Rune Mages: So ridiculous...
 

Okay, so clearly the Rune Mage was one of the last units worked on in the game. Right before release no doubt, since I dare say a developer temporarily increased their init to 20 for testing purposes (so they could always use them at the start of each fight!)

That aside, here's the setup:

Rune Mage has the Phantom skill. It makes a duplicate stack of one of your existing ones, but with only a percent of the total size. It can get up to 60% of the original size with 40 Mind runes laying about in your inventory.

Point Number 1: The number of Rune mages you have doesn't change this. A single Rune mage can make a 60 Royal Griffon phantoms from a stack of 100. You could go into a fight with 4 split stacks of Rune Mages, and a single stack of griffons, and by the end of the turn have 4 phantom griffon stacks, and 5 Celestial Guard stacks!

Point Number 2: Jarls and Paladins can give another turn to a stack, even if it has larger leadership (though not arbitrarily large). Somewhere around 34% efficiency on Phantom, you can phantom out a stack of paladins large enough to give the Rune Mage stack another turn.

Point Number 3: With level 3 in Rune Magic, your Rune Mages start with 2 Defense runes. A Mage can cast Runic Word twice on them in the first turn to give them 4 more, for a total of 6. You can then phantom jarls or paladins, have them give the Rune Mage another turn, and repeat until you've used them all up. All on the first turn. That's right, you could phantom 6 times (7 with wanderer scroll) on a single turn! Those 7 stacks could each be 60% of a single stack, giving you 430% of a single stacks worth of troops! That's almost a full extra army of guys!

Point Number 3: Sadly the Runic Word ability on the Rune Mages is broken. It does not give you more runes when you have more Magic Runes. Otherwise it would be even more ridiculous.

Okay, could you also describe for me how UNIT runes affect Rune Mages? 'Cause for us who have never encountered the unit in the game yet, this is not so clear... back in CW Rune Mages used Might/Mind/Magic runes (an inherently flawed setup I never liked, given the rarity of runes in the game) to increase their skills. Now, they use the Attack/defense/luck runes? Or what?

Okay, haven't got them yet, but they sound ridiculously overpowered. Phantom is a very powerful spell, and a 20%-60% phantom ability on a unit would be useful even if it had only one charge... repeatability, interaction with paladins and independence of the size of the rune mages stack make it silly. For now, one can abstain from using them, I suppose, but hopefully they will be fixed (and balanced) soon.


@BB Shockwave: I'll probably be ninja'd, but anyway: I read that their abilities use up the unit runes on activation (3 different abilities for attack, defense and luck runes), and are more powerful if you have unused talent runes (same as with rune mages in AP).

I don't think the change from ability cooldowns to Rune limitations was well thought out. And switching from giving you a random enemy to phantoming one of your own units seems pretty powerful. You can be guarunteeded of liking one of your units, where what unit you'd get from the enemy was much less likely to be optimal.

Hopefully they do something to balance the unit, as it does seem exceptionally OP, even if you don't actively exploit it.

They should fix Royal Griffons too, a phantom stack of Royal Griffons should not be able to leave behind persistent stack of Celestial Guards, the Guards should share their hosts phantom turn timer and expire at the same time.

Yeah it's pretty silly, their dmg from destruction is insane aswell. Arlania seems pretty boring becouse of how powerfull combo you can pull of in here.

After you get Rune Mage and Royal Griffin.
This game quite become "Clone war"!
Royal G give 1 phantom
Rune Mage can give 2. (maybe more as stated above)
Soothsayer can make 1 more from enemy.
This is just too much! If you play mage, get some from Summon spell. Well it's just too much !

I noticed that no additional runes were granted at 30+ Magic Runes, but at 40+ Runes I was getting 4 (so an additional 2). You're pretty much guaranteed at least 1 Defence Rune per Runic Word use, so each Runic Mage can cast phantom at least every other turn.

4 Runic Mage stacks + Anything pretty much rolls over everything ...

I agree that runemage is too powerfull with phantom. I have nerfed it in my minimod, but i don't stop splitting runemage abuse. May be by setting leadership requirement ?

@Zechnofobe It doesnt work this way my friend : units play in order or initiative, so first play runemage then paladin OR jarl give them second wind and so on to lowest initiative unit, then second turns go in reverse order, from lower to high initiative so runemage will play last in that turn with second wind from pala/jarl. It`s still to much to 1 units cast 60% phantom of whole stack but it cant act more then 2 times/turn (only goblin is able to do that :-) I`m not sure if things changed in WotN but in AP/CW it worked this way, order of units is decided on initiative from high to low, then in reverse and then turn ended, next turn same . . .

As for fixing their basic initiative go to game folder/data/data.kfs and find runemage.atom open it set initiative from 20 to any value you think appropriate (i chose 25 :-P ) close file save it in data.kfs and try game, new init value will be implemented right away in game.

I think the phantom ability should have a leadership cap like other summoning abilities. Something like "create a phantom of 60% of the target stack, but no more than half the leadership of this rune mage stack". This still leaves the other problems to be fixed, though (I think you introduced a decrease in power with each use in your minimod, this might take care of the rest).

edit: edited in "rune mage" for clarity.

Yeah it work if you have one troop of runemage. You're first summon would have 40% of the initial troop, the second 26%, the third 17% etc... (because it's infinite with one of the rune's spell).
But it don't cover the case of splitting runemage. Leadership requirement would not be hard to implement.

This is a single player game, you make your own challenge. If they are so broken that it makes the game too easy then don't use them?

Yes i agree with you, this game doesnt need perfect balance to be enjoyable. They should focus on fixing bugs as a first priority then balance issues.

