Fireball fireball fireball.....
 

.... with an occasional fire arrow when there are too many of my troops near the target. These are the only two spells I use because they are so dang powerful. I have tried the other spells like dragon arrow for my archers and he went from killing 1 enemy to "1-2" enemies. Biggeth woopeth. If I used fireball on that enemy I kill 10. So why bother with the other spells? I have to be missing something because the programmers put the other spells in there for a reason. But until that "bless" spell starts doing 2500 damage over the measley, what, 2 rounds in is in effect, I would much rather use those 2 rounds for 5000 fireball damage.

Thanks for any tips!

I haven't gotten very far in the game, but from what I hear, Fireball loses it's uberness later in the game.

But early on it's great, especially if you make a beeline for level 2.

For a warrior you're more likely to use crowd control than you are to use damage because the damage scale pretty poorly to spells like berserk or pigmy that add or subtract on a percentage basis. Bless likewise adds more, particularly mass bless at level 3. Really depends on your play style. I ran a war and found that controlling the battle is way more beneficial than casting DD. With a mage of course it is quite the opposite in most instances.

Well, direct damage spells ARE powerful especially if you have a mage build geared towards them. But even the most dedicated battle mages will resort to certain extremely useful spells like phantom, pain mirror and MASS slow. As rightfully observed by everyone, dd spells like fireball etc. are especially useful at the earlier stages of the game (pre-lvl15). Since early enemy stacks are too few in number and this naturally makes em' juicy targets for the fireball and your stacks also too few in bodies for say, dragon arrow to be oh so devastating. This is even more amplified on the easier difficulty levels where the enemy forces are even smaller in number.

If you're a mage, especially one dedicated to more destructive spells on hard/impossible difficulty, you should stock up on mana and intelligence until level 15 and use your dd spells to support your smaller/less reinforced army due to low ld.&att/def with your own considerable damage potential. Basically you mostly do their job (dealin'damage). As your army grows and their potential increases you should prioritize leadership etc. and deal damage and support your troops *lol* with important buffs that will actually make a difference or more importantly weaken huge enemy armies coherency with certain debuffs. (you WILL use mass slow, tis' inevitable) One turn you're gonna weaken the enemy with a double fire rain and the next turn one more fire rain AND a phantom to make the dryads put the lower level critters to sleep just one more turn until you clear up the big baddies. If you're a mage you'll use A LOT of fireballs at first and later you're gonne mix the "fireballs" with other spells...

If you're not a mage chances are you're never gonna be as good as a dedicated battlemage anyway and since you're going to have a bigger army both in the early and late game, you will use more buffs/debuffs throughout the game anyway. When you cast the low maintenance dragon arrows that requires low mana and no spellpower boost from intellect to be effective on 300 elven archers it WILL make a huge difference concerning damage... Especially if shooting things with high defense/resistances like the cyclopes.

Erm , mass slow? Only if u fiddle and edit the spell.txt file.

Why does every body jump on poor Dragon Arrows? As Eldritch mentioned and I'll emphasise, apart from removing range penalies, Dragon Arrows are armour piercing! They will make almost no difference against mobs like peasants but are lethal against the high def units that dominate the later game. Even bosses, the turtle, laughs your spells off, try dragon arrows on your lonely archers and see the difference :)

Yeah as a mage it almost feels too easy fireball, fire arrow and later firestorm just one piece of advice for you, demons and that's all demons and all dragons (and you will be facing many) have at least 50% fire resistance, their top units have 80%! Though spells like Ice Snake do make up for this a lot of demon fights will be more CC/Buff than DD fights. You will be crying for support spells like dragon arrows!

Also second that advice mages do cast magic differently to Paladins and Warrior, the second two are more about buff and support with the Paladin maybe touching on some crowd control.

Fireball to second level is good advice for new mages, some like to rush to level 3, I prefer the long haul to Higher Magic 1 for the versatility - you'd be amazed how effective a beserk on Royal Snakes can be.

Fireball is always good. It's just that fire rain is even better, so fireball loses its relevance. I like to leave fireball at a lower level because it costs less mana, and is useful for winnowing down stacks that you're planning to keep hanging around, near the end of fights, so you can gather mana/rage and resurrect all of your losses.

Damn, lvl 3 slow isn't mass? Never upgraded to lvl 3 but it required tons of crystals to upgrade and actually had some russian "M.........." cyrillic note on its decription which I thought was an untranslated "mass" in russian. Made sense since it required ridiculous amounts of crystals. Wonder what that "M......." means. I got atari's us version 1.6b7. I was just giving it as a general example for possibly useful debuffs among others and the infamous mass slow from heroes just came to mind. It should be mass though, what am I payin' so many crystals for? What does this "M..........." mean? What's the meaning of life, universe and everything?


*in b4 42*

Pain Mirror works wonders against demons. It along with Geyser and Phantom got me an early victory against Xeona on hard difficulty with minimal losses. Also a double lvl3 geyser first turn somehow froze the enemy for like 4 turns which was awesome. Like some kind of mass slow lol.

The distortion school is just awesome, everyone should max it asap. Phantom, Hypnotize, Pain Mirror and even an early guaranteed geyser for dd lovin' mages. Without Phantom and Pain Mirror I would have just LOST that battle. She had 400 demonesses ffs. :evil:

There is a nice shield that adds 20% to Pain Mirror as well. I think PM is probably the best Distortion spell. I am more of a Chaos Mage myself but Trap, Pain Mirror and Phantom are essential.

If you have a 200 griffin stack with stone skin/magic spring and bless that is attacked by enemies... well then you don´t need a fireball any more :D

Later in my mage game I really used tons of direct damage inflicting spells (fire rain, lightning, pole axes and so on), but those "troop enhancement" spells can deal (much) more damage in certain situations so I used them quiet often.

And if you are not a mage, low mana can prevent you from firing one fireball each round.

are you sure you don't mix them up with weakness? slow as a distorsion spell is not a mass spell on 3rd level. On chaos weakness on the other hand i noticed that the info tip b4 upgrading is a russian word m........, i suppose is mass, cuz weakness is mass spell on 3rd level.

PS. For slow I modified the spell.txt into a mass spell by replacing one,one,one with one,one,all

Sounds like you don't know that you can always cast a spell at lower level, using the "shift" and "ctrl" keys.

No need to "leave fireball at a lower level" to save mana.

Simply hold down Ctrl or Alt to cast a Lower Level spell - any spell. This is one feature of the game I only dreamed of having and this is the first game I see such a genius option available. :) (especially useful when you want to use Sacrifice Level 1 instead of Level 3 or 2 so you don't go over your leadership...)