. The second one is the one referenced once you've taken the first Area upgrade, and in fact it's retroactive: if you take the first two ranks of the first set and then take the first Area upgrade, the +6 Shards you've got turns into +18.
Rest upgrade
Rest 1 Upgrade: Rest: -1.
Yes, there's only one Rest down. Lord of the North does benefit from Action Rage, so that helps, but you still end up with 3 Rest with all the Rest downs; with Warriors of the North's fast pace of combat, it's not unusual for you to get only one use of Lord of the North in a given battle.
Final stats
Rage: 69
Rest: 6 (3 with maxed Action Rage)
Damage: 800-1300 Ice
(2400-3900 in practice before Defense penalty)Radius: 2 tiles out. (18 tiles affected)
Ice Shards: 54
Ice Spike chance per tile: 60%
Once you've got Lord of the North's area of effect increased and some of its other upgrades partially bought, it becomes an astounding option for dishing out damage while walling enemies off totally incidentally. The fact that it does Ice damage makes it highly reliable since the vast majority of units have little or no resistance to Ice, the fact that the Ice Spikes are each separate targets can badly stall melee enemies, and while its damage is, in the extreme long haul, not keeping up, there's a pretty decent chunk of the game where its damage is legitimately impressive. It's a fantastically versatile skill, especially if you're running Snow Elves since a portion of them can further leverage the Ice Spikes, and while its behavior is heavily influenced by randomness you'll rarely feel either clearly screwed over or clearly granted a boon by the RNG, so it serves to help break up the repetitiveness of some fights instead of being a frustrating form of RNG.
The high Rest period is really its primary flaw, particularly if you're not the Viking; if you leave Action Rage at Rank 1, Lord of the North's long Rest period can be seriously inconvenient in longer fights, and yet it's also sufficiently high that just maxing Action Rage doesn't help you get off a second use in shorter fights. (Contrasting with how Viking Vortex can be pushed down to 1 Rest via maxed Action Rage while having an inconvenient 3 Rest if Viking Vortex is maxed out and you've only got 1 Action Rage rank)
One minor irritation once you've got Lord of the North's radius upgraded and its Ice Spike generation rate fairly high is that a first-turn Lord of the North targeted to hit a typical enemy formation is perfectly placed to potentially ruin all the Trapper Traps that were spawned near enemies. Since Ice Spikes will trigger Traps and be destroyed by them, this can lead to situations where tossing out Lord of the North ends up clearing a path for the enemies where if you'd done nothing they'd have walked right into Traps.
In conjunction with Gudrida's Rage getting to spread Burns making it a very appealing first-turn choice, I often end up not using Lord of the North until the second turn, even if I have the Rage to use it the first turn, particularly if my entire army went before the entire enemy army.
Christa's Gift
Basic
Sets a gold pile in an open tile. Nearby enemies of a sufficiently low Level will be drawn to the gold pile, and upon grabbing it will suffer Physical
damage and end their turn. Flying units take half damage. If an allied unit picks up the gold pile, the player acquires Gold and no damage is suffered, the unit simply ending their turn.Damage: 300-600
Rage: 10
Rest: 1
Range: 1
Level: 1-2
Duration: 1
Note that, annoyingly, the Greed's Curse effect doesn't actually prevent AI Heroes from getting a casting opportunity when a unit's turn is consumed by forcibly taking the gold pile. It's a bizarre little oversight and can be incredibly frustrating in early Hero fights where you might think you've managed to avoid giving them a chance to inflict casualties with a Spell and nope.
A different behavioral oddity is that Pirate Ghosts treat the gold pile exactly like a chest, traveling an infinite distance to automatically grab it. This is particularly peculiar given that they're Level 3 and thus outside the base Level range of Christa's Gift. Very exploitable.
Also, the English version doesn't actually mention it doing halved damage to flying units.
Christa's Gift is actually a really good Rage skill in the early game for raw damage and for keeping Skeletons and Skeleton Archers out of your hair. It's also really good at wiping stacks to earn Medal progress, and as a result of its extreme early-game damage also tends to help level your Rage faster to a shocking extent. An additional layer of utility is that it gives you a bit more flexibility on timing: say you're trying to finish off a stack with Rage for Medal progress, but none of your currently-affordable Rage skills will do the damage, and you either have nothing stronger or are on the last of your unit's turns before the enemy unit is going to move and suicide on one of your units/inflict a casualty and thus cost you Grand Strategian progress/potentially steal a chest/whatever. If you can afford Christa's Gift, you can slap it down, and even if it isn't actually strong enough to finish off the unit at its current numbers you may well be able to have your unit attack the enemy, thus knocking them down into range for Christa's Gift to finish off the stack.
Its utility tends to fall away as the game goes on, alas, but in the early game it's seriously amazing so long as you can afford its Rage cost -which is a pretty demanding hurdle, actually, at least prior to Gudrida joining up. Warriors of the North, somewhat ironically given Gudrida's presence, is actually the main game in the series where I semi-regularly use Potions of Rage or the Sign of Rage, as getting a Christa's Gift off in the first turn can make a drastic difference, and before its improvements start raising its Rest requirement you can potentially spam it turn after turn to lock an enemy down!
Christa's Gift is your first plot-locked Rage move, though since getting Christa is how you unlock the ability to gain Rage experience it will actually be your second Rage move, and usually Ice Blades will be your third and Lord of the North your fourth. It's a weird dynamic.
Since it isn't an Olaf Rage move, it doesn't benefit from Action Rage, either. This can take a bit to figure out on your own, as it's really not intuitive.
Damage upgrades
Damage 1 Upgrade: Damage: 500-800, Rage: +2
Damage 2 Upgrade: Damage: 800-1100, Rage: +2, Rest: +1
Damage 3 Upgrade: Damage: 1100-1400, Rage: +3
Damage 4 Upgrade: Damage: 1400-1800, Rage: +3, Rest: +1
Worth grabbing, and if you're getting them reasonably quickly -which is quite likely, due to how Warriors of the North has overhauled Rage acquisition- Christa's Gift can be fantastically damaging for a good chunk of the early game.
In the long haul 1400-1800 damage becomes a pretty unimpressive damage value, but that's okay because Christa's Gift remains a decent way to take an enemy out of the fight for a turn, and the early value is seriously amazing.
Range upgrades
Range 1 Upgrade: Range: 2, Rage: +9, Rest: +1
I don't think this is really worth taking. Christa's gift is pretty iffy in its coding in general, and my own experience is that the range upgrade either doesn't do anything at all or is too inconsistent to be worth taking. The spike in the Rage cost and the added Rest period is just not worth it.
Duration upgrades
Duration 1 Upgrade: Duration: 3, Rage: +5
This is actually worth taking. Ideally Christa's Gift activates on the turn you drop it, or the turn after, but Christa's Gift has a very curious approach to its time-out where its duration is set relative to when you placed it, rather than being 'cleaned up' at the end of an entire round like most such effects are. As such, you can have situations where you drop Christa's Gift in a chokepoint on your last unit's turn, and then an enemy moves that's your ideal target for Christa's Gift but it's too far for it to reach Christa's Gift this turn, and then next turn the gold pile actually vanishes before their turn rolls around. Getting the duration up to 3 not only does away with these maddening situations but also means you have more of an opportunity to scoop up the Gold if no enemy takes the bait.
The flexibility is well worth the Rage cost increase, at least past the early game.
Level upgrades
Level 1 Upgrade: Level: 1-3. Rest: +1, Rage: +5
Level 2 Upgrade: Level: 1-4. Rest: +1, Rage: +7
This seems to be actively broken, or at least the second upgrade does. I've had inconsistent results with Level 3 units, but I have never had a Level 4 unit grab Christa's Gift. Even when they have literally nothing they can do except grab it, they'd rather just Defend!
Meanwhile, Level 5 units will sometimes choose to grab the pile, even though they're supposed to be immune.
So yeah, ignore these upgrades. They don't work.
Rage upgrades
Rage 1 Upgrade: Rage: -10
Yep.
Gold upgrades
???
You can increase the gold acquired when having one of your units grab the pile as a Rage upgrade, but I have no idea how that part actually scales. The game itself doesn't clarify, and nobody seems to have bothered to test or dig into the code, and I don't know where to look myself and am not willing to spend the time manual testing would take. The only source I've been able to find just lists a single such upgrade, and claims it increases Rage cost by 4 as its only data point, which is flatly untrue (It's a completely free upgrade), and I know for a fact you can upgrade the Gold amount at least 3 times. According to Quaranyr in the comments, it's supposed to be a one-time upgrade that raises Rage cost by 4, and improves your odds of getting more gold, where the baseline numbers are a 31%/31%/25%/10% to roll gold amounts that can be described as low/medium/high/very high gold amounts and then this upgrade changes it to 20%/30%/34%/16%... but, again, I consistently get it as a free upgrade that can be stacked, so I have no idea what it actually does.
I tend to treat it as something to grab when I really, really don't want any of the other options because they'll push something's cost too far up, or increase a Rest period, or are for a skill I just plain don't want to invest in.
Final stats
Damage: 1400-1800
Rage: 36 (15 if you ignore the Level and Range upgrades)
Rest: 6 (4 if you ignore the Level upgrades)
Range: 2
Level: 1-4
Duration: 3
If you ignore the non-functioning Level upgrades and the dubiously-functioning Range upgrade, Christa's Gift is affordable and awesome. If you do take those upgrades it's expensive and hasn't actually benefited any.
