Communion - items of master affect slaves ?

[Yrkoon]

Hi,

I am in a EA game with Kaisala and I noticed something ... interesting and highly exploitable during a communion.

I have a double bless strategy F9A10, and I was using a sacred national summon to bless my troops. I wanted to cast a Holy 3 spell (divine bless) and my national summon was Holy 2, so I thought : communion.

So here is my national summon, equipped with a copper plate (the armor: resist lightning 100%, charge body) and a cristal matrix (for the communion). And his slaves, shamen, with slave matrix. I scripted the summon to cast divine bless on turn 1, then cast spells.

As soon as the battle starts, before anything happens, I click on the shamen just to see and - surprise - they have "charge body" on them. But not resist lightning 100%.

It appears that some of the effects of the magic items carried by the communion master also affect the communion slaves. Some, but not all ... weird.

Did anyone else notice that too ? Is it only with crystal matrices or with the bona fide "communion" spell too ?

Anyway, I think this is highly exploitable : get a few masters with buffs from items, a few slaves, and as soon as the battle starts you have an army of buffed slaves. It's dead easy to script the slaves to, say, attack closest : they get the buffs without spells being cast, so without any fatigue.

It doesn't seem to work with slaves that are not spellcasters : I put a slave matrix on a bandar commander and he didn't have charge body

[Edi]

Slaves must have magic or communion does not work.

[Shovah32]

Do buffs cast by the master before the communion affect the slaves? If not the effect mentioned would only work with matrices.

[Baalz]

Wow, that's kinda weird. Sounds like things that effectively autocast a spell at combat start would also work (charcoal shield, rhime haubrik, crystal shield, ?boots of quickness?, amulet of missile protection....). Hmmm, wonder about that artifact that gives blood vengance...>

[Yrkoon]

That is good, so most thugs can not be buffed that way. The bug is still exploitable with spellcasters though.

In the case of Kaisala, there are some pretty nasty 4 armed summonable thugs that are spellcasters too, and I can see how they would become very very deadly with just a slave matrix.

[Shovah32]

The 4 armed guys, imo, are better with self buffing as its very easy for a fragile mage to die(although a second of the summonable thugs/SCs doing the buffing and then joining the fight may work well)

[atul]

I think all the items that mimic some spell effect function by actually casting the spell on their holder immediately at the beginning of the combat. That's why for example the wielder of Crystal Shield can't cast Power of the Spheres in combat (it's already cast on him).

And personal spells with range of 0 are transferred to communion slaves, just witness the fun of the master casting Phoenix Pyre and retreating.

[Wish]

if i recall, in dom 2, slaves did get the self-buffs that the master cast.

I imagine it is still the same in dom 3.

the charge body is mimicking a self-buff spell, and the resist lightning is probably mimicking a buff others spell.

a quick test with pythium reveals this to still be the case.

[Velusion]

Edi said:
Slaves must have magic or communion does not work.

What about the Pyhtium communion guys? They don't have magic and it obviously works...

[Shovah32]

Pythiums communicants are an exception.