Can we talk about Holy 2 Priests?

[Legowarrior]

They all cost at least 2 Command Points as if they were mages, but unless your priest has some other crazy good trait, or high magic paths, it's almost never worthwhile to build them.

Level 1 priests can bless units, and preach for a single CP. Level 3 priests can claim thrones and do divine blessings (are you rarely get many).

Level 2 priests seem to exist just to cost you 2 Command Points. They aren't twice as good as indie priests at Preaching, and they aren't twice as good at bless units (because they are likely not the bless an entire area.

Is there a way to rework Holy 2 that doesn't include reworking every Priest in the game? Perhaps a spell that reduces fatigue, to go along the Sermon of Courage. Maybe a divine spell that buffs the caster? Something to give them purpose.

[HexNibbler]

Originally posted by terve886:

The preaching and slightly higher and better priest spell access are the only advantages. a H2 has easily the same cost as recruitting two H1 priests gold and commander point wise while two priests are much more flexible. You often don't need H2 priest to bless sacreds as H1 will do it just fine as priests seldom have anything else to do and blessing wise two H1s still do just as well as a H2.

Being H2 costs gold, especially if it is on your main mage which you need for spell casting and not blessing units.

This doesn't really apply to H2 only. In general, having excess magic paths you are not using is costing you gold as mages can at most utilize two different magic paths at once due to crosspath spells and even then the main path is the most important. An A3 mage will be cheaper than A3H2 mage priest simly because the A3H2 has more paths and needs to pay for every single one of them.

Preaching.
The preaching is a big advantage by itself. H1 cost less, yet H2 are not limited when it comes to preaching. They don't simply preach "better", they preach where H1 just can't no matter how many you have.

Cost.
From what I understand of cost calculation : High priest is 50, priest is 25. Base cost for autocalc is 40 and 20. And that is because of +1 MR and +2 morale. If I understand autocalc correctly, the difference (+10 gold and +5 gold) apply for both a leadership (40 instead of 10) and holy path (2 instead of 1). Then 5 gold for +30 leadership and +1H path doesn't seem expensive at all if that's how it works.

Holy spells
Holy spell have huge scaling on holy path level.

- Blessing have +10 range (15 at H1, 25 at H2) and +5 AoE (5 H1, 10 H2). Precision 100. It also avoid the issue where two H1 priest bless overlapping squares on the same round.
- Banish, like "decree of the underworld" goes range 25->30, AoE 4->6 and Damage 4->7. Compare two banish H1 :2 * 4 * 4 * 3 = 96 damage (aoe 4, damage 4 over 3 units) versus 6 * 7 * 3 = 126. It also come with +1 magic penetration (difficulty of the MR check is 12 instead of 11.)

I just did a test using the generic "banishment" with 1 friar and 1 inquisitor vs the starting army of MA Ermor : Friar killed 1 guy. Inquisitor killed 19. only casting banishment. 2 friar wouldn't have done as much as the inquisitor alone. "slightly better" doesn't describe faithfully the difference IMO.

Crosspath.
As you say : it is a different problem. It isn't the problem of H2 versus H1 it is the problem of learning how to use specific caster that have many path. Having sacred on a caster is usually a good thing, I can't say that every H2 caster is a good recruitment choice. But I know the H2 priests I use can leverage that H2 very well.

[Legowarrior]

How much bless do you need in a small army though? If you have everyone hold and attack, a single Holy 1 priest should be enough to bless all your troops without any trouble.

The best reason to get a Holy 1 priest is very simple. It gives you space to also hire an 80 leadership commander, or an Assassin or perhaps an Enkidu Elder or Eunuch.
I could definitely see TC building Geomancer one turn and some troops one turn, and the next turn building a General, and Ceremonial Master and a few Red Guard the next for an attack party. That's something you can't do with with a Minister of Rituals because he has a leadership of 10. So, even though he can bless slightly more units, and banish slightly more undead, he can't do the one thing that I need him to do, that the combination of a General and a Ceremonial Master can do, and that is both lead a fair number of troops, and bless units at the same time.

Now there are exceptions. The Voice of the Lord is a Level 2 priest I like, but not because its level 2, but simple because of that sweet 80 leadership. The addition of Sermon of Courage is a perk, but lets face it, if it was not for that 80 leadership, I would never hire him. Just like I never hire Masters of Ceremony or Kannushi (which get the added bonus of being old and slow).


I do have another great case for why 2 Level 1 priests are better than a Level 2 priest and its battlefield organization. If I happen to have sacred mages that aren't priests (I had a who mess of Cynocephalian Shaman as Machaka in one game) and I have Spider Hunters, I don't necessary want them near each other. Having two level 1 priests in different locations allows me to bless both groups without an trouble.

