Warriors of the North Skill Analysis Part 1: Might

, , and are still used to label the Rune costs for purchasing a given Skill rank. (These being Might, Mind Spirit, and Magic Runes, respectively)

In general, same rules and formatting as with the previous two games.



There's a surprising number of Skills from Armored Princess that have vanished, jumped to another tree, or been significantly overhauled. I think it's for the best overall, but it's more dramatic a change than I was expecting, especially since relatively few of the replacements are particularly Viking-themed.

Heroism
Attack +1.
4 
1 
Attack +3.
9 
2 
Attack +6.
13 
3 

Skill tree requirements: None.

Exactly the same as in Armored Princess, with nothing particularly new to comment on.

Resistance
Defense +1.
4 
1
Defense +3.
9 
2 
Defense +5.
9 
2 

Skill tree requirements: None.

Unchanged from Armored Princess.

Rage Control
Rage cap +8, +1 Attack for Vikings (the species), and +10 to max Adrenaline on Orcs.
9 
2 
Rage cap +16, +2 Attack for Vikings (the species), and +20 to max Adrenaline on Orcs.
10 
2 
Rage cap +24, +3 Attack for Vikings (the species), and +30 to max Adrenaline on Orcs.
11 
2 

Skill tree requirements: None.

Randomly provides a minor Attack boost to your Vikings now. As noted back with Orcs, the Adrenaline max increase is a little different in its implications because Orcs have a higher base max; now the first rank is what's needed for Orcs to be able to spend Adrenaline without necessarily losing an Adrenaline Level, and everything past that is kinda gravy for Orcs, where in Armored Princess you needed the first rank to reach Adrenaline Level 3 at all, and the second to have any possibility of spending Adrenaline without necessarily losing an Adrenaline Level, and the third was gravy for anything that didn't spend at least 11 Adrenaline at once.

The Attack boost to Vikings means that if you intend to stick out a Viking-heavy force for the foreseeable future, ranks in Rage Control is probably better to pursue than ranks in Heroism, though it's a fairly minor thing overall.

Onslaught
All player units receive +1 Initiative on the first turn. Additionally, +5 max Rage, and player Orcs have 10 Adrenaline distributed among them at the start of a battle.
10 
1 
All player units receive +2 Initiative on the first turn. Additionally, +8 max Rage, and player Orcs have 20 Adrenaline distributed among them at the start of a battle.
10 
2 
All player units receive +3 Initiative on the first turn. Additionally, +10 max Rage, and player Orcs have 30 Adrenaline distributed among them at the start of a battle.
10 
3 

Skill tree requirements: Heroism, Resistance.

It's exactly the same as in Armored Princess.

Though, thanks to battles in Warriors of the North tending to run faster, the Initiative boost only lasting through the first turn is less of a flaw. Still a pretty significant flaw, enough so I'm not fond of investing in the later ranks unless I'm trying to do an Orc army or have already bought out much of the Might tree, but less of one. If you're using some mid-Initiative units, it may well be worth getting to Onslaught rank 2 fairly early so eg you can finish off a Skeleton Archer stack before it gets a move, or build up enough Rage for a Christa's Gift and then still have a unit turn before the Skeleton Archer stack gets to go so you can set Christa's Gift before they go. In the early-to-midgame of Warriors of the North, it's actually fairly hard to get high Initiative units, particularly of the sort that are best for avoiding casualties like Royal Snakes, so this is a very valid scenario, much more so than in either of The Legend or Armored Princess.

Action Rage
Rest period on Olaf's Rage skills reduced by 1, to a minimum of 1. Additionally, a random player Orc stack that is below Level 3 is granted max Adrenaline at the beginning of a battle.
6 
2 
Rest period on Olaf's Rage skills reduced by 2, to a minimum of 1. Additionally, a random player Orc stack that is below Level 4 is granted max Adrenaline at the beginning of a battle.
8 
2 
Rest period on Olaf's Rage skills reduced by 3, to a minimum of 1. Additionally, a random player Orc stack that is below Level 5 is granted max Adrenaline at the beginning of a battle.
10 
2 

Skill tree requirements: Rage Control.

