Mana blast

I think "Mana Shield" is arguably even better. The 100% damage reduction is just too strong. Auto resolving a battle with all units enchanted with Mana Shield however sometimes bugs and they do take damage... which is irritating.

Both do reward hording mana. Which in itself should bring you to a disadvantage naturally. At least when playing a decent game with high level AI. Sure you can casually play a game where you get to make tenthousands of damage with it, but thats not the point.

I'll just leave this here for ya.

Your gold and mana values are made of pure insanity. And did you mana blast some darklings? That's just wrong. I kinda wanted to hoard mana to see how ridiculous it could get, and your screenshot proves I was just scratching the surface.

I agree on mana shield. Maybe a 50/50 split.

The Darklings had it coming!

I didn't even min/max anything in particular in this huge map except for the AI opponents and the monsters.

It might be OP, but since you can never be sure you'll get it, does it matter that much?

You can spam the random quests as e.g. Altar, because it is somewhere in there.

Well, yes. The quest wasn't difficult, it's just a random chance, and I don't think any one spell / item simply should be THIS over-powered. Take the Scythe of the Void for example. You have to do some pretty tough fights in succession to get it, and even then it's not as big of an "I WIN" button, and even then there are drawbacks to using it. With mana blast :

1) ALL my heroes learned it once I finished the quest, even the Ascian.

2) Damage doesn't appear to cap out, or if it does it's probably not at any reasonable level.

3) It seems to be un-typed damage, as in even if I shot it at something with 100% resistance to fire, cold, and poison it would still do damage.

4) Costing 20-ish mana seems out of proportion considering all the above.

I would be ok with ONE of the above being the case, maybe two, but not all four. 

The spell is over powered. But i like it. Im just glad it has not been used on me.

Agree, I rarely get it and I'm not going to search for it.    Its fun though.

I don't have anything like 700-900 damage, though.  Mine range from 50-80 in some battles to 120-150 damage per shot in others.  Haven't paid attention to why the damage values change - but with one hero I sometimes get 250 damage.

For the eyes of dragon quest... 50-70.  doh.

holy crap on the resource levels.

If one wanted to nerf it (mana shield), I'd say a 95 percent damage reduction. This way you keep a good amount of damage being reduced... Only 5 of 100 gets through. Much better for balance... so the low level units don't hurt you only biggins...

The other option is add a max absorbed to the shield... like 500 or something. I prefer option one if any option.

If getting 10,000 mana is at all possible then overall game balance is the problem, not mana blast.  Either you're playing with your food or the whole spell system needs to be overhauled.

While I do agree, what I did here will never happen in a "real" game. On this map I had novice difficulty dense monsters no random events and only 1 novice AI player. So technically this was just fun to begin with and I at least wouldn't balance the game based on what you can reach in a soloplayer (1 novice AI does nothing) game.

with 10000 mana you can deathmagic enchant your champion for 1000 base damage or 250 initiative

or 700 damage and 150 initiative

this will provide ever higher dps then normal hero with 500 damage per turn, since such hero will act multiple times. 

Not true, if someone doesn't use any spells and gathers as many shards to themselves and cast meditation on every city with essence and make all essence cities into conclaves, it is not too far fetched to get 10000 mana. Biggest thing is that players use mana and cast spells throughout the game preventing one from attaining 10000 mana. So, it is not balance but how a person plays the game. If it is possible to gain 1000 mana per turn, well then there is some issues arrising here with balance, but in general no balance issues.

I think that particular game I was testing with extra-slow tech progression, so there was a lot of waiting around and not a lot to spend mana on, so it ended up stockpiling a lot until I could research the "buff your heroes" spells and use up all that mana.

Mana blast damage scales with your mana pool, but I think it should scale on a curve rather than a straight line.

Mana Blast is OP I agree. I usually have huge mana reserves as I build scrying pools and always have a few conclaves. On Huge maps it's very easy to get large mana pools later on in the game, and then you can 1 shot everything with mana blast.

Mana Blast would work if each character had his own mana pool and it was more restrictive. But because they have a faction-wide mana pool that is used much like a gold pool, I think it's impossible to balance a Mana Blast spell in that situation. They should change the mechanics to something else IMO.

In a completely theoretical example, if you spend all your resources on mana but dont' cast any spells your gameplan should be gimped and the opponents would run you over. That happens in a super tight game like Starcraft.

I think that the problem here is the spell conception. If I am not mistaken, a Level 1 non-wizard casting this spell does the same damage as a Level 20 wizard. It does not make sense to picture a rookie hero channelling 10,000 mana. IMHO the damage formula be should something like:

Player mana / 10 / HeroFactor

where HeroFactor is smaller for high level wizards and higher for low level non-wizards.

Oliver, that already is in the game through the spell damage amplification by high level mages. They do even more damage than 10% of your manapool.

Maybe some cap by Hero level?

Damage = Min(Manapool , Herolevel*1000) / 10

That way e.g. a hero at level 10 could do a maximum of 1000 damage (which is still much), but only if the player has acces to >= 10000 Mana.

One could also replace the 1000 with 250/500/750 or something along those lines, you get the point.

Or the cost of the spell could be a percentage of your faction's current mana, so it not only does more damage at high mana, but costs more too.

A possible solution would be a limitation of the maximum mana. After all, the mana needs to be stored somewhere after all. So what if the maximum mana was:

100 * Hero Magic Level +

100 * Essence available in all Cities +

X from Buildings

Well i had necromancer hero with soul drain spell (2x lvl damage, if target dies it gives 40 mana). Then i got this OMFG mana shield / mana blast quest.

Thats it: Buf necromancer with manashield and go search darklings. in few turns my mana got sky high becouse of his unique skill and then manablast turns to kill spell with insta cast with -1 spell cast trait.

You can abuse water mana leach spell with counterspell ability and drain mana from casters till you get borred just need to find proper victim.

I know its random and thats why they think its balanced but still such type of luck simply wins the game for nothing.

I could accept mana blast because it still kills only 1 target per turn and is random to get, but mana shield is to much overpowered. It should be <100 perc absorbtion.

mana blast shoud deal spell mastery of hero as damage at same mana cost (1:1 factor) and possibly include level factor and fraction of 10% of total pool.

This will make high level wizard with 200 spell mastery deadly and rookie with 30 spell mastery not stronger then soulspark. 

This makes sense from a gameplay and roleplay aspect. It's silly when your henchmen and low level heroes can 1 shot dragons, makes sense that your level 15 wizard can though, given he has this spell.

I can't believe no one can see that this is probably a bug. There is nothing unusual about having 2 or 3 thousand mana if you are playing on a rather large map. If you are a mage sovereign and a mage class and have the right picks, it is easy to do 400 - 500 damage. Late in the game I have done over 1000 damage. That isn't the point. I am quite sure that they meant to subtract the damage from your mana pool (OK, minus the bonuses a mage gets). It is so rare their beta testers (when was the last time we saw a game properly tested before release) probably didn't see it.

So, don't change anything, except after you use the spell 10% of you mana pool is removed. Simple fix. Another thing that might help to is to put a cool down timer. It does take a round to cast, but if you notice, there is a mage skill that lowers the time by 1 round. Talk about OP. Try going into a fight with 4000 mana, a mage with a initiative in the 20's, and can cast any spell in one round. grin The killer of summer? The maker of Dust? Those fights suddenly become pretty easy.

Leave mana blast and shield alone, I seldom get them in my games and when I do its a nice treat to have my ultimate hero guy that's unstoppable. If this were a MP game I would consider changing mana shield and blast, but since its not I say leave it the hell alone and enjoy it, if you don't like it don't use it.