Magic system is underpowered and weirdly balanced....

[sfebtyler]

Seriously a full magic character vs a full martial character the martial will win every time. Its also kinda dumb that you magic is tied to your units. Just give me a mana pool and let me research to get new higher leveled spells. HOMM did magic WAY better....

[NecromancyBlack]

The game where the meta is getting optimal essence generation for the best spells, has weak magic?

Okay.

[Rogarth]

Nah, magic is WAY more fun and interesting than HOMM, and if anything using magic in strategic ways seems a tad overpowered.

[lyravega]

Underpowered? I find it unbalanced to be honest.

Skill issue. Literally.

[Stepfan]

I also believe magic is under powered but only if enemy has magic resistance. A wielder like Everything is overpowered with natural magic resistance and pretty much all magic classes +insane essence generation per round. He can Armageddon twice in a round or any combo you might want. So to sum it up magic can be overpowered but it takes a lot of setup. In many ways this game will be defined by it's unique magic system. Players good with tactical battles will kinda always win in this game in pvp. For campaigns check guides and tips.

[Dixon Sider]

How do I get my magic to deal damage? The best I can get is 60ish in an AoE which is like less than 1% of these units HP lol. I am spamming the spell damage power ability but I cant get it to do anything.

[Shlomosuke]

Magic's the strongest in this game. I don't think you can even win on overwhelming without abusing magic. Of any kind. Even creation's good at slowing the enemy down.

Magic res is strong too, but countered by t3 destruction magic. It's very rare to face enemies with over 80% magic res and even then, those are pretty easy to defeat using the right combinations.

Magic is overpowered however without it, well good luck beating enemies that can min/max by turn 25.

[Ail]

Originally posted by Dixon Sider:

How do I get my magic to deal damage? The best I can get is 60ish in an AoE which is like less than 1% of these units HP lol. I am spamming the spell damage power ability but I cant get it to do anything.

You have to pick the magic-schools on wielder-levelups and get them to Tier 3.
It also depends on individual wielders how frequently you will be offered magic-school-levelups.
These upgrades are super-significant as tier 2 doubles and tier 3 triples the efficiency of your spells.
Then there's also channeling which doubles spell-damage on top of that.
So with all of that your 60 damage-AoE-spell would be 360 damage.

[Ail]

My opinion on the magic system is that it's OP in the early-game but falls off later on.

I have recommended a change to essence-generation:

Make it a floating-point number and make it per unit, not per stack. Use a full stack (without stack-size-upgrades) as reference for the new value.

For example each Fist of order produces 3/20 = 0.15 essence.

A full stack would generate the same amount of essence as now but going around with 6 one-stacks that can generate the same amount of essence as a massive army would nerf it early on against neutrals.

At the same time with stack-size-improvements you could boost your essence-generation to roughly double the current amount and have more powerful magic with a bigger army.

[Cubertino]

My only problem is with offensive/damage-dealing spells as I find them somewhat underpowered. The rest is good though and gives you a lot of options for crowd control, buffs and debuffs, etc.

[Dixon Sider]

For all you magic users, what about these cultists? I can not for the life of me figure out how to use them. Do I get any benefit for having 20 cultists in a group vs just 1 when singing the cultist song?

Also, it seems like I do not get any benefit to singing more than one cultist song in a turn. Is that true?

[Jaeger]

Originally posted by Dixon Sider:

For all you magic users, what about these cultists? I can not for the life of me figure out how to use them. Do I get any benefit for having 20 cultists in a group vs just 1 when singing the cultist song?

Also, it seems like I do not get any benefit to singing more than one cultist song in a turn. Is that true?

As far as I'm aware, multiple stacks of units can...well, stack their abilities. So, yes, two groups of cultists buffing your spell damage is twice as powerful as 1 group. Even if one of the "groups" is literally just one cultist chanting.

That also goes for essence generation and such, so there's absolutely some incentive and strategy to splitting stacks.

However, keep in mind that every time the enemy kills one of your stacks, their whole army gets the momentum buff, so trying to game the system by stretching your army super thin can easily backfire.

[Dixon Sider]

My cultists are usually sitting in the back due to all their stats being so incredibly weak. Assuming my group can keep enemies from bum rushing my cultists, sitting them in back to sing is the only use I could really find for them. Even then, they add maybe 100 damage per round to my spells at best, where my archer groups are hitting for over 600 per round.

[Jinol]

Played few times with my friends and feel that it is not possible to beat mage. Magic is broken, even antimage heroes and antimage units don't help. Mage will cut your mage resistance and will destroy you with aoe spells.

[Imry von Larisch]

Lol, this is more interactive and fun magic system than stupid mana pool

[SerMaddin]

The only thing I miss from HOMM in terms of Magic is the exploration aspect of it. It was always exciting to finally find that one powerful spell that could devastate entire armies.

In Songs of Conquest you get every spell from the start, but you have to make them stronger over time by optimizing your skills and items.
I think the Essence system is a cool idea but I wish they would also add the exploration and excitement from HOMM by deepening the Magic system even more and make every school of magic stand out even further by really specialiszing on it.