Mage Thugs vs Meat Thugs

[K]

So I've been playing around with various thug and SC combos, and I was wondering what people like to use.

Lanka's Raksharaja's have Air magic, so I've been tossing them into battle with Air Shield, Mirror Image, Mistform, and a Frost Brand with Reinvig equipment and that seems to work well, but I'd be curious to see what other people use.

Are mage thugs so much better than meat thugs like Banelords to be worth the added cost and loss of their spellcasting?

[Folket]

I find when facing enemy thugs I prefer to attack before any buffs to kill your opponent first.

[DrPraetorious]

I agree with folket to an extent - I think that 1 or 2 buffs (particularly quickness) are powerful enough to justify spending some time buffing yourself.

This means that I like thugs who have 1 or 2 points of a path with powerful and useful buffs - pretty well anything except death, although with a lot of death you can put up a soul vortex.

It doesn't really matter which path the thug has since I can give him the other buffs through items.

[Humakty]

Mage thugs are much better fighting big armies. In SP I empower and give bonus objects to my mages so as to reach 6/7/8/9, levels that allow overkill spells, especially in F/A. I often find that summoning/outfitting some meat thugs is too much for my gem economy.(in addition to mage thugs)

[Baalz]

In a similar vein, it can be worthwhile to add no magic paths your pretender. If you've got a Kraken, or Wyrm, or really anything useful without a bunch of expensive equipment, leaving them "bare" of magic paths means its no tragedy if they die. If you're playing a race with powerful priests you effectively make them immortal once you've got several priests. You can compensate for their lack of self buffing by having other mages buff them as appropriate with body ethereal, luck, quickness, iron warriors, etc. 'course, that works for non pretender meat thugs to...

[K]

I've heard that a Phoenix Pyre combined with Soul Vortex just takes armies.

Anyone have experience with that?

[DrPraetorious]

I tried that combo with a dai oni a couple of times.

It'll wipe out entire armies of chaff, but you tend to get a lot of afflictions, and there are easier ways to get the same effect.

Against really serious opposition, you die faster than you recover fatigue via the soul vortex, or you don't die at all because you're that bad ***.

[FAJ]

Blood Vengence + pheonix pyre + Reinvigorating equip.

If you can get there .

[Aethyr]

FAJ said:
Blood Vengence + pheonix pyre + Reinvigorating equip.

If you can get there .

Well, after just getting my head handed to me by a few of FAJ's SC's I have to agree with him.

[Shovah32]

You really have to love tartarians with great picks.
If you can get a D3F2 tartarian with either A2 or S2(+skullcap) then you can have a raiding soul vortex/phoenix pyre which, to a certain extent, gets rid of the problem DrP mentioned(being unkillable to being killed too much) because not every enemy force will be 'really serious opposition', atleast to your phoenix pyre guy, but sometimes an unexpected problem will come up and he will die - and then explode and reappear elsewhere on the battlefield.

He will stick get a load of afflictions if he does die, but the phoenix pyre is often more life insurance than anything else.