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.
|