Zen and the art of Thugging

[DonCorazon]

Originally Posted by Baalz

The point of this guide is that if you limit yourself (as many people seem to) to thinking a thug has to have a frost brand and a vine shield and a bunch of hitpoints, you're missing a whole aspect of the game.

Where did I say you have to limit yourself to a Frost Brand and Vine Shield? Thats taking my point ad absurdem. I just said “for raiding PD it is hard to beat the humble Frost Brand”. In your original post when you tried to compare things to Brands IIRC you reference the Flame Brand which costs 7 and requires 2 paths to forge – which I agree is expensive. But a Frost Brand can be just as good and costs 3 with only one path. And I tried to point out an aspect of the Brand that might be neglected – having 50 of CR (or FR) is enough to eliminate the fatigue penalty in extreme temperature scale provinces.

Of course there are times when you may need Water gems for other things. I guess I need to caveat everything with the phrase “may not apply in all situations” in order to avoid you taking the extreme case. But I generally find W gems the least useful of gems (again there are obviously times when this may not be the case). But I was making the point of relative cost and (many times, not always) find, say Earth, in shorter supply and thus relatively worth more. I can cite all sorts of spells that require those types of gems (eg for earth, Hammers, Crumble, Earth Attack, Mechanical Men, Earth Kings...) but obviously the player must decide themself what has the least opportunity cost.

Originally Posted by Baalz

You using your pretender to forge those frost brands? They're not nearly that cheap if you are. In a very real sense 10E can be cheaper than 5W, and 10W on turn 30 can be cheaper than 5W on turn 10.

Again, of course using your pretender to forge Frost Brands is more expensive than using some non-cap only mage. I mean if you want to use that to argue 10E is cheaper than 5W because you need to use your pretender, then I can just do the same and say using your pretender to forge any item you suggest is more expensive than a W item. It is sort of ridiculous.

Again on the Vine Shield, its almost always easier to forge than the Shield of Gleaming Gold (Con 4 vs. Con 6 and only requires Nature – the easiest path to get through indies, although admittedly getting N2 might be a challenge but overall is less difficult then getting E+F if you start w/o either). And again,in talking about raiding PD/taking indies, I think the Vine Shield works much better than Awe for the reasons I cited - basically high morale PD/national troops are more common than high Str PD/national troops (again there are exceptions as I am sure you will rush to point out).

I am not trying to discourage innovation, only pointing out the Frost Brand is pretty cheap for what you get and the vine shield is often better than the Shield of Gleaming Gold. Not in all cases.