Things That Are Overpowered

[Teralitha]

Lets make a list of things that the community feels are overpowered in this game and could use some "balancing." For starters, my suggestion.

1. Hero skill: Demonology. Im not sure how its calculated, but it seems to be that I am getting stupid amounts of summoned demons after every battle that just keep filling up my reserves. Im sure its scaled by the heros level or some stat as the amounts keep increasing as the game progresses.
2. The demon city's infernal gate? I think its called that or something similar. That thing is OP as hell. But why is it op? I mean, it takes a ton of sulfer to upgrade it, but because of the market. I can max out the upgrades easily. It is really powerful even long before its maxed out. Its even easier after I get that other town upgrade that reduces market prices. All I have to do is sell all my other resources, then buy all sulfer and upgrade the summons for instant free armies. The other reason why its so OP is how fast it fills the battlefield with those powerful demons. ***EDIT:*** I think ive changed my mind about this one. The later a game goes and if the game is set to have bigger armies, this infernal gate gecomes less effective, plus I think it goes away after awhile, or gets dispelled maybe. Ive seen it disapear after awhile in some battles for some unknown reason, and sometimes it seems to never go away. Not sure whats going on there and there is no battle log.

[GinormousAX]

I don't see how anyone could balance this game. It's a beautiful mess and I wouldn't change that. But for the sake of discussion here's my picks for the most OP:

- Devour. Do I have to explain? It is infinite scaling for any hero that picks up the skill. Just grab any creature producing skill and feed. Consider us lucky the AI has no idea how to properly abuse this.

- Glare. Seth of Sleep is incredibly strong as a hero mostly because he gets to spam this spell constantly. It's essentially three spells in one: Mania, Berserk, and Mind Control. Starts off as a weak Mania then upgrades into Berserk then finishes off by being able to roll into Mind Control. Did I mention it's dirt cheap at 5 mana? Just spam this spell non-stop and no army can even function while you will walk away with half their forces.

- Comet Rain. I have won so many games just by rolling this spell. Sure it has friendly fire but your enemy starts on the other side of the screen so just make this your first cast on the largest part of their army. A sure loss can turn into an instant win purely on the back of this spell.

[Keny]

Order (faction) hero " Marco " start with 2 paladin units.
by having the skill Mastery , you can generate a paladin without unlocking the cathedral witch is a mid-late game building.
if you combine this with the skill ''Bloodwarping'' it allows the hero to transform some of their basic creatures into elite creatures. , after couple days and fighting some enemies .

by having this , you can have +30 elite paladins pretty fast and steamroll through everything.

[BRRM]

Originally posted by MalvadoCrow:

Order (faction) hero " Marco " start with 2 paladin units.
by having the skill Mastery , you can generate a paladin without unlocking the cathedral witch is a mid-late game building.
if you combine this with the skill ''Bloodwarping'' it allows the hero to transform some of their basic creatures into elite creatures. , after couple days and fighting some enemies .

by having this , you can have +30 elite paladins pretty fast and steamroll through everything.

Blood warping needs to be made to only upgrade the chosen creature by one tier per blood warping level. At level 1 Blood warping a skeleton will warp into say a zombie, for instance. That would solve its problem. but a lot of people are using blood warping as a crutch atm, due to several instances of difficulty problems.

The other way to solve these ridiculous skills is to make them only available in the bottom row of skill trees.

Destruction I feel gets way to good at 3+ skill level. a swarm team can annihilate double their powers worth with some of the spells that come out. I had an instance where i lost 1200 power vs only a 500ish power force. all due to destruction. This is where believe a lot of people have difficulty troubles. Bodyguard skill makes this worse as the "free" units trigger this ability.

But i do like the quirkiness of a lot of these skills. so i dont know. im torn whether they should just bring the other skills up to their level of craziness.

I recently tried diplomacy and liked it. Works really well with lament because the extra units you grab feed your slave pens (if not lament unit and dragons aren't lament apparently.), thus you can spend more on diplomacy.

