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| Thread: Magic heroes weaker than might? |  This thread is pages long: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 · «PREV |
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Sal
Famous Hero
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posted August 03, 2014 03:09 PM |
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If you remove wells, it will have very little impact, as there is the poor's town portal, so resting one day in any town is just a detail.
The problem is that there are bonus locations and artefacts giving way too much power and knowledge, and this is the main reason the maps being played in tournaments use only might heroes: they can easily become versatile mages as well, using ridiculous buffs. Crag Hack with 25 spell power is something you see often in MP or single games.
I am very skeptical about an universal re-balance as it would need a) people agreeing on what needs to change and this isn't the case, b) an enthusiast programmer available to do the job c) hundreds of testers but we know they won't.
Instead of such hazardous work, IMO a much more useful modifications can be added to the external details, but not core. Secondary skills could be redone and be progressively activated upon level up.
I mean: today you hire a dumb barb, visit a hut, get earth, pick two chests and hop! you can slow hundred of archangels with your level 3 Rambo and the right unit. Totally weird.
What would be more realistic is to have power of spells depending on your level, a hero >10 level could slow by -2 speed, between 10 and 20 by -4 speed and so on. So you don't rely on the chance of finding or receiving the right skill only, but also on your progression. The same way armorer and offense work. A mage level 40 could slow a might hero army (or neutrals) by -8, so then we can discuss about might or magic!
Other secondary crap skills could work the same way. A guy with scouting expert could unlock interesting features after level 10: locate at each start of the turn the enemy Heroes.
A guy with learning could unlock the ability to teach skills he has at level 10.
A guy with sorcery + level 10/20 could launch map adventure spells which reduce the movement of the enemies, place shroud around, finds what spells will be offered in a guild and so on.
Probably no more a pure Heroes 3, but with all the top games around, if no diversity it will fail.
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JollyJoker
Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
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posted August 03, 2014 04:08 PM |
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Just to point that detail out:
Sal said:
If you remove wells, it will have very little impact, as there is the poor's town portal, so resting one day in any town is just a detail.
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It would also serve Magic heroes well, if the Town's guild would only replenish something like 10 points per level or so.
I'm also not very impressed about "Crag Hack having spell power 25". That means, for example, Malekith might have Attack 25 as well.
The main thing is to make magic more complex to work than just getting a 1st level spell and a magic school skill. There should be a lot more important magic skill, the knowledge of it would give magic heroes better casting abilities than a Might hero.
However, I think this is largely theory anyway.
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Maurice
Hero of Order
Part of the furniture
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posted August 04, 2014 10:21 AM |
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Edited by Maurice at 10:22, 04 Aug 2014.
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Sal said:
I mean: today you hire a dumb barb, visit a hut, get earth, pick two chests and hop! you can slow hundred of archangels with your level 3 Rambo and the right unit. Totally weird.
The game makes no distinction as it is with regards to stack size of the affected units anyway. Whether you manage to slow one Archangel or a hundred, as long as they're a single stack, you can slow them all at once.
It's actually quite weird that when you have two stacks of just 1 of a single unit type you'd have to cast a given spell twice, whereas if you have one stack of a 1000 of that same type, you can affect them all with just one casting of that spell.
Leaving that oddity aside, the example you've given could be remedied already by making "Mass" spells available at two or even three levels above the single version of that spell (instead of having the Expert level turn a given spell automatically to a Mass version) and have the affecting Spell School only boost the effect. I am even willing to accept that the Mass version of a spell is automatically learned from the base version once the proper Wisdom tier has been reached.
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bloodsucker
Legendary Hero
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posted December 14, 2014 01:17 PM |
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A thing I never noticed before is how weak it is to have (Expert)Magic Schools for damage versus mass spells.
If you have Expert Earth a spell like Slow or Shield doesn't increase effect, instead turns from single to Mass so it can be more then 7 times stronger (since in this case the total is greater then the sum of his parts), on the other hand Implosion bonus will increase like this: basic +100, advanced +200, expert +300. Were they joking?
But by reading in other threads how magic schools and wisdom are offered I came to the conclusion that if no pattern like that can be found for magic heroes, one could be created. If Armourer is ALWAYS offered at level 6 and after that every 6 levels and Tactics/Logistics/Offense/Archery/Resistance are alternatively offered at level 4 and after that every 4 levels then magic heroes would be much more reliable and you could be talking about Soly with 25 of Deffense...