So, if I were fighting Sceleria, maybe I would grab the Level 2 priest, but I would probably still prefer a mage. It would cost me the same number of mage turns.

[HexNibbler]

If what you are looking for is a H2 priest that can lead armies and cast magic spells, then why not Marignon ?

Either we talk about H2 in general, abstracted from the specifics of nations and units, or we talk about specific nation and the roles that specific commanders can or cannot fill.

It doesn't make sense to me to take Minister of ritual as an example of why H2 needs a buff with the argument that it cannot lead troops.

It isn't supposed to. It isn't even supposed to do battle support. It's one of those commanders intended as an agent to sit and preach in a province, get bad events out and bring good events in.

Reducing the whole Holy path to its ability to bless a very limited quantity of sacred is just ignoring what the holy path brings to the table. From there the conclusions are of course going to be that H2 is not useful. The problem you describe comes from the way you frame it, not from the game mechanic and balance.

It's the equivalent of judging the worth of magic path based on, let's say the research points efficiency, while ignoring the whole range of options that magic path provides.

[Legowarrior]

Originally posted by HexNibbler:

If what you are looking for is a H2 priest that can lead armies and cast magic spells, then why not Marignon ?

Either we talk about H2 in general, abstracted from the specifics of nations and units, or we talk about specific nation and the roles that specific commanders can or cannot fill.

It doesn't make sense to me to take Minister of ritual as an example of why H2 needs a buff with the argument that it cannot lead troops.

It isn't supposed to. It isn't even supposed to do battle support. It's one of those commanders intended as an agent to sit and preach in a province, get bad events out and bring good events in.

Reducing the whole Holy path to its ability to bless a very limited quantity of sacred is just ignoring what the holy path brings to the table. From there the conclusions are of course going to be that H2 is not useful. The problem you describe comes from the way you frame it, not from the game mechanic and balance.

It's the equivalent of judging the worth of magic path based on, let's say the research points efficiency, while ignoring the whole range of options that magic path provides.

If I may ask, when was the last time you purchased an Holy 2 Priest that didn't fall in one of the following three categories.

1) Had actual magic paths.
2) Had a leadership higher than any other Holy 1 priest.
3) Had a special ability, like High Priest ability to summon Sacred Serpents, could heal other units or some other unique trait that was superio their Holy levels?

I can tell you, the Minister of Rituals never fit the bill for any of those categories, and I have never purchased them. They bring Fortune to the table, but I don't think that is worth a mage turn. My Ceremonial Masters have Fortune Teller, and I can build two in a fort. My Geomancers have fortune Teller, and they are good researchers and communion slaves.

There are a few other priests that are pure Holy 2 priests that I would like to bring up, and you tell me how you would use them in your game.
Kannushi - An Old Holy 2 Priest with a 10% chance at magic. 10 leadership.
Exarch from Bogarus - It has nothing going for it except that it is holy 2.
Bishop of LA Man - the same thing.
Minister of Ceremony - has fortune Telling (which other units have) and bringer of Fortune (which is so small that it hardly makes a difference).

All 4 of these priests will probably never be hired because none of them have any abilities of value outside of having Holy 2 and Holy 2 has no significant value.

There are 2 Holy 2/Leadership 10 priests I would get, but neither is because of Holy 2.
Bishop of the Sacred Shroud can heal, which is always amazing
Polypal Mothers can spawn free units.

But those fall comfortable under the third Category.

So, let me know which Holy 2 Priest you think is worthwhile, because I bet you dollars to donuts its because of one of the three categories above, and has nothing to do with them being Holy 2.

[konon.ymir]

If I ever want to preach, I will hire a 2 holy priest above the alternatives. The gold cost for the priests you listed is 70, and the typical gold cost for a H1 priest is 50 gold.

Blessing coverage can also be an issue depending on the situation, and it does make a difference if you bless 90% of your units or 100%. Since the aoe on bless scales linearly with caster level, H2 priests are also more cost effective here.

H2 priests are also significantly better at banishing. Both the aoe and the damage scale with priest level. A H1 with the generic banish will do 4 damage to 4 squares for a total of 16 square damage. A H2 with the generic banish will do 7 damage in 6 squares for a total of 42 square damage. Again, about twice as effective, but not twice as expensive. If I'm fighting an undead nation, or a nation that is emphasizing their death magic paths, these priests are very useful.

There are also 2 H2 spells that are useful for general purpose casting.
Smite demon for fighting demons
Sermon of courage for boosting morale.

If I want to do anything that involves preaching or casting priest spells beyond blessing very small groups of sacreds in a box formation, I would buy an H2 priest over an H1.