Seriously, don't take those upgrades. You're more than doubling the final Rage cost, increasing the final Rest period by 50%, and getting no benefit and failing to spend those Rage levels into things that are actually useful.
That aside, Christa's Gift is seriously an amazing, versatile Rage skill, and the closest thing to a complaint I have is that it would've been nice if its damage had a percentage component or something so it didn't fall so completely behind in that regard in the endgame. And even then, the utility for preventing enemy turns is huge, and in some ways grows in value as enemy stacks get larger.
Gudrida's Rage
Basic
All enemies in a radius take Fire
damage, with a chance to be Burned. Allied units are at no risk.
Basic
Rage: 8
Rest: 1
Damage: 400-500
Burn chance: 30%
Radius: 3 tiles (Triangle formation)
Gudrida's Rage starts out as a shockingly cost-efficient way of dishing out damage with middling odds of getting Burns thrown in. And it's only one Rest, too, so you can spam it turn in and turn out! It takes four damage upgrades for Viking Vortex to have comparable/better damage per target, and Viking Vortex's Rest period keeps going up to boot.
Eventually you'll have to start accepting Rest increases, but there's a pretty decent chunk of the early game where Gudrida's Rage is just an astonishingly good source of damage.
Damage upgrades
Damage 1 Upgrade: Damage: 480-580, Burn chance: +2%, Rage: +3
Damage 2 Upgrade: Damage: 570-670, Burn chance: +2%, Rage: +4, Rest: +1
Damage 3 Upgrade: Damage: 670-770, Burn chance: +2%, Rage: +5
Damage 4 Upgrade: Damage: 780-880, Burn chance: +2%, Rage: +6, Rest: +1
Damage 5 Upgrade: Damage: 900-1000, Burn chance: +2%, Rage: +7, Rest: +1
The first upgrade is a gimme of course. If you take the second one, the third one is also a gimme. The second one is the first, and honestly, only particularly hard decision about when to take it; if you've got the Rage generation to use Gudrida's Rage every turn, the damage boost really isn't worth it. If you can't sustain Gudrida's Rage spam anyway, you might as well take it.
The fourth one can be a minor difficult decision as well, depending. 2 Rest is fast enough to routinely fire off two Gudrida's Rages in a single short battle. 3 Rest pushes you just outside the typical fast Warriors of the North battle duration for a minor boost to damage, while also increasing your Rage cost. It's really a judgment call whether you feel it a worthwhile trade.
Once you have taken the fourth one, though, you probably might as well take the fifth one. You're not going to be getting a second Gudrida's Rage off in most battles anyway, so the improved up-front damage is more relevant.
Radius upgrades
Radius 1 Upgrade: Radius: 7 tiles (Circle formation), Rage: +10
Radius 2 Upgrade: Radius: 19 tiles (Bigger circle formation), Rage: +12
The first of these upgrades is an important decision that's a bit awkward. On the one hand, the circle formation is a huge jump in Gudrida's Rage's utility, frequently allowing it to strike 3 targets toward the beginning of a fight and allowing it to often strike 2 targets where the base area would've only been able to hit 1. On the other hand, that's a massive spike in cost; if you're perpetually only barely generating enough Rage to use Gudrida's Rage, or even if you have a fairly comfortable margin of generation, this is taking you well outside the ability to use it at all. And if you regularly fall just short of being able to use Gudrida's Rage in a given turn, this first upgrade is often making it basically completely inaccessible without using Potions of Rage and whatnot. You have to have incredible Rage generation for it to be easy to bear the cost increase.
The Rage cost increase being so large is the only complication in whether you should take these upgrades or not. There's no friendly fire, after all; Lord of the North getting an expanded radius can create awkward situations where the unupgraded version would've been able to hit a group of enemies without touching your stuff and the upgraded version can't. The only vaguely equivalent issue on Gudrida's Rage is that you're potentially destroying Lord of the North Ice Spikes as a direct result, particularly once you've reached the point where you're regularly getting to use Rage twice in one turn... but by the time you reach that point, you've probably had the upgrades in question for a long time. And you'll have other Rage moves, so you've got options for doing smart things that avoid that situation.
Burn upgrades
Burn 1 Upgrade: Burn: +20%, Rage: +5, Rest: +1
Burn 2 Upgrade: Burn: +20%, Rage: +6, Rest: +1
I'm of the opinion these aren't really worth taking until either you've expanded the radius fully or until you've gotten far enough into the game that the raw damage of Gudrida's Rage barely matters and the Burn chance is the primary point of the move. The Rest period increase in particular is extremely inconvenient relatively early in the game, whereas once you're using Gudrida's Rage primarily to spread Burn the Rest period isn't so big a deal.
If you don't take these, your final Rest period will be 3, which is still an awkward number for most battles, so in the long haul if you're not wanting to prioritize other Rage moves per se these are probably worth taking anyway.
Control upgrades
Control 1 Upgrade: Rage: -10, Rest: -1
It's frustrating Gudrida's Rage doesn't benefit from Action Rage, because if it did you'd end up with a Rest of 2 when all was said and done, which would let you fairly regularly get a second use in short-ish battles.
I suppose it kinda works out anyway since in the long haul the main use of Gudrida's Rage is to spread Burns, which is not something that significantly benefits from spamming the move.
Final stats
Rage: 56
Rest: 5
Damage: 900-1000
Burn chance: 80%
Radius: 19 tiles (Big circle formation)
Gudrida's Rage is actually one of my favorite Rage skills in the series. It doesn't have as much raw damage as, say, Underground Blades did back in The Legend when maxed, and it has a worse strike radius to boot, but its early game damage is legit incredible and it stays relevant all the way into the endgame through Burn's percentile damage. It's pretty much perfectly tuned, and the only complaint I have is I really don't get why Action Rage only applies to Olaf's Rage moves. And even then, in Gudrida's Rage's case letting it benefit from Action Rage would make its tuning less interesting. More powerful, yes, but less interesting.
Hilda's Arrows
Basic
A semi-random selection of enemies is hit with attacks that do half their damage as Astral
and half of it as Magic
. Any stacks finished off by Hilda's Arrows leave behind Mana/Rage clusters, which provide 1 Action Point when walked into and some amount of both Mana and Rage.
Basic
Rage: 6
Rest: 2
Damage: 200-300
Targets: 3
Mana/Rage: 5
When I say 'semi-random', I mean you don't have control over it and I don't understand its priorities in most regards but it's not actually random. The main one I know is that it will always target Gremlins first above anything else. Which is really annoying since they're horribly resistant to Magic and high on Health when Hilda's Arrows doesn't have particularly great damage. It actually can generate Rage/Mana clusters from Gremlins, surprisingly, but you'll almost never see it happen. In practice this aspect of its targeting behavior boils down to making an already-weak skill borderline useless in Keeper fights. It's not like Gremlins lose effectiveness as you lower their Healtj, after all.
Christa's Gift is actually a really good Rage skill in the early game for raw damage and for keeping Skeletons and Skeleton Archers out of your hair. It's also really good at wiping stacks to earn Medal progress, and as a result of its extreme early-game damage also tends to help level your Rage faster to a shocking extent. An additional layer of utility is that it gives you a bit more flexibility on timing: say you're trying to finish off a stack with Rage for Medal progress, but none of your currently-affordable Rage skills will do the damage, and you either have nothing stronger or are on the last of your unit's turns before the enemy unit is going to move and suicide on one of your units/inflict a casualty and thus cost you Grand Strategian progress/potentially steal a chest/whatever. If you can afford Christa's Gift, you can slap it down, and even if it isn't actually strong enough to finish off the unit at its current numbers you may well be able to have your unit attack the enemy, thus knocking them down into range for Christa's Gift to finish off the stack.
Its utility tends to fall away as the game goes on, alas, but in the early game it's seriously amazing so long as you can afford its Rage cost -which is a pretty demanding hurdle, actually, at least prior to Gudrida joining up. Warriors of the North, somewhat ironically given Gudrida's presence, is actually the main game in the series where I semi-regularly use Potions of Rage or the Sign of Rage, as getting a Christa's Gift off in the first turn can make a drastic difference, and before its improvements start raising its Rest requirement you can potentially spam it turn after turn to lock an enemy down!
Christa's Gift is your first plot-locked Rage move, though since getting Christa is how you unlock the ability to gain Rage experience it will actually be your second Rage move, and usually Ice Blades will be your third and Lord of the North your fourth. It's a weird dynamic.
Since it isn't an Olaf Rage move, it doesn't benefit from Action Rage, either. This can take a bit to figure out on your own, as it's really not intuitive.
Damage upgrades
Damage 1 Upgrade: Damage: 500-800, Rage: +2
Damage 2 Upgrade: Damage: 800-1100, Rage: +2, Rest: +1
Damage 3 Upgrade: Damage: 1100-1400, Rage: +3
Damage 4 Upgrade: Damage: 1400-1800, Rage: +3, Rest: +1
Worth grabbing, and if you're getting them reasonably quickly -which is quite likely, due to how Warriors of the North has overhauled Rage acquisition- Christa's Gift can be fantastically damaging for a good chunk of the early game.
In the long haul 1400-1800 damage becomes a pretty unimpressive damage value, but that's okay because Christa's Gift remains a decent way to take an enemy out of the fight for a turn, and the early value is seriously amazing.
Range upgrades
Range 1 Upgrade: Range: 2, Rage: +9, Rest: +1
I don't think this is really worth taking. Christa's gift is pretty iffy in its coding in general, and my own experience is that the range upgrade either doesn't do anything at all or is too inconsistent to be worth taking. The spike in the Rage cost and the added Rest period is just not worth it.
