Weightless is one of my favorite new blesses

[Hajduk]

It's such an interesting bless - not only does it lower encumbrance of armor by half, it gives floating tag to units. This means they are immune to Earth Grip and Maws of the Earth. So especially on EA and LA Agartha which have both require-anywhere sacreds and abundant earth mages, you don't have to worry about friendly fire from those AOE spells. It also helps the LA Agartha Blindfighter sacred because he has such high encumbrance normally.

You can also have all-sacred armies of Agartha that can case Earthquake over and over which will not hurt floaters

[♔ Affable 7th Wave Teaboo ♔]

Neat usage!

[Bumc]

Sounds dope flavor-wise damn.
I can see how pretender swayed Agartha's people into following him.

[tiavals]

I was wondering if there was any use for it. Halving armor encumbrance is a net loss for the vast majority of nations(supposing it's rounded out of your favor), compared to taking Reinvigoration which is much more useful for caster sacreds.

Cool idea about the earth spells, didn't think of it at all. It makes it relevant in some cases. (and it was kinda relevant for like 2 or 3 sacreds even before that).

(Ironically the Earthbound is the one to get the greatest benefit, although the flavor description implies the reinvigoration will go away if it doesn't touch the ground. No idea if it's true if you have Weightless)

[Quillithe]

Oh wow I absolutely didn't think about Blindfighters though I've always liked the idea of the unit. That's perfect though since they're a somewhat tempting recruit anywhere sacred completely crippled by armor encumbrance. Getting immunity to some friendly fire on top really completes it.

[Demonsthenes]

LA Agartha is the main use case though there are certainly other candidates; Uruk and Patala also have big encumbance problems on otherwise potentially compelling sacreds.

[Burden of Brine]

It helps with encumbrance issues and facilitates earthquake spam? Sounds like something EA Atlantis would enjoy.

[Tanaka]

Originally posted by Gatorbate:

It's such an interesting bless - not only does it lower encumbrance of armor by half, it gives floating tag to units. This means they are immune to Earth Grip and Maws of the Earth. So especially on EA and LA Agartha which have both require-anywhere sacreds and abundant earth mages, you don't have to worry about friendly fire from those AOE spells. It also helps the LA Agartha Blindfighter sacred because he has such high encumbrance normally.

You can also have all-sacred armies of Agartha that can case Earthquake over and over which will not hurt floaters

How does this compare to reinvigoration? You get -2 encumbrance instead of -1? When is it better or worse to take one over the other?

[anaris]

Natural reinvigoration is 1, plus whatever listed reinvigoration amount. Fatigue accrued by a regular attack is equal to the unit's encumbrance. So if your reinvigoration amount +1 is greater than your sacred's armour encumbrance divided by 2, reinvig is better. For high encumbrance sacreds at like 6-9 encumbrance from armour (note: not their natural encumbrance, which can be significant too), you might find weightless more economical.

that said, you don't need to reduce fatigue to 0 really - fatigue neutral is important for big units lategame if you're still using them, but even then Curse of Stones exists and units don't necessarily attack every turn (eg if their combat speed is 9 and they're attacking archers set to Keep Distance). So it's like, a complicated thing where you will have to either eyeball it or make the mother of all spreadsheets (like most things in dominions)

[Ddraig Lleuad]

Frankly I maintain that reinvig is straight up bad as a bless. When you can get it functionally freely through earthpower, cool, when items are giving +3-5 in one go, that's valuable, but as a bless? Spellcasters generate fatigue in the 10's or 20's at LEAST, so reinvig in the amount offered by a bless just doesn't make much of a difference*, and for troops... I mean, worked example, fatigue reduces your defence skill by 1 per 10 points a unit has, attack by 1 per 20 points, and Anakim, Knigts of the Chalice, Tuatha Warriors, they all generate 5 fatigue every time they attack. So, by default they lose 1 defence skill per 2 attacks, and 1 attack skill per 4 attacks. With reinvig 1, it's 3/5, and with reinvig 2 it's 4/7. It's not nothing, but it's just such a small gain, y'know? I'd rather just stack defence/attack skill from the outset.

* It does have a niche use case specifically for communion masters, who often bring their spellcasting fatigue into the single figure range. Slaves will take too many instances of fatigue per round for reinvig to keep up, though.

Weightlessness is cool though, albeit more for the Floating ribbon than the encumbrance reduction. Yes, even for Blindfighters. Taking 6 encumbrance rather than 10 is nice and all, but they're still racking up fatigue fast, and they're still, at the end of the day, an expensive human heavy infantry that needs mage turns to caddy them around and only does 16 damage. You can try to make blindfighters into Good Combat Units, but it's always going to trying to ice skate uphill, because I'm sorry but they're just Not. They're not a bad unit! But they don't exist to fight and kill things for you.

