Best H3 Spell

[Daniel14676]

I was looking around for a nice list of the pros and cons of the different divine spells that replace smite. Like is Syllable of death as good as it looks, how much does the range matter, and isn't heavenly strike kind of crappy?

Thanks a lot.
Sidenote: all I did was look them all up on the mod inspecter.

[ethorin101]

Range CAN matter alot, Heavenly Strike is pretty solid, Syllable of Death is potentially very strong but only if you are reliably getting the double MR check. Pretty much all but Heavenly Fire are quite good.

I'm curious though, why do you think Heavenly Strike is bad?

[Daniel14676]

Well looking at it though the mod inspecter. It has 10 damage and then 5 shock damage. Which is 15 overall damage, which is less than everything else. Based on that it isn't bad, definitely better than smite, but lacking compared most of the others. Shrug, that was just my impression from a first look.

Sidenote: for reference, how large is a combat map? like is it 100 long, 200?

[ethorin101]

80*40 generally, big maps can get bigger on the 40 side but AFAIK from edge to edge 80 is the biggest it gets, with 80 being the part that range cares about.

You are indeed correct that it's not as much damage on the face of it as say, Heavenly Fire, but it's AN Shock damage, meaning A, it's as much damage as Heavenly Fire on anything with 10 prot and more damage on anything with 12 or more prot, B. it's Shock damage which means it can stun, and Stun is at least as good as Paralyze and arguably as good as Petrify, and definitely better than Entagle or Chest Wound.

[joeball123]

There's also a lot of circumstantial considerations when discussing the value of a given spell. Spells with [Element] Damage, for instance, are more valuable against enemies who have difficulty accessing things that give [Element] Resistance, especially if those enemies natively have [Element] Vulnerability - for instance, almost all of Niefelheim's units have Shock Vulnerability and the national mages have relatively poor access to the paths needed to counteract that through spells or items, so Heavenly Strike will look particularly good when fighting them; conversely, pretty much all of Abyssia's units have Fire Resistance, so Heavenly Fires is particularly unattractive against them. Claim Life, meanwhile, is generally useless against MA Ermor - undead are entirely immune - but if the Ermor player has a high-value non-undead non-lifeless unit embedded in a massive army of undead, a spell like Claim Life could be very useful because it will only target units that it can affect and so will specifically target that high-value unit (obviously, the Ermor player can counterplay this a bit by including other non-undead non-lifeless units in the army, but Ermor doesn't necessarily have a lot of gold to work with, nor much access to magic that might allow it to summon living chaff).

I will say, however, that the H3 spell you get generally isn't a very important consideration when choosing your pretender's dominant magic. H is easily the weakest and least versatile magic, natively-H3 national casters are somewhat uncommon and mostly cap-only, Bishop Fish and Juggernauts can be awkward to summon (and at 50 pearls and two S5 mage-turns Juggernauts are quite expensive if you're only getting them to be H3 casters - not to mention that you need Const-9 for Juggernaut Construction and Thaum-7 for Divine Name before you can have Juggernaut commanders), H1+ Communion/Sabbath/Chorus Masters generally have access to other spells that you'd prefer for them to cast, you only have one Prophet at a time (and you don't even get that in a Disciples game unless you neither are nor have a Disciple), and in the unmodded game the only H boosters are artifacts while the only way to empower in H is to declare someone your Prophet. Basically, what Smite spell you get is an afterthought, because what blessings your pretender bestows upon your sacreds and what magics your pretender can use are significantly more important than what smite your H3s can use - especially since in general you don't recruit H3s for their ability to smite your enemies with divine power but rather for their ability to bless large numbers of sacreds with a single spell, or because they're good mages or maybe good commanders who also happen to be powerful priests.

[ethorin101]

ehhhhh, that depends a LOT on the nation, several nations actually have rec anywhere H3 or non STR H3 in the capital, and for several of those nations having an effective Smite IS their early game strat, the shining example of that is Bogarus, where Eparchs kind of ARE your expansion and are definitely your best answer to basically every form of sacred rush, which you are hideously vulnerable to by virtue of your only competent units being either shortbows who are only functional with Flaming Arrows(but have the virtue of being probably the single most massable ranged unit in LA) or your VERY expensive heavy cav, everything else you have is there to die as slowly as their incompetent selves can manage to buy your mages time to do things. But without serious research none of your mages are actually as good as an Eparch dropping Smites.

