Skipping rage skills?

[Writhan]

Poison cloud is NAAASTY.

Does SO much damage.

Can be dangerous to use though, as it can hit your own units.

[bugmenot]

I'm becoming a huge fan of the swamp spirit.

One thing I will mention though, when you first get poison cloud it has a Rest of 4, and the cloud lasts 4 turns (90% sure of this, but I don't have a save to check).

After an upgrade the Rest is reduced to 3, but the cloud now only lasts 3 turns.

I'm also a bit of a fan of Poison Spit.

At lower levels I heavily used the Sword spirit, but now the enemy stacks are too large for physical damage the poison spit works quite well.

The Swamp Spirit poison reduces enemy attack by about a third, lasts 3 turns, only costs 5 rage and has a Rest of 1 (when upgraded). The actual damage done by the spit is negledgable.

It also stacks with normal poison from snakes / alchemists.
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[bman654]

cheap tactic with poison cloud: Since it triggers at the start of each unit's move, you can deal a whole lot more damage by using Wait on each of your unit's turns. This causes the cloud to trigger once when first visiting your unit and again when your unit is revisited! I only have my cloud upgraded once so far so it does something like 30-60 damage. But in one turn using this tactic against an enemy with 5 stacks, the cloud triggers 15 times! == 450 - 900 AOE damage per turn. The way I handle the danger of damaging myself is to use Royal Snakes as my primary melee unit. They are poison resistant and I use the Archmage defense spell to increase their defense. They typically take 0-1 damage when they are inside the poison cloud.

[mythofillusion]

Hi, I'm new to this forum ...

Poison cloud is wonderful. My cheap trick ... Shaman's Totem + Poison Cloud. This trick really help me soften the enemies threat, especially after you have upgraded Poison Cloud skill. I often use this trick when the battle is going to be tough and long.

[bman654]

what does shaman's totem do?

[mythofillusion]

Shaman is a unit from orc races. Can be get from Eastern Island.

Use the shaman offensive totem skill and place it from of the enemies and it will caused the enemies to attack the totem when their turn come. The totem hp = the stack of shaman unit * 10. From here, deploy the Poison Cloud.

I use this trick whenever I fight castle battle with numerous group or enemies unit is out of my reach. I can minimize my unit casualty.

[Daedalus]

Zarok i find is the least useful of the spirits since he has 1 mediocre tactile spell and 3 offensive ones, one of which is a bit redundant (the rockfall vs underground blades). A pity the wall has so few hp...

I've always liked the cloud myself as well, a useful tactic is to fear mobs so they remain in place, then cloud them, and like was already mentioned, wait with all your units, bonus is since they are feared the enemy will also wait before defending itself which results in extra damage

the Glot armor is also vastly underestimated, it can take ANY amount of damage before fading once. ie a stack gets hit for 1 million damage and the stack has lvl 1 Glot armor it takes 0 losses, quite handy if you know what units the sadistic AI likes (poor, poor inquisitors...)

The Shoal is only useful in the early game or to tack on more damage against low lvl trash, not a great help later on.

the poison spit can be deceptively powerful seeing as you can upgrade the initial damage AND the poison damage seperatly, like was already stated the debuff from this last relatively long and coupled with some clever targetting van result in much losses on the enemy their side.

The best spirit imo is Lina, the Orb, Gizmo and the Ice Thorns are simply great. The Orb blocks ranged attackers from shooting, has no retaliation ability and can hit for ALOT of damage if positioned correctly.

Gizmo is handy but requires alot of upgrades to be really useful. Ice Thorns is fabulous against melee troops if you get alot of obstacles on the map, they draw attention, melee troops need to attack them and waste a turn and you can use it to safeguard totems if needed.

Reaper is basically a rage generator for me atm to power the others with smatterings of the soul reap skill on large stacks. Black hole is simply too expensive to be used as a mage and i've yet to select the time back ability which is a bit worthless imo...

[bugmenot]

I'm quite enjoying Lina Ice Ball (rolling ball thing), but so far I've chosen not to upgrade it.

Completely un-upgraded it costs 10 rage, if I upgrade it the cost goes to either 15 or 20 (can't remember), but the damage / hit points only goes up slightly (about 10%?).

Even at level 1 the Ice Ball seems pretty hard for the oppositon to kill.

In a normal battle I can get 10 rage on turn 1 (phoenix, inquisitors + a few ranged units).

Has anyone upgraded the ball a few times, does it become an essential killing machine, or just a too expensive gimmic than you never use?
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[Quikpik]

I love the ice ball. I've upgraded it 3 times, once for more health, once for more damage and the last upgrade was so that it uses less rage. So my ice ball only costs 20 rage with those 2 upgrades. I had a shot once where it rolled across the entire length of the battlefield and it critted for over 3k. Took that stack of giants right out.

It is also useful for distracting enemies or keeping it next range units. It has an insane defense, so it takes a long time to kill it.

[OmegaDestroyer]

Looks like the Poison Cloud was hit with the nerf bat. Instead of lasting X amount of rounds, it's duration is limited to number of attacks.

According to the new patch log:

Duration of Poison Cloud determines the amount of attacks that Cloud makes before disappearing

As much as I like it in the early game, I find it tends to be more of a liability later on.