Fire Magic - why is it still so weak?

[Legowarrior]

Ever noticed that in Dominions 6, fire magic, though improved, is still really weak? What's with that?

[boozermonkey]

Fire is in beautiful shape now. Could it be better? Of course, but you could say the same thing about glamour, nature, cold, air, blood, and earth.

You could say the same about mounted archery. You could say the same about weapon and troop types for each individual nation.

And on and on the wheel turns..

In terms of global scale and power, fire needs no additional changes in dom6.

We’re good here. Moving on to things that matter more.

[crawlers]

The specifics mentioned repeatedly (fire being screwed over by resists harder than any other path) do not apply to other paths. The importance of balancing the paths of magic takes higher priority over a single nation's troop types (though the latter has a measure of importance) simply because it affects the game more on average.

A continuing, even endless upward ascent towards greater levels of balance is not a problem, but a good thing. The existence of multiple balance problems (of unequal magnitude and broadness) is something that I advise not going with a reluctant attitude but rather with thought on how to improve the matter. The pros and cons of a particular change is something that can be discussed of course.

I remember it mentioned earlier "what would one bring a big fire mage in to cast on the battlefield" is something specific that I don't see a great answer for right now. The high level fire battlefield spells (heat from hell, firestorm) seem mostly negated by a bit of fire res and prot. If there was a late game battlefield fire spell that gave the enemy army -5 fire res, I think that would change quite a bit to make fire relevant later in the game and to give a reason to get a big fire mage.

[Chronia]

Originally posted by Legowarrior:

...
Some suggestions I have -
Fire summons that don't deal fire damage - Maybe Primordial Magma Creatures that use regular steel weapons and armor - Still keeps the fire theme and fire resistance, but now is heavy armored units that deal regular damage.
...

Magma spells and summons already exist, and are fire / earth cross-paths. I think that makes sense, and should stay that way.

I agree with your other suggestions, fire could use some additional utility. Being mostly an evocation damage type leads to obvious counter play.

[Dezzmont]

I have been thinking about this a bit, and I think fire needs like... one or two things to feel 'good.' Because I think fire definitely has its uses, there are some clear problems.

Firstly, fire 3 is really not very good once you evaluate it, which is a problem because 3 is usually the most you can expect, and is a nation defining capability. Fire 3 in Dom 6 borderline doesn't play differently on the strategic level at all (you get fire spirits, so you can now summon fire 3 mages, which is ironically only super relevant for nations that build a pretender to do it and don't have native fire 3 access), and in combat while having the ability to push to fire 4 buffs your fire magic, it doesn't let you do anything really different than a fire 2 mage does. Like being able to buff an infinite number of archers rather than 'basically all of them' with flaming arrows is mostly a convenience thing more than actually a power spike. So much of fire's power is in fire 1 (lightless lanterns) and fire 2 (Summon phoenix power into fire combat summons, or phoenix pyre) that it obfuscates how good fire really is by making any time its the 'showcase' feel like its falling flat IMO.

One part of the asymetric path boosting scheme that is interesting is that different paths have different 'climbs' that make different breakpoints important, but the difficulty of the fire 4 climb combined with fire 3's capabilities being so anemic contributes a lot to having fire magic be a big national path feeling bad. So one thing that may make sense is to tap down the flaming helmet to fire 3, so that the jump from fire 2 (which is something many nations can randomly roll) to fire 3 (which is generally your national strength) means something. That does nerf fire 4, but 4 path mages are very rare and a fire 4 mage can push themselves to fire 6 and just start melting armies with flame storms.

This is probably the singualr biggest issue, and is why fire is complained about more than water despite water also not being very strong: you basically don't get anything for having fire 3 access. Fix that and I think a lot of fire's problems go away instantly, though there are other pain points to fire.

The attack buff is interesting, and fire definitely could use with another army buff or two. One issue is that due to what you want armies to be doing by the time buffs come online, endurance matters a lot more than offense, especially in the context of a fire nation. I would rather get +1 to prot or defense in most cases than +2 to attack, and army buffs can go way higher than just +1 or +2 to prot. So its useful, but its not a strategy yet. There is a lot of thematic room for fire buffs, even defensive fire buffs that don't lean entirely on fire damage, so having fire interact more with armies would be neat. It would make it similar to earth, but earth already is in many ways 'fire but better' so I don't think its a huge danger to have that bleedover.

Having stronger fire summons would also not hurt, its the school most clearly lacking in options. It could desperately use some sort of humanoid supernatural troop summon, rather than the mostly animals and monsters fire has now... that literally can't benefit from the buffs it got. That said I don't think fire necessarily should be a full conjuration path, or at the very least its conjurations should mostly focus on in combat magic as it does now due to how good they already are, and adding some beefy troop that really likes taking an attack buff and damage aura does risk creating that scenario.

[MadAsgardian]

Originally posted by crawlers:

The issue of fixing fire magic being weak getting the response of "just break into another non-national path and use that" feels like an admission that it is weak.

It's an admission that any one spell school does not excel at all things, as it should be.