A similar, if somewhat less extreme example, is MA Atlantis, expecially when up against MA Pel or MA Ys, MA Atlantis' answers to their sacreds is basically "I have H3's with a good Smite". MA C'tis can wind up in a similar spot though Elite Warriors and Falchioneers both provide something of a blender option for dealing with the majority of sacred rushes via sheer weight of attacks.

[Daniel14676]

I have played the MA, Ind a bit in single player and they have a lot of priest units, and can easly spam out H3 (or communion master/slave H2). Also I enjoy finding a mechanic and sitting down to understand it fully. For example, I had no idea about shock damage causing stun, and had missed the armor piercing part of the description.

So for example, which smite(s) are better at assisting my troops deal with independents in this case? (lets say I'm playing Ind and have a rainbow bless of some kind)

And what other little details are easy to miss with the smites?

[ethorin101]

The S Smite(Word of Power) has 100 range and doesn't miss, it also has a secondary Paralyze effect which is only worse than stun by virtue of mindless units being immune(IIRC, though it might just be that most things that Paralyze can't be cast on mindless), this makes it pretty handy for a number of things, including interrupting Thug Scripting and rendering Elves highly vulnerable to basically everything. Without being vulnerable to Shock Res negating it's effect the way Heavenly Strike is.

D and E Smites are both MR checks for instakills though Petrify is a bit weird in how it actually works for that, Nature Smite Entagles but makes the Nature Banish so bad at what you normally want Banish for(killing hordes) that I think you probably want to outright avoid having N as your highest if you are expecting lots of early undead from anyone(Scel, MA Ermor, Lemuria, etc.) On the other hand, the N Banish IS an AoE 2+ Easier Resist Soul Slay, and of course, having an H3 dropping it makes it a bit easier for the banish to soul slay stuff(unless they are H3 from Comm for some reason). N Banish is weird because it basically shifts how you wana use the Banish.

All Smites are solid for dealing with random indies, but IIRC, the only Indies with any elemental resist are Lavaborn with F res so you might wanna avoid Heavenly Fire just in case you encounter that Indie type(most common in caves, have big hits, heavyish armor, heat aura, and pretty high hp for being size 2, some dark vision, can be a problem for some set ups)

[joeball123]

Originally posted by ethorin101:

All Smites are solid for dealing with random indies, but IIRC, the only Indies with any elemental resist are Lavaborn with F res so you might wanna avoid Heavenly Fire just in case you encounter that Indie type(most common in caves, have big hits, heavyish armor, heat aura, and pretty high hp for being size 2, some dark vision, can be a problem for some set ups)

Watery Death is at least as bad against aquatic, amphibious, inanimate, or undead indies as Heavenly Fire is against Lavaborn, because waterbreathers, lifeless things, and undead are immune to the secondary damage effect and so it's effectively just 10 AN MR-negates instead of 10 AN MR-negates + 10 AN MR-negates on damage. Aquatic and amphibious indies being much more common than Lavaborn, if Heavenly Fires should be avoided due to negative interaction with Lavaborn then Watery Death should be avoided due to negative interaction with waterbreathers. Additionally, if we're concerned about interactions with relatively rare indies, there's also the fact that undead or inanimate things are entirely immune to Claim Life, though Banishment is probably better than any of the smites in that situation anyways.