[funkmonster7]

Seth of Sleep is just absolutely busted, I can concur to that. I used him just last night. I used a doppleganger and a deity (the giant sandman monster), and then on the first turn summoned 137 Fire Elementals on my enemies. Then 2 seconds later, summoned 98 Water Elementals on my side. Then 2 seconds later, summoned 100+ Thunder Elementals. Then 2 seconds later, another 137 Fire Elementals on my enemies. Then a few seconds later, 98 Mana Elementals. Then a few seconds later, I found Glare hiding somewhere at the back of my spell book and used it. Then another 137 Fire Elementals once the cooldown is up. And then just sat back and watched the lag show as my army of summons obliterated the enemy team.

I was at only 230 mana at the time. Of a maximum of 680. My mana regen per turn was 98.

I mean, if you include the fact that Seth starts with that +% XP skill... And then his dopples can go around murderizing Impossible-difficulty enemies with just 4-5 casts of Summon X Elementals spells, while he Devours his own permanent units (half of whom will end up in hospital) for permanent buffs... Yeah, he's busted.

[Lavan]

Originally posted by BRRM:

Destruction I feel gets way to good at 3+ skill level. a swarm team can annihilate double their powers worth with some of the spells that come out. I had an instance where i lost 1200 power vs only a 500ish power force. all due to destruction. This is where believe a lot of people have difficulty troubles. Bodyguard skill makes this worse as the "free" units trigger this ability.

The third priest in Order is a great example of this, starts with the skill that restores some troops after combat, moves into siege equipment is better to replenish during combat, into destruction and the one that leaves ghosts when units die. Use creation and mercurial to replenish anything thats actually still dead after Healing. She just sends an endless stream of units at you that explode into spells.

Really thats the game though, figure out what works well and push it for all its worth

[Teralitha]

Yeah but, once you figure out a OP strategy, the game becomes boring because the AI doesnt abuse it like you do.

[Quillithe]

Basically I'd classify by category:

- skills that give you more troops when you fight a battle. a bunch of skills do this and they're all pretty good. Demonology, creation, dragonking, avatar, diplomacy, hegemony, and I'd include bloodwarping. Necromancy's probably the weakest of them, though hegemony isn't always great I think.

- elemental magic schools are by far the strongest magic skills, and if you can stack some stuff with them it can get silly. In particular air magic - > avatar - > free diplomacy skill is pretty nice

- creativity just gives you a ton of nearly free skills for fights so you'll pick up all the other broken skills eventually

- recruitment can be pretty nice to get, especially with royalty to make units free. more of a second hero thing

- logistics and scouting let you get into more fights to snowball faster

- almost every troop buff seems pretty weak, except devour of course. My favorites (though not broken at all) are legion (for weak troops when stacked) and archery (range bonus!). A lot of these skills are just terrible where you could probably just combine 3-4 of them into a single skill and they still wouldn't be that good.

[Heinrich]

I think the game is great. Certainly better work than I could do. But I do have a few recommendations so far as balancing goes, though keep in mind these are all PvE - I've yet to dabble with PvP but they may be easily counterable:

Mastery and banditry pretty good early but they calm down later. Banditry is perhaps a bit better because it can be used on a town hero to catch them up in levels and produce insane amounts of gold.

I'd propose a change to banditry to make it work like enclave's beast hunting. You'll occasionally spot wagon tracks and be able to overtake a caravan, rather than the 2 day spell.

Necromancy, Demonology, Creation, Diplomacy, and Hegemony quickly overshadow mastery later, and the AI will abuse these.

The Pyre portal probably should only activate like 5 times max. It does eventually run out I've noticed, but it takes forever. I've literally defended castles from the AI with just citadel units and portal before.

Glare is the god spell, hands down. It should have a once per fight cooldown or something. The cheese is SO strong. Even at low levels when you don't get permanent units throwing it on the enemy ranged units is a free win.

The enemy AI needs to cast more spells, that or player spellcasting needs to be slowed down considerably.

[Teralitha]

You can change things up by altering the advanced settings. One of which is random hero skills. Youll never know what ya gonna get.

[Quillithe]

Originally posted by Teralitha:

You can change things up by altering the advanced settings. One of which is random hero skills. Youll never know what ya gonna get.

Does that mean a random skill tree or a random choice? Personally this subgenre works better with a choice of random skills to help make things more interesting. When HoMM didn't do this, it was HoMM 6 and 7. Not exactly the high points of the series.