Nature 10 bless option

[BoboYagga]

After reading yet another post about how it is unlikely that you would ever take Regeneration + Resilience due to the crazy cost, I was thinking what if there was a Nature 10 bless that was Regeneration plus 15 hp? That would allow the Hp to essentially scale better than the +1 you get from Resilience even when taking a magic path that costs a LOT of design points.

[Зачем я здесь?]

If you're not going to bless for giants or blessrush better to take berserk+recuperation.

[sunbeam]

Originally posted by Да, я на коне:

If you're not going to bless for giants or blessrush better to take berserk+recuperation.

I've experimented with taking blood/nature as a bless and putting everything into hp's.

Dull as frick, but it really helps "human" type sacreds a lot, as opposed to giants.

Undying might be more bang for the buck, but unless your nation has native death mages, eh I have more enthusiasm for paths like Earth than Death.

[BoboYagga]

Originally posted by Да, я на коне:

If you're not going to bless for giants or blessrush better to take berserk+recuperation.

Beserk is not for me. Too many mages are sacred that I do not want beserking.

Originally posted by Nargo:

Would rather have a better non-incarnate bless for nature to replace resilience(or make resilience scale better) imo.

I would too, but I was curious about what if we had more lvl 10 blessings

[oddball]

Regen + undying has the effect you want. You can take nature 7 and death 5 and get an extra 10 hp. Undying is not quite as good as resilience; you don't get the extra point of regen as the undying points do not count towards the 10% regen calculation. But you don't die at the end of the battle just because you went below zero; you will regen back above zero first.

[HiddenStar]

This was probably very intentionaly changed to avoid the situation that persisted in the previous games where Nature bless was dispropotionaly attractive, especialy for giant nations, due to it's stacking HP bonus + regeneration.

[BoboYagga]

Originally posted by oddball:

Regen + undying has the effect you want. You can take nature 7 and death 5 and get an extra 10 hp. Undying is not quite as good as resilience; you don't get the extra point of regen as the undying points do not count towards the 10% regen calculation. But you don't die at the end of the battle just because you went below zero; you will regen back above zero first.

Sorry, I am aware of what exists in game, and yes, that is probably the better option currently, but I was thinking of a way to make it attractive to go to 10 or even 9 in a scale other than water.

Originally posted by mkdelta3:

This was probably very intentionaly changed to avoid the situation that persisted in the previous games where Nature bless was dispropotionaly attractive, especialy for giant nations, due to it's stacking HP bonus + regeneration.

The issue with the other versions of dominions was that you could take this with an imprisoned pretender, but that's not actually very attractive currently, so I don't think of it as a problem.

[SaurianDruid]

I'd rather we get more diverse nature blesses than a variant on regen. Maybe nature 10 gives all your sacreds a vine grab effect when they attack? It would make all your sacreds basically have a free net attack to entangle enemies. Could be especially powerful for nations with cheap human sized sacreds. More attacks mean more enemies entangled.

I'd also really like another non-incarnate nature bless. So often I end up wanting to grab nature 3 or 4 on a rainbow and then look through the bless options and feel like nothing is especially good. +HP is nice, but poison resistance, low-light vision, and forest survival is so incredibly situational.

Maybe if poison weapons didn't require a point in Death it'd be a lot more attractive.

[Uncle Al]

Certainly I think a change to how stacking blesses are calculated would be an improvement.

Currently you want to avoid more than one bless in a path because taking +1 hp from nature costs maybe 10 design points and yet the same +1hp bonus costs 200 points if you have regen as well, because you're having to purchase very high levels of nature to get both. That means you avoid taking what otherwise you could be quite thematic blesses:

E.g. you'll virtually never see regen + larger, or recuperation + unaging taken, because two blesses in the same path make the costs prohibitive.

If bless points increased additively, like path costs do, that might fix this somewhat:

e.g. nature 8 gives 1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8 = 36 nature bless points

Regen is a level 7 bless so it costs 1+2+3+4+5+6+7 = 28 points

With your left over 8 points you could spend 6 of them (1+2+3) and get +3 hp as well.

Doing things this way would mean pretenders with 10 in a path could stack a number of blessings from that path (if it doesn't have a 10 blessing already which would burn all your points) which seems very thematic. Nature 9 (45 points to spend) could get you regen (costs 28), recuperation (costs 10) and +3hp (costs 6) for example, which seems pretty fair enough for a paragon of nature.

