0.12.11 Balance suggestions by DW

You are not a noob you were just part of my experiment. After a weeks analysis and 20-1 match stats I have come up with the following conclusion, Chastiment is OP. Mana cost should be 5 to prevent the above posters scenario. Its good otherwise and simply requires the opposing player to not group up units.

Actually Chastiment is pretty damn good, what I don't understand about that spell is why it doesnt hurt own units but Seal of Dellar does. Maybe making it to hurt own units will make people think very hard about using it in some situations?

Because the first thing a wolven would do is sprint all his units to your mage (which is what they still do) except now they would have a valid excuse to doing because your mage wont be able to punish him without destroying the army that is trying to shield him. Chastiment is only op when used in the manner i used where i exploit alahan discipline roll to cast chastiment 4x in a row by reaching the end of round 2 with 12 mana.

Because the first thing a wolven would do is sprint all his units to your mage (which is what they still do) except now they would have a valid excuse to doing because your mage wont be able to punish him without destroying the his army that is trying to shield him. Chastiment is only op when used in the manner i used where i exploit alahan discipline roll to cast chastiment 4x in a row.

True. Then maybe as you said just make it 5 mana, that for sure will make it harder to cast.

i Never had any problems Vs Alahan mage with RAM - as long i have more activation (its easy when enemy have 130ap unit) two units placed in charge distance from a mage attracts his attention enough to forgot about further chatisment threat.
Lion Vs Lion its even easier when Mage can be dealt with both by assaults and archers.

of course if map is reasonable - but only 2-3 setups are currently broken and many other companies can be annoying there also.

True. Then maybe as you said just make it 5 mana, that for sure will make it harder to cast.

for me mage is already to weak to threat vs serious players - its semi nice idea but +1 mana not only blocks 4 casts in a row (changes it into 3 casts that still will be devastating vs newbie or weak player) but also blocks casting a serious spell each turn... and 130ap mage without mana able only to cast one primal... is rather terrible
For me its enough that lev 1 mage is more useless than ram Priest and only lev 4-5 can try to be usefull - while Necro is great at all levels.

Valkyrie is still very good but i saw it much much less often. Even after the nerf it is still very good. Also...to all the lion players which love to use mages...do you realize favorable auspices gives you +40% casting chance? For god's sake it should be an auto include into any mage-based comp as you can take recovery and have 100%+ cast chance...more mana + nearly impossible to fail spells = super damage.

all spells mage casts have a 100%+ chance of hitting except chastiment which has 90%, with full health and NO mastery of the arcana. even with medium dmg say 28/40 most spells retain 100% chance of success or very close to it. To guarantee hits when your mage is engaged/feared/seriously inj you have 2x divine favor to guarantee hit. Why whould I waste another +60ap to get another meatshield with one more divine favor?

maybe because you can use divine favor also for other things? you do not have infinite divine favors and sometimes it is worth to be used on some other units (ranged with double shot - which is better than favorable auspices as there is only one shot affected by +10 ACC). Also not always your mage will be wounded or engaged and a 90% chance can be still risky and potentially make you lose the game or miss a big chunk of damage.

im fine with it being 4 mana but the range is the problem as it is much longer than a simple 4 hexagons. Compared to celestial scourge a mage with the AOE spell can hide and hit even without coscience without exposing itself.

ranged with double shot

yep - i can confirm that Vs half of top lion players i take one or two divines + double in first turn or even activation
and im more than hapy it they are aimed at my necros ;]

but i also like to start with offensive stance on skelly archer when i see 7 clustered enemies (without healer) in first round

i Never had any problems Vs Alahan mage with RAM - as long i have more activation (its easy when enemy have 130ap unit) two units placed in charge distance from a mage attracts his attention enough to forgot about further chatisment threat.
Lion Vs Lion its even easier when Mage can be dealt with both by assaults and archers.

I think that Alahan mage setup against Wolfen is an auto-win as Lima said and proved, also against Ram and other Lion compositions you can win easily if you do not make big mistakes (like putting your mage under the enemy archers range & field of view). Remember that you can cast without having to see the enemy and hit the enemies behind walls and that you still have about other 250AP for Lions, Sparklings and Guards among others (so just killing the mage doesn't win the match!!!). The zerg Ram army is maybe the only one that can win against it, but only if the Ram player is a good one.

