Skipping rage skills?

[Namel]

Can I leave rage skills unlearned? I find that rock spirits wall thing never gets enough HP to really be of any use so I rather use my levelups for something else. Can I just not take that skill and get others? Same with poison guys cloud, it is prolly great skill but I can't stand lack of control where it goes so I rather not use it and instead take skills which I can aim myself.

[Tuplis]

You can leave them unlearned but the game will keep occupying the slots on level-ups so if you don't want to take them you'll be having less to pick from on level-ups. And by the way, the rock wall is extremely good in some situations. Sure, it has 100 hp on level 1 but it'll still take one hit from even a huge walker stack giving you one more round before it can reach your ranged units.

[Namel]

I keep restarting game when I get new ideas so I have never played farther than dwarven lands but I have very few times had situation where wall had been useful and where I had the rage to cast it. I do use stuff like shamans totems, phantom, phoenix or poison spirits armor for purpose of slowing enemy.

Big problem I have had with stonewall is that when I have taken one point of it soon I will be offered choice between more stonewall hp or more stonewall duration which both are essentially useless since unless I really get lot of hp events it wont survive more than one hit anyways.

I am now testing not taking it. I got spirits around level 10 and so far they have offered stonewall twice but both times alternative was good and I picked it. Seems really better way to concentrate on 3 skills making them stronger than 4 bit weaker ones.

[Hazimel]

I put only one point in Stone Wall, I think it is enough.
I only upgrade the Smashing Sword, because I prefer big damage on the most dangerous enemy than average damage on every enemy.

[Namel]

Skipping some skills works great. I now got rock guy at level 17 and poison guy at 20. And I have totally skipped stone wall and poison cloud. They aren't even offered that often so I have usually some choice.

I think I chose wrong skill to skip for rock guy. My area meteor thing for rock guy is pretty nice now. It hits 17 squares and does 390-750 damage. Problem is that it is kind of pointless to have both that one and underground spikes. So I think next time I will skip meteor and concentrate on spikes that hit all enemies instead of just 17 squares. :)

[Zhuangzi]

IMO:

Rock dude:


Smashing Sword is good early but useless later.
Rockwall is pretty useless (others disagree)
Rockfall is horrible.
Underground Blades are excellent when upgraded properly.

I use the first and last a fair bit but ignore the other two.

Sleem:

Poison Spit is useless.
Evil Shoal is extremely good early on, but weak later.
Cloud of Poison is pretty bad.
Glot's Armour can be useful at times.

Evil Shoal is essential early on but Sleem isn't so hot later in the game.

Lina:

Chargers are really, really stupid.
Gizmo can be useful, but ultimately is quite weak.
Ice Ball can be devastating if used correctly (from long distance).
Ice Field or whatever it's called is crap.

In general I use Lina the least.

Reaper:

Soul Drain is THE BEST RAGE SPELL. PERIOD. :cool:
Rage Drain is nice, but it interferes with Soul Drain so I don't use it much (unless there are no souls to drain).
Time Back I haven't learned to use properly.
Black Hole seems great initially, but it uses so much rage and you get it so late that you will be facing huge stacks in the later part of the game, so it isn't as good as it seems.

Reaper is the best. :cool:

My order of preference by level 20 or so:

Soul Drain
Underground Blades
Ice Ball
Rage Drain
Glot's Armour
Smashing Sword
Evil Shoal

and that's all I use. :grin:

[Namel]

Rockfall is horrible.
Underground Blades are excellent when upgraded properly.


Rockfall is horrible at start. But later you can upgrade to hit 9 squares and then 17. (3 across and 5 across). And damage is pretty near same as with underground blades. Problem is that blades hit everyone from start and you don't need to waste 2 levels for more area. So blades are better choice. Going to skip rockfall totally now and concentrate on blades every chance that is given.

[Zhuangzi]

You answered your own question there, Namel. :-P The more you use something, the more chances to upgrade it you will have. So if you leave Rockfall alone you will have more opportunities to upgrade Underground Blades.

Still, by the end of the game, ANY 'fixed amount of damage' type of spell/rage loses its power. Even Black Hole. This is when you need things like Pain Mirror and Soul Drain.

[Shd]

You answered your own question there, Namel. :-P The more you use something, the more chances to upgrade it you will have. So if you leave Rockfall alone you will have more opportunities to upgrade Underground Blades.