Duration upgrades
Duration 1 Upgrade: Duration: 3, Rage: +5
This is actually worth taking. Ideally Christa's Gift activates on the turn you drop it, or the turn after, but Christa's Gift has a very curious approach to its time-out where its duration is set relative to when you placed it, rather than being 'cleaned up' at the end of an entire round like most such effects are. As such, you can have situations where you drop Christa's Gift in a chokepoint on your last unit's turn, and then an enemy moves that's your ideal target for Christa's Gift but it's too far for it to reach Christa's Gift this turn, and then next turn the gold pile actually vanishes before their turn rolls around. Getting the duration up to 3 not only does away with these maddening situations but also means you have more of an opportunity to scoop up the Gold if no enemy takes the bait.
The flexibility is well worth the Rage cost increase, at least past the early game.
Level upgrades
Level 1 Upgrade: Level: 1-3. Rest: +1, Rage: +5
Level 2 Upgrade: Level: 1-4. Rest: +1, Rage: +7
This seems to be actively broken, or at least the second upgrade does. I've had inconsistent results with Level 3 units, but I have never had a Level 4 unit grab Christa's Gift. Even when they have literally nothing they can do except grab it, they'd rather just Defend!
Meanwhile, Level 5 units will sometimes choose to grab the pile, even though they're supposed to be immune.
So yeah, ignore these upgrades. They don't work.
Rage upgrades
Rage 1 Upgrade: Rage: -10
Yep.
Gold upgrades
???
You can increase the gold acquired when having one of your units grab the pile as a Rage upgrade, but I have no idea how that part actually scales. The game itself doesn't clarify, and nobody seems to have bothered to test or dig into the code, and I don't know where to look myself and am not willing to spend the time manual testing would take. The only source I've been able to find just lists a single such upgrade, and claims it increases Rage cost by 4 as its only data point, which is flatly untrue (It's a completely free upgrade), and I know for a fact you can upgrade the Gold amount at least 3 times. According to Quaranyr in the comments, it's supposed to be a one-time upgrade that raises Rage cost by 4, and improves your odds of getting more gold, where the baseline numbers are a 31%/31%/25%/10% to roll gold amounts that can be described as low/medium/high/very high gold amounts and then this upgrade changes it to 20%/30%/34%/16%... but, again, I consistently get it as a free upgrade that can be stacked, so I have no idea what it actually does.
I tend to treat it as something to grab when I really, really don't want any of the other options because they'll push something's cost too far up, or increase a Rest period, or are for a skill I just plain don't want to invest in.
Final stats
Damage: 1400-1800
Rage: 36 (15 if you ignore the Level and Range upgrades)
Rest: 6 (4 if you ignore the Level upgrades)
Range: 2
Level: 1-4
Duration: 3
If you ignore the non-functioning Level upgrades and the dubiously-functioning Range upgrade, Christa's Gift is affordable and awesome. If you do take those upgrades it's expensive and hasn't actually benefited any.
Seriously, don't take those upgrades. You're more than doubling the final Rage cost, increasing the final Rest period by 50%, and getting no benefit and failing to spend those Rage levels into things that are actually useful.
That aside, Christa's Gift is seriously an amazing, versatile Rage skill, and the closest thing to a complaint I have is that it would've been nice if its damage had a percentage component or something so it didn't fall so completely behind in that regard in the endgame. And even then, the utility for preventing enemy turns is huge, and in some ways grows in value as enemy stacks get larger.
Gudrida's Rage
Basic
All enemies in a radius take Fire
damage, with a chance to be Burned. Allied units are at no risk.Basic
Rage: 8
Rest: 1
Damage: 400-500
Burn chance: 30%
Radius: 3 tiles (Triangle formation)
Gudrida's Rage starts out as a shockingly cost-efficient way of dishing out damage with middling odds of getting Burns thrown in. And it's only one Rest, too, so you can spam it turn in and turn out! It takes four damage upgrades for Viking Vortex to have comparable/better damage per target, and Viking Vortex's Rest period keeps going up to boot.
Eventually you'll have to start accepting Rest increases, but there's a pretty decent chunk of the early game where Gudrida's Rage is just an astonishingly good source of damage.
Damage upgrades
Damage 1 Upgrade: Damage: 480-580, Burn chance: +2%, Rage: +3
Damage 2 Upgrade: Damage: 570-670, Burn chance: +2%, Rage: +4, Rest: +1
Damage 3 Upgrade: Damage: 670-770, Burn chance: +2%, Rage: +5
Damage 4 Upgrade: Damage: 780-880, Burn chance: +2%, Rage: +6, Rest: +1
Damage 5 Upgrade: Damage: 900-1000, Burn chance: +2%, Rage: +7, Rest: +1
The first upgrade is a gimme of course. If you take the second one, the third one is also a gimme. The second one is the first, and honestly, only particularly hard decision about when to take it; if you've got the Rage generation to use Gudrida's Rage every turn, the damage boost really isn't worth it. If you can't sustain Gudrida's Rage spam anyway, you might as well take it.
The fourth one can be a minor difficult decision as well, depending. 2 Rest is fast enough to routinely fire off two Gudrida's Rages in a single short battle. 3 Rest pushes you just outside the typical fast Warriors of the North battle duration for a minor boost to damage, while also increasing your Rage cost. It's really a judgment call whether you feel it a worthwhile trade.
Once you have taken the fourth one, though, you probably might as well take the fifth one. You're not going to be getting a second Gudrida's Rage off in most battles anyway, so the improved up-front damage is more relevant.
Radius upgrades
Radius 1 Upgrade: Radius: 7 tiles (Circle formation), Rage: +10
Radius 2 Upgrade: Radius: 19 tiles (Bigger circle formation), Rage: +12
The first of these upgrades is an important decision that's a bit awkward. On the one hand, the circle formation is a huge jump in Gudrida's Rage's utility, frequently allowing it to strike 3 targets toward the beginning of a fight and allowing it to often strike 2 targets where the base area would've only been able to hit 1. On the other hand, that's a massive spike in cost; if you're perpetually only barely generating enough Rage to use Gudrida's Rage, or even if you have a fairly comfortable margin of generation, this is taking you well outside the ability to use it at all. And if you regularly fall just short of being able to use Gudrida's Rage in a given turn, this first upgrade is often making it basically completely inaccessible without using Potions of Rage and whatnot. You have to have incredible Rage generation for it to be easy to bear the cost increase.
The Rage cost increase being so large is the only complication in whether you should take these upgrades or not. There's no friendly fire, after all; Lord of the North getting an expanded radius can create awkward situations where the unupgraded version would've been able to hit a group of enemies without touching your stuff and the upgraded version can't. The only vaguely equivalent issue on Gudrida's Rage is that you're potentially destroying Lord of the North Ice Spikes as a direct result, particularly once you've reached the point where you're regularly getting to use Rage twice in one turn... but by the time you reach that point, you've probably had the upgrades in question for a long time. And you'll have other Rage moves, so you've got options for doing smart things that avoid that situation.
Burn upgrades
Burn 1 Upgrade: Burn: +20%, Rage: +5, Rest: +1
Burn 2 Upgrade: Burn: +20%, Rage: +6, Rest: +1
I'm of the opinion these aren't really worth taking until either you've expanded the radius fully or until you've gotten far enough into the game that the raw damage of Gudrida's Rage barely matters and the Burn chance is the primary point of the move. The Rest period increase in particular is extremely inconvenient relatively early in the game, whereas once you're using Gudrida's Rage primarily to spread Burn the Rest period isn't so big a deal.
If you don't take these, your final Rest period will be 3, which is still an awkward number for most battles, so in the long haul if you're not wanting to prioritize other Rage moves per se these are probably worth taking anyway.
Control upgrades
Control 1 Upgrade: Rage: -10, Rest: -1
It's frustrating Gudrida's Rage doesn't benefit from Action Rage, because if it did you'd end up with a Rest of 2 when all was said and done, which would let you fairly regularly get a second use in short-ish battles.
I suppose it kinda works out anyway since in the long haul the main use of Gudrida's Rage is to spread Burns, which is not something that significantly benefits from spamming the move.
Final stats
Rage: 56
Rest: 5
Damage: 900-1000
Burn chance: 80%
Radius: 19 tiles (Big circle formation)
Gudrida's Rage is actually one of my favorite Rage skills in the series. It doesn't have as much raw damage as, say, Underground Blades did back in The Legend when maxed, and it has a worse strike radius to boot, but its early game damage is legit incredible and it stays relevant all the way into the endgame through Burn's percentile damage. It's pretty much perfectly tuned, and the only complaint I have is I really don't get why Action Rage only applies to Olaf's Rage moves. And even then, in Gudrida's Rage's case letting it benefit from Action Rage would make its tuning less interesting. More powerful, yes, but less interesting.
Hilda's Arrows
Basic
A semi-random selection of enemies is hit with attacks that do half their damage as Astral
and half of it as Magic. Any stacks finished off by Hilda's Arrows leave behind Mana/Rage clusters, which provide 1 Action Point when walked into and some amount of both Mana and Rage.Basic
Rage: 6
Rest: 2
Damage: 200-300
Targets: 3
Mana/Rage: 5
When I say 'semi-random', I mean you don't have control over it and I don't understand its priorities in most regards but it's not actually random. The main one I know is that it will always target Gremlins first above anything else. Which is really annoying since they're horribly resistant to Magic and high on Health when Hilda's Arrows doesn't have particularly great damage. It actually can generate Rage/Mana clusters from Gremlins, surprisingly, but you'll almost never see it happen. In practice this aspect of its targeting behavior boils down to making an already-weak skill borderline useless in Keeper fights. It's not like Gremlins lose effectiveness as you lower their Healtj, after all.
