Blessings need some balancing?

[Findus]

You can quite easily build a rainbowy imprisoned pretender with solar, withering and magical weapons plus extra attack, defense, some cold resistance and reinvigoration. Still have points over for scales and a pretender that can do loads of interesting things when it comes on. Whereas if you wanted quickness it pretty much has to be awake to grant the sama benefits, which leaves way less points over for scales and doesnt offer as good rewards. It seems to be way too harsh to have the higher cost blessing both needing really high pathcost and having them incarnate at the same time. Even worse is etherealness which not only requires a whopping 10 astral and an living pretender but also 3 magic scale to be present for the blessing to even take effect. Nevermind the fact that going over 9 astral is pretty much useless except for this bless. Is it just me that thinks some of the blesses need to be reevaluated? Perhaps having some of the high cost blesses not be incarnate and some of the low cost ones be?

[nicknight7]

Its decent on EA Marverni due to relying on trampling for damage, with the enlarge bless increasing the trample damage.
Its decent on MA Agartha, because while it would be inferior to Regeneration as is the case on all other tanky sacreds, the MA Agartha statues cannot benefit for Regeneration anymore.

Making comm slaves last a bit longer is nice, but not worth the price, and not worth sometimes nerfing your sacreds (The best thing to do if Enlarge is your only Mictlan bless for instance is to kill your god, as not being Enlarged will make your sacreds better.)

[Mardagg]

Ethereal bless is vastly underpowered for the cost imo.
Its so easy to get magic weapons for just 2 points non-incarnate and its a hard counter .
Also, stygian skin is not much weaker for initial expansion, but way less expensive.

I think there a quite a bunch of underpowered or useless blesses , I am not sure though if I would call others overpowered right now. I would leave Blood Surge where it is, maybe make Magic weapons cost slightly more.
I dont think all death blesses are underpowered btw, I like Withering weapons, undying and stygian skin to stay where they are point wise. They are all situational useful.

[wilson.max]

Originally posted by Findus:

Also I dont think we would just go back to just the stronger blesses. Not when we have so many diffrent low cost ones to pick from. While etherealness is very powerful you still get basically all of those blesses I mentioned above in one package for the same cost, while not needing a awake pretender nor specific scales in the province. Magical weapons straight up nullify them being ethereal as well.

Only partly. If you take a magical weapon bless, you nullify ethereal for attacks from your blessed sacreds, but your national troops are still nigh-useless against the other guy's sacred troops, and so is skelly spam and many summons (like trolls and water elementals). And ethereal still lets sacreds move through walls.

Astral-10 + Magic-3 is a high price to pay for ethereal, but you get the benefits of ethereality (nigh-immunity to regular weapons, ignoring walls) and magic-3 (faster, more cost-effective research which saves you money on forts and mages).

[Phyvo]

I did simulations using human unit stats to test the elemental and death weapon blesses. They all performed poorly compared to +STR in terms of additional damage dealt per pretender point spent (before accounting for specific pretenders). Fire and Frost weapons just sucked unless the targets were nearly naked. Thunder weapons aren't for doing damage to begin with, but I dislike it for other reasons. And against high armor targets (18-21 prot) +STR matched or exceeded death weapons since STR doesn't have to pass MR checks. So against targets with 10 or more prot +STR is just better than everything else. Heck, STR doesn't have to deal with resistance spells either and stacks well with STR buffs, so it has less counterplay. So if I ever grabbed an elemental weapon bless it would purely be because of other concerns in pretender design. That's rather sad from a balance perspective.

Larger feels like it needs bigger bonuses. Most size 3 units have 15 or 16 strength, 5 or 6 more than a normal human, but larger is stuck at +3. And it will only give 3-4 HP to most human sized units while most size 3 units have 8+ HP over a human. Similar things can be said for going from size 3 to size 4, or from 4 to 5. Unless the extra size itself somehow becomes more of a benefit rather than a detriment (fewer attacks per square) it will remain very niche.

I think the waterbreathing bless should be fixed as part of a larger patch that makes travelling between land and sea easier. Like, greater gift of water breathing which lets land units under water without penalty, and similar but not exactly mirrored airbreathing items for UW nations. These would be higher tier items but they would exist so that wars between UW and land nations wouldn't stall out forever. Waterbreathing bless would just grant true amphibean and give early access to the sea, and perhaps there'd be an airbreathing bless too.

[Alias]

Originally posted by nicknight7:

Originally posted by Alias:

Blood Surge: overrated.

Enlarge: actually good in fringe cases.

Blood Surge for its price is absolutely fantastic, though yes it does suffer vs elites and espeically if you're fighting a purely undead nation. It could be priced at Blood 5 and Incarnate and would still debatedly be a good choice, though obviously not amazing at that point.

