[0.983-0.99] Blindness

Or a duration of 3 turns.

Not everybody has a fortified tile so your reasoning for nerfing Blind is flawed.  Perhaps you just found a nice combination that works for people playing Kraxis.  Thanks for playing.

Ok. You are not Krax. You have 20 dodge and cast Blindness on Forest Drake. Initially drake has 93 Accuracy. So before blinding drake has 73% hit chance. After blinding drake has 27% hit chance. So Blindness cuts drake's hit chance in almost 3 times for 4 mana. Imho overpowered. 

I think Blindness is OP without the kraxis thing. 50% reduction to accuracy? That's an early-game reduction of melee damage by ~50% that scales perfectly throughout the game.

Compare with Shrink, Life 3, target gets -50% melee damage and +50% dodge.

The problem with Blindness is you can't really balance it without boosting other death spells. It is CRUCIAL to building a death mage.

Edit: I would change Blindness to 35% (+2% per death shard). Then I would boost Berzerk by making it give +15% melee damage and target loses 10% of its health when hit by it. That way, berserk becomes a decent early game spell instead of the end-game spell it is for military units.

Either way you get defensive, with Krax or a Custom Faction, that's not everybody.  Secondly, what is not mentioned was who was the caster and what level.  The drake's level. 

A lot of the time I'd argue that the drake should resist if you're lower level and even if you're his level should have some minor chance at it.   IMHO,  I'd look at the drake's resist values and what kind of mastery values champions have and tweak that.  To make it harder to cast on drakes and dragons.

I'm fine with it.

I am thinking about changing it to do -5 Accuracy per turn. So you go blind over the course of the battle. That just seems more interesting.

3 turns duration is just perfect

and has no side effect

no need to complicated things

or as someone said some time ago you regain it over time, like 50% blind +10 per turn or so

It sounds like Sean can make a mod for a few people with a new ability/spell called "Blur".  Let's leave Blind alone in the real game.

I don't mind leaving it alone, but my 20 turn battle could have finished a lot sooner if I didn't have to fight blind against a blind man. I'm all for a turn limit on the spell just so I don't have to spend 20 turns to kill something that should easily be killed. I suppose auto-play would take care of this functionality, but I think it would be a more strategic spell if we give it a turn limit. I'm fine with a turn limit of 10 turns.

I don't know if there is a counter spell like true-strike that adds +50% to accuracy for the duration of the battle. This way it's not a nerf to blindness, but new content.

While I agree that Blind is rather strong for when you can get it, I would rather see it left alone or go with Heavenfall's solution than see a fixed-duration of three turns. I would also rather not see a duration value which is tied to the number of Death Shards you control, as I think that much of the magic in this game is tied too strongly to shards and too loosely to the caster already - for this spell and most others, the caster only matters for whether or not the spell affects the target at full strength, half-strength, or not at all.

Personally, if I were in charge of changing it, I would have it (and other curse-type spells) have to make a check against spell resistance each turn (or maybe every several turns) in order to remain active on the target. Possibly also include a penalty for the effective spell mastery value or a bonus to effective spell resistance for each subsequent check. This would leave the caster as a more important part of the spell - that level 20 mage with a spell mastery of 100 when looking to curse your enemies than the level 5 novice with a spell mastery of 50, since the level 20's curses will usually stick longer and are more likely to apply (note: spell mastery values are made up, and do not represent actual in-game values). As things stand now, you only need to get lucky once with the level 5 novice and you have the same effect as you would have had with the level 20 mage.

I could also get behind a combination of my nerf to spell duration and Heavenfall's nerf to spell power.

I also think blindness is overpowered.

I think a limited duration is the best option for balancing Blindness.  Keep it at -50% accuracy, and if you really want to be nice, give 10% of that missing accuracy back per turn, until it expires.  But for the love of god, stop nerfing every single spell just because it's good!  Warriors are boring to play

Could the time limit be imposed through a mod? How would one go about doing that?

I like it!

i have discussed the point in another thread

i have nothing against a check each turn at all

but from a logical point of view its just a fancy overcomplicated way to make a fixed duration

make a fixed duration tied to spell master/res or spell dmg and you obtain the SAME thing just with 90% less code and lag and mechanic understanding and needyness to balance 10 stats

also in the end you let the actual main problem persist:

a good mage casting blind on a low res unit make it a neverending  blind

thats not acceptable

buffs and debuffs are cool when they are strong and short duration, infinite debuffs (of this kind that nearly annihilate a whole unit) are just unfun and frustrating and wrong from a balance point of view

I am fine with this spell as the way it is.  It's a good counter to super combatants, as we call them in Dom3. Single, super powerful units.  It's far from an I win with them, but it is a way to take some of their power.  Many powerful things have both a high resistance to spells and a high accuracy, it can be difficult to land a blind, losing valuable mage turns and mana.  Blind takes Death 2, So that limits it to about half a dozen champs on a large map if that? And if I take it on my Sov, than that means I am not taking something else.  I find it perfectly balanced.