I do know it's actually coded to prefer high-Health stacks (Which might be why it targets Gremlins so consistently...), which... what?
Also, while I'm unsure whether it actually matters, Hilda's Arrows has very unusual behavior in regards to its damage type; it's actually baseline Physical damage that gets converted to half-Magic and half-Astral. I suspect this makes its behavior more consistent in regard to effects that boost Rage damage, but if so it's probably a negligible difference.
I like the idea of Hilda's Arrows, in that it sounds like a less obnoxious and more interesting version of Lina's Chargers, but honestly if you replaced Hilda's Arrows with Lina's Chargers it would probably be a direct improvement to the functionality of the skill. The need to outright finish off stacks means it'll almost never actually pay off -it would've been much better if it was something like 'casualties inflicted are converted into Mana for the player'.
Damage upgrades
Damage 1 Upgrade: Damage: 300-400, Rage: +2
Damage 2 Upgrade: Damage: 420-520, Rage: +3
Damage 3 Upgrade: Damage: 560-630, Rage: +4, Rest: +1
Damage 4 Upgrade: Damage: 720-820, Rage: +5
Damage 5 Upgrade: Damage: 900-1000, Rage: +6, Rest: +1
Notice Hilda's Arrows ends up with the same final damage as Gudrida's Rage while starting out much weaker, starting out with the same maximum possible number of targets, and requiring just as many damage upgrades to get there. Hilda's Arrows is terrible as a damage effect, which is a problem since the entire other half of its utility is locked behind successfully killing things.
Targets upgrades
Targets 1 Upgrade: Targets: 4, Rage: +5
Targets 2 Upgrade: Targets: 5, Rage: +6, Rest: +1
Notice that Gudrida's Rage ends up with far superior potential to hit multiple targets with its first area upgrade than Hilda's Arrows gets with both of its maximum number of targets upgrades. And Gudrida's Rage doesn't increase the Rest period in the process.
Hilda's Arrows is terrible and you should avoid putting Rage levels into it.
Mana/Rage gain upgrades
M/R 1 Upgrade: M/R: 7
M/R 2 Upgrade: M/R: 10, Rest: +1
If you really have no better options, you might as well take the first upgrade, since it doesn't cost you anything other than a Rage level, which is going to waste if all your options are bad anyway. The second one increasing the Rest period is adding insult to injury, though.
Control upgrades
Control 1 Upgrade: Rest: -1
Sure, why not.
Final
Rage: 37
Rest: 5
Damage: 900-1000
Targets: 5
Mana/Rage: 10
Hilda's Arrows is terrible and you should avoid putting Rage levels into it.
Hilda takes long enough to unlock, even if you're willing to do some ninja-ing -she arbitrarily won't join you until you've gotten Gudrida and Gudrida demands you kill a series of Heroes first- that by the time you have Hilda's Arrows the basic damage is a pain to actually arrange to finish things off. Even when you do arrange things so a stack is weak enough to be wiped out by Hilda's Arrows, the game doesn't prioritize targeting stacks that will be finished off; it's perfectly normal for it to target everything other than the stack that would be finished off by it! And even if you do finish off a stack with Hilda's Arrows, there's no guarantee the resulting Mana/Rage cluster is placed conveniently enough for you to reach it -in fact, it's overall more likely that the result is some enemy gets to charge closer to your forces.
Fully-upgraded, it's basically 'Gudrida's Rage, only completely useless, but hey at least it's less expensive'. The only reason to bother using it is if you're overflowing on Rage and there's nothing better to do with your Rage use of the moment. Once you've got Runic Mastery, this will crop up semi-regularly, but outside of that... seriously, Hilda's Arrows is terrible. I have no idea why it doesn't hit harder, nor why it doesn't have a less awful gimmick.
Basic
Rage: 20
Rest: 2
Impact Damage: 100-200
Here's the basic Lava Golem, for reference:
Lava Golem
Level: 5
Leadership: 1
Attack/Defense: 35 / 40
Initiative/Speed: 5 / 2
Health: 650
Damage: 80 Physical
Resistances: 25% Physical, 50% Poison
, 80% Magic, 80% Fire, -50% Ice
Talents: None.
Abilities: Lava (Immune to Burn, 25% Physical resistance, 50% Poison resistance, 80% Fire resistance, -50% Ice resistance, immunity to mental effects, +50% Attack and Defense in lava battlefieldsand -50% Defense in snowy battlefields), Flaming (Enemies that initiate melee attacks on this unit become Burned), Stuns (Automatically Stuns enemies it attacks melee who are below Level 4), Magic Immunity (Immune to most Spells, 80% Magic resistance)
I like the idea of Hilda's Arrows, in that it sounds like a less obnoxious and more interesting version of Lina's Chargers, but honestly if you replaced Hilda's Arrows with Lina's Chargers it would probably be a direct improvement to the functionality of the skill. The need to outright finish off stacks means it'll almost never actually pay off -it would've been much better if it was something like 'casualties inflicted are converted into Mana for the player'.
Damage upgrades
Damage 1 Upgrade: Damage: 300-400, Rage: +2
Damage 2 Upgrade: Damage: 420-520, Rage: +3
Damage 3 Upgrade: Damage: 560-630, Rage: +4, Rest: +1
Damage 4 Upgrade: Damage: 720-820, Rage: +5
Damage 5 Upgrade: Damage: 900-1000, Rage: +6, Rest: +1
Notice Hilda's Arrows ends up with the same final damage as Gudrida's Rage while starting out much weaker, starting out with the same maximum possible number of targets, and requiring just as many damage upgrades to get there. Hilda's Arrows is terrible as a damage effect, which is a problem since the entire other half of its utility is locked behind successfully killing things.
Targets upgrades
Targets 1 Upgrade: Targets: 4, Rage: +5
Targets 2 Upgrade: Targets: 5, Rage: +6, Rest: +1
Notice that Gudrida's Rage ends up with far superior potential to hit multiple targets with its first area upgrade than Hilda's Arrows gets with both of its maximum number of targets upgrades. And Gudrida's Rage doesn't increase the Rest period in the process.
Hilda's Arrows is terrible and you should avoid putting Rage levels into it.
Mana/Rage gain upgrades
M/R 1 Upgrade: M/R: 7
M/R 2 Upgrade: M/R: 10, Rest: +1
If you really have no better options, you might as well take the first upgrade, since it doesn't cost you anything other than a Rage level, which is going to waste if all your options are bad anyway. The second one increasing the Rest period is adding insult to injury, though.
Control upgrades
Control 1 Upgrade: Rest: -1
Sure, why not.
Final
Rage: 37
Rest: 5
Damage: 900-1000
Targets: 5
Mana/Rage: 10
Hilda's Arrows is terrible and you should avoid putting Rage levels into it.
Hilda takes long enough to unlock, even if you're willing to do some ninja-ing -she arbitrarily won't join you until you've gotten Gudrida and Gudrida demands you kill a series of Heroes first- that by the time you have Hilda's Arrows the basic damage is a pain to actually arrange to finish things off. Even when you do arrange things so a stack is weak enough to be wiped out by Hilda's Arrows, the game doesn't prioritize targeting stacks that will be finished off; it's perfectly normal for it to target everything other than the stack that would be finished off by it! And even if you do finish off a stack with Hilda's Arrows, there's no guarantee the resulting Mana/Rage cluster is placed conveniently enough for you to reach it -in fact, it's overall more likely that the result is some enemy gets to charge closer to your forces.
Fully-upgraded, it's basically 'Gudrida's Rage, only completely useless, but hey at least it's less expensive'. The only reason to bother using it is if you're overflowing on Rage and there's nothing better to do with your Rage use of the moment. Once you've got Runic Mastery, this will crop up semi-regularly, but outside of that... seriously, Hilda's Arrows is terrible. I have no idea why it doesn't hit harder, nor why it doesn't have a less awful gimmick.
Part of the problem is that you don't automatically collect the Chargers if a battle ends with any on the field. If you did do so, Hilda's Arrows would be a way to use a relatively easy fight as a springboard to launch into a harder fight with some starting Rage without having to miss out on Mana or avoid casting Spells in the first fight or use any potions. That would be a bit of a limited niche, but still something. As-is, Runic Mastery is really the only reason you'll be using it with any regularity.
Mista's Lightning
Basic
Generates a ball of lightning at an arbitrary location on the battlefield. The ball of lightning does not actually share space with regular units, but it does compete with other balls of lightning. The ball of lightning is outside of the player's control, and starting from the turn after it was summoned it will attack a single enemy per turn very early in the turn (Initiative: 20) for percentile damage, with a chance for the attack to 'split' and hit another nearby enemy for full percentile damage. Each hit also has a chance to Shock.
Basic
Rage: 15
Rest: 1
Damage: 1-10% Magic
Split chance: 10%
Shock chance: 20%
Actions: 2
Basically a worse version of Ball of Lightning from Armored Princess, failing to act on the turn it's summoned, by extension attacking only twice instead of three times, starting with a minimum damage of 1%, and only being able to move something like 3 tiles! The only advantage it has is the 'bounce' mechanic, which is horribly unreliable.
It's... also got worse travel ability, burns its duration on every turn that passes even if it didn't manage to attack anything, and if you're able to get multiple onto the field -which is really easy prior to upgrades- there's a risk of the game soft-locking. This only seems to happen when the balls outnumber possible targets, but still. That's vastly inferior behavior than Ball Lightning.