I think a possible solution would be to change the casting in a way that you have to cast it ON a unit, not anywhere and that the damage range is blocked by big obstacles and reduced to half by small ones. OR that you affect also your units for half the damage.
With this it would be more balanced and still it would do considerable damage to an enemy who moved carelessy his units.

I think that Alahan mage setup against Wolfen is an auto-win as Lima said and proved,

Many setups are auto-win against Wolfens currently ;P

also against Ram and other Lion compositions you can win easily if you do not make big mistakes (like putting your mage under the enemy archers range & field of view). Remember that you can cast without having to see the enemy and hit the enemies behind walls and that you still have about other 250AP for Lions, Sparklings and Guards among others (so just killing the mage doesn't win the match!!!). The zerg Ram army is maybe the only one that can win against it, but only if the Ram player is a good one.

But i can't agree with that... only thing that enemy must have - is more units/activations - and its not so hard Vs 130ap unit.
You simply need two suicide units that can be cost efective at killing mage with their wirst activations... currently when alahan have no resonable healing - Mage can be even killed in parts in two different turns

For Alahan - Lion + Sparkling or Bowman + Lion or two Bowmans should be enough (8 hex of run and 4 + offensive makes hiding really hard )

For RAM Gargoyles + puppet block + bowman harras + scaterred swarm is also enough.

Wolfens can try lucky Crossbowman with offensive (i win once or twice Vs mages but it was only thx to mistakes and not great company composition)... but it needs luck or two crossbowmans in company.

Honestly I also think Chastiment of Light is too strong on the mage setup with Focus, like I said earlier on this thread I some times use a Human company on 250 AP that is level 5 mage (Seal/Chastiment/Focus) + 3 level 1 Swordmen + level 3 suicide Sparkling, this company is brutal it seriously destroys most other companies I have fought in 250 and that is exaclty why I stoped using it after 6 matchs, I even commented with other people in game chat how the Mage level 5 was a beast in my opinion and some people though that he was too costly and that he is the first thing to go down but as DeepBlue said part of the power the Mage has is that not many people can actually calculate Chastiment range correctly, I fought some good players on 250 AP with it and the company only lost 1 time after a total of 15 fight (and it was a blunder on my part).

Like Lima I also think that probably making it 5 mana will make it much harder to just spam-cast, reason is... something has to be done to that Talent and I rather they either increase the mana cost or lower the damage with Focus but I don't want them to touch the range, a big problem pure mages have in general is that is to easy too know exactly what they will do next and because you can see the range of his spell or in case of Seal you see the Seal effect is to easy for the enemy to just move his units away to prevent most damage from the mage. What they can do if they want to touch the range issue is to increase the blue line range helper you see when you put the mouse on top of the spell to the spell maximum area, that means the base spell range for a target+the area of the spell.

maybe because you can use divine favor also for other things? you do not have infinite divine favors and sometimes it is worth to be used on some other units (ranged with double shot - which is better than favorable auspices as there is only one shot affected by +10 ACC). Also not always your mage will be wounded or engaged and a 90% chance can be still risky and potentially make you lose the game or miss a big chunk of damage.

im fine with it being 4 mana but the range is the problem as it is much longer than a simple 4 hexagons. Compared to celestial scourge a mage with the AOE spell can hide and hit even without coscience without exposing itself.

Same argument can be made for the mage except its even stronger.

Say you have 12mana on a lvl 5 mage that is injured and archer with 2xshot but at some range. You have 1 Divine favor and a valk with fav ausp, which will get the divine favor and which gets fav ausp? Ofc the mage gets the divine favor, because the dmg output of 12mana is much greater than any 2xshot even if they both crit. So the mage needs the divine favor more than the archer because the mage rarely gets activated to cast just 1 spell, its always 2 or more.

I understand the appeal of fav ausp but on the valk its not worth it. I would replace the suicide spell on spark with it, and make the 60ap valk useful for something beside buffing fav on archers (please dont bring up that aweful heal).

Say you have 12mana on a lvl 5 mage that is injured and archer with 2xshot but at some range. You have 1 Divine favor and a valk with fav ausp, which will get the divine favor and which gets fav ausp

If you have Lev 5 Mage, Lev 2+ Valkyrie and Lev 3 bowman - than both my lion and ram companies are happy that you have almost 250+ ap in 3 units that can be torn apart by 2 Lions/Gargoyles ;P