[.91] Overpowered? Panca Archers and Mana Blast

There is a huge range in power outcomes of rewards for quests / spoils, which is for the most part interesting, but there are a couple of things that appear to be gamechangers and really unbalance the scenario.

The quest which give Panca archers is quite easy to handle very early on, and once you have them you can pretty much steamroll everything in the early game.

I'm not at the game right now so can't remember the name of the sword, but the one that gives you mana blast becomes the mid to late game changer. Once you have built up a good mana stockpile this becomes a one hit kill on pretty much anything even when resisted, and doesn't require a powerful caster to do it. Last night I used it to finish the Arena. Pretty much nothing else I had could toch the obsidian golems at the end, so I just had meat shields hold them off long enough to mana blast them one by one. Always resisted, always lethal

I'm sure there are others, but these are the ones I have found, with the archers in particular giving ludicrous momentum early.

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I'm not sure what sword that is, but I've found a few of the high end weapons must contain an h bomb, considering how destructive they are.

However I totally agree about the panca archers. Archers with decent bows and two shots before anyone else even gets to move, they are rediculous. One of my games, I had found two of those quests, and that made for one short game.

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DerekPaxton

Join Date 03/2003

+309

Good feedback, thank you. The level prereq on the Sword of the Sovereign has been increased and the Panca Archers will be slowed a little bit and go form a group of 5 to 3.

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With the mana blast, could I recommend that the mana cost scales with your mana pool? As it stands, no matter how late you get it, once you do you can pick off any enemy rapidly. At a cost of 30, when the mana pool is in the thousands each strike will be essentially as powerful as the previous.

From the description I gather that mana blast is meant to be a release of lots of stored up mana. The cost for that huge burst of damage should be a big drop in mana, such that it is a non-sustainable spell.

Currently the cost is 30 mana, which if your stockpile is 2000 means you can dish out close to 200 points of damage (save for half) every 2 actions, and recover it in very few turns in the late game. If instead the cost was mana/20 or mana/15 it would still allow for some massive strikes on key enemies, but appreciably decrease your stockpile and prevent you from using it too frequently.

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How about letting it do 10% of total mana in damage, but at a cost of 10% total mana?

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Weapons that scale can really break the game. I found a Shrike Shield that does 12 damage each time you get hit. Loaded up my sovereign with defense, and let enemies hit her to (their) death. I was very surprised to find that the effect either scales with spellpower or shards too because endgame it was doing 55 damage. I beat the quest ending guy with that even though my weapon could barely dent him (who needs weapons).

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I had thought this too regarding the sov sword mana blast. My thoughts was to have it have a casting time of 4 turns and cost a huge amount. i.e. 400 mana or maybe 33% of your mana pool... and perhaps if the target resists it it does nothing or only 10% damage...

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Quoting ccgerm,

reply 5

I quite like very powerful items - but think they should be rarer. Or perhaps craftable instead, at high cost / level / research level.

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In my recent game I got my hands on a berserker broadsword fairly early. It only has a 12 attack but it has the maul ability. This lets you attack over and over at a reduced accuracy until you miss. So my sovereign would only do about 10-15 damage with this sword but because my accuracy was quite high she would often get 5-8 shots i before missing (sometimes more). So each attack would dole out 50 to 100+ damage every round. This let me just maul to death pretty much anything i ran into other than some very high level creatures. I was still using it when other heroes had upgraded to doom maul's or better because the total damage I could deal out was still higher than I could with other weapons with much higher attack ratings. That weapon should likely be scaled back a bit too fro balance reasons even though I did enjoy hacking my enemies with it.

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