Regardless, as far as dealing with random indies goes, there are a couple things to consider:
1. The 'typical' indie has about 10 HP and 10 MR; MR-negates spells affect 10 MR targets about half the time. Thus, against a 'typical' indie:
- Word of Thorns kills outright about 7% of the time (5 AN deals 10+ damage about 14% of the time).
- Smite and Word of Power kill outright about 25% of the time (10 AN deals 10+ damage about 50% of the time).
- Word of Stone kills outright about 31% of the time (initial hit for 10 AN deals 10+ AN about 50% of the time, about 50% of those damaged but not killed by the initial hit are affected by petrification, about 50% of those petrified die).
- Watery Death and Syllable of Death kill outright about 37% of the time (initial hit for 10 AN deals 10+ damage about 50% of the time, and then about half of those who survive the initial hit die to the secondary effect - note that Syllable of Death kills a bit more reliably here, as it's a true save-or-dies whereas Watery Death's secondary damage is just another 10 AN MR-negates, which only very likely kills a 10HP unit on a failed save when that unit had previously taken damage from but survived a 10 AN hit)
- Heavenly Strike kills outright about 40% of the time (10 AN + on-damage 5 AN deals 10+ damage about 80% of the time).
- Heavenly Fires and Claim Life kill outright about 48% of the time (10 AN + on-damage 10 AN and 20 AN deal 10+ damage about 97% of the time)

Thus, against 'typical' 10 HP 10 MR indies, Heavenly Fires, Claim Life, and Heavenly Strike are the best; Watery Death, Syllable of Death, and Word of Stone are second-best; Word of Power is third-best (better than Smite because it can paralyze if it doesn't kill outright, not as good as Watery Death / Syllable of Death / Word of Stone because a chance to paralyze targets that survive the initial hit is worse than a similar chance to kill targets that survive the initial hit); Smite is fourth-best; and Word of Thorns is probably worst (single-target crowd control isn't very good when dealing with large numbers of relatively low-threat units, bleed isn't very good DoT since the expectation is that a 10HP unit hit by 5 AN damage will still have 5 HP afterwards and profuse bleeding only does maxHP/20 damage per round while bleeding persists, so that's at least 5 rounds before the unit dies to bleeding depending on rounding) but might be more worthwhile against common high-threat indies like heavy cavalry.

2. There are some particularly dangerous enemies, such as elephants, in the indie roster that are much more difficult to kill outright with straight damage. Against these, true save-or-die effects (Word of Stone, Syllable of Death) and crowd control effects (Word of Power, Heavenly Strike, Word of Stone, Word of Thorns) are generally more valuable than straight damage (Smite, Watery Death, Claim Life, Heavenly Fires), and DoTs (Heavenly Fires, Word of Thorns) can be useful. Thus, against such targets, Word of Stone, Syllable of Death, Word of Power, and Heavenly Strike are probably best; Heavenly Fires is probably second-best; Claim Life and Watery Death are probably third-best; and Smite is probably worst. Word of Thorns is likely a bit better than Smite but probably not as good as the good damage-smites, since bleed is a relatively good DoT against high-HP targets but the 5 AN base damage is probably enough less that the DoT won't really make up for the damage advantage held by Claim Life and Watery Death and also since single-target entangle can be decent crowd control against small numbers of high-threat targets but doesn't work very well against high-strength targets.

3. Some special cases:
- Syllable of Death and Watery Death are in some cases only 10 AN MR-negates, putting them on par with Smite. Specifically, undead are immune to Syllable of Death's save-or-die while undead, inanimate, or waterbreathing targets are immune to Watery Death's secondary damage effect.
- Heavenly Fires and Heavenly Strike lose a lot of their elemental damage and see their secondary effects (the stun and the fire DoT) greatly weakened against targets with an appropriate elemental resistance.
- Claim Life does not work at all against undead or inanimate targets, though this can also be an advantage if there's a non-undead non-inanimate target hidden in the army since it will only target things that it can affect. Additionally, the chance to inflict a Chest Wound is a minor drawback if you're trying to be clever with e.g. Hellbind Heart and isn't an especially crippling injury for many thugs or supercombatants.
- Undead or inanimate targets are immune to Word of Thorns' bleed effect and high-strength units are little affected by the entanglement.
- Word of Power is slightly weaker against large targets as the nominal duration of paralysis is (paralysis_damage_inflicted - target_size)/2, so with an expected 10 paralysis damage inflicted a size-2 unit is paralyzed for four rounds while a size-5 or size-6 unit is only paralyzed for two rounds. Conversely, Heavenly Fires is arguably slightly stronger against large targets as fire DoT deals 1d[size] damage per round as long as the fire persists (that said, small targets tend to be things that it can kill outright or at least damage badly enough for the DoT to kill in a round or two whereas large targets tend to be tougher than that).