Enlarge on the other hand is useful for EA Marverni and MA Agartha and no one else. Even in those cases there are sometimes more useful blessings.

Enlarge is good for others too. It's the only bless that can increse reach. The extra map speed can push certain sacreds to useful map move thresholds. You mentioned its interactions with trample. Extra health/strength is never wasted.


Blood Surge though...the moment I see somebody with Blood Surge in multiplayer I know it's the easy pickings. It's a bless that shines in all the easy battles, and fizzles out the moment you face real opposition.

[Zonk]

One thing I dislike about Enlarge thematically is that it's major Earth, minor Nature, but enlarge effects in the game are usually pure Nature.

[terve886]

Originally posted by Alias:

Originally posted by nicknight7:

Blood Surge for its price is absolutely fantastic, though yes it does suffer vs elites and espeically if you're fighting a purely undead nation. It could be priced at Blood 5 and Incarnate and would still debatedly be a good choice, though obviously not amazing at that point.

Enlarge on the other hand is useful for EA Marverni and MA Agartha and no one else. Even in those cases there are sometimes more useful blessings.

Enlarge is good for others too. It's the only bless that can increse reach. The extra map speed can push certain sacreds to useful map move thresholds. You mentioned its interactions with trample. Extra health/strength is never wasted.


Blood Surge though...the moment I see somebody with Blood Surge in multiplayer I know it's the easy pickings. It's a bless that shines in all the easy battles, and fizzles out the moment you face real opposition.

The enlarge is detrimental for most units due to the worse attack thickness, making your troops get overrun by enemy units due to harashment penalty and overrall the enlarge gives rather small bonuses. Getting enlarge bless is also redicilously expensive as it requires at least 4N and 5E to unlock the bless points to get it.

Bloodsurge on the other hand gives 3 extra strength and attack skill and 1 point of defence skill and reinvigoration for 3 turns after succesful kill. The attack skill and strength alone are much bigger bonuses than one would get for picking strength or attack skill bless effects.
The blood suge is also so cheap that it is easy to get it to fit in in addition to many stronger bless effects.
For comparison, a nation that picks bloodsurge will be able to pick another 5 path requirement bless compared to a nation that took enlarge bless + 1 of the 1req nature blesses.

[Alias]

Originally posted by wilson.max:

Originally posted by Findus:

Also I dont think we would just go back to just the stronger blesses. Not when we have so many diffrent low cost ones to pick from. While etherealness is very powerful you still get basically all of those blesses I mentioned above in one package for the same cost, while not needing a awake pretender nor specific scales in the province. Magical weapons straight up nullify them being ethereal as well.

Only partly. If you take a magical weapon bless, you nullify ethereal for attacks from your blessed sacreds, but your national troops are still nigh-useless against the other guy's sacred troops, and so is skelly spam and many summons (like trolls and water elementals). And ethereal still lets sacreds move through walls.

Astral-10 + Magic-3 is a high price to pay for ethereal, but you get the benefits of ethereality (nigh-immunity to regular weapons, ignoring walls) and magic-3 (faster, more cost-effective research which saves you money on forts and mages).

Magic 3 by itself is excellent, so it doesn't add to the cost of ethereal.

As for ethereal itself, as wilson said it has plenty of applications, but is also expensive and counterable by the much cheaper magic weapons (and they excel against other threats like stygian/invulnerability/mistform). The present gap in Astral cost between Magic Weapons and Ethereal may be 1 dot too wide.

[Szronar_PL]

speaking about magic scale, if anyone doesnt know it already it also raises your starting researchby, i think, 50 points per well, point

[Alias]

Originally posted by terve886:

Originally posted by Alias:

Enlarge is good for others too. It's the only bless that can increse reach. The extra map speed can push certain sacreds to useful map move thresholds. You mentioned its interactions with trample. Extra health/strength is never wasted.


Blood Surge though...the moment I see somebody with Blood Surge in multiplayer I know it's the easy pickings. It's a bless that shines in all the easy battles, and fizzles out the moment you face real opposition.

The enlarge is detrimental for most units due to the worse attack thickness, making your troops get overrun by enemy units due to harashment penalty and overrall the enlarge gives rather small bonuses. Getting enlarge bless is also redicilously expensive as it requires at least 4N and 5E to unlock the bless points to get it.

Bloodsurge on the other hand gives 3 extra strength and attack skill and 1 point of defence skill and reinvigoration for 3 turns after succesful kill. The attack skill and strength alone are much bigger bonuses than one would get for picking strength or attack skill bless effects.
The blood suge is also so cheap that it is easy to get it to fit in in addition to many stronger bless effects.
For comparison, a nation that picks bloodsurge will be able to pick another 5 path requirement bless compared to a nation that took enlarge bless + 1 of the 1req nature blesses.

Firstly, I'm not comparing Blood Surge to Enlarge, I have no idea how you managed to construe my posts that way.