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Zzyrks
Tavern Dweller
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posted December 15, 2014 07:25 PM |
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Might heroes are better than magic heroes for 1 they don't have a limit in a battle like magic does. What I mean is this magic heroes have limited Spell points and might heroes Might does not need something like Spell points. 2 Might Heroes start with better skills and attack defense power and knowledge. Even though Magic Artifacts are more common than might artifacts might is still better than artifacts + might artifacts have more meaning than like knowledge +1. That's all I have to say about might heroes and magic heroes!
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looom
Adventuring Hero
Flying High
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posted December 15, 2014 08:57 PM |
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Edited by looom at 20:58, 15 Dec 2014.
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Might wins purely because it is used every turn in one round. Magic, on the other hand, can only be used once per round.
Spells like Haste and Slow, some luxury like Frenzy are what complement the might part. Rest of the magic is luxury and quite unnecessary.
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OhforfSake
Promising
Legendary Hero
Initiate
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posted December 15, 2014 09:13 PM |
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Well, if under no rules, then the magic hero can often force the battle to be only one turn.
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Living time backwards
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looom
Adventuring Hero
Flying High
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posted December 16, 2014 07:48 AM |
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I'll admit that someone with Efreeti / Black Dragons and Armageddon is quite the nuisance, but if they are training their main hero to be a Magic specialist, they are asking for trouble. There are the Inhibition Orb/Recanter's Cloak - under no rules there are also no rules against using those artifacts. Just one slot equip counters one's entire progress.
Was actually quite common to train 2 heroes for final battle back in the day. Check for artifact with tactics-fodder hero, then suicide with your Armageddon hero and clean up with main.
Still, one slot equip is all it takes to counter that.
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OhforfSake
Promising
Legendary Hero
Initiate
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posted December 16, 2014 04:51 PM |
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looom said:
I'll admit that someone with Efreeti / Black Dragons and Armageddon is quite the nuisance, but if they are training their main hero to be a Magic specialist, they are asking for trouble.
Absolutely! And most maps typically won't allow this, and indeed one item slot will easily ruin all the effort (though there really only exists 3 such items), but if the map allows for it, one could imagine e.g. warlocks used as scouts first, all at level ~10, having visited all the power increase places and got distributed all the power increase items among them.. then if one can have a larger amount of attack and flee magic heroes. However since it's no rules, it'd be more of an attempt to remove the units the opponents main have got via diplomacy, or from the cloak..
But the idea is that if you can build up a hero quick enough and there's a nice amount of +power sources, then there's no reason for only one magic hero, because unlike the might hero, they're not limited in power by unit count, but by power level and unit speed.
If enough money, in case of shackles one can in principle still re-buy the lost hero.. and in case of recanters one can attack with lightning in stead of implosion.. which of course is much less effective.
So I guess it's mainly more of a trick than a really valid tactic, but under some condition I do imagine it could work well enough.
Alternatively in a rules game, I guess one could do as you suggest, but with more than one heroes. Simply attack with a single unit, fire Armageddon and lose that hero. After all, if your main was level 22 in stead of 25 you could have several other heroes on level 10 in stead of 1..
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Living time backwards
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bloodsucker
Legendary Hero
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posted December 16, 2014 06:20 PM |
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First, sorry for reviving the thread with such a misleading post.
Might heroes are (far) better then magic heroes (point).
One of the reasons is because you are sure Crag will have the chance to learn Earth or Air (probably both with a remote chance of being forced to choose Fire instead).
Now, imagine you were sure Solmyr would recieve a choice betwen Offense, Armorer and Tactics at level 4 and after that at every 4 levels. You would also end up with an hero with Wisdom, Air, Earth, Tactics, Offense and Armorer even if the other two would tend to be not exactly the same.
Now, compare Shakti or Mephala with Soly. Even if Leadership is not so great is very usefull when at start of the game you don't have any moral artifacts.
They have the chance to evolve usefull skills while waiting for the magic school that will necessarly appear at level 4. Solmyr on the other hand starts with Wisdom, a skill that will be usefull but only much later in the game, when you build level 3 or higher mage guilds (or if you find a Pandora Box teaching spells, ok) and Sorcery (and this is along with Intelligence the best magic skill a main can have). This hero would benefict tremendously of an exception for might skills at level 4 but no, what he has instead is a precipitation of the magic school to level 3. If skill presented at level three is fire magic and you don't choose it u are increasing the probability of having to choose betwen Eagle Eye and Intelligence or Scholar and Mysticism by far since next turn will be Wisdom almost for sure (it has also an excepton to appear at every 3 levels). But if he chooses Fire, since a new magic skill will be presented at the most after two levels up, the moment he gets expert on the first magic school he is already close to full expertise. So, he has an higher chance to be forced to pick lesser magic school or crapy skill.