Yes, Action Rage only reduces the Rest duration for 4 of your Rage skills. It's nice to get the first rank early in the game, but anything past that is dubious to pursue unless you're playing the Viking and either have run out of other Skills to dump Might Runes into or are really wanting to prop up an Orcish army or maximize the utility of using a single Orcish unit in your army. In the latter case Onslaught may make more sense, if you're not inclined to max Rage Control.

Of course, if you do max Rage Control then Action Rage is actually granting an Orc 60 Adrenaline, which is more than enough to get them through the entire battle.

And yes, this is pretty much Adrenaline-the-Skill only instead of a random Speed boost it provides a non-random Rage cooldown reduction... and has been shunted to Might, of course, with its Rune costs flipped and also slightly modified: the progression in Armored Princess was 2/7-2/8-2/9, as opposed to this progression of 6/2-8/2-10/2. Same total Rune costs in the end, but Warriors of the North has shifted one Rune to the back.

I approve of this change, as it always bothered me a bit in Orcs on the March how there were two Adrenaline-related Skills in Might and 1 in Mind. Warriors of the North making Orc specialization more concretely a Viking thing is nice, and thematically it's appropriately timed given the Skald, as we'll see, is overall the most focused on Vikings-the-species of the classes.

Frenzy
If an allied unit finishes off a unit, it gains +2 Attack for the remainder of the battle.
5 
2 
If an allied unit finishes off a unit, it gains +4 Attack for the remainder of the battle.
7 
2 
If an allied unit finishes off a unit, it gains +6 Attack for the remainder of the battle.
10 
2 

Skill tree requirements: Onslaught.

Strangely, Warriors of the North didn't see fit to do anything to make Frenzy more complex or interesting. I still find it a bit confusing how fond the developers are of Frenzy.

They haven't even changed its costs, just made it earlier in the skill tree.

I seriously don't get it.

Quick Draw
Ranged attackers gain +3 Attack and +1 Initiative.
8 
1 
Ranged attackers gain +5 Attack and +2 Initiative.
9 
2 
Ranged attackers gain +7 Attack and +3 Initiative.
10 
3 

Skill tree requirements: Onslaught

For reference, straight from the .txt file...

unit=archer,bowman,cannoner,catapult,elf,elf_hunter,elf3,elf2,goblin,thorn,thorn_ice,beholder2,beholder,kingthorn,alchemist,droideka,cyclop,slinger_man,axthrower,satyr,spider_ice,gorgon,mistik,dread_eye

... this is the list of units Quick Draw affects. Note that Satyr is the internal name for Fauns, Dread Eye is the Evil Eye, Mistik is Contemplator (Not Mystics. They're 'Mystiques' in the code. Yes, like the X-Men character), and in case you've forgotten Droideka is the Repair Droid. (Also, Elf3 is the Avenger and Elf Hunter is the Snow Elf Scout) Also note that this affects Alchemists, but not Engineers, which is an interesting change from Armored Princess. It's a pretty weird list overall, with the main takeaway being that if you're a ranged unit and not some kind of wizard you probably benefit from Quick Draw. This includes that Goblin Shaman are no longer affected.

Though, as with Power of Darkness back in The Legend, Quick Draw does have the odd quality of being overall more appealing to the Soothsayer than to the Viking. It's not nearly as dramatic as in The Legend since Rage is actually pretty useful in Warriors of the North throughout the game, but... since the Viking is only really better at funding Rage, whereas the Soothsayer's actual performance with Spells is well ahead of the Viking's, it's still a situation biased toward the Soothsayer getting bigger benefits from Initiative boosts.

Anger
Rage gain in combat +20%, and additionally +1 to Rage gained.
8 
2 
Rage gain in combat +40%, and additional +2 to Rage gained.
9 
2 
Rage gain in combat +60%, and additionally +3 to Rage gained.
11 
2 

Skill tree requirements: Action Rage.