[ethorin101]

I'd honestly entirely forgotten about Watery Death, you are right about it definitely being the worst smite against random indies the most often though... why are there so many undead poptypes anyway?

Claim Life, Syllable of Death, Word of Stone probably win on sheer "general lethality" but Word of Power having 100 range is still pretty interesting against a lot of things IMO.

[Kamiyama]

Word of stone seems to be the most broadly lethal? Assuming the unit doesn't make it's magic resistance check, anyway. Are there any units immune to petrify?

[ethorin101]

Originally posted by Kamiyama:

Word of stone seems to be the most broadly lethal? Assuming the unit doesn't make it's magic resistance check, anyway. Are there any units immune to petrify?

Stone Beings, Golems, Gargoyles, Stone Monstra, Earth Elementals, etc.

[joeball123]

Originally posted by ethorin101:

Claim Life, Syllable of Death, Word of Stone probably win on sheer "general lethality" but Word of Power having 100 range is still pretty interesting against a lot of things IMO.

I agree that 100 range is interesting against a lot of things, but I don't think that the range advantage is enough to boost its value against indies:
- You don't care if indie troops manage to rout off the battlefield because indies who rout off the battlefield are as good as dead even if you lose the battle, so paralyzing fleeing enemies so your troops can chase them down isn't as valuable as it could be against another player's forces.
- Indies start roughly in the middle of 'their' deployment area and are essentially on 'Attack' orders, so even if you start all the way at the back of your own deployment zone and have your troops on 'Hold and Attack' there's not really a whole lot of time to get off extra Words of Power before the infantry lines meet.
- It's only a single-target damage & paralyze, and for the 'typical' indie trash mob there aren't really any single important targets to neutralize (it's more commonly a bunch of more or less uniformly low-value targets like mixed militia, light infantry, and heavy infantry or a band of Lion Tribe Warriors, and somewhat less commonly a bunch of more or less uniformly 'high'-value targets like mixed maul-barbarians and sword-barbarians), so while pinging a couple of extra targets before the infantry lines meet is nice it's also not that likely to make much of a difference to the outcome of the battle in the general case against 'typical' indie trash mobs.
- Killing targets outright is typically more valuable than incapacitating them, and while Word of Power is a very good smite for incapaciting things it's also in the bottom three for lethality against 'typical' 10HP 10MR indie trash mobs.
Thus, I consider it to be a mid- or low-tier smite against the 'typical' indie trash mob comprised of 10HP 10MR units.

That said, Word of Power, Word of Stone, Syllable of Death, and Heavenly Strike would be my preferred choices for smites when looking at smites in a vacuum, because I think that answering a question like "how do you deal with elephants" is generally more important than answering a question like "how do you deal with trash mobs" - you're in a whole lot of trouble if a front line of national infantry (or less commonly national cavalry) backed up by an H3 casting pretty much any smite cannot adequately deal with indie trash mobs whereas something like an elephant can do a lot of damage to even high-end troops if it's not managed appropriately. Plus, single-target spells requiring X3 casters aren't actually very good answers to the question "how do you deal with trash mobs" even if the caster is only a priest, so I'd prefer not choose a smite solely on the basis of that particular performance metric.

[Duuvian]

Originally posted by ethorin101:

ehhhhh, that depends a LOT on the nation, several nations actually have rec anywhere H3 or non STR H3 in the capital, and for several of those nations having an effective Smite IS their early game strat, the shining example of that is Bogarus, where Eparchs kind of ARE your expansion and are definitely your best answer to basically every form of sacred rush, which you are hideously vulnerable to by virtue of your only competent units being either shortbows who are only functional with Flaming Arrows(but have the virtue of being probably the single most massable ranged unit in LA) or your VERY expensive heavy cav, everything else you have is there to die as slowly as their incompetent selves can manage to buy your mages time to do things. But without serious research none of your mages are actually as good as an Eparch dropping Smites.

