lore i sort of did it!

[ckdamascus]

No, I did not.

I have come to the conclusion any "ability" gives you a critical hit rate % of ... 0%. So I suspect you lose your ability to crit when you use stuff like "double arrow shot" (elf ability) or "dragon arrow".

They seem to only be really good with archers that have range penalty early on, otherwise, helplessness level 3 seems to work quite well.

I am a little bothered that hell breath does not seem to scale up in power due to intellect. I do wonder if hell breath works with two necklaces of flame/firestorm. So would a level 3 hell breath (40%) go to (40*1.6 = 64%?)

Do you know if +fire dmg or +astral dmg items also get multiplied by criticals? If so, seems like hell breath might be particularly useful.

[Zechnophobe]

I do not know first hand, but I think it probably does not.

And you can't cast helplessness on Ktahu (If you can and I've missed that all this time, I am sad).

Not that I use dragon arrows very often, but the jaw dropping damage they do against units like Cyclopses and trolls is pretty amazing.

[ckdamascus]

It does. You get linear growth with hell breath. Not sure on how any special immunity to fire helps out. It "might" sneak through since the true base damage is physical. Unless the game is clever enough to break it down separately when calculating total damage.

[edit] Game is clever enough to break it down separately when calculating total damage.

No, but the bosses tend to take quite a bit of damage anyway. 100% crits really changes everything and it is not clear to me if 30% less resistance (too bad there are no negative resists) and NO chance to crit PLUS losing one round of casting is better than 150% damage guaranteed. I prefer the 150% damage for now.

That said, the Flame Necklace is one of the few items that DOES increase the power of Hell Breath. Intellect does nothing for this skill. I happen to have two of them in my game and a fire bracelet for a potential total of 30+30+10 or 70%. Ugh, those keepers are SO hard to kill though.

Level 3 hell breath gives 40% damage * 1.7 = 68%.

So, I can do mass precision, and one hell breath on the lucky stack that gets to do, INSANE DAMAGE.

Yes, I did test this.

Sadly, since warriors tend to have double the leadership over mages, all I might have really gained is a flexible build due to superior mana pool and doublecast, but one that is "crippled" by requiring both buffs to reach the same level of damage, and possibly not as good against fire resistant enemies.

This almost makes me want to cry.