Anger is still a fantastically-designed Skill. It's also completely unchanged from Armored Princess, aside that Training has gone away (Thankfully) and so Anger is more accessible than in Armored Princess.

Berserker
5% chance to units to do double damage.
10 
10% chance for units to do double damage.
10 
15% chance for units to do double damage.
10 

Skill tree requirements: Frenzy.

It's nice to have a point in Berserker just for the chance to get lucky, but past that it's only really useful when you have more Might Runes than things to spend them into. And it's still heavily RNG-based, which unfortunately is a trend with Warriors of the North. It's sheer swinginess particularly annoys me.

To be fair, it's not quite as swingy as it sounds, in that attacks/Talents that hit multiple targets actually roll Berserker for each separate target, not for the attack as a whole: an Imp hurling a Fireball that hits five units is reasonably likely to roll doubled damage on one of those targets, rather than either doing normal damage to all targets or doing doubled damage to all targets.

... but it's still really swingy.

It also has the obnoxious quality of interfering with your ability to make any kind of plan. Once you do have Berserker maxed, it's not unusual to come up with a plan like 'I'll weaken this stack with this unit, slap Kamikaze on them, and then finish them off so they do massive damage to everyone around them' and then have it randomly be taken away from you because your attack that couldn't have killed more than 40% of the stack was a Berserker critical hit and so the stack instantly died, taking away your Kamikaze target.

Shield of Rage
Units have a 10% chance of purging one negative effect at the beginning of the round.
7 
1 
1 
Units have a 20% chance of purging one negative effect at the beginning of the round.
7 
2 
2 
Units have a 30% chance of purging one negative effect at the beginning of the round.
7 
3 
3 

Skill tree requirements: Frenzy and Anger.

Shield of Rage confuses me as far as its name/conceptual end of things goes -I'd really expect it to be something like 'chance to purge negative effects based on how much Rage is in your pool', going by the name- but its mechanics are, randomness aside, something I love.

One of the big frustrations with the Warrior in Armored Princess is that your units are a focal point of your performance, but you don't really have tools for dealing with negative effects that can cripple them. The Mage not only didn't care as much when units get crippled so long as she kept the opportunity to cast Spells, but thanks to how Higher Magic worked it wasn't a significant burden to toss out one Dispel a turn for up to 6 turns, so she actually was the best of the classes at purging problematic status effects. Armored Princess really could've used something like a Rage move that purged negative status effects, or something.

Warriors of the North providing Shield of Rage is a step in the right direction, making it so that a mid-level Viking who runs into enemy forces that put a ton of effort into crippling his armies will entirely shrug off some portion of them. The randomness of it is a bit of a pain, particularly when you're dealing with eg a single effect on a single unit that's nonetheless a linchpin, but in particular it makes Keeper fights much less frustrating, since Gremlins do in fact love to bury your units in negative effects. Warrior Amelie's only solution was to try to kill the Gremlins as fast as she could. Viking Olaf can potentially power through so long as the RNG isn't overly-hostile.

It's not the best solution, but a step in the right direction is excellent.

Icy Rage
Damaging Rage Skills gain a 3% chance to crit. Additionally, Viking Vortex and Lord of the North gain a 25% chance to inflict Freezing for 2 turns.
8 
1 
Damaging Rage Skills gain a 5% chance to crit. Additionally, Viking Vortex and Lord of the North gain a 50% chance to inflict Freezing for 2 turns.
9 
2 
Damaging Rage Skills gain a 7% chance to crit. Additionally, Viking Vortex and Lord of the North gain a 75% chance to inflict Freezing for 2 turns.
10 
3 

Skill tree requirements: Anger.

