Re: Death vs. Fire bless
 

But remember, the armor has an opposed DRN. Fire weapons do (6+DRN)-(Prot/2+DRN), before accounting for fire resistance/vuln. Thus they are weak against high-Prot units.

-Max

Re: Death vs. Fire bless
 

excellent!

any thoughts on where (or if) a high enough strength might make a weak blood bless potentially more useful than a strong fire bless? Consider the extremely high protections and usage of fire resistance common with SCs. I think the challenge in this is to find a unit with high enough attack to remain powerful _enough_ against normal squads of units when using a blood bless (relative to a fire bless), but that would benefit more from higher strength against thugs and SCs.

Re: Death vs. Fire bless
 

Yeah, the blood bless is really good at two points.

1 - when your units strength + weapon damage = (more or less) the defenders protection, and both are fairly high. Say, a jaguar warriors with an obsidian sword against Ulmish infantry. +4 damage is really significant when you're hitting for 0-2 damage. A fire bless on the other hand is just doing 6 + DRN damage against 10 + DRN protection, so it doesn't land that often.

2 - when the extra damage puts you over the point of being likely to kill the defender in one hit. Say, a Lanka Palashanka vs heavy infantry with a 12 protection buffed with legions of steel to 16. Again, a fire bless is not going to do too much, but the blood blessing makes it fairly likely that the main hit will do 26+ damage, outright killing the human infantry.

Re: Death vs. Fire bless
 

Related to #1: another time Strength boost is useful is when some of the Prot is coming from shields. Bashanites have attack 11 and do 26 damage, which means against Ambibate Noble Warriors with Defense 15 (counting shield) they hit only rarely. Shield hits vs. Prot 27 also usually don't do much, but if the Bashanites have +4 Strength for SoG the shield hits do 3-4 damage apiece, and the "real" hits one-shot them.

-Max