Air a bit overtuned?

[thedumbbunny]

As the title asks I feel like air of all the elemental paths is a bit overtuned. it has the best elemental summon for general purpose (water for under water but otherwise air is king). it has what i consider the best evocation in Tstrike. Storm soft counters fire and ranged weapons. defensively mist form is great for early thugging, fog warriors is one of the reasons that magic weapons is nearly a must and arrow fend is a soft counter to arrows for your units only. you even get wind guide for easy ranged weapon and spell precision bonus.

comparing firestorm to wrathful skies is not even close. 6 ap fire damage vs 14 AN lightning damage. 5 fire resist is enough to make firestorm fairly low damage when combined with any armor. 15 lightning resist is needed to do the same for wrathful skies and it will still do chip damage especially in a storm. the only thing i think is even close in power is foul vapors which is an uncommon crosspath and something people occasionally build pretenders around having for their first war.

I know there are at least soft counters to all of these but im just wondering if either the other paths could use a buff or air a nerf of some kind such as increased research level required.

[Legowarrior]

Here is the thing about Air Magic. Unless you stumble on a site, you can never really break into Air magic if you nation doesn't have air magic. And if you don't have at least Air 3 for Storm, you'll never actually do anything with Air Magic except maybe forge Air Boots and jump around.

There are no generic Summons that include air, except Air Queens and Fairy Queens, and by that time, you should be in the end game. If you take Air 4 or 5 on your pretender, it will only every have an impact where ever your pretender is.

So, overtuned or not, only people that play Air nations will every be impacted by it.

[terve886]

It is no secret that air is strong, though so is astral, earth, blood and death. The bigger problem is that water and fire are weak in comparison.

In my opinion, air magic is a good example of how magic paths should be: It has good offensive evocation while also having access to strategic buffs like mass flight and mist form. Air is also popular path for thugs whether its for casting personal form of mistform or cloud trapezing on the tactical map.

[Legowarrior]

Air is a very powerful and probably game defining magic. Probably on par with Astral, for nations that can at least achieve Air 3 in battle.

There are 3 classic spells that do break the mold of Air in my mind.

First, there is Arrow Fend. Air 3 Spell for only 1 gem that cloaks the whole army in Air Shield, effectively killing archery for any opposing nation. Not that archery was a good way to play Dominions 5, except crossbows.
In any case, at Enchantment 6, any nation with a 2 Air mage shut down Archery without any way around it. Windguide, Flaming Arrow, both are nullified by the early spell. And since it is battlefield wide, you never need more then 1 mage.

Similar spells of that level and power and cost, such as Wave Warriors, is limited in area, and also provide a rebuff to balance it's gains.

Later on, you have Storm, which allows you to boost your Air magic by 1, which is pretty much necessary, because Air Magic Boosters require 4 Air or higher paths, so unlike Earth, Nature, Fire, Death, Water, or Astral, you can't forge a 10 or cheaper item to boost up.
Storm also hurts archery, but for all players on the field, as well as most evocations.

At Alternation 7, when nature gets Mass Protections, and Earth gets Marble Warriors, Air gets the Battlefield wide Fog Warriors. Air 5, 3 gems, so you need a Air 4 mage to spend 4 Air gems. A tall investment, but very much game changing, on par with Army of Lead or Gold, but 2 levels earlier.
Which is probably how I understand Air magic. Perfectly balanced, if all the spells showed up a level or two later in research.

The only saving grace is that Air Magic is almost always limited to Air Nations. With the exception of nation summons and pretenders, you can't break into high level Air.

Got Air 3 or less, no boosters that require less then 4 Air, or 7 Astral, or 4 Water/4 Fire. Maybe you can throw up storm in battle.

Went to spread you Air magic around a bit? Either find an Air Recruit Site, or get Conjuration 8/Blood 8 (or was it 7?). Otherwise, you are stuck with only your pretender throwing down air. No Troll Kings, or Flame Spirits or Mound Spirits. You get a Fairy Queen at Conjuration 8, if you have nature magic. Maybe you get lucky with some sort of Demon.