Even if the probabilities for all other skills to appear were equal and they aren't, he would have less chance to wait for them cause wisdom and magic schools expertise faster.
I don't want to seam paranoid but this goes right to my point in "Why are there so many bad skill speciallists?" and "Do some factions have a better set of heroes?", 3DO developers knew what they were doing and they really wanted to make might more powerfull then magic; even if any one of us can probably recall a time when he was fascinated with Solmyr's potential. They seam to have wanted to make us change gameplay along the timeline. They were betting on replayability...
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BlackMagik
Adventuring Hero
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posted December 17, 2014 01:42 AM |
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It's obvious might wins vs magik in this game...multi-player results bear this out. The only way a magik user triumphs is if might is played very poorly, the magik player gets extremely lucky, or both.
Many of the opinions posted in this thread attempt to pose solutions by making magik users more like melee types in order to equalize battle results.
My personal opinion is that this takes hero development into the "cookie-cutter" realm...one hero will perform much the same as any other. This makes the game boring, IMHO, and removes the personal attachment one might have for one particular hero or another.
There are two things that could be done, one minor and one game-changing, that could restore some of the age-old excitement/debate between might vs magik.
The first is rather simple, and somewhat minor....make the number of points in the starting attributes equal. Combat already favors melee and giving melee heroes a head start only makes this worse.
The second is where the "meat-and-potatoes" of my argument lies, and I start with a question; why, oh why, did the devs completely throw out the book on traditional D&D combat? Think of any good D&D type of game from the original, to Baldurs Gate, to Neverwinter Nights, to the Elder Scrolls, etc....
Most of you have probably played some or all of those and a whole slew of others. I will use Baldurs Gate as an example because I still play it and it's my favorite.
One word in BG raises the pulse very quickly: LICH
Those undead, spell-casting, carousels of doom.
If one looks at why they are so tough to beat, you come to the crux of the matter...very high spell resistance, and the ability to cast high level offensive spells.
HOMM3 makes absolutely no distinction between a barbarian who has managed to learn a few useful spells, and a mage who has spent their entire career mastering them...and that is what leads magik users to be so much more weak than melee types.
But in the D&D system, the level of the caster vs what (or whom) he/she is casting a spell upon matters greatly, and what makes a spell caster so deadly in combat.
[I will split this into two posts]
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BlackMagik
Adventuring Hero
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posted December 17, 2014 01:57 AM |
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[Part II]
As an example, lets take the level 3 Mage spell...Dispel Magic.
The base chance of successfully dispelling is 50%. For every level that the caster of the Dispel Magic is above the original caster, their chance of success increases by 5%. For every level that the caster of Dispel Magic is below the original caster, their chance of success decreases by 10%. However, despite the difference in levels, there is always at least a 5% chance of success or failure. Thus, if a caster is 10 levels higher than the magic they are trying to dispel, there is only a 5% chance of failure. Similarly if the caster is 4 levels lower
than the magic they are trying to dispel, there is only a 10% chance of success. Intuitively, this spell is almost useless if the target is 5 or more levels higher than the caster. [from D&D rules]
In other words, if Daremyth and Craig Hack meet in battle, and Daremyth gets to move first and casts some sort of mass debilitating spell on our favorite barbarian, there should be very little chance of the Hackster dispelling that if the disparity in spell levels is large.
Furthermore, if CH had no spell resistance, Daremyth's spell works virtually every time. Failure to resist further spells can quickly have a snowball effect and the Hackster is, in all likelyhood, doomed.
Another aspect of D&D rules (and so basic as to be almost criminal that it was ignored) is that mage specialists can learn high-level spells that others cannot...only logical, yes?
Give spell casting specialists spells that a Knight or Barbarian can never, ever learn...and...well...you get the idea
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bloodsucker
Legendary Hero
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posted December 17, 2014 02:54 AM |
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@BlackMagik
I never played D&D but there is still one more thing: Crag will easly learn Resistance skill, Daremyth can only get it from scholar or custom witch hut.
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BlackMagik
Adventuring Hero
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posted December 17, 2014 03:45 AM |
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If you are referring to the original D&D, it was loads of fun. Moving your hand-painted pewter figurine around a custom-made dungeon board, with a Dungeon Master presiding over the game, and having a collection of various-sided dice to roll game results, was priceless. Spent many all-nighters playing the newest dungeon with friends...
But surely you've played games like Baldurs Gate, Icewind Dale, Neverwinter Nights, etc., that all use D&D rules?
But I digress...