Curiously, I've once seen a ball that had no proper targets 'attack' a Fire Trap. This didn't accomplish anything, but it's interesting that it could happen at all.
Damage upgrades
Damage 1 Upgrade: Damage: +4% to max, Shock: +2%, Rage: +3
Damage 2 Upgrade: Damage: +5% to max, Shock: +2%, Rage: +4, Rest: +1
Damage 3 Upgrade: Damage: +6% to max, Shock: +2%, Rage: +5, Rest: +1
To be completely clear: this only raises the maximum roll on the damage, not the minimum, Yes, that means Mista's Lightning always has a chance of screwing you over with a low roll. It's actually affected by Runic Power, and even raises the minimum damage to 2%, but this is barely an improvement. It's also affected by the Medal that boosts Rage damage, but, again, this isn't much of a boost. (With both maxed, you end up with 60% for your high roll) I have no earthly idea why Warriors of the North did this, especially since high roll-wise Mista's Lightning actually has higher potential damage than Ball of Lightning; a Mark of Blood instant-kill trick is completely possible, you just need max-power Runic Power to pull it off. And a cooperative RNG, of course.
I'd totally understand Mista's Lightning ending up being overpriced, over-Rested garbage compared to Ball of Lightning in Armored Princess -and to be clear, that's basically exactly what it is- but crippling the minimum damage with no way to improve it isn't some overly-aggressive-but-understandable reaction to 'oh god with Mark of Blood you can kill arbitrarily large stacks' or the like, it's just pointless RNG.
Shock upgrades
Shock 1 Upgrade: Shock: +6%, Damage: +2% to max, Rage: +2
Shock 2 Upgrade: Shock: +8%, Damage: +2% to max, Rage: +3, Rest: +1
Shock 3 Upgrade: Shock: +10%, Damage: +2% to max, Rage: +4, Rest: +1
You might as well take the first one, at least.
I tend to ignore the later ones, though.
Split upgrades
Split 1 Upgrade: Split Chance: 18%, Rage: +6
Split 2 Upgrade: Split Chance: 28%, Rage: +7, Rest: +1
Split 3 Upgrade: Split Chance: 40%, Rage: +8, Rest: +1
I don't really get why the game values the 'split' upgrades so much. You can't get the split chance high enough to count on it happening. You have no control over the ball of lightning. The bounce is outside of your control, when it even happens. It's still always possible for the bounce to roll a measly 1% damage, itself. Seriously, why?
Control upgrades
Control 1 Upgrade: Rage: -10, Rest: -1
Worth it.
Final stats
Rage: 47
Rest: 6
Damage: 1-31%
Split chance: 40%
Shock chance: 50%
Actions: 2
A strong argument can be made that you should avoid taking any of the Rest-increasing upgrades, or only take one on the idea that the Control upgrade will cancel it. Mista's Lightning is a decent 'filler' Rage attack, particularly once you have Runic Power and so will be erratically getting two Rage uses in a turn, and being able to toss out a ball of lightning every turn if you like goes a long way to minimize the RNG-screw aspect. It's also not too frustrating to toss out your second Rage as Mista's Lightning, in terms of the fact that having Mista's Lightning not immediately do something (Where some other Rage attack would have an immediate impact) isn't a big deal if you're treating the second Rage as a nice bonus rather than an essential element of your planning. Raising its maximum potential at the cost of increased Rage costs and a longer Rest period can rapidly shove it into being more or less unusable.
On top of all that, Mista's Lightning is hampered by Warriors of the North having far faster-paced combat than the previous games. Getting to do percentile damage next turn isn't terribly impressive when even into the late game you may well be doing stuff like wiping out 60% of the enemy army with Death Star on the first turn. Low percentile damage next turn, when the enemies are already crippled, is just terrible.
On the plus side, it's still better than Hilda's Arrows. In particular, while it's terrible when you're facing more-or-less on-level battlegroups, it's worth using as a follow-up to Gudrida's Rage when you're dealing with oversized battlegroups thanks to the percentile damage, with no other competition particularly.
Regina's Messenger
Basic
Generates a Lava Golem at a target open tile, inflicting Physical damage on all enemies on the field, the damage dropping off with distance.
Mista's Lightning
Basic
Generates a ball of lightning at an arbitrary location on the battlefield. The ball of lightning does not actually share space with regular units, but it does compete with other balls of lightning. The ball of lightning is outside of the player's control, and starting from the turn after it was summoned it will attack a single enemy per turn very early in the turn (Initiative: 20) for percentile damage, with a chance for the attack to 'split' and hit another nearby enemy for full percentile damage. Each hit also has a chance to Shock.
Basic
Rage: 15
Rest: 1
Damage: 1-10% Magic
Split chance: 10%
Shock chance: 20%
Actions: 2
Basically a worse version of Ball of Lightning from Armored Princess, failing to act on the turn it's summoned, by extension attacking only twice instead of three times, starting with a minimum damage of 1%, and only being able to move something like 3 tiles! The only advantage it has is the 'bounce' mechanic, which is horribly unreliable.
It's... also got worse travel ability, burns its duration on every turn that passes even if it didn't manage to attack anything, and if you're able to get multiple onto the field -which is really easy prior to upgrades- there's a risk of the game soft-locking. This only seems to happen when the balls outnumber possible targets, but still. That's vastly inferior behavior than Ball Lightning.
Curiously, I've once seen a ball that had no proper targets 'attack' a Fire Trap. This didn't accomplish anything, but it's interesting that it could happen at all.
Damage upgrades
Damage 1 Upgrade: Damage: +4% to max, Shock: +2%, Rage: +3
Damage 2 Upgrade: Damage: +5% to max, Shock: +2%, Rage: +4, Rest: +1
Damage 3 Upgrade: Damage: +6% to max, Shock: +2%, Rage: +5, Rest: +1
To be completely clear: this only raises the maximum roll on the damage, not the minimum, Yes, that means Mista's Lightning always has a chance of screwing you over with a low roll. It's actually affected by Runic Power, and even raises the minimum damage to 2%, but this is barely an improvement. It's also affected by the Medal that boosts Rage damage, but, again, this isn't much of a boost. (With both maxed, you end up with 60% for your high roll) I have no earthly idea why Warriors of the North did this, especially since high roll-wise Mista's Lightning actually has higher potential damage than Ball of Lightning; a Mark of Blood instant-kill trick is completely possible, you just need max-power Runic Power to pull it off. And a cooperative RNG, of course.
I'd totally understand Mista's Lightning ending up being overpriced, over-Rested garbage compared to Ball of Lightning in Armored Princess -and to be clear, that's basically exactly what it is- but crippling the minimum damage with no way to improve it isn't some overly-aggressive-but-understandable reaction to 'oh god with Mark of Blood you can kill arbitrarily large stacks' or the like, it's just pointless RNG.
Shock upgrades
Shock 1 Upgrade: Shock: +6%, Damage: +2% to max, Rage: +2
Shock 2 Upgrade: Shock: +8%, Damage: +2% to max, Rage: +3, Rest: +1
Shock 3 Upgrade: Shock: +10%, Damage: +2% to max, Rage: +4, Rest: +1
You might as well take the first one, at least.
I tend to ignore the later ones, though.
Split upgrades
Split 1 Upgrade: Split Chance: 18%, Rage: +6
Split 2 Upgrade: Split Chance: 28%, Rage: +7, Rest: +1
Split 3 Upgrade: Split Chance: 40%, Rage: +8, Rest: +1
I don't really get why the game values the 'split' upgrades so much. You can't get the split chance high enough to count on it happening. You have no control over the ball of lightning. The bounce is outside of your control, when it even happens. It's still always possible for the bounce to roll a measly 1% damage, itself. Seriously, why?
Control upgrades
Control 1 Upgrade: Rage: -10, Rest: -1
Worth it.
Final stats
Rage: 47
Rest: 6
Damage: 1-31%
Split chance: 40%
Shock chance: 50%
Actions: 2
A strong argument can be made that you should avoid taking any of the Rest-increasing upgrades, or only take one on the idea that the Control upgrade will cancel it. Mista's Lightning is a decent 'filler' Rage attack, particularly once you have Runic Power and so will be erratically getting two Rage uses in a turn, and being able to toss out a ball of lightning every turn if you like goes a long way to minimize the RNG-screw aspect. It's also not too frustrating to toss out your second Rage as Mista's Lightning, in terms of the fact that having Mista's Lightning not immediately do something (Where some other Rage attack would have an immediate impact) isn't a big deal if you're treating the second Rage as a nice bonus rather than an essential element of your planning. Raising its maximum potential at the cost of increased Rage costs and a longer Rest period can rapidly shove it into being more or less unusable.
On top of all that, Mista's Lightning is hampered by Warriors of the North having far faster-paced combat than the previous games. Getting to do percentile damage next turn isn't terribly impressive when even into the late game you may well be doing stuff like wiping out 60% of the enemy army with Death Star on the first turn. Low percentile damage next turn, when the enemies are already crippled, is just terrible.
On the plus side, it's still better than Hilda's Arrows. In particular, while it's terrible when you're facing more-or-less on-level battlegroups, it's worth using as a follow-up to Gudrida's Rage when you're dealing with oversized battlegroups thanks to the percentile damage, with no other competition particularly.