Note that the in-game description just vaguely says you can infuse "the hero's rage skills" with freezingness. This is easy to interpret as referring to all Rage moves, but nope. You similarly might expect it to affect Loki's Aid since it shares its cooldown with the Olaf Rage moves, but, again, nope. It's just Viking Vortex and Lord of the North for the Freeze chance.

On paper, Rank 3 Icy Rage is bringing your crit chance to a total of 10% instead of 3%. In practice, since the base Rage crit chance is scaled to your current percentage of Rage and Icy Rage's boost is not, the total crit chance will be somewhere above 7% but below 10% much of the time. This means Icy Rage makes Rage crits quite a bit more common than the base numbers would suggest.

In spite of how limited the list of Freeze-gaining skills is, Lord of the North and Viking Vortex are both staple skills all the way through to the end of the game, and Lord of the North in particular is a fantastic opening move for stalling and distracting enemies with the Ice Spikes. Gaining high odds of Freezing enemies means that once your Rage generation is able to keep up with using Lord of the North readily it can displace Gudrida's Rage as a way to open the battle. Why go for mass Burn when you can go for mass Freeze, drop Ice Spikes, and do better up-front damage?

As such, Icy Rage is actually a surprisingly useful Skill, particularly since Freeze is such an excellent effect to inflict.

Helping this is...

Bloodlust
Max Rage +5, and Rage cannot drop below 15% of max when outside battle.
14 
Max Rage +10, and Rage cannot drop below 25% of max when outside battle.
14 
Max Rage +15, and Rage cannot drop below 40% of max when outside battle.
14 

Skill tree requirements: Berserker

Bloodlust remains amazing, though it's very strange that it's not exclusive to the Viking the way it was exclusive to the Warrior in Armored Princess.

The Viking is, admittedly, the most effective at leveraging it from an early point, but in the long haul every class tends to come close to maxing out every Skill tree. As we'll be seeing, the Viking ends up with no unique Rage-focused Skills... while the Soothsayer continues to have Higher Magic unique to them. It's a bit uneven.

Note that while Bloodlust itself hasn't changed any aside modified accessibility, in real terms it's actually more powerful and useful than ever. Part of this is the faster combat point: being able to start a battle with a high-end Rage move is much more effective than in Armored Princess. A bigger part is that your Rage maximum in Warriors of the North is just way higher than in Armored Princess, taking into account points like Gudrida's fairly large max Rage boost. It's not unusual for an endgame character of any class to be able to open every battle with a maxed-out Lord of the North, where in Armored Princess Bloodlust tended to reduce how much Rage you needed to generate on the first turn, not let you fire off a strong Rage move as your very first action of the battle.

Runic Power
For each unspent Rune the player is holding, 1% more damage on damaging Rage Skills and a 1% chance to get a second use of Rage in a given turn, to a maximum of 20%.
7 
3 
3 
For each unspent Rune the player is holding, 2% more damage on damaging Rage Skills and a 2% chance to get a second use of Rage in a given turn, to a maximum of 40%.
7 
3 
3 
For each unspent Rune the player is holding, 3% more damage on damaging Rage Skills and a 3% chance to get a second use of Rage in a given turn, to a maximum of 60%.
7 
3 
3 

Skill tree requirements: Icy Rage.

Apparently the developers really liked the dynamic with Rune Mages in Orcs on the March, because here we have a similar idea, but in Skill form. It's... strange in implementation. Buying additional ranks of it is actually often going to be a bad thing, since it means you're carrying fewer Runes and so possibly the new rank will end up less effective than the old one even though it gets more per Rune. It's sort of a neat idea, and makes you feel less like you're making a mistake when you're holding onto some Runes to buy a Skill even though you could buy some other one right now, but then it also basically punishes you for purchasing new Skills unless you are dead-set on constantly floating 20+ unspent Runes. (That is, you don't buy a Skill unless it will keep you above 19 Runes after the purchase)

I certainly like the idea of a Rage equivalent to Higher Magic, but I'm not so much of a fan of 'balancing' it with RNG. Especially since Rage's generation mechanics mean it's a really poor fit to such; if Higher Magic was RNG-based, you could be pretty confident that the majority of the time you rolled it you've got the Mana to follow up. Runic Power being Rage-based instead leads to maddening situations of failing to roll it on a turn where you have gallons of Rage and then rolling it on turns you're completely dry after just one use -especially since the RNG means you can't really plan your Rage. Sure, you could use one of your cheap skills in hope that Runic Power triggers and you can use another cheap skill, but if it doesn't then you're just screwing yourself over.