[Legowarrior]

Originally posted by Chronia:

Originally posted by Legowarrior:

...
Some suggestions I have -
Fire summons that don't deal fire damage - Maybe Primordial Magma Creatures that use regular steel weapons and armor - Still keeps the fire theme and fire resistance, but now is heavy armored units that deal regular damage.
...

Magma spells and summons already exist, and are fire / earth cross-paths. I think that makes sense, and should stay that way.

I agree with your other suggestions, fire could use some additional utility. Being mostly an evocation damage type leads to obvious counter play.

Basically "use something other then Fire because Fire is weak" is the admission that Crawler said happens.

And it has zero relevance to Fire Spirits or 2 of the 3 Fire Kings.

[Dezzmont]

Breaking into another path is just smart. You should do it in every path, this is true.

Breaking into another school to use as your primary path is when the core path clearly isn't balanced (on the mages its on and in its national context).

So the fact that say... MA Abyssia is played as mostly a blood nation despite having anti-synergy with growth, poor patrollers, and cap only blood mages is a pretty damning condemnation of how fire works into its strategy, because your actively sidestepping it for the most part and going with something that is deliberately very limited to your nation. Despite being the fire nation, they mostly avoid it, which highlights the problem fairly well: fire is not working as a major national focus.

I would argue that nations like Arco and Agartha use fire better than nations like Abysia, not just because they aren't doubling up on fire damage with their troops, but because fire only really makes sense as a supplementary path. "Stand alone" big fire doesn't really work or make sense at the moment because so much of its more dynamic tools are low level. So in some sense its a nation design problem (Abysia probably could use a MA Man style rework, to be frank, though we have to see how them becoming a pseudo-popkill nation plays out), but I think also it comes down to fire breakpoints being really funky where its all about incidental fire access or top tier 'design a pretender for this' access and very little in between.

Put an interesting (not even super strong, but interesting) combat spell at fire 4 (so its castable by fire 3s with phoenix power) and ritual at fire 3, and I think it would improve the gamefeel of fire nations dramatically which is the more pressing problem. Fire being weak(It is, but it has extreme advantages to offer to a nation as well, and that suits fire thematically IMO) isn't nearly as much of a problem as fire not feeling very good to be a national focus.

[Emphyrio]

Originally posted by Dezzmont:

Breaking into another path is just smart. You should do it in every path, this is true.

Breaking into another school to use as your primary path is when the core path clearly isn't balanced (on the mages its on and in its national context).

So the fact that say... MA Abyssia is played as mostly a blood nation despite having anti-synergy with growth, poor patrollers, and cap only blood mages is a pretty damning condemnation of how fire works into its strategy, because your actively sidestepping it for the most part and going with something that is deliberately very limited to your nation. Despite being the fire nation, they mostly avoid it, which highlights the problem fairly well: fire is not working as a major national focus.

I would argue that nations like Arco and Agartha use fire better than nations like Abysia, not just because they aren't doubling up on fire damage with their troops, but because fire only really makes sense as a supplementary path. "Stand alone" big fire doesn't really work or make sense at the moment because so much of its more dynamic tools are low level. So in some sense its a nation design problem (Abysia probably could use a MA Man style rework, to be frank, though we have to see how them becoming a pseudo-popkill nation plays out), but I think also it comes down to fire breakpoints being really funky where its all about incidental fire access or top tier 'design a pretender for this' access and very little in between.

Put an interesting (not even super strong, but interesting) combat spell at fire 4 (so its castable by fire 3s with phoenix power) and ritual at fire 3, and I think it would improve the gamefeel of fire nations dramatically which is the more pressing problem. Fire being weak(It is, but it has extreme advantages to offer to a nation as well, and that suits fire thematically IMO) isn't nearly as much of a problem as fire not feeling very good to be a national focus.

Are these your impressions of Dom6 or Dom5 Abyssia?

Abyssia has gotten a lot of attention over the years and it's better than it used to be. I don't know how they stack now power wise. If they're still too weak, I'd suggest giving better access to E2 in EA and MA.

[Feikki]

Originally posted by Dezzmont:

Breaking into another path is just smart. You should do it in every path, this is true.

Breaking into another school to use as your primary path is when the core path clearly isn't balanced (on the mages its on and in its national context).

So the fact that say... MA Abyssia is played as mostly a blood nation despite having anti-synergy with growth, poor patrollers, and cap only blood mages is a pretty damning condemnation of how fire works into its strategy, because your actively sidestepping it for the most part and going with something that is deliberately very limited to your nation. Despite being the fire nation, they mostly avoid it, which highlights the problem fairly well: fire is not working as a major national focus.

I would argue that nations like Arco and Agartha use fire better than nations like Abysia, not just because they aren't doubling up on fire damage with their troops, but because fire only really makes sense as a supplementary path. "Stand alone" big fire doesn't really work or make sense at the moment because so much of its more dynamic tools are low level. So in some sense its a nation design problem (Abysia probably could use a MA Man style rework, to be frank, though we have to see how them becoming a pseudo-popkill nation plays out), but I think also it comes down to fire breakpoints being really funky where its all about incidental fire access or top tier 'design a pretender for this' access and very little in between.