It's not balanced because you can sit there and do it to a whole army. If they are going to leave it as is, it needs to have a cooldown of 4 turns.

You have to blind one unit at a time and they can resist, if it had a cooldown of 4 turns, that would make it worthless.  

Well, half Accuracy pretty much means a hero is worthless and a unit is going to get half its strikes. In the late game that is fine because we have lots of units in a battle. In the early game most people have maybe 4 units in a battle. It can also be used on deadly monsters and totally save a battle, giving massive amounts of XP. A cooldown would set it to be effective on one or two units, but the player would have to carefully choose which units to blind. Right now you can spam it and blind a whole army with a decent level 5 mage. That is too powerful for the spell level and the early game balance. Death magic should have many such curses, not one spell that makes up for the rest of the element being pretty useless. 

Let me ask you this:

Would you cast Berserk or Blind?

Would you cast Curse or Blind?

Would you cast Touch of Entropy or Blind?

Would you cast Life Leech or Blind?

Would you cast Mass Curse or Blind?

Blind is cheaper and works a serious hurt on the enemy. It has no real drawbacks and outperforms all other death spells until level 5 or so. Part of that is because we just don't have enough wonderful death magic in tactical battles. But mostly Blind is just too good. Adding any Dodge to your army and relying on Blind is a game breaker.

It counters supercombatants too well for a level 2 death spell. Adding the standard 30 Dodge to a trained units does make this an i win spell. A unit with 100 Acc. goes to 50 and 30 Dodge makes that 20 Acc. Way OP from an objective standpoint. It is resistable, but the standard Spell Mastery is 75 and even at a 50% success ratio, you can wreck enemies that are not completely immune to magic. As far as opportunity cost, what are you passing up that could even remotely equal the power of blind? That would have to be one powerful trait.

The problem with those other spells isn't that Blind is so OP, it's that those spells suck.  Although Curse isn't too bad.  That can be pretty handy. and Without blind, Death becomes a pretty shitty path.  It's worth having blind because I have no access to healing magic.  Nerfing blind would really put the empires and death magic at a disadvantage to life magic, in my opinion.  

And when designing a Sov with Death 2, I could scrap that and get Wealthy, free recruiting heroes, and another trait of my choice or get blind spell.  

That is exactly the thing I was hoping you would say. Blind is carrying the spellbook. Sure Curse has a contextual use, but most of those spells are DOA. The others need a buff and Curse needs to not have a casting time. Mass Curse needs a casting time of 1, with a high mana cost. This whole spellbook needs some love. Especially the +1 Attack spell. It needs to be more expensive and more attack. 

We started out with a random bag of unbalanced spells. Then we went big, else we go home. Death never got the go big buff that other magics did. Now other spells are being reigned into a solid balance, but death still feels left out in the cold. I would add a few more curses to it and buff the really useless spells that require several deathshards. Wither for example should be -3 attack, -.5 per death shard. Berserk should be +3 Attack, +1 per death shard with a high mana cost. I could go on balancing everything, but that is why I have a balance mod.   The general concept is probably enough.

Then talk about buffing the bad spells and not nerfing the once decent one.

you are wrong

blind IS op, there is no arguing about this

its op in EVERY way, its cost is too low

its effect is too strong(basically its a shrink without a malus, and shrink is lvl 3 blind lvl 2)

its duration is too long

it is op, there cant be any logic argument against this

and you guys are wrong about death being bad too

lets examine them

-wither, this is vERY VERY strong late game in fact its only weakness is that its a level 1 death that is scaling so well late game, so not so useful early but very strong in war late game, maybe id move it to lvl 3 4

-infection dunno, potentially is super strong late game if you really can blind curse 1 guy and then move all that aoe, but it depends on bugs and usability

-berserk not so useful, usually not worth the mana cost

-curse very good nearly op late game

-graveseal very very good, in some situation op, the only problem is that its not self sufficient, this spell rely on having other guys to make it worth, but if you have the right setup is super strong

-drain life is the first nuke, its not so good as dmg and cost and cd but the addition effect is very strong, its cool to have but you cant play it like you would play a fire mage ofc

-dirge of ceresa is another super op spell, really after you have contagion dirge of ceresa is just useless to play

-touch of entropy is not balanced but seeing the goal they devs have for it its basically going to be the main nuke for death, its very good too

-mass curse is also decent in wars etc, not too much good because you really dont need to have all enemies cursed, cursed is super strong on a enemy of choice, having them all cursed is a small plus

combo spells are super OP

syphon strenght is good

soulburning is more good as fire mage, until other spells outscale it but its ok

horrific wail is very good aoe, still unsure if too much good or not but surely ok

contagion is so op it hurts probably the most op spell of the game

so basically there is not 1 death spells weak, and half of them need a severe nerf

blindness is just one of them