Eldritch Sovereign - Some thoughts post update

[M.M.]

I am a *huge* fan of the new update with the hero system, but I have been struggling a bit when playing my once favourite eldritch sovereign necromancer.

I am wondering how is everyone's experience? I'll give my thoughts and I am curious to hear everyone else's!

So then, I will test her out combined with mage later, but what immediately jumps out to me having initially played her as a ritualist is the kinda clunkyness of it, the eldritch sovereign unique skills while very fun do not fully jive with the currently available classes. (Though I am of an opinion that ritualist period needs to be split up into druid. necromancer and priest classes as right now it is kind of all over the place both thematically and mechanically. Not enough priest stuff to represet a full priest, and vice versa for a "druid" and a necromancer) there is an inordinate amount of synergy between them and the mage class from what I noticed since it has a lot of debuff etc abilities in the curse line, while only a limited synergy with the ritualist's more specialised summon (though the fleshcrafting line does synergise nicely with the undead disease aura skill)

I think ES would greatly benefit from slight tweaking to their skills in an update in the future and I am very excited to see what the giants dlc will bring.

Hope everyone has a nice time playing!

[✧Starshadow Melody✧]

Well, as usual, I think the new hero system is awful. My heroes simply do not feel uniquely mine, as there's just five(seven now) different types of skillsets they can have in a fight. You pick a box, and you only get to play with the stuff in that box. You can't really modify anything in that box, or add extra boxes to it. If you're a warrior, you're a warrior. If you're a ritualist, you're a ritualist. Plus there's a bunch of dead, otherwise uninteresting skills you have to push through to get to the good stuff, which feel like wasted resources. It has little to no personalization, which feels underwhelming next to form traits and society traits, which, while simple, allow the player to make their faction more uniquely theirs. I'd like to see a new rework bring a system more in-line with this sense of customization and personalization.

Ritualist definitely needs to be split up. It has priest-like heals, druid-like plant manipulation, raise undead, and an awkward Ward line that I don't really know how to categorize and doesn't immediately tell you the unit it summons can shield your real units.

Since the developers made Spellblade and Death Knight primarily by splitting up pieces of existing classes and mashing them together(with a few tweaks following), my proposal is to go further with that general idea- split all the classes up into separate trees- such as Warrior being split up into a Knight and Berserker tree, and Ritualist split up into four pieces- a Warding tree, a Healing tree, a Necromancy tree, and... whatever you wanna call the plant tree. Then give rulers a number of points to spend putting trees together into their own skill set, and we have something a good deal more appealing.

[Daedric Arbiter]

Eldritch Sovereign is a bit weird with the class system as they're mechanically built differently. They're in a weird situation similar to the Dragon Lords, though Dragon Lords kind of received the better end of the stick. In general, when it comes to these two Godir ruler types, they're pretty asymmetrical compared to the humanoid godir rulers.

As with the Ritualist class, yeah, it has several trees, you don't have to take all of them, but you can if you want some of the mechanical benefits to make your ritualist more survivable. All up to personal preference really.
The healing/buffing tree in all honesty, serves as a massive benefit to necromancer-like builds as you take the regeneration route. Because not just they're regenerating temp hp, they also gain extra buffs that allow them to do more damage and be far more survivable. In general, that tree plays a vital role with the ritualist class builds imo. And if I'll be honest with my opinion, there is no better necromancer than the ritualist because of the healing and buffing factor of it just purely in its kit.

Ritualist is overall very powerful in my opinion, and can be flavored in so many ways rpg-wise, to where they actually thematically fit with no issue.

[MrButtermancer]

There's too much competition in the skill tree to really do much exploring (the ES traits are a bit anemic compared to books plus mage traits). The economic side is very flat now.

You pretty much build a control wizard powerhouse that defines your leader stack, but I don't feel a great deal of impact on leader type ANYWHERE else these days.

[Zoggy]

I always found mage to be a better class for Eldritch sovereign 90% of the time.

you need to think about actions as ES - the only two reason i would consider a ritualist ES
Is first for a magical origin build using the he astral skills going for astral bond and swift restoration.

the alternative is to go for the priest side full supportive side pickup- the order forgotten tome -undying loyalty- it kinda works if your going full order enthralling build or something

you round out the build with more unique ES skills/rituals ( if your want a lot ES skills your better off going mage anyway)

[Midas]

I don't find the class matters all that much. ES has like... 18 points worth of stuff from just being an ES, or something like that. Most of the ES benefits are strategic, which is almost 2 full tomes worth of extra strategic spells/summons, and if you're not getting those, I don't see why one would play an ES at all.

The class is almost always a fotenote in my ES builds, which I think is part of the intent, because you have several builds worth of variety just from your Forbidden Tome and initial weapon choice.

[Anthreris]

I've only played a few matches with an Eldritch Sovereign, and have yet to successfully complete a match at or above Normal difficulty yet so my opinion isn't probably as reliable as others.

However Eldritch Sovereign seems really good when paired with mage since you can massively increase it's magic damage via the Eldritch skills, and the mage skills for a total of +80% magic damage excluding the Channel Power Skill. So I think it might be more reliable as a damage powerhouse, especially since a champion mage can do 64 damage before Channel Power.

[CrUsHeR]

Mage is an absolute no-brainer for the ES.

> you get free Ignore Status Resistance
> you get extra range
> you get a ton of extra damage
> you get a free teleport
> all your tome skills with unlimited range also get to inflict a silly amount of debuffs

The only thing holding down the ES a bit from soloing entire armies is his innate Slow Movement (3 tiles). So you need to get the Tome of the Archmage ASAP to make this Very Fast Movement, which also adds yet another +30% damage.

For that reason, the Dragon-Warrior lord is currently the absolute premium choice. It's just hilarious how this guy can solo everything long before researching stuff like Explosive Manifestation.

Overall there also is more to the ES which probably hasn't been mentioned yet. For example, whenever you attack an army led by an Astral Sea creature (or just Ethereal?) you may get the option to take control of this leader in exchange for Thralls.
And yes this includes Lost Wizards. Which also get buffed by Cosmic Overdrive.