I would consider this a bug though.

All other summon spells/mind control spells (basically anything that nets you a new unit) have a built in leadership cap.

Yes, I'm sure it's an oversight. A big one, but it's obvious they didn't intend them to be able to do that.

Hopefully they'll fix them soon. In the meantime, exploit them at your own risk. Risk of making the game too boring, that is ;)

hix, the game is too buggy (spell/crash...) and over power at the moment.
Make it Imposible mode is not a really challenge. Because when u meet a hard boss/enemy, you have to try all the ways to fight it in impo, and then you will choose massive summon! that's natural, hard to not abuse !
I think I'll stop abit and wait for the next official patch ! I think !

It sounds like this should be added to the bug thread if we want an official response. Everyone seens to agree the 20 initiative needs another look. Is there any consensus on how we'd like to decry the phantom ability?

Is this right? Preview:

Rune Mage is too fast and phantom ability too strong: The rune mage has 20 initiative which may have been left over from testing. What is the intended value? Also its phantom ability is the same strength regardless of the number of units. Should this be a scaling value?

This isn't theory craft. Rune mage goes, phantoms paladins. It's turn is over. Paladin phantom goes, second winds rune mage, and then ends its turn. Rune mage goes, phantoms paladins, it's turn is over... repeat.

You aren't 'waiting' you are literally ending their turn with an action. I have done it, and it is glorious.

The big problem with Rune Mage is Runic Word ability. It can be cast indefinitely (if you dont use luck rune) that meaning infinite Phantom charges. And with paladins in army that means infinite ressurection.

Phantom should only be cast-able on a troop of X Leadership and below, where X scales with the number of Rune Mages in the stack.

Man I love reading this board; some tricks players invent are just priceless.
I remember reading some article about the game developers who were amazed that the players invented ways of playing their game, that developers themselves didn’t know it was possible, maybe it’s the case here.

@ Zechnophobe, keep these tricks coming can’t wait to go home and try it now. lol

I reckon the devs just aren't aware players would ever think to split troops, because for any unit besides a rune mage its basically pointless to waste your leadership on smaller stacks of units when you could have bigger stacks? so in their testing they never caught the rune mage problem whereby 1rune mage is as powerful as 30?


ya know what would be nice besides adding a leadership cap? if it were possible for the abilities to have BOTH CHARGES AND RELOAD, so you could phantom every 2turns if and only if you still have charges leftover or something? (basically just whenever 1phantom fades is when you can do a new one, but only so long as you keep the charges flowin? that'd prolly be still quite powerful yet balanced somwhat)

A single turn delay on the phantom would prevent the first turn phantom spam nicely.

You'd also need to make it so that the runic word ability can't give THEM luck runes. Since they can generate infinite runes this way, which is not a good idea.

Why is it that again only 1 unit in game gain benefit from unused runes hero or unit no matter) = rune mages.
I didnt check, but do undead units get runes attack/defense/luck in hero army ? If yes, how do they benefit from them. Simple bonus to att/def/crit% or do they gain charges to sills like rune mage (necro for plague, archers for poison arrow . . . )?

amazing how OP the rune mage is xD

can rape whole armies alone :D

never gonna use them


just a side note
does the beam attack also work on bosses?

I used to split stacks of Inquisitors as well to take advantage of Holy Rage in order to spam Dragon abilities early on for AP. I also split Beholders to get more enemy units stunned. I'm sure there are other instances where splitting is optimal (basically to take advantage of abilities that don't scale with leadership). For instance I'm considering splitting Warrior Maidens since their Call of Vahalla ability seems to scale a little too well (Unit-based rather than HP-based) when it comes to ressing Lvl 4 creatures.

Hmm. I didn't think phantoms had any abilities. So I'm not sure the paladin-rune mage trick would work since your first phantom wouldn't be able to do anything but move and attack. Has anybody actually pulled it off?

And speaking of ridiculous, how about a tricked-out ice ball (with max creator, max level and good intellect). Roll (or teleport) it in the middle of the enemies and they obsess over it while barely hurting it. Add max level avenging angel for extra lols.

Players can't "invent" anything in a game. They can only discover, at best, very subtle possibilities that the games already offers.
For comparison, electricity wasn't invented, it was discovered.

dictionary.reference.com/browse/invent - to originate or create as a product of one's own ingenuity

So I finally got to the part with rune mages, but mine have only 2 intiative, not 20, and my game is not modded...

EDIT: Not complaining, everything else is still working pretty much like described here, just the initiative that is different, and I found it odd.

Rune Mages + Royal Griffins is really ridiculous, imo. By turn two I have a whole bunch of phantomed Royal Griffins and Celestial Guards running around absorbing hits. Deadly stacks aren't so hard at all - just beat Constantine the Vampire to get the fourth Valkryrie without too much problem.

There was a patch yesterday which addressed this issue.

I guess that means that 2 is its intended initiative?

They could drop the initiative to 0 for all it matters. As long as 1 rune mage can create several thousand leadership worth of units the only difference will be that after the battle is over you might need to phantom your paladin stack a second time for more resurrection.

For now my self-imposed rule is only 1 rune mage stack, no using phantom more than twice.

Phantoms have abilities. What they don't have is runes, which means you can't phantom your rune mages to phantom more rune mages.

Ugh, that's hard to believe. Rune Mages in AP didn't have 20 initiative, certainly, but they had significantly higher than 2. Forget the exact number. But they should have somewhere in the 5-8 range, imo.

Well, it does explain where 20 came from. :rolleyes:

phantoms do have abilities, it does work, it is nuts

Thanks for clearing that up. Did they tweak the power of phantom in the patch, or is it still maxed with only one unit?