I don't like the "all-or-nothing" application of Magic Resistance in HOMM3. It should be % based like Offense or Armorer. In the above example, the Hackster would have a % to resist any spell, and the greater the difference between Daremyth's spell-casting ability and his spell resistance, the less likely he is to resist a spell. (and spellcasting ability could perhaps be figured as a combination of Wisdom/Sorcery/Intelligence?!? would take the Sorcery skill from the realm of near useless to battle winner status....)
Once a spell takes hold, a large difference between the casters level and the target, makes dispelling that spell very unlikely (but not impossible, of course).
Whether Daremyth has Spell Resistance is irrelevant except for counter spells. With such great importance being placed on casting level and spell resistance in this method, I can't see it as a terrible problem to make Spell Resistance one of those skills that gets offered to every hero every preset number of levels, much like Wisdom.
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BlackMagik
Adventuring Hero
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posted December 17, 2014 08:46 AM |
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Here's a possible arrangement:
Make the Sorcery progression 5/10/20 just like Resistance (making its max lvl 5% less than Resistance was just another way to nerf magik users )
Make the spell lvl a multiplier: Basic = 1x; Advanced = 2x; Expert = 3x
At maximum effect (for a non-specialist) that equates to 60% (3 X 20%)
Now a comparison is done between Spell Power and Spell Resistance. If the difference (spell vs resistance) is <1, than the chance to resist the spell is 100%. From 1 to 1.75 it's 75%; from 1.75 to 2.5 it's 50%; from 2.5 to 3.25 its 25%; anything 3.25+ it's 0%.
When calculating the chance to dispel, use the casters proficiency at Dispel Magic as a % and Wisdom level as a multiplier, and compare to the enemy casters number (much the same as the D&D rule I quoted).
The greater the difference, the less likely the spell can be dispelled.
Wisdom and Sorcery become a more powerful combo (along with the importance of learning spells at expert level); Resistance (both innate and through artifacts) becomes more important, and Resistance specialists (with their level multipliers) become an essential member of your heroes team as mage fighters, and conversely, Sorcery specialists can become Barbarian/Knight killers with their sorcery multipliers.
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kicferk
Known Hero
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posted December 17, 2014 09:13 AM |
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Well, you forget that there are spells that come in pairs. Haste/slow is an example. Even in BG if you cast haste after you have been slowed you counter slow's effect, without caring about level of opposing magic user.
The other thing you did not mention is one of the most important reasons why magic mains are not reliable. Recanter's cloak and Orb of inhibition. They are equivalents of BG2 "protection from magic" scroll used on a magic user. No way to resist, no way to counter, no way to cast spells.
And finally, there is plenty of ways to get partial resistance to magic(both in H3 and in BG) The difference is, that in H3 getting protection from might is impossible. Even in BG2 I found slaughtering everything with warriors and one mage for support much more reliable than using just mages, especially while playing Tactics/ Ascension/ Improved Anvil.
So to sum up: your solution may have some sense in it, but it is far too little to make a difference. I rarely see dispell or cure used in a battle at all, let alone on expert level.
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BlackMagik
Adventuring Hero
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posted December 17, 2014 02:37 PM |
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Quote:
Even in BG if you cast haste after you have been slowed you counter slow's effect, without caring about level of opposing magic user.
And because this is HOMM3 and not BG, I would propose a deviation from D&D rules by making the success of such counters dependent on the casters level. Baldurs Gate is very well balanced in that an entire party of fighters or one of mages will find it extremely difficult to survive. HOMM3 has no such balance.
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The other thing you did not mention is one of the most important reasons why magic mains are not reliable. Recanter's cloak and Orb of inhibition.
If it were up to me, the Orb of Inhibition would be removed from the game. There is already a game imbalance in favor of melee. The Orb only exacerbates that. The Recanters Cloak is acceptable...spellcasting is restricted, not prohibited.
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Even in BG2 I found slaughtering everything with warriors and one mage for support much more reliable than using just mages
And in BG, a straight-up warrior can't cast spells at all, otherwise you wouldn't need the mage
One other part of my solution you neglected to mention is something you would be familiar with from playing BG...even if you have a Fighter/Mage multi-class, you will never reach the spellcasting levels required to cast high level spells. Yet another reason, no matter how accomplished your fighters are, they would never get very far without the support of a specialist mages spell repertoire
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your solution may have some sense in it, but it is far too little to make a difference.
My solution would make a difference if the ability to counterspell even for something as simple as haste/slow were tied to spellcasting level, and the most advanced spells restricted to specialist mages.
The alternative is crafting HOMM3 spellcasters into melee experts in an attempt to compete with Knights/Barbarians etc. And even then they can't compete because level progression still favors melee while melee types still have equal footing in the spellcasting department. I would rather keep each class distinct by retaining their unique styles.
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