So I like the key idea of a Rage equivalent to Higher Magic, but Runic Power is really, really not the way to go about that. Unfortunately.

It's also just bizarre that Higher Magic continues to be a Mage/Soothsayer-exclusive Skill, but its Rage equivalent is available to everyone. Shouldn't it be exclusive to the Viking, to equivalently emphasize their role as Master Of Rage?


The following two skills are exclusive to the Viking, and as always this space will double as a micro-analysis of the Might class.

Warriors of the North has reworked the classes, and not just by renaming them. There's a clear conceptual shift: in the previous two games, the Mage had the weakest army and theoretically the worst ability to leverage Rage in exchange for by far the best Spellslinging ability, the Warrior had the largest, bestest armies and was the best at Rage, and the Paladin was some vague 'balance' class with vague, gimmicky bits welded on based on the thematic 'holy warrior' stuff. 

In Warriors of the North, the Mage Soothsayer is (theoretically) holding to the same dynamic as ever, but the Warrior Viking and Paladin Skald have been overhauled. The Skald's change is the more interesting of the two, but I'll cover that when we get to the Skald. The Viking's shift is that now they're the middle class for Leadership scaling, not the highest class, with their focus being on unit quality and on Rage.

In practice, since the Viking doesn't have any exclusive Rage-focused Skill the Viking ends up being much more focused on their army than on their Rage, especially late in the game when Rage remains relevant but no longer as powerful as it was in the early-to-midgame, and while I really feel like the dynamic needed work -seriously, why aren't Bloodlust and Runic Mastery exclusive to them?- overall I think Warriors of the North was on the right track.

I'd probably place the Viking as the weakest of the three classes, unfortunately, but certainly nowhere near as bad as in The Legend. The only thing The Legend's Warrior had going for him over the Viking is that The Legend's Warrior had Anger as a class-exclusive, making him inarguably the best class at Rage. Between Rage being pretty terrible in The Legend and Reaper breaking the Rage economy eventually anyway, that's not much of a point in The Legend's Warrior's favor.

The Viking is the weakest class in Warriors of the North, but that's because the other two classes are overly-strong, not because the Viking actually struggles to beat the game or anything like that.

So about those two exclusive Skills...

Steadfast Norse
Spells, Burn, Poisoning, Bleeding, and Freezing do 10% less damage to your units.
10 
1 
Spells, Burn, Poisoning, Bleeding, and Freezing do 10% less damage to your units, and negative effects last 1 less turn on your units. (To a minimum of 1 turn)

10 
1 
Spells, Burn, Poisoning, Bleeding, and Freezing do 20% less damage to your units, and negative effects last 1 less turn on your units. (To a minimum of 1 turn)

10 
1 

Skill tree requirements: Resistance.

Ooooookay.

And yes, it really does alternate non-Might costs like that.

Steadfast Norse is a Skill you should ideally have at the second rank before you get to the Giant Undead Spider, just to make its webs less maddening, and there's plenty of situations reducing a negative effect's duration by one turn is useful in, but the Spell damage reduction part is irritatingly niche, since it only applies in Keeper and Hero fights. (Or if you're willing to friendly-fire your own troops, but why are you even using direct-damage Spells as the Viking?) It's probably not worth getting the third rank until you're so far into the game that you've got literally nothing better to do with your Runes -Warriors of the North is the only game in the series where it's entirely possible to max all the Skill trees in real play.