I agree with this except I will say Peshti can be decent for their role and the black hood horse archers you get in non fort provinces can also be good. I usually start with a lot of shortbows and a line of spear peshti. if I can afford it I set some Black hoods to auto recruit in a few provinces and have the starter commander ferry them to the Bogatyr or whoever is leading the main armies.

But yeah I agree that Eparchs are very useful early on. It's usually my first recruit followed by a Veliki Knyaz or whatever the best leadership chassis is. Then more Eparchs or a Starets for site searching.

Eparchs are great and then you get Alkonosts as summons which are Eparchs but better as they can fly 3 squares. I Prophet an Eparch and then an Alkonost when the Eparch dies of old age UNLESS the Patriarch hero shows up, who starts at H4 and warrants an immediate Prophet position.

The Black Hoods shoot better than the shortbows and do significantly better if say Caelum birdmen drop on them. I also mix in a few of the trainee Druzhina (the ones with bows) from forts because they have good armor even if they aren't as precise as the black hoods who are more accurate and cheaper but don't even wear a T-Shirt. . It would be REALLY COOL if after the Druzhina Jrs. earned X amount of Xp or something they promoted to the full Druzhina but they are stuck as archers/bodyguards of archers forever I think.

Koschei is also a great thug/SC hero because he is immortal. Once in a single player game I used reinvigorate to turn him back to a 25 year old man (so many blood slaves) hoping it would change the chassis due to his backstory. Nope; he did lose the old age penalties though. Completely unworth the cost of course.

Peshti are really good at holding a line while your mages nuke whatever is slowly killing them in melee. The spear users also have 2 map speed so they can be a part of a a slightly faster army. This is good because your Peshti spearman casualties will be attrocious against things like heavy cavalry independents and you will be ferrying more to the main army until you have the mages and priests to break heavy cav or worse elephants quickly. Peshti still hold the line in the face of massive casualties if you have the H4 morale spell., which is really their main purpose. I put a slightly smaller axe peshti squad in a line behind the spear line. The axe peshti tend to fill in gaps and get lots of kills against already tired enemies but that's more speeding up of the process than necessary.

The sword peshti also have castle defender or whatnot. They make a pretty good garrison and Bogarus can easily ferry more in with taxi mages if they have a few turns of siege and the research paths done, though it can be tough to have broth cauldrons unless your pretender has some nature or you get lucky with sites or Baba Yaga shows up. If you have cauldron access and taxi mages who can bring over a hundred into the castle the defender bonus is actually pretty sweet combined with the usual mages summoning birds inside the castle to force attackers to bring more siegers. Note this is against the AI but in one of my few PBEM games I tried to use it on a human player but the castle in the swamp province on our border was too obvious a trap.

The heavy cavalry is really great but early on I can't afford much more than 5 for bodyguards. Once I have them though the commander mortality drops significantly. It's also about the time I start changing their equipment from slings to melee stuff because the 5 heavy cavalry bodyguards plus a thug loadout does well as a lance charge after a certain number of turns.

Once you get Evo 3 or so your Starets are starting to become army nukers, and Bogarus has a great diversity of magic. The glaring exceptions are nature and water, and if you are lucky there is a hero that has those.

Also you forgot Fivefold Angel and the Skarets. The things those can do.. they are just irritating to use because of the unrest. It makes it annoying to gather large numbers as you will have to patrol wherever they are. In multplayer once they figure out what's causing the unrest it isn't too hard to stop that so it's more a one time trick.

However the fact that they are blessable and the Skarets being so very cheap leads to some fun bless strategies. The Five Fold Angel seems like it would be a great sacrificial unit against an SC too maybe though I'm not precisely sure how damage reflection works.

My last SP game I fought the nation that is mixed Caelans and Abyssians, forgot the name. I won a pretty epic siege thanks to my peshti blocking the hole in the wall for the whole battle. I was outnumbered pretty badly and their pretender was there. The pretender escaped and I lost when I tried to break the siege the next turn, so I conceded to the AI.

Their birds kept tearing up my mages through their buffs until I gave them all decent bodyguards and clumped them together. I think those early losses are why I lost the war.