***

Blood Surge is a decent bless, but it is nevertheless overrated as "the best thing evah" and novices everywhere take it when they really shouldn't and (if in MP) suffer for it.

On the Pretender side, there are two situations: we're taking high Blood Pretender anyway, at which point Blood Surge is compared to other Blood blesses only and looks even better (although, as some have realized, there are other good choices be it plain Strength); or we're specifically investing in Blood just for Surge, at which point it has to be compared to the great options in the other paths.

Battle-wise, there are two situations again. First one is the "mop up" when we want to lose as little as possible of the capability of our force. If that's the case there are better blesses of protection/resistance/regeneration flavors, but even pure attack/strength/defense might do better on account that they are active all the time.

The other situation is a real battle against a competent opponent, and I have absolutely wrecked each and every Blood Surge opponent I've met in MP. Moreover, none of my opponents who did well and put a worthy fight had Blood Surge, presumably because they had the chops to see its failings too. It is what it is.

***

Enlarge is not a good bless. Setting aside it's weird Nature isn't the leading path and looking only at the math, most sacreds won't be served well by it.

What's interesting is there are some fringe cases (and maybe a few more will be discovered) in which Enlarge becomes decent. I think you're a bit confused to think all sacreds care about things like harrassment penalties, and completely miss how potent repel is. You also underestimate pure Strength bonuses, map mobility in MP (not SP), or even the effect of 30% larger health pools for survival, or mitigating the odds for stun and affliction.

[nicknight7]

The loss of attack density is never worth what Enlarge gives you. For most nations using sacred troops Enlarge isn't worth it even if it was free. For those with sacreds already at 1 per square, they're almost universally better served by Regeneration.

For a nation with purely sacred communion slave mages, +HP is strictly better as well.

By this point I'd argue that the edge cases (outside of new nations popping up ofc) are pretty well known; sacred tramplers, and sacred size 4+ units that cannot benefit from regeneration.

[Phyvo]

Originally posted by Alias:

Originally posted by wilson.max:

Only partly. If you take a magical weapon bless, you nullify ethereal for attacks from your blessed sacreds, but your national troops are still nigh-useless against the other guy's sacred troops, and so is skelly spam and many summons (like trolls and water elementals). And ethereal still lets sacreds move through walls.

Astral-10 + Magic-3 is a high price to pay for ethereal, but you get the benefits of ethereality (nigh-immunity to regular weapons, ignoring walls) and magic-3 (faster, more cost-effective research which saves you money on forts and mages).

Magic 3 by itself is excellent, so it doesn't add to the cost of ethereal.

That's just not true. Magic 3 is a situationally good scale not every nation wants to take. Many bless nations might want to actually take some drain instead, especially in quicker games. The extra points you spend on Magic 3 can also lock you out of having more holy points early game or force you to take more turmoil/sloth such that your production of sacreds is incredibly stymied compared to taking Quickness. It's not a cost if you were already planning on Magic 3, but that isn't relevant unless you're seeing bless nations in general grabbing Magic 3 while taking other blesses.

[Nombrilist]

Originally posted by Zonk:

Water Breathing: Should be significantly cheaper and stack with natural poor amphibian to give you 'true' amphibian.

That's insanely niche. How many poor amphibian sacreds are there? I'd rather see poor-amphibian-when-non-incarnate-amphibian-when-in-the-world, but we don't have blesses that vary by pretender incarnation.

More generally, and in line with the OP, it seems off that all incarnate blesses are medium-to-high-cost. It's a design decision, I know, but having some blesses that are lower-priced but require incarnation seems like it would not be unreasonable to allow some more tradeoffs. It's harder to justify high-priced non-incarnate ones, though...

[Zonk]

It's definetely niche, I know. It's just a secondary bonus I'd like to see for nations like Therodos with poor amphibian sacred.

As for having lower-priced but incarnate blesses, what kind of bless are you thinking about?

Also such a bless sounds like it would be an obvious choice for awake expanders, especially if it's the kind of bless that's actually useful to the pretender.
EDIT: What I'm implying is that unless you want such a bless to be too good, it should perhaps not benefit pretenders likely to be awake much.

[Nombrilist]

Honestly, I'd make them more commander-oriented blesses than troop-oriented ones. Supply bonuses, PD recruitment, #nobadevent 1, #resources 5 or 10, inquisitor, foolscouts or falsearmy, perhaps more cost-effective versions of undead/magic/mundane bonus leadership, things like that.

Enlarge seems like a good candidate for helps-troops-but-not-pretender. Chaos/order/magic/etc. rec bonuses could work, I suppose. Skirmisher or formation fighter would probably work too, but that'd be really odd to make incarnate-only. If it's just helping commanders, it seems less bizaire to give "whatever" to them, since the commanders are more closely tied to the would-be diety.