Regina's Messenger
Basic
Generates a Lava Golem at a target open tile, inflicting Physical
damage on all enemies on the field, the damage dropping off with distance.Basic
Rage: 20
Rest: 2
Impact Damage: 100-200
The damage drop-off is 10% per tile. (As in, it can hit 0% damage at ten tiles out; not many battlefields are large enough to actually see this happen, though. And it would still do 1 damage; this series isn't a big believer in zero damage attacks) In reality, you'll see lower numbers than that would imply because it's the other Rage move that's affected by Defense and consults Olaf-the-unit's zero Attack. At least the impact damage isn't the main point of Lava Golem?...
Here's the basic Lava Golem, for reference:
Lava Golem
Level: 5
Leadership: 1
Attack/Defense: 35 / 40
Initiative/Speed: 5 / 2
Health: 650
Damage: 80 Physical
Resistances: 25% Physical
, 50% Poison, 80% Magic, 80% Fire, -50% IceTalents: None.
Abilities: Lava (Immune to Burn, 25% Physical resistance, 50% Poison resistance, 80% Fire resistance, -50% Ice resistance, immunity to mental effects, +50% Attack and Defense in lava battlefields
To be clear, the damage modifiers to Rage moves from Runic Mastery and Favorite of the Valkyries does not affect a Lava Golem's own, personal damage. They only affect the initial impact damage of using Regina's Messenger.
Note that the Stun description claims it works on anything below Level 5, but no, Level 4 is already high enough to be immune. Also note that the in-game description for Lava alludes to the Defense boost, but not the Attack boost, and is just plain wrong when it indicates it cares about snowy battlefields. (Also, the in-game description actually claims it boosts the Lava Golem in snowy battlefields and penalizes in lava battlefields, but I suspect most players fill in with the almost-correct expectation rather than properly reading it)
Of course, by far the most important quality of the Lava Golem isn't its stats, it's the fact that it makes the game borderline-unplayable.
No, seriously. The heat rising off of it or whatever that's supposed to be is atrociously inefficient within the engine. As far as I can tell, once the Lava Golem has been on the field for more than about five seconds, the game starts lagging horribly and doesn't stop until the Lava Golem has been gone for several seconds, and having more horsepower in your computer barely helps. So the occasional situations the Lava Golem could be useful, I mostly avoid calling it in regardless because it's not worth making the battle a miserable chore to play through, not unless I'm expecting it to pretty much immediately die.
Damage upgrades
Damage 1 Upgrade: Impact Damage: 200-300, Golem Damage: 120, Rage: +7
Damage 2 Upgrade: Impact Damage: 300-400, Golem Damage: 180, Rage: +8, Rest: +1
Damage 3 Upgrade: Impact Damage: 400-500, Golem Damage: 280, Rage: +9, Rest: +1
Damage 4 Upgrade: Impact Damage: 500-600, Golem Damage: 400, Rage: +10, Rest: +1
The Lava Golem's utility isn't even centered on its damage output, regardless of whether you're talking about it's impact damage or its Damage stat. Even if it didn't lag the game horribly, this would be a dubious expenditure of Rage levels.
Health upgrades
Health 1 Upgrade: Health: 850, Defense: 48, Rage: +4
Health 2 Upgrade: Health: 1150, Defense: 58, Rage: +5, Rest: +1
Health 3 Upgrade: Health: 1550, Defense: 70, Rage: +6, Rest: +1
Health 2 Upgrade: Health: 2200, Defense: 85, Rage: +7, Rest: +1
If you're going to bother sinking Rage levels into the lava Golem, this is where your Rage levels should go. Its primary utility is as a distraction, after all. Surviving longer also means it's more likely to get to spread Burns and Stuns around.
Control upgrades
Control 1 Upgrade: Rage: -10, Rest: -1
Control 2 Upgrade: Rage: -10, Rest: -1
If the Lava Golem were actually worth it, sure.
Final stats
Rage: 56
Rest: 6
Impact Damage: 500-600
Golem Health: 2200
Golem Defense: 85
Golem Damage: 400
I've already been over the lag problem, but the other big problem with the Lava Golem is how late it enters your pool of Rage skills. You're roundabout halfway through the game when you finally get Regina, and by that point the Lava Golem is honestly too weak to accomplish much unless you're specifically facing Fire damage, Magic damage, or to a lesser extent Poison damage attackers. Anything else will tend to kill it in one hit, and upgrading it does less to help offset this than one might hope. In theory its Flaming quality should mean that it's worth using to spread Burns, but Gudrida's Rage is far superior at the job.
I like the general idea of the Lava Golem, but wow was it poorly-executed.
Loki's Aid
Basic
Inflicts Fire damage in a wave that spreads to a total width of 5 tiles. The wave can be started from any normally-passable tile, so long as the tile isn't currently occupied. 'Fire Traps' spawn randomly within the strike zone, which will end the turn of units that walk into them and inflict Burn, and are not used up by being walked into. Soaring units take half damage from this Burn.
Basic
Damage: 300-600
Rage: 25
Rest: 4
Fire Traps: 3
Loki's Aid is your fourth and final move classed as one of Olaf's Rage skills, sharing its Rest period with Viking Vortex, Ice Blades, and Lord of the North, even though it's plot-locked behind defeating Loki. By extension it also benefits from Action Rage's Rest reduction. Never mind that its name is Loki's Aid and that the head in the lower-right is Loki's instead of Olaf's.
Just as Traps and Zlogn cannot coexist, so too are Fire Traps unable to coexist with them. (Though amusingly Ice Blades placed atop a Fire Trap is just fine) Whichever is newest will overwrite the prior one. In the case of Loki's Aid you have limited ability to influence the placement of Fire Traps so it's difficult to really leverage this effect, but it does mean you should avoid overlapping Loki's Aid's strike zone with your Traps if you don't want them being potentially wiped away. On the flipside, if for some reason you consider it inconvenient to have a Fire Trap somewhere, you can potentially erase it by placing a Trap or getting a Zlogn generated. You'll also occasionally see a unit die, generate a Zlogn, and this conflict with the Fire Trap.
Of course, by far the most important quality of the Lava Golem isn't its stats, it's the fact that it makes the game borderline-unplayable.
No, seriously. The heat rising off of it or whatever that's supposed to be is atrociously inefficient within the engine. As far as I can tell, once the Lava Golem has been on the field for more than about five seconds, the game starts lagging horribly and doesn't stop until the Lava Golem has been gone for several seconds, and having more horsepower in your computer barely helps. So the occasional situations the Lava Golem could be useful, I mostly avoid calling it in regardless because it's not worth making the battle a miserable chore to play through, not unless I'm expecting it to pretty much immediately die.
Damage upgrades
Damage 1 Upgrade: Impact Damage: 200-300, Golem Damage: 120, Rage: +7
Damage 2 Upgrade: Impact Damage: 300-400, Golem Damage: 180, Rage: +8, Rest: +1
Damage 3 Upgrade: Impact Damage: 400-500, Golem Damage: 280, Rage: +9, Rest: +1
Damage 4 Upgrade: Impact Damage: 500-600, Golem Damage: 400, Rage: +10, Rest: +1
The Lava Golem's utility isn't even centered on its damage output, regardless of whether you're talking about it's impact damage or its Damage stat. Even if it didn't lag the game horribly, this would be a dubious expenditure of Rage levels.
Health upgrades
Health 1 Upgrade: Health: 850, Defense: 48, Rage: +4
Health 2 Upgrade: Health: 1150, Defense: 58, Rage: +5, Rest: +1
Health 3 Upgrade: Health: 1550, Defense: 70, Rage: +6, Rest: +1
Health 2 Upgrade: Health: 2200, Defense: 85, Rage: +7, Rest: +1
If you're going to bother sinking Rage levels into the lava Golem, this is where your Rage levels should go. Its primary utility is as a distraction, after all. Surviving longer also means it's more likely to get to spread Burns and Stuns around.
Control upgrades
Control 1 Upgrade: Rage: -10, Rest: -1
Control 2 Upgrade: Rage: -10, Rest: -1
If the Lava Golem were actually worth it, sure.
Final stats
Rage: 56
Rest: 6
Impact Damage: 500-600
Golem Health: 2200
Golem Defense: 85
Golem Damage: 400
I've already been over the lag problem, but the other big problem with the Lava Golem is how late it enters your pool of Rage skills. You're roundabout halfway through the game when you finally get Regina, and by that point the Lava Golem is honestly too weak to accomplish much unless you're specifically facing Fire damage, Magic damage, or to a lesser extent Poison damage attackers. Anything else will tend to kill it in one hit, and upgrading it does less to help offset this than one might hope. In theory its Flaming quality should mean that it's worth using to spread Burns, but Gudrida's Rage is far superior at the job.
I like the general idea of the Lava Golem, but wow was it poorly-executed.
Loki's Aid
Basic
Inflicts Fire
damage in a wave that spreads to a total width of 5 tiles. The wave can be started from any normally-passable tile, so long as the tile isn't currently occupied. 'Fire Traps' spawn randomly within the strike zone, which will end the turn of units that walk into them and inflict Burn, and are not used up by being walked into. Soaring units take half damage from this Burn.Basic
Damage: 300-600
Rage: 25
Rest: 4
Fire Traps: 3
Loki's Aid is your fourth and final move classed as one of Olaf's Rage skills, sharing its Rest period with Viking Vortex, Ice Blades, and Lord of the North, even though it's plot-locked behind defeating Loki. By extension it also benefits from Action Rage's Rest reduction. Never mind that its name is Loki's Aid and that the head in the lower-right is Loki's instead of Olaf's.
