Not really. It is very easy to get defense against elemental attacks. You can give your units items that grant a combined 75% fire or cold resistance just by researching up to Arcane Apparel. Add a Nature's Cloak to the mix and you can make your units immune to fire or cold, or even both with enough Earth Shards. The only one, that could be potentially dangerous is Pariden's Leht Staff, because items with lightning resistance are pretty rare. However, to get the staff you have to research the Warfare-tree up until Weapons of War and then the Magic-tree until Arcane Weapons. This takes a veeeery long time to do, so don't expect to see the staff anytime soon.

No matter Ash Mage costs 15 Crystals. Ash Mage does up to 24 damage to dragons from distance. Other troops require more technologies and do almost nothing against powerful monsters in early game.

This is the wrong forum for this - you should move it to FE Beta, as FE support is for bugs.

I agree with this though. I just killed an ashwake dragon with rank 1 cold staves. In fact, the arguments against how rediculous this is are rediculous themselves. Wear a cold cloak and cold ring? What if they are using fire staves? Not to mention you would have to best your opponent a great deal in research to obtain cloaks at the same time he has staves. And even if that was possible, that throws the value of resources bit out the window, because it costs -more- crystals to construct a unit with gear to defense against that damage.

Also how exactly do your spearmen kill them? Units that use staves are not restricted in gear. They could also be wearing armor. And then the leht staff that pariden gets... my god. Unless you stack dodge on all your units, it's game over. In short, there needs to be a way to defend against elemental damage. Resistance versus mastery would make sense.

I have long been thinking about this, a very sad case.

I was thinking about a defense option for magic, along with the spell resistance / Spell mastery. With the current system there is no ideal way to implement this IMO but adding 1 more stat would clog up the game.
And are you proposing that we both need to hit with accuracy, AND penetrate spell resistance? I am not against that, I am curious to your thoughts, I think there is vaguely / horribly little to do against mages, or elemental damage, when they are the problem.

Edit: Put in the important L on "Idea(L)"

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Nature's Cloak is a Earth 1 spell and provides 20% (+10% per Earth Shard) to Cold, Fire and Lightning Resistance of a single unit per casting.

Protection from Cold is available from a random tech and provides 50% Cold Resistance to all allied units during combat.

Fire Resistance is also available from a random tech and provides 50% Fire Resistance to a single unit per casting.

You killed a dragon with cold staves? And that is ridiculous? Even if we assume it is (I mean is there a range of 'acceptable' weapons you would like for dragon killing?). The solution to that isnt the dragon teching up to buy itself a cold cloak, its giving the dragon some elemental resistance. Easy.

Now for the second bit, why are spearmen fighting mages? On their own? Arbitrary unit matchups can be done for anything and dont prove a thing. Cant the spearmen charge into battle? or have a cold ring? or even do some elemental damage itself with an amulet or something. The spear is a first lvl tech v mage with full armor?

Third why is it necessary to have the ring and cloak, cant get by with just a ring?. Staff damage is already less then other weapons. Now its only acceptable if its 75 percent reduced? Is this the balance for weapons. Are spears only acceptable if there damage can be reduced 75 percent by using items that must be cheaper! then the spear itself.

Now using a stave is a very costly exercise, and we have people talking about giving them full armor, abilities, amulets and rings etc to up that. In practice I found them to be a good unit but as they should be. There ultra expensive in crystal, I could only build ONE group of mages decked out like this in half the game. Cant churn out 10 or 20 of them. Not like spearmen with a cold ring.

If your opponent has built these amazing mages then you know that killing the one or two units of his and they are gone for dozens of turns of crystal mining.

Target them with champs or spells or alpha strikes of your own stack, they cant come back like your spearmen can.

Leeroy clearly you have no idea what you are talking about. Building a staff has a crystal cost of 3, building a fire/cold ring unit has a crystal cost of 2. If you can afford to build spear units with cold rings, you can afford to build a group of mages. Though the reality is that if you wanted to defend against mages, belts of precognition would provide more defense.

However whether your basic spear unit can kill that basic mage unit isn't the issue. The issue is that regardless of how high your defense is elemental damage will bypass it. Crystal is gained at the same rate as metal, and constructing a full suit of chain takes 12. It takes 3 crystal to make that chainmail pointless. The tech level required is also signifcantly higher. Have platemail? Champion plate?! Wasted resources.

You are also doing the wrong comparison. We should be looking at archers. A full suit of leather provides 8, while chain provides 16. Shortbow against leather will do 4 damage on average. Longbow against chain will also do 4 (3.8) Both of these values are lower than our mages can do, at lower level tech. But what if we look at a scenario were you only have a shortbow against chain: Now your doing Less than 3 (2.6) and that empires tech advantage is meaningfull.

With cold staves, he could have all the way up to platemail and it wouldn't make a lick of difference. Will that empire be capable of killing you with other things? Sure it could! But making a line of research, or an entire group of monsters, pointless with a single tech is nonsense. But it's not just staves that are at fault here. Lightning hammers, cold amulets, heart of fire. All of these things provide an advantage that your opponent can do little to stop.

And just to be clear here, when I said I killed an ashwake dragon will cold staves, I meant the ones you get from enchantment.. the 2nd tech in the magic tree..

Mage staffs were actually at a pretty good balance at 4 base damage, IMO, though I use them enough that I don't mind them being slightly buffed.  The problem, as you've noticed, is that archers are always outclassed by comparable armor techs.  It doesn't make any sense that having a suit of chainmail will somehow protect you against a dragon's breath, or a fireball, as I don't believe there's any way to simply make mage staffs get reduced by armor without affecting every other elemental damage source.  Bows simply need to do more damage, with mage staff damaged reduced by 1 or 2 points, and the problem will be relieved.