[Balance] Dirge of Ceresa

Every big damage spell does this, not just this one. And it totally rapes grouped units, and only stings big single units.    I had a whole army of death mages, but then I ran into an army of golems, and they told me to shove my poison magic up my ass.  I asked, how?  And then they showed me...

Another reason that I thing the mechanics of single unit vs grouped unit thing should be changed, but no one listens to Xia...

Costs a trait & is 100% useless against all elementals, inc Shrills, Igns ect.

But yea the dam/shard should be reduced a bit.

Welcome to the club xia! Nobody listens to me either! And very amusing anecdote.

I haven't seen any posts from you about army changes. Perhaps you should make one, so we actually know what you are proposing.

As far as damage from group spells is concerned, it was a major mistake to make their base damage as high as each inidividual unit of the stack.

I concur. It should be called the "Conquer City in three turns Spell". It disintegrates any defense a large city with many defenders have. Mid game, there's nothing else to do you cast it and wait and the city is yours.

I think that Corruption is the real unbalanced thing. Dirge is pretty strong yes, i can even use it to kill drakes and such with 10 shards. However the Wither spell is also really powerful. Again, if you corrupt a bunch of shards you can easily wither away most or all of the attack of enemy units. The fact that you can cast it globally before a battle ensues you don't even have to have lots of death mages to cast it. 

I really like the spells from that trait, though they are OP enough to overshadow other choices when you are using death magic. So yeah some nerfing probably needs to happen, but I don't think Dirge alone will be enough. 

Dirge just needs an additional turn of casting time.  I think that would balance it out.

Ceresa is pretty much the walking nuke glass cannon faction. 

One way to balance corruption is to buff the shard summons for elemental shards based on # of shards, but not for death shards.

 Yes I agree here 100%. To be able to convert any shard you like to death shards is the problem. You can't do that with any other shard. I have been able to take out a world boss (I think the swamp guy), with a level 12 hero by himself in three turns (or maybe four), simply by casting dirge. I had 13 or 14 death shards when I did this. Corruption should probably be removed or replaced with a spell that gives you a CHANCE to turn a shard into a death shard or have the shard destroyed. This would make casting corruption a risk  for the player since he could lose a shard entirely.

No the problem is Dirge. I rarely use corruption more then 1 or 2 times in a game and I still 1 shot entire armies with Dirge. I also use it to do pretty heavy turn by turn damage to dragons and the like. Dirge is supposed to do damage over time not kill everything on the first one. The damage per shard needs to be greatly reduced so it is not OP with Corruption, because you always get both. You can always boost the basic damage to compensate but all the spells unlocked through Death Magic need to have small per shard bonuses.

I just started a game with Ceresa, I finally got the Dirge of Ceresa spell and it is super powerful.  I even forgot about Corruption.  Now that I have done that, it is almost a one shot kill for everybody.  I annihalted the Altar Kingdom by just walking Ceresa by herself from city to city.  The Champions that I fought in the first battle, which I did have some help, were all hurt.  So the spell even killed all of them.

Now, I have started casting corruption, and it is just brutal.

I think bonuses to Dirge, and things like the Pyre Sword need to be based on combination of Shards.  For every death + fire share you get the bonus.  Not just death or fire.  Dirge could be Death and Water combination.  I also think it needs to be a higher level.  It the lay out worked just perfect and I got Ceresa up in level pretty quick.  I only had to champions and they were both Governors so I left them at home.  Ceresa is practically untouchable right now.

Resoln is a faction that needs powerful spells to stay competitive so I don't mind to uberness of Dirge but there does need to be a spell-interruption element to casting to make it less unbalanced and make archery less useless. Archers as counters to Mages makes sense to me. Perhaps even have a probability of casting level 3+ spells based on health e.g Mage has 57% health left so has a 57% of successful casting.

I agree there should be more spell interruption.  The "arrow in the face" for a mage would be a good start.  Right now, magic is just uber powerful mid to late game and makes non-magic units a bit pathetic.  Archers, as said a million times already, are also pretty useless atm.

I think they need to go back so the only units that can cast magic are the Sovereigns.  Then they can choose to Imbue another Champion is they choose.  There is no point in having units.  All the champions with spells makes everything else obsolete, and actually makes magic too powerful and little boring.

can a custom sov get this spell? and what is needed to get it.

Death Worship race trait, and enough Death Magic (maybe 3 levels ie. Death Mage?).  Anyway you can look it up in Heirgamenon.