If you instead just care about the ability to build a temple, then obviously an H1 priest is more cost efficient, but there's only so many temples you build in a game.
The other use of cheaper priests is to provide chaff for anti commander things like mind hunt or assassins. This is not always something players have to deal with, especially in the earlier game, and it's only a 20 gold difference compared to an H2 priest.

[freek_o_nature]

Apologies for being somewhat off-topic, but a question: aside from the usefulness of what's there when it's needed, I've never thought Holy magic looked particularly interesting at all, since it's a short and unchanging spell list with limited access and situational necessity. Like, I get that blessings and morale boosts and undead-paffing etc. are pretty integral functions of H magic, it's just that, like others in this thread are saying, I feel as though there really isn't much there if you don't need it at that moment, and there's no way to change it once the game's begun.

What I'm trying to ask is, has there ever been (or is there currently) any interest or discussion of expanding Holy magic in general? This discussion about H1 vs. H2 notwithstanding, was H magic more complex overall in pre-4 iterations of the game? I remember the path-dependant Holy spells of Dom5 being a cool new addition to H magic, but still...then again, it's not like I have any suggestions for how it could or should work, nor am I knowledgeable enough about game balance to make any. I'm just curious about whether this discussion is only one small part of a larger and longer-term discussion about the entire Holy magic system.

[Legowarrior]

Originally posted by konon.ymir:

If I ever want to preach, I will hire a 2 holy priest above the alternatives. The gold cost for the priests you listed is 70, and the typical gold cost for a H1 priest is 50 gold.

Blessing coverage can also be an issue depending on the situation, and it does make a difference if you bless 90% of your units or 100%. Since the aoe on bless scales linearly with caster level, H2 priests are also more cost effective here.

H2 priests are also significantly better at banishing. Both the aoe and the damage scale with priest level. A H1 with the generic banish will do 4 damage to 4 squares for a total of 16 square damage. A H2 with the generic banish will do 7 damage in 6 squares for a total of 42 square damage. Again, about twice as effective, but not twice as expensive. If I'm fighting an undead nation, or a nation that is emphasizing their death magic paths, these priests are very useful.

There are also 2 H2 spells that are useful for general purpose casting.
Smite demon for fighting demons
Sermon of courage for boosting morale.

If I want to do anything that involves preaching or casting priest spells beyond blessing very small groups of sacreds in a box formation, I would buy an H2 priest over an H1.

If you instead just care about the ability to build a temple, then obviously an H1 priest is more cost efficient, but there's only so many temples you build in a game.
The other use of cheaper priests is to provide chaff for anti commander things like mind hunt or assassins. This is not always something players have to deal with, especially in the earlier game, and it's only a 20 gold difference compared to an H2 priest.

You assume that all your holy troops are grouped together, that's the only time that an H2 priest is better at blessing than 2 H1 priests.

I usually have several different groups that need blessing, so, I having 2 H1 priests are much more effective. Especially since I usually will have each spending two turns blessing troops.

I usually find with H2 bless, some of the area if effect doesn't hit the target.

As for banishment, would I really prefer banishment to an actual mage. When you have a 2 CP leader, that is always your baseline. Would I prefer a Holy2 priest, or a mage that can research/forge or cast spells? The answer is almost always that I would take a mage of some sort, because fort turns are a premium.

I only hire priests if I absolutely have to, and then I usually try to hire a cool national commander to go with him.

I make exceptions for priests that are exceptional commanders, but that is because I want a priest and a commander, not because I want a Holy 2 commander.

As for preaching, how often do you actually do that in a Multiple game? I am so busy with research, war, and spell casting that I can't afford to take a castle turn off to build a priest just to preach. Maybe an indie priest in a random temple, but not a castle priest.

[konon.ymir]

You make a good point that H2 isn't that much better at blessing, because they aoe is basically in a circle instead of whatever shape you actually want. However, they are only 40% more expensive, which is about equivalent to the area vs diameter of a circle.
If you have a couple small squads spread out across the battlefield then you don't need the full H2.

Do you mean multiplayer when you say Multiple game? It's definitely going to vary on the situation, but preaching can be quite useful, for the same reason that you build temples pretty much. Priests are also able to move around, unlike temples, and are even more cost effective if you take a low dominion score. 5 H2s (350 gold plus upkeep) is an average of 3 candles a turn in friendly dominion. With a temple (400 gold for most nations) and a dominion score of 10 you get 1 candle per turn, but you can't control where it goes and is a lot more vulnerable to raiding.

[Legowarrior]

5 Holy 2 Bishops also replaces 5 Arcane Magistrates. That's a lot of magic you are losing out on.

[konon.ymir]

Temples also tend to be (thought the specifics depend on your dominion conflict value) penalized worse when reducing enemy dominion than priests are.