The duration reduction effect is also weirdly erratic. It reduces Blind's duration to 1 turn, but Sheep is unaffected. I have no idea why some affects get reduced and others don't. Is it intentional? Is it an overlooked bug? No idea!

To be honest, Steadfast Norse's terribleness is a good chunk of why I say the Viking is the weakest class. The other two classes simply don't have an equivalently bad exclusive Skill, and as we'll be covering in a second Absolute Rage is surprisingly good but not 'as good as two strong Skills put together' good.

Steadfast Norse does at least reduce damage from over time effects (Not that the game mentions this...), so it's not as niche as it looks, but still.

Absolute Rage
Player units have a 10% chance to increase Attack by 25% for two turns anytime they receive damage. Counterattacks have a 50% higher crit chance (eg 20%->30%), and unit crits do 10% more damage.
14 
Player units have a 25% chance to increase Attack by 25% for two turns anytime they receive damage. Counterattacks have a 75% higher crit chance (eg 20%->35%), and unit crits do 25% more damage.
15 
Player units have a 50% chance to increase Attack by 25% for two turns anytime they receive damage. Counterattacks have a 100% higher crit chance (eg 20%->40%), and unit crits do 50% more damage.
16 

Skill tree requirements: Berserker and Shield of Rage.

Note that the additional percent chance to crit damage is basic addition, which is to say that rank 3 Absolute Rage raises your crits from 150% damage to 200% damage.

Absolute Rage is a somewhat complicated-looking Skill, but in practice it's fairly simple. The chance to boost Attack by a percentage when hit is honestly ignorable; +25% to Attack, non-stacking (Having it trigger again just refreshes the duration), is insignificant most of the time. The boost to crit chance on counterattacks is nice, but also fairly ignorable. It's not like it's actually worth going out of your way to arrange counterattacks to leverage it -at most it means that eg Furious units are a little more appealing for the Viking than for other classes.

No, the only part of Absolute Rage that has a significant impact on actual play is the boost to crit damage. And it has a big effect, much more so than you might expect. Crits doing doubled damage instead of 50% more damage does a lot more to raise the Viking's damage output than you might expect, even if you don't bother to use units with high crit chances or the like.

Unfortunately, the impact is... not negative on the Viking's performance, but fairly negative on the play experience. A Viking who has Absolute Rage and Berserker maxed is a Viking who basically can't make any kind of meaningful plan at all. You'll attack a unit, intending for it to survive in a weakened state so it'll block off other units from reaching your forces and whoops you Berserker crit-killed it for four times your maximum expected damage, sorry. Okay then, you'll try making an attack on this other unit and hope luck is with you and it instantly pops to four times maximum expected damage -nope, Berserker didn't trigger, and you didn't roll a crit, so now you're eating a major hit.

One of the more subtle impacts of this is actually one of the most bothersome to me: it means the Viking actually hates using melee! The chaotic swinginess of the Viking's damage output will almost never backfire if you're using an army that's all ranged units, or only one melee unit you mostly use to finish off or blockade nearly-wiped stacks. (Preferably something fast and mobile, like Archdemons or a dragon) If you're using a melee-focused army, though, your attempts to control battle lines will inevitably collapse when an enemy unexpectedly dies, clearing the way for an enemy unit to go somewhere you'd planned for them to not reach.

This is bothersome both on the larger level that the Viking is pretty clearly imagined in general as a melee-focused class, just as the prior games' Warriors were pretty clearly imagined as melee-focused, but even more so for the fact that the Skill itself is quite bluntly targeted at 'you hurl melee units into melee where they get beat up but strike back super-hard'. Yet the Skill's actual impact is the exact opposite!

I overall enjoy playing the Viking, but this is my main criticism of their design: that Absolute Rage isn't a bad Skill in the sense of being a Skill with poor utility in the way that Steadfast Norse is, but in the sense that it has an obvious goal and it so completely fails at it.

---------------------------

Next time, we check out the Mind Spirit tree and how it's changed.

It's changed a lot.