Because there's only so many good blesses in a path, I can't see any glaringly overpowered combinations straight away. Regen + barkskin + 3hp at N10 is as good as it gets. Is that still at a reasonable power level compared to quickness? I think so. Equally F8 would allow fire shield + heat aura. Thematic, and not excessively overpowered, not least because the counter to both is the same.

[alexsa2015sa]

Originally posted by Uncle Al:

Certainly I think a change to how stacking blesses are calculated would be an improvement.
...
Because there's only so many good blesses in a path, I can't see any glaringly overpowered combinations straight away.

I kind of like that idea, to be honest. But only in regards to higher-than-necessary paths becoming viable.

It encourages taking various blesses within a single path (because buying an ability is comparatively cheap and situational doesn't mean useless) with the way X6 path gives 21 points, which is enough to buy most non-incarnate abilities. It's enough to justify moving all of non-stacking blesses like minor resists to X2, or else any imprisoned rainbow will have all minor resists tacked on. Or to be honest, any blesses except for arcane/undead command, Precision, HP and Undying; even Mountain Survival and Winter's gift aren't weak enough to justify 1 point in that system, with X4 giving 10 points nearly any rainbow will pick all minor effects just to complete the set and still have leftovers.

[Uncle Al]

Originally posted by alexsa2015sa:

Originally posted by Uncle Al:

Certainly I think a change to how stacking blesses are calculated would be an improvement.
...
Because there's only so many good blesses in a path, I can't see any glaringly overpowered combinations straight away.

I kind of like that idea, to be honest. But only in regards to higher-than-necessary paths becoming viable.

It encourages taking various blesses within a single path (because buying an ability is comparatively cheap and situational doesn't mean useless) with the way X6 path gives 21 points, which is enough to buy most non-incarnate abilities. It's enough to justify moving all of non-stacking blesses like minor resists to X2, or else any imprisoned rainbow will have all minor resists tacked on. Or to be honest, any blesses except for arcane/undead command, Precision, HP and Undying; even Mountain Survival and Winter's gift aren't weak enough to justify 1 point in that system, with X4 giving 10 points nearly any rainbow will pick all minor effects just to complete the set and still have leftovers.

Certainly point costs might need a little tweaking, but they need a little tweaking as things stand.

Bear in mind that going to 4 path with a rainbow is a significant cost over 3, so even using current costs as a base it would be relatively rare to get the 'rainbow with 4 points left over in lots of paths after taking the main thing they wanted (stuff like att, def, unaging etc. at level 3). Even when that happens, there's only so much to spend those 4 points on in each path.

If you move everything except the scaling stuff up to 2 (3 points) it just means pretenders will still never take stuff like winter move or mountain survival. Basically because these are abilities that are 'I'll take them if they're effectively free, but I'm never going to spend extra design points to get them, or give up anything else I could have had in order to get them'. I can definitely see moving minor shock and cold resistances up to match fire being sensible, but I'd leave the really weak stuff at one point.

Glad the basic premise doesn't sound completely foolish to at least one other person, though!

[oddball]

Originally posted by BoboYaggatheTiny:

Originally posted by oddball:

Regen + undying has the effect you want. You can take nature 7 and death 5 and get an extra 10 hp. Undying is not quite as good as resilience; you don't get the extra point of regen as the undying points do not count towards the 10% regen calculation. But you don't die at the end of the battle just because you went below zero; you will regen back above zero first.

Sorry, I am aware of what exists in game, and yes, that is probably the better option currently, but I was thinking of a way to make it attractive to go to 10 or even 9 in a scale other than water.

I think undying would remain the better option. To go from nature 7 to nature 10 is 140 - 200 pts depending on whether you started with 1 or 3 in the path. Adding death 5 costs about 120 on a rainbow and obviously gives significant benefits beyond just the extra hp.

[BoboYagga]

Originally posted by oddball:

I think undying would remain the better option. To go from nature 7 to nature 10 is 140 - 200 pts depending on whether you started with 1 or 3 in the path. Adding death 5 costs about 120 on a rainbow and obviously gives significant benefits beyond just the extra hp.

Sure, undying would probably be the better option, and that death path would probably be better for most nations too, but there would still be times where it is worse. For instance with most troops being at the -0 hitpoints increases affliction chance. Also the amount of regen you get from Regeneration scales based on hitpoints, but not on undying (I believe) So there could still be a time where it would be better to go full nature, especially if you were doing say a nature titan that could rather easily get to Nature 10, but not Nature 7 + Death 3.