[konon.ymir]

I'm not trying to say that you should replace mages with priests. You might consider building fewer temples and more priests though.
Pretty sure everyone agrees that you need to pay attention to your dominion candles at least a little bit throughout the game.

[Legowarrior]

It depends on your scales though. I dont worry too much about my domain unless I have something like Gift of Health up. Until then, as long as it is healthy and positive, and I keep raiding the enemies temples, I should be fine.

Temples also have the benefit of slowly increasing the number of holy units you can recruit, which is always nice if you have cap only sacred units. Always good to get an extra Black Hunter or Red Guard once in a while.

It's a question of opportunity costs. When you build your Holy 2 priest for 80 or 90 gold, that could be a TC Geomancers, or Machaka Sorcerer/Witch Doctor or a Arcane Magistrate or a Master Shugenja (all these nations have nature Holy 2 Priests, so they aren't just random wizards).

I could build a few indie priests and send them around preaching. They might not be as good, but they wouldn't slow down my mage production.

[TheMeInTeam]

Originally posted by konon.ymir:

Temples also tend to be (thought the specifics depend on your dominion conflict value) penalized worse when reducing enemy dominion than priests are.

I thought most people temple their forts (after lab if they can make mages with just lab). Preaching in temple makes preaching more effective.

H2 have an advantage in this regard in that they can preach to a higher candle score in that province, which means temple will start pushing candles to adjacent provinces more quickly.

In a SP game I got squeezed by multiple AIs that went 8+ dominion score on pretender while I had 6 as a water nation. That was awful, and took temples + multiple preachers to stabilize. In MP where people mostly stick to 4-7 dominion (with a few exceptions that are predictable) H2 in temple allows you to max or nearly max dominion candles in that province. Usually enough to keep dominion in land without too much fuss.

[HexNibbler]

@Legowarrior

Your position is that H2 priests has no intrinsic value based on the idea that H2 path has no value beyond blessing a small quantity of sacred scattered across the field.

It's circular logic : you build a set of arbitrary constraints that void the usefulness of the H2 then "logically" conclude H2 has no value.

That's what your post says : if units with H2 are hired, it isn't because of H2. If unit only has H2, it has no value.

It's just statement asserting the consequences of the constraints arbitrarly imposed, which are derived from your own way of playing.

If those constraints are not within the scope of the discussion because you consider them to be implcits then there is no discussion.

[Legowarrior]

Again, my focus is mostly on MP games. Single player is such a different beast.

So, when it comes to Recruiting priests, two things come into play. First, why do I recruit a priest and second, what does it cost me to recruit a priest (it's known in economics as the opportunity cost, what could I do instead of recruiting a priest).

For the first part, why. There are 4 basic reason to recruit any priest.

1) to bless sacred units.
2) to build a temple
3) to preach/summon undead
4) to banish undead

As you stated, and Holy 2 priest can do 3 if those things better, but require two things that a Holy 1 priest doesn't.

First, a Holy 2 priest must be hired in a fort (outside of a few magic sites).

Second a Holy 2 priest costs two command points.

These two extra requirements is what makes the Holy 2 Priest gives it a much higher opportunity it then a Indie Holy 1 priest.

(On a tangent, when might you have a temple without a fort? Well, I usually build temples right away, while the fort is being built, giving me two or three turns that I only have access to indie priests)

So, now you have to consider you early and midgame needs (late game can vary so much that all the rules go out the window). You can build a Holy 2 priest in your brand new fort, but doing means that you not be building some other commander that turn. This would hold partial true if you built a regular Holy 1 priest as well, but since most plain ones only cost 1 CP, the opportunity cost is lower (note that I really don't take into account gold. Since sacred have lower maintenance, the real cost difference between 2 Holy 1 priests and a Holy 2 priest is rather insignificant).

If I do hire a indie Holy 1 priest, I should still be in a position to hire something of value, even if it isn't as valuable as a mage. As Jomon, it might mean a Ninja, or a Daimyo. As TC, it might mean an Eunuch, to spread Defense.

Of I can build half a mage, and next turn I can build a Mage and another indie priest.

So, again, with research and spells being literally game changing (Fire Fend or Rain against Abysia is a good example), I think the opportunity cost of not hiring a wizard is pretty high, unless I plan to make a really good commander to lead large armies, or an assassin.

As I stated above, there are exceptions.

The Voice of the Lord is an excellent example, because with 80 leadership to combines a good commander and a priest together.

The Bishop of the Shroud has literal Healing. Other cool abilities can also be considered a priority as well.

And of course any priest with magic ability is pretty much a mage first.

But the fact of the matter is, these exception really make clear how limiting Holy 2 really is.