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I've reserched all spells. Spawning in a desert area certainly was fun. I finished off my neighbor the Necromancer early on and then pushed against the Senator and Priest King to my east. Then the Demonologist swept down from the north with an MASSIVE amount of demon summons who are frightfully powerful. I had to completely re-direct my forces to stabilize, and eventually gain on that front. But now that pesky Senator has rebounded hard and is advancing on my easten flank with 200 units armies! Great fun indeed!
About the desert-summons. Their kind of a mixed bag. You can get those goat-demon-things with lightning in their hands that while powerful, leap in front of your ranks and thus expose themselves to the brunt of the enemies missiles. This gets them killed early on. So powerful, yet functionally ineffective. You can also get a smaller goat-demon that is a good damage-dealer, a succubus unite with charm, and a demon that turns every kill into a zombie.
The thing is... all of these a good add-ons. But when it comes to holding the front lines you really want those gigantic scorpions and the Anakite Giants that you get from blood feast. Regularly they form the back-bone of my army. So desert-summons arn't really a definitive game-changer.
About blood feast... yeah you get some sort of Anakite unite from them. Are they worth it? Eh... not sure. Giant Scorpions fulfill a similar position and do not need a settlement sacrifice. You can also get Incorporeal Anakites, which needless to say, are pretty fun.
The Third-Thier Rituals for the High Priestess are totally metal.
You get the Third summon ritual. Here you can summon wingless-dragons called Sirrush that are a definitive game-changer. They are increadibly beefty and spew fire at the beginning of each turn in addition to their normal attacks. Very powerful both against trash and quality foes.
You also get manicores that, while very durable, lack much offensive capabilities. Not worth the 100 sacrifices. Then you get a man-scorpion hyprid that works as a trash-killed by spreading fear all the time. Worth the price, but not by a lot.
Then you get the third blood fest spell. Here you summon a Anakite King that can summon level 1 Necromancer units along with Incorporeal Anakite. Same problem as before, effective yet costly.
There is also the summon Baal spell that you mentioned. Not worth it. Basically you get a great and beefy trash killer. You also lose the Priestess whom perfom the ritual and the God can't perform rituals himself. He is also banishable so you can find yourself losing this super-expensive unit with a stroke of the wand. Cool for role-playing purposes though.
My favorite High-Priestess spell though is...... CREATE A NEW FREAKING SUN!!!! I'm not kidding, you create a new sun that warms up the surrounding area and prevents winter from ever taking place there.
Basically, to me the High-Priestess seems like a weaker version of the Demonologist. Same mechanics and strategy, yet the summons are weaker and more expensive. The uppside is that their rituals never fail. Which is nice to have yet dosen't really compensate for how insanely strong the Demonologist summons are.
One Lammashta.
ONE.
Senator is almost totally boned vs Lammashta, unless he gets lucky. 100% Immunity to physical + converting enemies into undead with each kill is insanely OP. Let me emphasize this - if your army has no strong enough magic damage, Lammashta would obliterate the whole army singlehandedly(well... she'll be surrounded by a million zombies by the end of it). No other class I know gets something that ridiculous so early.
To make this even more silly, give her some items to buff her even more.
I won against her, somehow, but when the final battle happened I just assumed I would lose it and skipped the whole thing. To my shock, I realized that I won next turn, though massive Senatorial blob was decimated down to near nothing. I still have no clue how I won.
But really, no nation should be allowed to explode without resistance. Even pressure throughout is better than desperate clash in the end, in most cases. Unless you are Demonologist or Horror Carpet Bomber.
So, my advice is to blitz yourself to Lammashtas and spam them HARD. They will probably die fast to armies full of magic attacks, but at least early on, not many armies have something that can reliably stop Lammashta. Senator in paticular would just sit there watching his entire Legions being methodically converted into zombies by a single flying chick - seeing how it's impossible to target a specific unit in battle, chances of Lammashta ever being hit by any spell are low.
The only thing that's missing is some kind of terrain transform spell to get a desert if you don't have one. Maybe restricted to savanna for not making it too easy. I would also have liked to use a sphinx for that since I had three in range. It would be cool if you could influence the summoning results depending on if you cast it at a sphinx, in desert or otherwise.
Is the sun a unique spell or just one of the ceremony summons? It sounds pretty cool though.
Anyway, I guess the true power of the High Priestess lies in her end game. Seems like I missed a lot by not getting T3 spells *grumble*. I probably would rated her higher then. Though I'm not sure how to get such huge sacrifice incomes. I had about 10 per round and that was already a lot of work to get.
I guess I shoul revisit the High Priestess at a later time. But not now.
The issue, I think, is that people shy away from your greatest strength - the Blood Feast spells. In general, they are as powerful as equivalent rituals from the Demonologist, but safer and sometimes cheaper.
Yes, you lose levels from your settlements. You trade long-term economic power for short-term martial and magical power. But consider; Lesser Blood Feast destroys a farm, and in return gives you 2-5 Gibborim or 1 Anakite. It normally takes a farm 50 turns to accumulate enough gold to produce 5 Ba'alite spearmen. Even two Gibborim is a lot better than that, and you get them for fifteen sacrifices; you also don't lose and Sacrifices income, as a farm only produces gold. I tend to cast LBF on every farm I come across. This provides a substantial force that will carve straight through numerically superior forces of humans.