Afaik its untrue. Chance to get certain skill upgrades not depending on how much you use that skill. There is very good table about skills in fan manual and about mechanics i already translated most important part in other thread:

For lvl 3 evil shoal you need your rage spirit at least lvl 8. Mechanics works like:
If you reach all prerequisites (in this case lvl 8 and 2nd level of evil shoal) then one of the choices will be lvl 3 evil shoal (of course if at that point you dont have reached prerequisites for 3 skills. In that case it may not propose you to upgrade that skill, but such situation is almost impossible). So you dont have lvl 8, you hadn't lvl 2 shoal when reached lvl 8 or you just missed it... If you missed it or didn't had lvl 2 shoal at lvl 8 then next chance to get it is completely random.


Still, by the end of the game, ANY 'fixed amount of damage' type of spell/rage loses its power. Even Black Hole. This is when you need things like Pain Mirror and Soul Drain.

Totally agree. Especially in hard/impossible. And then most important rage abilities is Stone wall/poison cloud/gizmo/time back :)

[Tibster]

Poison cloud can be exploited to the point of :rolleyes:

[Writhan]

Poison cloud is NAAASTY.

Does SO much damage.

Can be dangerous to use though, as it can hit your own units.

[bugmenot]

I'm becoming a huge fan of the swamp spirit.

One thing I will mention though, when you first get poison cloud it has a Rest of 4, and the cloud lasts 4 turns (90% sure of this, but I don't have a save to check).

After an upgrade the Rest is reduced to 3, but the cloud now only lasts 3 turns.

I'm also a bit of a fan of Poison Spit.

At lower levels I heavily used the Sword spirit, but now the enemy stacks are too large for physical damage the poison spit works quite well.

The Swamp Spirit poison reduces enemy attack by about a third, lasts 3 turns, only costs 5 rage and has a Rest of 1 (when upgraded). The actual damage done by the spit is negledgable.

It also stacks with normal poison from snakes / alchemists.
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[bman654]

cheap tactic with poison cloud: Since it triggers at the start of each unit's move, you can deal a whole lot more damage by using Wait on each of your unit's turns. This causes the cloud to trigger once when first visiting your unit and again when your unit is revisited! I only have my cloud upgraded once so far so it does something like 30-60 damage. But in one turn using this tactic against an enemy with 5 stacks, the cloud triggers 15 times! == 450 - 900 AOE damage per turn. The way I handle the danger of damaging myself is to use Royal Snakes as my primary melee unit. They are poison resistant and I use the Archmage defense spell to increase their defense. They typically take 0-1 damage when they are inside the poison cloud.

[mythofillusion]

Hi, I'm new to this forum ...

Poison cloud is wonderful. My cheap trick ... Shaman's Totem + Poison Cloud. This trick really help me soften the enemies threat, especially after you have upgraded Poison Cloud skill. I often use this trick when the battle is going to be tough and long.

[bman654]

what does shaman's totem do?

[mythofillusion]

Shaman is a unit from orc races. Can be get from Eastern Island.

Use the shaman offensive totem skill and place it from of the enemies and it will caused the enemies to attack the totem when their turn come. The totem hp = the stack of shaman unit * 10. From here, deploy the Poison Cloud.

I use this trick whenever I fight castle battle with numerous group or enemies unit is out of my reach. I can minimize my unit casualty.

[Daedalus]

Zarok i find is the least useful of the spirits since he has 1 mediocre tactile spell and 3 offensive ones, one of which is a bit redundant (the rockfall vs underground blades). A pity the wall has so few hp...

I've always liked the cloud myself as well, a useful tactic is to fear mobs so they remain in place, then cloud them, and like was already mentioned, wait with all your units, bonus is since they are feared the enemy will also wait before defending itself which results in extra damage :)

the Glot armor is also vastly underestimated, it can take ANY amount of damage before fading once. ie a stack gets hit for 1 million damage and the stack has lvl 1 Glot armor it takes 0 losses, quite handy if you know what units the sadistic AI likes (poor, poor inquisitors...)

The Shoal is only useful in the early game or to tack on more damage against low lvl trash, not a great help later on.

the poison spit can be deceptively powerful seeing as you can upgrade the initial damage AND the poison damage seperatly, like was already stated the debuff from this last relatively long and coupled with some clever targetting van result in much losses on the enemy their side.

The best spirit imo is Lina, the Orb, Gizmo and the Ice Thorns are simply great. The Orb blocks ranged attackers from shooting, has no retaliation ability and can hit for ALOT of damage if positioned correctly.

