Is Solar Weapons really that bad?

[Seleucus I Nicator]

It seems the general consensus is that Solar Weapons is a pretty bad bless. Why? Is 4 AP damage really that insignificant? Are there any nations it is still good with anyway?

[Emphyrio]

1 point of strength is usually better than a 2nd attack that does only 4ap. Killing undeads and demons is a niche bless, less useful than just making your sacreds all-round better fighters.

[Red_Rob]

Originally posted by Seleucus I Nicator:

Is 4 AP damage really that insignificant?

Well... yes? Anything that a 4AP hit can hurt, you don't need sacreds to fight. You can just let the regular infantry handle it.

[DasaKamov]

Solar weapons are very niche, like Emphyrio said. They can explode Undead and Demons without breaking a sweat, but they're firmly in the "meh" camp against every other foe.

It * might* be worthwhile if *know* you're playing against a majority of those kinds of nations, or a pre-set Disciples game where half the players agree to play "evil" nations and the other half agree to play as "good-ish" nations, but it's not a great choice in a random-pick nation game.

[Wave Goodbye 2 Landlords]

Don't solar weapons count as magic weapons?

[MadAsgardian]

I think one problem with this game's discourse is that so much of it revolves around multiplayer, where the focus tends to be on making optimal choices.

If you want to try Solar Weapons, run a single-player game with a thematically appropriate nation, like say MA Marignon, and as suggested add a couple undead/demon opponents to the mix.

[AN]

Originally posted by MadAsgardian:

I think one problem with this game's discourse is that so much of it revolves around multiplayer, where the focus tends to be on making optimal choices.

If you want to try Solar Weapons, run a single-player game with a thematically appropriate nation, like say MA Marignon, and as suggested add a couple undead/demon opponents to the mix.

It's not a problem; you don't need to know what's good in single player, you just need to know how things function. Then you can experiment and learn at your own pace without pressure or obligation.

[Quillithe]

Originally posted by Emphyrio:

1 point of strength is usually better than a 2nd attack that does only 4ap. Killing undeads and demons is a niche bless, less useful than just making your sacreds all-round better fighters.

Basically this. Imagine you're hitting even pretty light 10 prot with a human spear at 13 damage.

+1 to str gives a decent average damage increase, probably like +.6 or .7, enough to help get kills a little.

Solar weapons cost a bunch more and add less since they have a hard time penetrating even 10 prot.

Exceptions being killing undead where they're very solid, and killing very lightly armored ethereal units, maybe? I'm not sure if they still hit if the original is negated

Anyway rather niche - they'll help against Ermor but so almost nothing against most nations, especially since many undead already die so fast. Maybe useful against Lanka or something too?

[Draken]

I think the problem is that 4 AP damage is just a very small amount that is easily stopped by just about any amount of armor. I mean, yeah, you can get lucky with an exploding damage dice, but usually unless the target is basically in the buff the damage will just bounce off.

So unless you are up against demons or undead, it's incredible easy to just invalidate.
And against those even 9 AP damage isn't guaranteed to go through heavier armor.

So the issue is that just about any other way of increading your damage or attack via your bless is going to deal more damage than Solar Weapons.

[Seleucus I Nicator]

Thank you everyone, including Quilithe. Quilithes answer was the one I was looking for.

[Quillithe]

Originally posted by Seleucus I Nicator:

Thank you everyone, including Quilithe. Quilithes answer was the one I was looking for.

I hope I didn't oversell their usefulness even when they are useful - I forgot that the triple damage was after protection so against Ermor you're still going to have a tough time hurting Lictors or something (the damage that gets through is tripled, but I think you still need to do a 4 vs 18/2=9 roll for body hits). A head hit would destroy them though!

You'll destroy longdead, but so will anything.

And it looks like the bonus damage will ignore ethereal, so if you're getting both like hitting ethereal undead (Lemuria) it's pretty effective. But Lemuria has a lot more ghosts than you do sacreds and magic weapons would also destroy their ghosts pretty well while being more useful against armored ethereal units.

[Ddraig Lleuad]

I might be misremembering, but I think it also has the problem that due to the way the damage multiplier works, in the long run it's still ignorable for undead. That is, fireres applies to the damage, and painting fireres 5 actually makes the damage multiply negatively, from -1 to -3.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

yeah the solar effect was moved to post-protection, its just totally garbage now.

[Swirler]

I was thinking about this for a while, is it possible you could combo it with a poison attack to guarantee the hit to let the poison work?
That limited AN might do the trick.

And if that's the case, then other attacks with unique effects that only need to get that hit in might also be a bit better with it? Perhaps withering weapons? Or even pretender specific attacks that are usually too niche to be useful?

[Demonsthenes]

I think actually against a 10 protection rather, a 4AP roll will be DRN-1, and that averages a bit more than 1 point of damage. So on most units, it is better than strength against that sample target. On a modest damage sacreds (say, 16 slashing), it can match their main attack against 24 protection units, since both roll DRN-8 in that case. And that's not considering effects like Body Ethereal or Stygian Skin.

Also worth noting it can pop Mistform, and is one of the very few non incarnate blesses capable of that now that magic weapons is incarnate. Makes a big difference to go from doing 1 damage per hit to getting the normal damage rolls against any point buffing that.

Also worth mentioning that there are a lot of massable undead and demons in Dominions.

Finally I seem to recall that solar weapons procs on shield hits even if the original attack didn't deal damage, which can be important against high attack targets.

Still not amazing, but I think it's way better than the above analysis makes it sound.

I think Illwinter fixed the dom5 bug that fire resistant demons were triple protected from it.