Air 9 bless: useless?

[Saber Cherry]

I mentioned earlier that I thought "Unholy Thirst" would be a good Blood blessing, giving blessed units a life-draining "Bite" attack. But "Hemorrhagic Butchery", the art of striking an opponent to cause profuse bleeding, would be fun, too. It would be something like, "Any opponent wounded by a blood-9 blessed unit has a 25% chance of being affected by 'bleed', meaning they lose 1HP per combat turn until death."

[GavinWheeler]

But Air magic in general is certainly worthwhile - you get great direct damage spells like orb lightning as well as the precision to ensure they hit what you want them to hit. i.e. the 'indirect' effect of the school (improved precision) has a nice synergy with many of the spells of the school.

So it makes some sense that the blessing effect of the school is less powerful than those of some other shools. You don't want one school to have so many advantages as to overpower any other school, and balancing these sorts of issues is what the dynamic duo seem to do best.

[archaeolept]

'bleed'

that's a supercombatant killer, though, as I've experienced to my horror...

but Blood does most definitely need a new level 9 blessing. Why not blood vengeance -2 or some such? (actually, I'm not quite sure how blood vengeance works, or what would be an appropriately balanced modifier).

[Kristoffer O]

Blood vengeance once was the 9-blood-blessing, but it was removed due to severe balance issues.

[archaeolept]

so, got any better suggestions...

As long as the additional Life Drain attack had a certain # of penalties to Att/Damage then Life Drain would be fine.

[PvK]

I'm with Gavin. Blessings don't have to be balanced in parallel, and trying to do so would make things more bland. High blood magic has its own rewards besides the level-9 bless effect. For example, Blood spells tend to require a ton of fatigue, so dividing it down with a high level (and making the effects harder to resist too) makes the pretender potentially very wicked on the battlefield.

Though, here's an idea - what if it were a chance that the killer sometimes got horror marked instead of cursed? This would fit blood magic, and be somewhat more ominous.

PvK

Originally posted by GavinWheeler:
But Air magic in general is certainly worthwhile - you get great direct damage spells like orb lightning as well as the precision to ensure they hit what you want them to hit. i.e. the 'indirect' effect of the school (improved precision) has a nice synergy with many of the spells of the school.

So it makes some sense that the blessing effect of the school is less powerful than those of some other shools. You don't want one school to have so many advantages as to overpower any other school, and balancing these sorts of issues is what the dynamic duo seem to do best.

[Scott Hebert]

Well, while the suggestions are good, may I suggest that perhaps a better way to 'fix' the Blood-9 blessing might be to enhance the power of Curses? Not directly, perhaps, but indirectly.

Now, I confess that I only have the demo, and I'm not very cognizant of all of the spells in the game, but one night after reading about Undead Tug-of-Wars, I was in bed thinking of a spell that did similar things to Cursed units. Now, you could either make it a battle spell which allowed you to take control of Cursed units, or a Ritual that forced Cursed units in a Province to attack it.

Anyway, does this sound like an idea? If you really want to improve the Blood curse, you could put these spells in the Blood path. Oh, and I apologize profusely in advance if this spell or one like it already exists... :|

Bayushi Tasogare

[Peter Ebbesen]

Originally posted by Bayushi Tasogare:
Well, while the suggestions are good, may I suggest that perhaps a better way to 'fix' the Blood-9 blessing might be to enhance the power of Curses? Not directly, perhaps, but indirectly.

As curses, like horror marks, are permanent, they are already bad enough - when they hit important units. The ease with which you can curse target important units (suicide attacks by commanders with Totem Shields, casting Baleful Star at target provinces) argues against making curses worse.

[Teraswaerto]

Originally posted by GavinWheeler:
Horror marks are way more powerful than curses, I would think, so this would have to be a rare event.

Horror attacks are rare even in magic 3 dominion, so I'd say Curse is nastier. A horror mark isn't a big deal most of the time.

Maybe a good new Blood 9 blessing would be a chance (with an MR save) to receive a random affliction when attacking/hitting the blessed unit?