Gizmo is handy but requires alot of upgrades to be really useful. Ice Thorns is fabulous against melee troops if you get alot of obstacles on the map, they draw attention, melee troops need to attack them and waste a turn and you can use it to safeguard totems if needed.

Reaper is basically a rage generator for me atm to power the others with smatterings of the soul reap skill on large stacks. Black hole is simply too expensive to be used as a mage and i've yet to select the time back ability which is a bit worthless imo...

[bugmenot]

I'm quite enjoying Lina Ice Ball (rolling ball thing), but so far I've chosen not to upgrade it.

Completely un-upgraded it costs 10 rage, if I upgrade it the cost goes to either 15 or 20 (can't remember), but the damage / hit points only goes up slightly (about 10%?).

Even at level 1 the Ice Ball seems pretty hard for the oppositon to kill.

In a normal battle I can get 10 rage on turn 1 (phoenix, inquisitors + a few ranged units).

Has anyone upgraded the ball a few times, does it become an essential killing machine, or just a too expensive gimmic than you never use?
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[Quikpik]

I love the ice ball. I've upgraded it 3 times, once for more health, once for more damage and the last upgrade was so that it uses less rage. So my ice ball only costs 20 rage with those 2 upgrades. I had a shot once where it rolled across the entire length of the battlefield and it critted for over 3k. Took that stack of giants right out. :)

It is also useful for distracting enemies or keeping it next range units. It has an insane defense, so it takes a long time to kill it.

[OmegaDestroyer]

Looks like the Poison Cloud was hit with the nerf bat. Instead of lasting X amount of rounds, it's duration is limited to number of attacks.

According to the new patch log:

Duration of Poison Cloud determines the amount of attacks that Cloud makes before disappearing

As much as I like it in the early game, I find it tends to be more of a liability later on.

[bman654]

Naww. I've been using the GG 1.6.5 patch for a while and it is working fine. By waiting all my units I get 10-15 attacks per turn for 5 turns. It's insane.

Here is something I noticed last time I played: I have not yet upgraded its rest or duration...just its damage. So it has "5 Attacks" and "4 Rest". So there is a brief opportunity to cast a 2nd cloud while the first is still active.

So I did this last night at the same location as the old cloud. It seemed to reset the counter on the first cloud! So for the rest of the battle, the enemy was getting hit 2x per cloud tick. Pretty funny.

[Quikpik]

Too bad that doesn't work with Ice Orb. I thought I could get two of those at the same time. :(

[Namel]

I think blackhole is actually quite worthless skill. By time I get it my underground blades do more damage. Even at fully upgraded blackhole isn't that much better than fully upgraded underground blades. And while reaver got two other extremely useful skills (time back and 50% kill) rock dude really has nothing else worth using later in game so it is good idea to skip blackhole and just use rock dude when you want area damage.

I now got blades upgraded to 820-1210 damage to all (except casters who take double that). It is still quite nice near end of dwarven lands. Specially when enemy decides to split troops in 10 groups.

[Ryastar]

I think you guys are selling black hole a little short. It does bonus damage based on the level of the target, and the higher the level, the more damage it does. Also, no one has resistance against astral damage, which is what it does, so you are garunteed full damage, whereas undergraound blades does less damage to those resistant to physical attacks.

[Zhuangzi]

Well, I don't think any of the direct damage rage spells are much use in the late game. Why use Black Hole when you can be using Soul Drain and Time Back? Well, against Undead. :)

The only rage spells I consistently use are Glot's Shield, Evil Shoal early in the game, Chargers, Ice Orb, Soul Drain and Time Back. The others aren't necessary, at least not for me.

[Calinda]

Stone wall and crystal thorns are quite important too if you ask me. Stone wall early on can block some enemy for at least one turn, crystal thorns may be used for the same thing, they cost only 15 rage when maxed. You can easily surround your archers with them and this will discourage most of the enemies to go for them. They are designed to surround 3 units but using map edges with some imagination you can surround 4 units. Some dragon fights become quite easy this way.

[Gatts]

Fact is that stone wall has one Hit Point counter (so all three hexagons vanish when the HP is 0), but the thorns work different - each ice thorn has its own HP - what is much better (also I thought that if you level up thorns - you can surround larger area, but I may be wrong)

For both stone wall and thorns I would vote for placing change - let me select where to place them, first than it may be realy usefull... It is to me like one could not select the trajectory for shallow fish...

Anyway, when I can use rage skill that damages all enemies with 5000 dmg, or ice thorns... guess which skill I will chose