Lesser Ceremony to Ba'al is nearly worthless, even in a desert. The higher-level ones are worth it, though the regular one mostly in deserts, especially if you're trying to keep your economy afloat. The results from these have already been extensively covered - I'd presume it's, again, because people shy away from the Blood Feast rituals. They're not bad, overall. Usually not as good as what the Demonologist can do, but certainly not bad. Se'irim have multiple attacks, Shedim are Storm mages and should be put behind something more durable in big armies, Lilot are very cheap for succubi, and the Lammashta is, as noted, extremely potent against enemies without magic attacks.
The Blood Feast spell I prefer to cast solely on villages. This reduces you gold and sacrifice income by one, but in exchange, you usually gain a full army of giants. Just one of these armies, unsupported, can conquer almost anything held by independents, save unqiue or high-level sites. They are durable and hit like trucks. Sometimes you also get relatively potent mages. The Zamzummite is somewhat underwhelming, but I'd never say no to a durable caster that casts between two and three spells per turn and can give you access to a new form of income, though, inexplicably, he can only cast a single, generic Necromanctic ritual. You'd expect him to be able to summon Ditanim or something.
Greater Blood Feast and the Banquet of the Dead sound painful. You need to target a town or port with them, and yeah, not gonna lie, that can hurt pretty badly. You can also target cities, but I never do that. I have my limits. But what do you get in exchange? Rephaite and Anakite Kings and accompanying armies of huge, powerful giants. Undead, ethereal Rephaite necromancer god-kings and accompanying armies of huge, undead, and powerful giants. Nephilim and Watchers, who are almost Demon Lord level and cost about as much, but they never betray you.
(Summon God is, as noted, a terrible ritual. Don't use it. Normally I'd never advocate this, but always save before using a third-tier ritual of Mastery. If you get Summon God, breathe a sight of relief and quite and reload. If you get Summon God and didn't remember to save, cry.)
The High Priestess is powerful. But she cannot be played cautiously. You must take land, sacrifice it and use the gains to take and sacrifice more land until you've rolled over everything. It's not a nation you turtle with. The nation's biggest weakness, I think, lies not in its summoning rituals, but rather the crippling weakness of many of its units to Banishment spells. You will fold to any Voice of El faction that has a similar level of power to yours; and your only real chance is to stomp them into the ground before they become a problem.
ed: It should go without saying, but the High Priestess performs much better in the Empire and Dawn of a New Empire societies than the other ones.
I'm almost tempted to give the class a retry...
I believe that Lammashta is one of the possible units from Desert Summoning.
I think deserts can be created with certain effects. If memory serves, Demon Lord Bael the Goat Sun turns plains into deserts occasionally. Having said that, he's pretty high tier Demonologist summon, that's not directly applicable to Priestess, but the precedent is there so its possible. Or just go south - that's where deserts are, according to manual(though maybe the equator is where they are? not sure).
Yeah. 5 armour sounds like a lot - but keep in mind that a Gibborim can deal in the area of 3-8 damage with an average hit, and they are the weakest of the Ba'alite giants. The bigger ones can, and frequently do one-shot very tough conventional units like knights.
Not as good as the various giants that Warlocks can field, but a lot easier to get, particularly in large quantities.
They are an (admittedly infuriatingly rare) result from the second-level Blood Feast. They are more common than they used to be in CoE3, but odds are you'd need to burn quite a few villages to get one.
Most of the the time when you burn a village, you will simply get an army of giants (though that is pretty impressive in its own right; they're usually capable of conquering most independent sites in the game and are seriously strong for what they are). Sometimes you get a few Ditanim, undead ethereal giants (generally fewer and much stronger but hilariously vulnerable to Banishment spells), instead.
As otherwise mentioned, the "Blood Feast" rituals are great as scorched earth. When fighting on higher difficulties especially, as you'll often walk into enemy territory and find yourself unable to steamroll them. Any cities you take will just be recaptured, so why not gain all the benefits of the Blood Feast without having to really pay for the drawbacks? (again, you aren't going to be able to hold this area for some time). You'll gain powerful reinforcements within their territory while depriving them of income. Eventually you'll be strong enough to take them, or strong enough to take them with your beefed up army+reinforcements coming from your capital.
A note on ports- you can cast Blood Feast on them to gain a citadel. They "degrade" into "Deserted Port" that counts as the High Cultist's starting CITADEL. So you'll trade the reduction in income/sacrifices for gaining a new recruitment center. Can be quite handy to resupply from.
Btw, the "Second Sun" ritual gains you the ability to create deserts. From CoE 3 I believe any unit with sufficiently high fire shield will burn forests it passes through, and the second sun summon will do this while creating desert tiles where it walks. Great way to finally &%$# the &%$#ing @#*$ out of those ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ &%$#ing deer spawning sacks of @#*$. &%$#ing deer.
Yeah I just noticed that. And, more alarmingly, the Second Sun seems to turn settlements into desert as well! After a few turns inside the recently converted terrain, they disappear! Pretty radical. You pretty much depopulate an entire area with that ritual.
Had I known that before i used the spell I'd have Sacrificed all those settlements in its vicinity.