In the end, Air Magic is powerful, but thankful, it is out of reach for most nations, so it doesn't matter as much as something like Foul Vapors.

[TheMeInTeam]

^ Water damage spells aren't as good as air, but they are significant. Water is a hybrid between point buffs, damage spells, and debuffing enemies. Numbness (in cold scales), quagmire, grip of winter, and quickness on own troops (especially those with multiple attacks) can create large swings in troop performance, and it can do so before fog warriors (this timing is more comparable to the storm + tstrike setup). Water elementals with buffs are also some of the best anti-thug/SC options that are inexpensively available early in the game.

Numbness gets special mention because its relevance is situational, but large when present. It's an early game spell, and CR is an uncommon resist/bless. Numbness has 100 precision, AoE 1, and in addition to the fatigue event freeze puts -3 atk and def. Later down the same path as quickness and numbness, frozen heart scales into a spammable spell (minimal fatigue, W2+ mages can cast a ton of them that never miss). Even if you don't have swamp survival, simply using quickness and frozen heart do a lot of work when not making elementals, which are excellent. If you can get quickness on water elementals in particular it is devastating, but hard to do. Ice elementals are easier to get mages to target, but not as threatening (quickness trampling is still not insignificant though).

Fire has a few problems:

- It is way more common to see FR right now than CR.

- Most fire spells are AP, so you don't need that much FR to block damage with armor. The generic exception is pillar of fire, which is a very late game spell but throws enough AP damage to break through normal FR. Evo 8 is a big ask, however.

- Incinerate, one of the few exceptions that is AN and not merc'd by rain, is a bit buggy in that mages often don't want to cast it vs 10 FR, despite that it will still do a lot of damage vs 10 FR. Still, if you can convince fire mages to use this it will do work and force a lot more FR investment than usual for thugs.

- Earth gets significant protection and strength buffs, water gets buffs to quickness/liquid body (situational), air gets mistform, precision, and mass flight. Fire gets...resistances like the other schools and flaming arrows. That's it. No other troop buffs. No thematic attack buffs (only water can buff attack skill :D), nothing for melee whatsoever.

- Fire debuffs are limited. Blindness is single target and only 20 range, so hard to use in significant numbers since it's MR negates. If rage acted like the description (causing enemy troops to attack whatever is nearest consistently) it would be an impressive spell...but nope. Just inflicts the stupid trait for the battle, more or less. Prison of fire is okay, but it's inferior to earth meld, numbness in cold, and mostly functions as one of many holding spells. Though comically it still outperforms many other fire spells as a damage spell because it's 3 AN. This is not good damage, its main purpose is to break up formations and tie up junk like elephants.

Fire is way better at clearing skeletons than air, and fire elementals actually beat air elementals in a direct fight (air elementals beat water, and tends to beat fire despite ethereal due to FR 15). Another thing to note about fire is that its best 2 spells for early-mid game direct damage (fire cloud, incinerate) are 30 range, so if you take far caster and can find a way to hit opposing mage lines using phoenix power (while something else blesses) they'll need to work harder than simply relying on FR bless.

Air elementals are oppressive, but expensive to use as a primary tool. Shock damage is quite good, but even just SR 5 blocks most of the AoE problems, and if you use storm it hurts precision enough that said AoE is a big component of the utility. Wrathful skies is quite oppressive, but takes heavy investment to avoid damaging even your own stuff and looks silly against things like corpse constructs, or SR 5 vine ogres/other high-ish hp stuff with regen. SR 5 + will of fates also lowers its impact a lot, more than FR 5 + will of fates screws firestorm, (though both spells are pretty irrelevant with will of fates + resists up).