The super secret trick to LA Agartha is you pretty much ignore Blindfighters for the first ~year or two. Take a bless to keep your mages alive, expand off of cave knights and entrance guard, then once the mid to late game rolls around and Man With Sword stops being a kill mechanism that anybody cares about, that's when you switch to massing Blindfighters. Slap that omnires mage suvivability bless on them so they're an absolute bastard to get rid of even with mages, and hey presto, you've got some of the best meatshields between your mages and anything threatening them you could ask for.

The Blindfighters will still conk out after 10 rounds of swinging whifflebats, of course, but everybody's swinging whifflebats at that stage of the game, and you're paying them to hold their ground anyway. So long as they sleep standing up, who cares?

[Quillithe]

Originally posted by Ddraig Lleuad:

Frankly I maintain that reinvig is straight up bad as a bless.

Just to address this, I think reinvig is quite solid as a bless purely for its effect on sacred mages. In a way that might end up weaker in dominions 6 though? Or stronger? Dunno.

The big thing is that if you're a nation not planning to make extensive use of holy troops (which is a lot of nations) - well, in Dominions 5 what else could you use earth bless on if you had any? Mountain survival? Strength? Affliction protection? Fire and shock resistance of course if you had 5 earth but that's pretty far up, where any pretender with any earth benefited from grabbing reinvig.

It's a bit different now since you can spend those bless points on other low level blesses that might be useful for sacred commanders - + hp, precision, resists etc. But the truth is there still just isn't much that helps your mages in the first place and although reinvig is low impact it works all combat, where stuff like +hp or resists only helps your mages when they get hit. And if they're old men in robes there's a good chance they're dead anyway.

[Ddraig Lleuad]

Originally posted by Quillithe:

Just to address this, I think reinvig is quite solid as a bless purely for its effect on sacred mages. In a way that might end up weaker in dominions 6 though? Or stronger? Dunno.

I firmly disagree. Mages generate too much fatigue too quickly for reinvig, in the amounts provided by the blessing option, to make any functional difference. It'll help them get off, I don't know, another 2 or 3 spells in a long battle, the kind of fight where there are a myriad of other factors at play, many of whom are liable to be far more impactful. Reinvig is in my opinion not a good bless, but it is especially not good for a mage bless - if I had to take it for anything, I'd take it for troops who really value trying to be as close to fatigue neutral as possible for some reason.

If you have earth points to spend on a mage bless in 5, buy fire & shockres to inoculate them against battlewipes like Fire Storm and Wrathful Skies. Hell, buy Larger to make them less vulnerable to lategame remote attack spam. It's much the same in 6. "A mage bless" is mostly not about making your mages deadlier - they're mages, they're already deadly as hell, and if you really want more firepower you take farcaster and/or mpen anyway. It's about giving them the resilience to survive the things opposing mages do.

[Quillithe]

Oh, fire and shock resistance is absolutely better and larger is also good. But not every pretender with earth has earth 5 or nature magic.

It's not something you go out of your way to get, it's a use for bless points that will actually impact mages though.

I guess I'd settle on weaker in 6 though - unless you somehow don't have any other magic paths besides E4 or so there's usually a better option now, where anyone with E2-3 or E4 without nature magic could have had some earth specific bless to use up.

[anaris]

You get Reinvig for several reasons, and they're all solid. Firstly, you don't actually take 20 fatigue per spell, because by midgame you're using the relevant Power, gems etc to reduce those fatigue costs - 5 per spell is something you actually could reinvig off. Reinvig gets you over thresholds - so the common script sequence of 20 fatigue Power followed by 100 fatigue cost spell is either 4 rounds that mage is out of combat or 20. With sacreds you don't see constant attacking in every matchup - a flying sacred goes up one round and down the next I think, while a slower sacred has to take two steps between units on the battlefield. It's also important to note that some mages are perfectly good mages wearing 5 encumbrance points more armour than they need, which can be compensated for by enough reinvig.

Then you have the fact that +1 is a fairly significant swing in anything using a DRN - take a look at a thug or a sacred troop gaining fatigue and you'll see the hits that start adding afflictions and begin the spiral to death aren't when you hit 100 fatigue, they're when you get a couple of points off your defence and someone gets to score lucky hits with 2 dice instead of 3.

Lastly, it's not "get off one extra spell", it's "get one more spell than your opponent's mage did every battle for all time", and that stacks with reinvig items. Earthpower + Girdle is charmingly low investment, and taking that 7 to 10 with 6 bless points makes some sacred mages fatigue neutral for path 1 spells. It's also the FIRST spell - not needing to cast Earthpower every time means hitting Earthquake before they hit Mass Flight, for example.

Like everything in Dominions, it is not good everywhere at every time. But I humbly suggest you might be undervaluing it!

[anaris]

Also because some people want SOME sort of magebless but don't want to invest in 7 astral or get mage duelled lol

[anaris]

I'm not a communions gal but if i understand right: a slave at 199 fatigue takes 0 damage from a spell cast, a slave at 201 takes x damage where x is the fatigue cost of the master's spell. Maybe one can, in theory, build a communion where 2 extra reinvigoration will keep slaves alive for multiple turns longer bc it gets them below that threshold?