Put an interesting (not even super strong, but interesting) combat spell at fire 4 (so its castable by fire 3s with phoenix power) and ritual at fire 3, and I think it would improve the gamefeel of fire nations dramatically which is the more pressing problem. Fire being weak(It is, but it has extreme advantages to offer to a nation as well, and that suits fire thematically IMO) isn't nearly as much of a problem as fire not feeling very good to be a national focus.

These problems go together. It is a bit of a one trick pony but the trick is quite good. So it works really well as a dip. With 1 level of fire random on some mages you break into lightless lanterns.

Flame spirits even kind of shaft the flame nations further. It is a good summon that allows any random pretender with fire and fire gem income to get pretty good fire mages. So while it boosts fire as a path, it makes late game native access to big fire mages less valuable.

Simply having a decent berserker spell in fire would remove fire being countered almost totally as fire resist.

Maybe adding some fire/air summons and fire/earth summons and giving fire nations access to crosspaths would add some interesting stuff. Djinns and magma children would not be pure fire creatures and could do pretty easily something besides just burning like most fire summons.

[anaris]

Originally posted by FacePerson:

I think one issue is that pretty much every other path has a late-game reason you would want a high level mage of that path alongside an army, and where a single super high level mage would be very impactful. And it just feels kind of un-fun that fire doesn't have much use for a high level mage.

E.g.
An air mage to cast mass flight or fog warriors or arrow fend, etc...
An earth mage to cast army of gold
A nature mage to cast mass regen, or awaken forest
A death mage to cast life after death
An astral mage to cast master enslave(s)
A glamour mage to cast dreamwild legion, or legion's demise
etc...

Flaming Arrows kinda has this position in the middle game for some nations but has the same problem against fire resists.

Acid, sulphur haze, and bane fire aren't fire-tagged spells, so fire has a lot of crosspath potential (buff erinyes plz). The remote attack spells are nice in fire but limited, and Murdering Winter exists. Solar eclipse, blindness, phoenix pyre, army of gold, rage and a few others do solid duty into the lategame though. Pyre of Catharsis too for some nations. It's not like fire has none of these, really. It's more that fire's primary focus is evocating big damage spells, and that's one of the weaker areas of magic.

[crawlers]

There are evocs that are absolutely not weak and are hard to deal with such as banefire and gifts, but those have the important property of ignoring resists, caring little for prot, and hitting very hard. Their power is so great that they can define the capabilities of nations with good access to them (ma tienchi and la ctis).

There are also some other strong abilities, like blood's ability to kill thugs and scs, water's ability to kill demons/undead, and death's ability to kill undead. Does every path need a meta-warpingly powerful evoc? No, but the one path that is more focused on evocs than any other doesn't seem to have one.

[Kamiyama]

Don't forget that fire synergizes with death pretty good. You get banefire and skull of fire.

I would argue it's in better shape than air magic. Air has a harder climb because it's boosters are A4 and A5. Skull of fire is an easier to access booster at F1D1. Also while air magic spells generally do AN damage, most of them don't hit as hard as banefire does.

There are some hybrid air spells that create clouds but nothing that is just standalone awesome like banefire.

I've seen other people describe it as "the F U spell" and yup that's basically what it does.

I complained about air magic back in Dom5. If your nation has air mages with A1 to A3, you're not boosting them. They only get boostable once they reach A4.

[Dezzmont]

Air is one of the strongest paths in the game, due to having magic phase movement, thunderstrike (an actually extremely strong evocation ability), and very powerful buffs and utility effects such as flight, storm and fog warriors. Shock damage is also vastly superior to fire damage.

Glamour, as a path, exists in large part as a nerf air by removing a lot of utility from it, to give some context of how bonkers good air is historically.

[crawlers]

Fire has some decent crosspaths for sure, I absolutely have not forgotten. But that doesn't mean high amounts of fire as a main path is not weak in contrast to f1 or f2 paths which as people mentioned before had plenty going for them as a side thing, which is exactly where banefire is.

[Burden of Brine]

My only beef with fire magic are a few key points. What about Fire magic is so powerful as to justify the following;
1) Reduced max age? I get the thematics of it, "the candle that burns brights twice as bright burns half as long" or however that idiom went.
2) Path boosting magic items with penalties? The Fire Helmet gives negative invigoration, the Skull of Fire gives cold vulnerability. And if you have to point to that one artifact that boosts fire magic as a booster with no penalties, I dunno what to tell you.

I'll concede that astral and blood no doubt have their own woes in regards to eating horror marks for breakfast, but why of all magic paths is fire so hellbent on being served with so many penalties along the way?
And yeah, some fire summons that don't deal fire damage would be cool to get one day.

On the upside for dominions 6, I do like the new +Att/Mor buff that fire got going for it, I just need to start researching into Thaumaturgy for it more often. And the boosts to fire evocations is pleasant, but I don't know if I'd call that a fire specific buff. It was more of an across the board thing, or?