Magic Rebalance Needed
Wielders focusing on magic quickly outscale ones focusing on troops (later called commanders). This is the result of 4 things: units HP, essence generation, lack of magic resistance and damage dealing spells scaling. Wielder focusing od spells can anihilate one stack per turn or heavily damage several, while a commander has very little counterplay to this.
About half of the troops in this game have relatively low hp, that gets outscaled by spell damage quickly.
The other issue is the essence generation. Troops generate essence, skills generate essence,and we have ability essence burst which when leveled allows casting high level spells on enemies on turn one. Spell costs should be revised.
I might be wrong on that, one but aside from several specific wielders and I think some artifacts, we have no ability to build magic resistance, that would passively alleviate that issue.
Spells should be somehow learned by the wielders instead of being available from the very start to everyone.
Comments: 17
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19 May, '22
OzymandiasMagic seems op. With it you can clear neutrals without losing a unit. If neutrals are melee one can stack brambles(sorry i dont know correct translation of spells) and poison gas all over battlefield and just keep waiting. Rana with turtles can generate absurd amount of mana for this.
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21 May, '22
bbengerI would like to propose a solution for this. Magic seems underpowered when you don't have the higher level skills yet, but OP if you do. This should be reflected by essence cost. In order of simply replacing the Tier I with Tier II and later Tier III spells for the same cost, have different tabs in the spellbook for the different Tiers. Tier I costs less essence, Tier II more and Tier III even more. A skilled wielder needs to choose if you wants to use the cheaper Tier I or the more expensive Tier III spells.
In addition, I would limit the countless +essence buildings all over the map. Combined with higher costs, casting devastating Tier III spells becomes much less frequent, due to essence limitations. -
26 May, '22
TeutonicPersonally to me - if they want a "quick fix" and then look at magic later the skill "Essence Burst" should just be erased from the game. it is way too powerful.
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28 May, '22
UUEssence Burst is ridiculously overpowered. If we put warrior vs mage balance aside and accept that only mages are viable in PvP, in a mage vs mage situation, the one with this skill will always win. The victory becomes the matter of being lucky to get Essence Burst.
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30 May, '22
DyingstillMaybe add magic resistance/immunity to some units would solve the problem, currently theres not a single unit that will can effectively deal with magic. I mean is fine for magic to be strong but there has to be ways to deal with it, we just dont have any options to do so. Dragons might be the strongest unit on paper but we can straight kill 1 with injustice without even leveling into the skills for it, and we can only have so many of them on a wielder ( Not to mention how hard it is to actually get to dragons). Then there are casts like Chain lightning, Arcane Storm, Fireball that will annihilate low tier units. The game goes so fast that we would not have a resistance wielder prepared for that final battle, which then just becomes who gets to cast these devastating spells first wins.
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02 Jun, '22
Satur9 MergedIn my playthrough, Magic felt like the most undercooked feature in SoC. I feel there were three major problems:
i) Schools of Magic (Order/Chaos/Destruction/etc.) were too similar to each other
ii) Spell Balance was out of whack
iii) Few options for counterplay/interaction
Let me discuss these in more detail through comments below: -
03 Jun, '22
Aleksall wielders use magic, all troops have essence. it is only problem with wielders that don't start with magic, such wielders should always get offered at level 2 a choice in one of the schools of magic that are fitting for faction+wielder class. I added this here https://songsofconquest.featureupvote.com/suggestions/304910/
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20 Jun, '22
kitty MergedOf all the magic schools, I felt that the Chaos was the weakest or else it had the least identity or feel relative to the other schools especially its first two spells. Like if you were offered a level up and have to choose between skills, I end up picking Chaos the least!
For the first two spells, their weakness is related with thematic overlap: for whatever it is they do, some other spell does better. I would never pick Chaos Step when Dimension Door or Quicken exist (unless it can be buffed to also displace enemy troops so it provides utility for disruption). While Boiling Blood is straight up weaker than Insect Swarm: the DoT is inconsequential (unless it's buffed to last the entire combat), the initiative debuff matters a lot.
(Suggestion for possible replacement cont'd in comments) -
20 Jun, '22
TheBlasterPastor Admin"Magic Rework: Unique Schools and New (balanced) Spells" (suggested by Satur9 on 2022-06-02), including upvotes (2) and comments (0), was merged into this suggestion.
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20 Jun, '22
TheBlasterPastor Admin"Chaos Magic Too Weak or Thematic Overlap with Other Schools" (suggested by kitty on 2022-06-20), including upvotes (1) and comments (0), was merged into this suggestion.
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04 Jul, '22
ST Hélios MergedAs of writing this, might wielders are outclassed severely by magic wielders. Creeping is simply inefficient and slow due to the units being prone to causalities meaning that the more camps you clear the weaker you are whereas mage wielders can afford to simply clear most of the camps early on without taking losses.
This brings us to the idea that wielders should have their starting units changed to fit their archetype better and probably increase them to tier 2 for the sake of keeping up with magic
That's the easy way
The hard way and more time consuming development wise is to allow the players to create their own loadout after selecting their wielder. it would be balanced on a gold pool no matter the map *or* gold pool based on the map alike maps already feature different starting resource stockpiles
Another thing that may be worth thinking about is a modifier in % to the cost of units based on mana or to the pool depending on wielder strength/archetype -
05 Jul, '22
TheBlasterPastor Admin"Wielder loadout rebalancing and personalization" (suggested by ST Hélios on 2022-07-04), including upvotes (1) and comments (0), was merged into this suggestion.
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05 Jul, '22
Vyr MergedFaey generating huge amount of single essence (chaos) while being high initiative, cheap units creates generally unfun strategy to play against. Early encounters with arleon are always enging in getting nuked before you can even take a move.
What doesn't help is that you can do so while taking small resource cost and do suicide bombing runs on the enemy wielder.
Another problem is the sheer effectiveness at which wielders that start with them are destroying neutral blocks (PvE) while not taking any considerable losses. -
06 Jul, '22
TheBlasterPastor Admin"Faey spirits / Ragers essence generation with high initiative needs to be looked at." (suggested by Vyr on 2022-07-05), including upvotes (1) and comments (0), was merged into this suggestion.
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10 Jul, '22
TheBlasterPastor Admin"Nerf Magic" (suggested by Tomas on 2022-07-09), including upvotes (1) and comments (0), was merged into this suggestion.
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12 Jul, '22
FK9DD MergedMagic counterplay is very limited right now and making hero focused on army is auto lose.
Game need more skills and spell to counter magic for army focused wielders.
Example:
If wielder has skills guard + order magic he gets spell that makes 1-3 units immune to magic enemy or ally,so you can save your units from being damaged/debuffed/moved and you also can make enemy units unable to take buffs/debuffs/being moved.
Or something like counter spell that will cancel effect of next 1-3 spells,or will increase their cost
Locking some devastating buffs behind army skills
lock rapid fire and scale it with archery skill so to unlock rapid fire you need archery order and destruction
same with onslaught and rejuvination,lock behind melee/prepeared -
12 Jul, '22
TheBlasterPastor Admin"Magic counterplay" (suggested by FK9DD on 2022-07-12), including upvotes (1) and comments (0), was merged into this suggestion.