[thedumbbunny]

I would say: earth has a few good but rarely game defining early buffs. air shield will change the way you play. legions of steel+earthpower+legions of steel make you better at what you were doing but dont have the same punch in most cases as arrow fend. air spells just invalidate something each. human sized troops? tstrike makes them stunned. no magic weapons? air elementals disrupt and kill enough stuff you will never be able to trade efficiently.

for the comments about astral death blood etc they are supposed to be better spells later. earth and nature are imo strong at early research and strong at very late research for different reasons. earth has good battlefield spells like the army ofs and weapons of sharpness is a hugely powerful buff.

i was thinking if you took air elementals to size 5 instead of 6 they would probably be in line with fire and earth elementals but unsure. earth would do more damage while it was size 6 and have an additional size form to go through. air would get whittled down faster since it was closer to the size 2 where it stops being super powerful but it still has a massive combat speed meaning it does the disruption and a lot of damage via the trampling so still worth spending a gem on. smaller air elementals should be left alone at size 3. tstrike i honestly think is fine its just having everything relatively cheap is opressive at conj 5 evo 5 you have everything you need for an air nation whatever the other paths are. storm+ a couple air elementas+lots of tstrike/lightning bolt. I think that the big spells should be pushed up 1 research level. namely storm perhaps with a rainstorm that does some things like - precision allows storm power but doesnt stop fliers and buff tstrike/lightning bolt/wrathful skies? mistform i think is fine. arrow fend should probably be a 50% reduction. 80% is like making an archer cost 50 gold with 1 gem per battle. 50% would be 20 gold.

[MC]

I feel like water is highly underrated. The spammable nature of their spells, the ease of boosting, and general abundance of natural high water paths makes them fairly absurd in longer fights. Roll some w4 mages of the deep, give em boosters, and watch your enemy's armies get obliterated.

As for air I think it's powerful but also fine the way it is. It's strong, but if someone's going air then they're going air. Its not really something you can just decide, "hmm yeah I feel like working some air into my gameplan" on a whim outside of a few nations where the ability to do that is part of their power. If it was easier to mass tsrikers or for random nations to whip out arrowfend I'd agree, but as long as you can generally know who can/can't do that and potentially move on them before they come online I think it's fine.

[TheMeInTeam]

You can't easily work in air evo spammers (unless you get a lucky throne/site), but it's pretty common to pick up faerie queens or pretenders to cast fog warriors and/or mass flight eventually, if the game goes on long enough. Sometimes you get a cloud mage that can hold a crystal matrix too. Storm + elementals are more out of reach, but fog warriors and mass flight are both potentially game changing spells so it's worth breaking into air at least a bit.

[MC]

I mean yeah but thats either something you've planned on from pretender creation or going deep into a tree. Not saying you CANT break into air but that doing so is a pretty significant investment compared to breaking into most other elements and a lot of the choicest goodies are still probably out of reach unless you go hard. IMO the balance of being able to tech some air into strategies without easily being able to do everything even a light air nation can do naturally is pretty good ATM.

[TheMeInTeam]

Yeah, to be clear I'm not convinced air is "overtuned", many people have played against and soundly beaten air nations w/o having it themselves in MP, sometimes even 1v1. Air has some really nice tools, and since it's hard to break into it I always like it when it's available nationally...but while it's harder to counter storm + elemental + shock evo + fog warrior...air has less to fall back on if those things are countered.

In contrast, if someone counters cold (to prevent direct damage/fatigue plays), water has multiple avenues whereby it allows troops (national or summons) to run up and smack enemy troops with a ton of damage, MR check damage, MR check kill/cripple, and both forge items and spells that do no-check damage to demons/undead. It even gets a spell that just does 18 slash in a respectable area as it scales up, if for some reason you're still struggling to mulch chaff.