Just as Traps and Zlogn cannot coexist, so too are Fire Traps unable to coexist with them. (Though amusingly Ice Blades placed atop a Fire Trap is just fine) Whichever is newest will overwrite the prior one. In the case of Loki's Aid you have limited ability to influence the placement of Fire Traps so it's difficult to really leverage this effect, but it does mean you should avoid overlapping Loki's Aid's strike zone with your Traps if you don't want them being potentially wiped away. On the flipside, if for some reason you consider it inconvenient to have a Fire Trap somewhere, you can potentially erase it by placing a Trap or getting a Zlogn generated. You'll also occasionally see a unit die, generate a Zlogn, and this conflict with the Fire Trap.
Soaring units have weird interactions with Fire Trap, in that they're able to fly right over Fire Traps without getting stuck in them, but will still be affected if they end an action inside the Fire Trap. And... not necessarily immediately, potentially only having it apply when some other unit ends its turn.
Alas, the Burn damage is a joke. It has 10% strength -as in, 10% of the base Burn strength. So it does 0.5-1% damage. (Before accounting for the Medal that boosts Burn strength, but whatever) I suspect this was meant to be an extra-strong Burn that effectively always high-rolled, but that's not remotely how it's coded if so. Don't plan as if the Burn damage will help. (But do plan as if it will cost you Grand Strategian progress!... admittedly you should have Grand Strategian maxed long before you get Loki's Aid) And yes this means Soaring units take 0.25-0.5% of their total Health in damage.
The Fire Traps themselves last for one turn, can be placed underneath units at use, and annoyingly have a rule that forces them to cluster a bit -each Fire Trap has to be within 5 tiles of another Fire Trap. That's not hugely constrictive given the size of the battlefields, but it does mean that the game is biased toward clustering Fire Traps over spreading them out.
Loki's Aid's starting values are pretty poor, though a bit deceptive since you may well have Action Rage maxed when you get it and so actually have it with a spammable Rest of 1. It's easy to be a bit underwhelmed, but it gets a lot better... potentially...
Damage upgrades
Damage 1 Upgrade: Damage: 600-900, Rage: +10
Damage 2 Upgrade: Damage: 900-1200, Rage: +10, Rest: +1
Damage 3 Upgrade: Damage: 1300-1600, Rage: +10
Damage 4 Upgrade: Damage: 1700-2000, Rage: +10, Rest: +1
Damage 5 Upgrade: Damage: 2200-2500, Rage: +10, Rest: +1
Damage 6 Upgrade: Damage: 2700-3000, Rage: +10, Rest: +1
Damage 7 Upgrade: Damage: 3300-3600, Rage: +10, Rest: +1
Yes, yes, yes! Expensive, but worth it. You're late in the game, you've got the Rage to spare.
Notice that the second upgrade already has its damage better than Gudrida's Rage's final damage.
Control upgrades
Control 1 Upgrade: Rest: -1, Rage: -10
Control 2 Upgrade: Rest: -1, Rage: -10
Take 'em!
Fire Trap upgrade
Fire Trap 1 Upgrade: Rage: +5, Fire Traps: 5
It's a minor cost for making Fire Trap distribution more reliably useful. Go for it!
Final stats
Damage: 3300-3600 Fire
Rage: 80
Rest: 7 (4 if Action Rage is maxed)
Fire Traps: 5
These are the final stats on Loki's Aid, but you're not very likely to see them in an actual run. Loki's Aid takes a long time to reach, and it's entirely possible you'll be at Rage level 50 by the time you get it -that would be exactly enough levels to max it out if the game offered Loki's Aid upgrades every single level you got, which is... unlikely to actually happen. In one Viking run, I was at Rage Level 57 when I got Loki's Aid, and I was only given one chance to upgrade Loki's Aid at all.
It also has the secondary, annoying consequence of meaning it's entirely possible that putting ranks into Loki's Aid is actually a bit of a waste. Getting Loki's Aid 2-3 upgrades doesn't really get it up to proper endgame relevance, and yet it's potentially costing other, more immediately useful skills the opportunity to be even better.
This is theoretically a bit of an issue with Regina's Messenger, too -it doesn't show up that much sooner than Loki's Aid- and the only reason I didn't comment on it there is that Regina's Messenger is so bad and so laggy that you don't want to put anything into it anyway if you can avoid it. With Loki's Aid, though, this is genuinely frustrating, as Loki's Aid is meant to end up as basically your ultimate attacking Rage move, like Fiery Phantoms before it, but you have to either be lax in using your Rage or really aggressive about pushing to Loki to have a shot at it actually happening. This is one of the most egregious cases of most Rage moves being plot-locked creating design problems, yet it's not even the only such issue.
Seriously, I'd love to have a 3300-3600 damage attack, especially because between the Medal and Runic Mastery it would actually be 6435-7020 damage. That would be good even in the endgame! I've never had it happen, though, and I'm not sure I ever will.
I do think Warriors of the North has a really great implementation of Rage overall, but the plot-locking thing is a dubious decision that wasn't executed well.
----------------------------------------
Next time, we break from prior games' order to cover the Companions next, since they're directly tied up in Rage in this game.
Loki's Aid's starting values are pretty poor, though a bit deceptive since you may well have Action Rage maxed when you get it and so actually have it with a spammable Rest of 1. It's easy to be a bit underwhelmed, but it gets a lot better... potentially...
Damage upgrades
Damage 1 Upgrade: Damage: 600-900, Rage: +10
Damage 2 Upgrade: Damage: 900-1200, Rage: +10, Rest: +1
Damage 3 Upgrade: Damage: 1300-1600, Rage: +10
Damage 4 Upgrade: Damage: 1700-2000, Rage: +10, Rest: +1
Damage 5 Upgrade: Damage: 2200-2500, Rage: +10, Rest: +1
Damage 6 Upgrade: Damage: 2700-3000, Rage: +10, Rest: +1
Damage 7 Upgrade: Damage: 3300-3600, Rage: +10, Rest: +1
Yes, yes, yes! Expensive, but worth it. You're late in the game, you've got the Rage to spare.
Notice that the second upgrade already has its damage better than Gudrida's Rage's final damage.
Control upgrades
Control 1 Upgrade: Rest: -1, Rage: -10
Control 2 Upgrade: Rest: -1, Rage: -10
Take 'em!
Fire Trap upgrade
Fire Trap 1 Upgrade: Rage: +5, Fire Traps: 5
It's a minor cost for making Fire Trap distribution more reliably useful. Go for it!
Final stats
Damage: 3300-3600 Fire
Rage: 80
Rest: 7 (4 if Action Rage is maxed)
Fire Traps: 5
These are the final stats on Loki's Aid, but you're not very likely to see them in an actual run. Loki's Aid takes a long time to reach, and it's entirely possible you'll be at Rage level 50 by the time you get it -that would be exactly enough levels to max it out if the game offered Loki's Aid upgrades every single level you got, which is... unlikely to actually happen. In one Viking run, I was at Rage Level 57 when I got Loki's Aid, and I was only given one chance to upgrade Loki's Aid at all.
It also has the secondary, annoying consequence of meaning it's entirely possible that putting ranks into Loki's Aid is actually a bit of a waste. Getting Loki's Aid 2-3 upgrades doesn't really get it up to proper endgame relevance, and yet it's potentially costing other, more immediately useful skills the opportunity to be even better.
This is theoretically a bit of an issue with Regina's Messenger, too -it doesn't show up that much sooner than Loki's Aid- and the only reason I didn't comment on it there is that Regina's Messenger is so bad and so laggy that you don't want to put anything into it anyway if you can avoid it. With Loki's Aid, though, this is genuinely frustrating, as Loki's Aid is meant to end up as basically your ultimate attacking Rage move, like Fiery Phantoms before it, but you have to either be lax in using your Rage or really aggressive about pushing to Loki to have a shot at it actually happening. This is one of the most egregious cases of most Rage moves being plot-locked creating design problems, yet it's not even the only such issue.
Seriously, I'd love to have a 3300-3600 damage attack, especially because between the Medal and Runic Mastery it would actually be 6435-7020 damage. That would be good even in the endgame! I've never had it happen, though, and I'm not sure I ever will.
I do think Warriors of the North has a really great implementation of Rage overall, but the plot-locking thing is a dubious decision that wasn't executed well.
----------------------------------------
Next time, we break from prior games' order to cover the Companions next, since they're directly tied up in Rage in this game.
Mista's gift gold return is quite generous. I'm on Greenwort now, and it gives me about 5k per cast, with combat reward being 10k. So, if you cast it twice during combat, you can double your combat gold income.
ReplyDeleteIt looks like the amulet was originally a ring.
ReplyDeleteViking Vortex is Personal Contribution in the original. Because Olaf just personally attacks enemies. Well, it was Steel Vortex earlier in development and still called this way internally, but I like the final name better.
I also find it amusing that Olaf is the only KB protagonist who is familiar with the esotheric knowledge of hitting people/creatures/objects with axe/sword/staff.
Damage upgrade 4 is 640-720, not 640-729.
Ice Blades wall is an Ice Creature and is Immune to Magic. It has 25% physical resistance, 50% poison resistance, 80% of both magic and ice resistance and 100% fire weakness. It's damage type is ice.
You have both fourth and fifth Health Upgrades marked as 4. And final one has +6 to Rage cost, not 8.
Control upgrade requires not merely 6+ rage cost, but 30+. It reduces rage cost by 10, not by 6. It reduses rest by 10(!) turns, not 1. It only requres rest of 4+ through, so it's better wait until rest will be 7 for maximum effect. And yes, this is propably not intended number.
Final rage cost thus is 32. Final rest is 1.
