orc shamans

[bman654]

Anyone else think that orc shamans are just imbalanced as all hell? They are like an I Win button when you get them in your army with their totem skills.

If I made a little mod to balance them would people be interested in it? The change would be minor: You would only be able to place a totem in hexes adjacent to a friendly unit, much like the summon spells work.

This would prevent you from dropping totems in the enemy back lines and forcing the AI to kill the totems before moving towards you.

They'd still be powerful and the totems could still be abused against the AI, but at least it would take a little bit of setup to do it instead of just dropping them without even thinking about it.

[Kings Bounty Hunter]

I've heard people saying this but i'm struggling like hell with my lvl22 warrior and I would say THAT needs balancing more than anything. If you're a mage you just hypnotise then sacrifice the enemy if you need units. failing that of course you always have resurrect but for the Warrior..it sucks on the hard level! every bloody army is strong or "slighty stronger" do I have the money to replace all the lost units when the enemy have 20 black dragons or 40 Bone Dragons? NO! lol

edit:

Sorry for the thread hijack, I have not seen enough Sharmans to even investigate your claims. The totems themselves are week as p*ss anyway and don't stand up to a Unicorn farting on them! So how are they any good?

[renton]

placed correctly, totems can help in a number of ways, first, they can buy time. A turn destroying a totem is a turn not attacking you. I find this incredibly useful and i use this to the full extent. You can even make an enemy walk backwards to destroy it instead of advancing towards you.

If they are attacked , yes, they die quickly but a lot of times Ive had close battles midfield , had the death totems right behind my front lines and protected by tanks and so they work great as the catchment area is big enough to catch the enemy.

Shamans rock!

note: i personally wouldnt use that mod but only because i so enjoy thinking about where to place totems as part of my strategy in their unconstrained present state.

[bman654]

yep. Combine totems with the Trap spell on a confined battle map and the enemy can never reach you.

Anyway I tried this out yesterday and it worked great. It toned down the totem ability without removing the fun. It takes more planning and risk to place the totems where you want but the totems were still useful to serve as blockers and lures.

[Namel]

I don't think I would use such mod. As shamans work now they are very different from any other units. I like that difference and I think your idea of mod would make me rather use another ranged attacker unit.

[Daedalus]

what could be a fix is to increase the reload on the life and death totems by 1 round each if they decided to nerf them abit.

must say that the shammies are one of the best units in the game atm for allround usefulness (healing ability, defense ability, decent damage and good melee/hp)

[wolfing]

Man, shamans are my favorite unit of them all, don't even think about TOUCHING THEM!! lol. Are they overpowered? hmm... sheez I'll hate myself for saying this, but yeah I guess they are. Their green totems give a big defense bonus and also heal you round after round, the red totems are the perfect CC (slow and damage, also big taunt for the enemy they always go for them first), their axe attack does some nice damage, and heal your units at the same time! (patch 1.65 supposedly did something to the healing, not sure what changed). Also, they have good initiative and are very durable. Their only drawback is that it's all special attacks, so just one magic shackles on them and they're useless.

[Zhuangzi]

I'm not sure how many people want you to nerf their Shamans, bman. :-P
Personally I think it's a good idea but I'm not sure if I would continue to use them if they lost effectiveness.