Though similar to air, for nations that lack any national water mages at all some of these tools are out of reach in practical games. You can pretty much always make a demonbane with some W1 random, but if you're a nation w/o water it's expensive to summon sea kings, almost twice the cost of a flame spirit...and kokythiads need a crosspath/are still 40gems (can be nice though). So while you can do some buffing, make some anti-thug elemental setups, spam quickening a few times etc with summoned water you're probably not going to forge a bunch of boosters and drop massed cleansing water/ice strike/liquify/30 water elementals from living water (via a few communion casts) setups as a non-water nation.

[MC]

Oh yeah agreed. Water is more accessible than something like air but a lot of its big power plays require investment as well. If you're already a nation that goes deep into construction and alteration then just getting w1 indies can suddenly give you access to eles via bottles of living water and some really good buffs (including quickening if you're REALLY deep into alt) thanks to rings of water only requiring w1, but unless you plan for it/have natural access to w2 base mages you probably aren't gonna be able to start going crazy with everything the element can offer.

[Legowarrior]

Originally posted by TheMeInTeam:

Yeah, to be clear I'm not convinced air is "overtuned", many people have played against and soundly beaten air nations w/o having it themselves in MP, sometimes even 1v1. Air has some really nice tools, and since it's hard to break into it I always like it when it's available nationally...but while it's harder to counter storm + elemental + shock evo + fog warrior...air has less to fall back on if those things are countered.

In contrast, if someone counters cold (to prevent direct damage/fatigue plays), water has multiple avenues whereby it allows troops (national or summons) to run up and smack enemy troops with a ton of damage, MR check damage, MR check kill/cripple, and both forge items and spells that do no-check damage to demons/undead. It even gets a spell that just does 18 slash in a respectable area as it scales up, if for some reason you're still struggling to mulch chaff.

Though similar to air, for nations that lack any national water mages at all some of these tools are out of reach in practical games. You can pretty much always make a demonbane with some W1 random, but if you're a nation w/o water it's expensive to summon sea kings, almost twice the cost of a flame spirit...and kokythiads need a crosspath/are still 40gems (can be nice though). So while you can do some buffing, make some anti-thug elemental setups, spam quickening a few times etc with summoned water you're probably not going to forge a bunch of boosters and drop massed cleansing water/ice strike/liquify/30 water elementals from living water (via a few communion casts) setups as a non-water nation.

You compared it to Fire spirits, but Fire Sucks, and no one cares.

Water at least has summons. And all you need is Water 2 to get up to Water 5 with a Sea King and the easy to forge water boosters. It's a cinch.

You can't do anything like that with Air. You need Air 4 or nature 3 to do anything with Air at all. Even a Faerie Queen still tops you out at Air 3 at the most without 50 gems for an elemental Staff.

In battle, you might be able to get Fog Warriors by putting up Storm first with a Faerie Queen.

That's probably a good thing. Could you imagine how OP air would be if you an anything like Sea Kings, Flame Spirits, Wraithlords, Liches, Vampire Lords, the whole set of Demons that exist, or even the Spectre, Lamia Queen or Mound Fiend, all with items that could actually be forged?

Imagine, a Flame Spirit with a Flaming Skull, but instead it was Air magic?

Of a Mound Fiend with a Skull Staff but instead it was all Air magic?

Or a Vampire Lord with the Dagger, bet instead of Blood, it had Air?

I would hate to imagine if you could get Air 5 as easily as you could get Water 5.

[TheMeInTeam]

Faerie queen can cast storm --> storm power --> fog warriors, yeah. It's a little slow, but even w/o reinvig gear your base fatigue recovery will put you back under 100 very fast after storm, and storm power costs almost no fatigue at A3. They have no trouble casting mass flight at all, if you want that instead, or any of the other normal battlefield buffs/resistance (arrow fend, SR etc).

And yeah man, it's totally trivial to come up with 75 water gems with non-national water to have one mage at W5 and another at W2 :p.

How OP would air be with a 55 gem air summon? About the same as now, because air doesn't have the boosters and anybody with air gems probably would rather win several large battles with an unreasonable quantity of elementals. If you gave air all the things other schools have without the limitations of other schools, then yeah air would be stronger/OP. But air does not have all those things, lol. Water would be OP if you handed it magic phase/research boosters/etc without helping other paths too :D.