Lord of the North first equally spreads shards through all affected tiles. Excessive shards are than dropped on random tiles in the affected area. For example, with 36 shards and 18 tiles each tile get hit by 2 shards. Olaf takes upgrade to 45 shards - now, after each tile get hit by 2 shards, 9 random tiles get additionally hit by 1 shard each.
Area upgrade is a one time thing. It increases area to 18 tiles, changes what Shard upgrades table is used and increases cost by 10.
Some or your final stats are wrong. At the very least it looks like you counted both versions of shard upgrades together? And area upgrade must have confused you. Anyway, here are correct final stats:
- rage cost: 69
- rest: 6
- shards count: 54
So in theory every tile receives 2400-3900 damage. In practice it will be much lower as Lord of the North damage is actually affected by defense. And Olaf-the-unit (he stands at edge of battlefield and is the source of rage attacks) doesn't have attack stat - which is treated as 0. It's still pretty good - with defense ignore it could be overpowered.
Christa's Gift is indeed a special chest. It only gives gold, the same number as normal chest. It can potentially be taken by any enemy (so level 5 creatures taking it is not a bug), just like any other chest; affected units MUST take it through.
Like atleast Russian description tells, it does only half of damage to flying creatures.
Level increase indeed doesn't work. Or, to be exact, upgrade itself does work, but the script for making AI units react to Christa's Gift has a mistake that does not allow the game to see level parameter (regardless of any upgrades or lack of such) - thus it uses default number - 2.
I do not know why is your gold upgrade is so weird. It is indeed 1 time upgrade that increases cost by 4. As for it's effect - in WotN a chest (Christa's including) with gold has 4 variants of how much gold it has. Exact amounts are dependant on location and game difficulty, but they can be described as low (around 31%), mediocre (same), large (around 28%) and very large (10%). Technically there is also a very low amount but it has 0% chance.
Gold upgrade changes the chances on Christa's gold pile to 20/30/34/16%. So it does not actually increases gold amount but gives you better chances of getting better result. In my opinion it doesn't worth it.
Final rage cost should be 40, but if you somehow have free gold upgrade...
Gudrida's Rage have final cost of 56, not 58.
Internal name of burning blades that are used by animation of this attack refers to Regina instead of Gudrida.
You have Hilda's Arrows final stats labeled as basic.
DeleteAI working is really not my thing, but this attack gives higher priority (=higher chances to be attacked) to stacks with higher hp. Makes total sense for an attack that gives special benefits upon finishing off stacks./s
Interestingly, unlike any other mixed damage attacks we saw so far, this one is not expected "X astral damage + Y magic damage". Instead it's base damage type is technically physical, but when attack is made half of it is converted to astral and another half - to magic.
Mista's Lightning is called "lightingbeam" internally. Interesting name.
Lightning has 20 initiative and deals magic damage. It IS affected by the medal - it is both shown in description and used in-game. I tested to be sure. Lightning with power of 27%. With maxed medal and Runic Power it got to 52%. I made it always deal maximum damage for the test - and indeed it dealt damage equal to 52% of target's health.
So everything maxed will bring it to 1-60%. Quite a range.
Regina's Messenger base impact damage is 100-200, not 120-240. On distance damage is decreased by (10*distance)%. And it indeed deals physical damage in my game atleast. Tested in game - works as it should.
It's also affected by defense. And like I already said, Olaf-the-unit doesn't have attack stat.
Now to Lava Golems.
Contrary to description of Lava (wrong in the original too, and it's Made of Lava there btw), Golem receives +50% to both attack and defense in lava arenas and has no special interactions with snowy arenas.
Stuns doesn't actually works on level 4 creatures.
I never had lagging problems even on my old PC. Through Lava Golem indeed has a lot of radiant particles.
Loki tells that he will teach Olaf when he gives us the ability, so it beong conidered Olaf's personal is logical - Olaf just copies Loki's attack.
Traps do not instantly affect soaring units, but do apply burn to them when someone's turn end. This may look pretty weird - say, move Lake Sprires to a trap and 'wait' there - nothing. Next unit does something/defends - and now Lake Sprites burn.
Burn from the traps deals halved damage to soaring units.
I never saw the full might of Loki's Aid in game - it unlocked waaaay to late, sadly. Regina doesn't have the same problem for me - I usually clean all of Darion before sailing to Feedom Islands/Merlassar/Ice Gardens, so she have a lot of time to level up her Golems, if needed.
Loki's Aid will get to 6435-7020 with maxed medal and Runic Power. And a lot of undead have fire weakness... If only. Why, 1C, WHY?!
We can get Regina's Messenger MUCH earler than Loki's Aid. Maybe you meant Mista's Lightning here? We only get it after Gilford-the-hero battle.
I think I got to all this? Certainly confirmed what I could.
DeleteAlso discovered that, at least in English, Lava actually claims the opposite boosts/penalties for terrain -I just expected it to say 'good in lava, bad in snow' so strongly I saw most of the text being right enough and didn't properly read it!
Really weirded out by exactly two moves using Olaf-the-unit's Attack stat, with neither being Viking Vortex...
I always clear most of the Isles of Freedom before even going to Darion -the Giant Undead Spider is such a huge hurdle it's vitally important, especially on Impossible. And Regina's Messenger has, across all my runs, offered upgrades at a poor rate; Mista's Lightning has consistently gotten more chances at upgrades even though it comes later.
I do suspect I got confused on the order when first drafting the post, mind; I mostly went for unlock order, which should place Mista's Lightning after Regina's Messenger, not before.
Ice Blades text doesn't mention it being Immune to Magic (like Black Dragon). A stray fireball won't hurt it.
DeleteAlso, it's propably obvoius, it's a Siege-able object too. Just in case me of me possibly making you think that Ice Creature makes it not being an object. It's both.
You still list 5 area upgrades. There is only one - the first one. It just increases the radius, triples base number of shards and switches Shard upgrades to Shard upgrades Other.
Hilda's Messenger should deal 1 damage if penalty will go over 100%. Well, I didn't test it, but I'm pretty sure.
Loki's Aid maximum boosted damage is 6435-7020, not 6434-7020 :)
Maybe you should mention that it can create traps 'under' units. Traps will apply Burn as soon as anyone end it's rurn.
Some more info on traps - they are placed relatively close enough to each other; a trap must have another within 5 tiles distance.
They last for 1 turn.
Their burn deals only 10% damage of normal. So 5% in case of soaring. Yes, without medals it means 0,5-1% of total health for most and 0,25-0,5% for soaring. 'sigh' I wonder if it's the same person who made a single Goblin Catapult command over 26000 leadership of goblins?..
Do you think that using defense for those 2 attacks may be a mistake/unintended that needs fixing? It does feel strange - I'll look into it later.
On the other hand, Lord of the North can become ay to powerful...
Now that I think about it, I usually didn't point unit attacks ignore attack/defense - so I'll list them here. In all games: Goblin Shaman's astral attacks, orc Shaman's Dancing Axes, various units' Power of Horde, Totem of Death attack, explosion of Goblin Catapult's explosives, Book of Evil/Nightmares. WotN/DS only - Tirex/Necroh roar attack.
DeleteHuh, so it is. I'd figured it was immune in a more unique way and never noticed stuff like Death Star kills it just fine.
DeleteAnd yeah, I got the info from the forums and they listed things that way. I've been meaning to more properly scrutinize Lord of the North for months just because eg my final conclusion on cost really, really failed to line up with the in-game numbers. So that's what most of the jank with this post in particular is.
My assumption is Loki's Aid was supposed to have an extra-strong Burn that always did 10% damage, like a high roll on a regular Burn, and whoever coded it didn't realize they were setting a multiplier applied to the base percentage instead of setting the base percentage directly. And that does explain why I've always found the Burn seriously underwhelming...
At this point I suspect the INTENT was that Olaf was going to either reference his own leadership stats (ie have his Attack equal to or boosted by the Hero Attack) or was going to be a special unit that scaled in its own right much like the Beholder familiar from Red Sands, with Rage moves being derived from this unit instead of being standalone in a mechanical sense, and then it got cut with only a handful of signs of such plans. So I'd personally class the Defense usage in those two moves as an error -they're probably holdovers from aborted plans that didn't get fully cleaned up, not an actual deliberate balancing factor in the final design. And Lord of the North still wouldn't stand up to the full power of Loki's Aid, so... it wouldn't be that huge a boost to Rage's peak effectiveness.
Wait, the fearsome roar ignores Attack/Defense? Holy crap, is THAT why it's so pathetic?
'groans' Regina's Messenger, not Hilda's.
DeleteWhen I mentioned books - only their Random Spells ignore attack/defense. As you propably noticed, it is an attack after all (Berserker...).
Sorry for possible confusion. Each time I write something at night, it becomes even more, well, confusing than usual.
Your assumption about Loki's Aid is mostly correct, except it's not about super-strong Burn, but a misunerstanding during coding halved damage for soaring/normal damage for others.
Looking into attack/defense again - atleast in case of Regina's Messenger it may be just oversight with it possibly being just a summon originally. Than they added damage but forgot that by default any attack uses attack/defense mechanic - and they didn't put ignore here.
With maxed upgrades, medal and Runic Power, Lord of the North gets to 1560-2535 per shard. So 4680-7605 per tile. It's not much weaker than Loki's Aid and on occasion will be stronger with defense ignore, while being accessible much earlier. Look at this - https://ibb.co/wM4wcXz
But it alone using defense doesn't feel right too...
Yes, Primal Fear ignores attack/defense but, like I said, only in WotN/DS. In AP it doesn't.