"Fire sucks" is an interesting position. I wouldn't want it as my only spell path, but it's threatening throughout the game to a majority of nations.

[Legowarrior]

Originally posted by TheMeInTeam:

Faerie queen can cast storm --> storm power --> fog warriors, yeah. It's a little slow, but even w/o reinvig gear your base fatigue recovery will put you back under 100 very fast after storm, and storm power costs almost no fatigue at A3. They have no trouble casting mass flight at all, if you want that instead, or any of the other normal battlefield buffs/resistance (arrow fend, SR etc).

And yeah man, it's totally trivial to come up with 75 water gems with non-national water to have one mage at W5 and another at W2 :p.

How OP would air be with a 55 gem air summon? About the same as now, because air doesn't have the boosters and anybody with air gems probably would rather win several large battles with an unreasonable quantity of elementals. If you gave air all the things other schools have without the limitations of other schools, then yeah air would be stronger/OP. But air does not have all those things, lol. Water would be OP if you handed it magic phase/research boosters/etc without helping other paths too :D.

"Fire sucks" is an interesting position. I wouldn't want it as my only spell path, but it's threatening throughout the game to a majority of nations.

75 water gems is actually not that hard to get, if you don't have a good way to spend it.

In my last game, as Patala, I had about 75 air gems by turn 40, just by site searching with a Merc mage. I would have love an Air Troll with an army of trolls to summon.

When you don't have a good way to spend gems, it really is easy to accumulate them.

Thankful, Astral Simmons helped got me the Air I needed to wreck my opponent with ease.

But the point stands. The only reason Air isn't OP is because you can't break into. It might as well not exist for over half the nations.

As I said, it would be a different story if you get to Air 4 as easily as you can with Fire 4, or Death 4 or any other spell. Before Alteration 9, it is the ultimate Battlefield Path just because of Arrow Fend, Fog Warriors and Storm.

[TheMeInTeam]

That point is silly, however. Any path would be "OP" if the game removed its designed restrictions. "If it is easier to break into and boost air" is the same thing as saying "if death had excellent elementals and an early magic phase attack" or "if fire had an attack +4 buff and were changed to AN".

Of course there are hypothetical things that make any magic path OP. But unless I'm mistaken, the discussion here is about the paths as they stand now (in particular, air).

[Legowarrior]

Originally posted by TheMeInTeam:

That point is silly, however. Any path would be "OP" if the game removed its designed restrictions. "If it is easier to break into and boost air" is the same thing as saying "if death had excellent elementals and an early magic phase attack" or "if fire had an attack +4 buff and were changed to AN".

Of course there are hypothetical things that make any magic path OP. But unless I'm mistaken, the discussion here is about the paths as they stand now (in particular, air).

Its not silly at all. It's arguing that the Path is incredibly powerful, so powerful that its designed to be exclusive to certain nations. Its making a set of principles for the game, and then saying, "screw it, these principles of design don't apply to Air because of reasons".

And you see these principles show up in all the other paths of the game. Playing as Pythium and want Earth? That's fine, because midway through the game, you can summon Troll Kings to bring down late game Earth magic. Heck, you might even get an Earth King.

Water, sure, splash water on your immobile pretender, or Demiliche. You'll be able to summon a Kokythiad, even if you are playing as MA Machaka, and get something out of it in the midgame.

Nature as Mekone, well, you have Troll Shaman, Lamia queens, Ivy King, Naiad, Treelords and even a Worm Mage. All can spread nature mages to battles, while your Monolith hangs tight.

Notice that trend? The one that Air Breaks?

Air is the most boring magic in the game, simple because, unlike any other magic in the game, it has zero purpose outside of a few specific nations. Its not like you can mix in Air Magic to your game plans, unless you have a national summon that can do something with it.