NargottОбкаст = casting Buffs / Debuffs

Thanks! I was wondering what is this.

NargottКстати, очень важное замечание по обкастам Свето-Тьмы. Поскольку вы сделали отброс не в 0.5, а в 0.1 (или в 0.0), то игра на обкастах значительно ослабилась, необходимо подумать о том, чтобы усилить их эффекты, параллельно подняв цены. Как раз для того, чтобы классы с низким 10-15% знанием не могли себе позволить слишком много обкастов в бою, в идеале 2-3 не более (если специально не прокачивали знание). Поднимать цены нужно из-за того, что в гонке обкастов расход маны за 1 раунд снизился вдвое из-за в 2 раза более редких обкастов, и герои с низким знанием получают несправедливое преимущество, соревнуясь с теми, кто сидит на обкастах под высоким знанием. При старом (0.5 темпе) мана может закончиться довольно быстро, а вот при 0.1 темпе уже нет (если не поднимать цены).

First the general idea is Might heroes to be able to cast blessing and curses. This is how they can make their army a little bit stronger. The spells effects and duration are reduced due to lack of spellpower. Here is an example for bless and expert Light:
Might hero with 5 spellpower: +26.65% bonus initiative for 2.5 turns.
Magic hero with 50 spellpower: +41.5% for 7 turns.

Besides the obvious difference in the bonus the low amount of rounds means every third ATB action the Might hero will be busy with casting that blessing.
This mechanics refers to our initial idea for the Might vs Magic class.

A hero (any class) affects the battlefield in 2 main ways - passive and active.
- Passive is in the form of skills that benefit the native army or negatively affect the enemy army during the duration of the battle where all the benefits come from skills and stats that do not reduce the ATB
- Active is in the form of spells and abilities that improve native army, negatively affect the enemy army or cause direct damage. Any of those skills require hero ATB usage, can be burst or can spread over period of time.

Might classes are more prominent in passive effects, Magic classes are more prominent in active effects, Balanced classes thrive in between.
In a battle:
- Passive effects - they just work no need to explain.
- Active abilities - This is the interesting part that I hope may change your vision for some of the changes. For mages is obvious they have a vast range of spells to cast during the whole battle. The player is overwhelmed with choices especially when playing with 2 or 3 schools at the same time. From the Mage perspective the battle is interesting. But from the Might perspective... Might heroes have restricted usage of spells (dark or light) and even with the schools the range of spells in those schools can be halved for them because some of the spells require spellpower.

So the Active part for Might heroes is not that interesting. Basically you cast some spells for a lesser effect and there is no much mind put in it. But with the addition of Combat a Might player actually chose another path. Depending on what Combat path you take the Might hero can adjust his battlefield strategy significantly. Yes Combat does not offer much of a booster skills but it offers tactical adjustments before (preparation) and during ("Chain strikes", "retaliation", Avenger") battle.

Not once or twice can happen to have a good shot against vulnerable enemy stack but to cancel but to cancel your offense with the T5,T6 or T7 unit just because the enemy hero put a "retaliation strike" on that unit and damn it will hit hard. This is concept that cannot be justified by numbers and statistics.

Also I see that you try to hard to make a note and I understand that but have in mind that the changes you want come with a huge investment of time.
If you open the game, get a mage hero and visit a witch hut it will give you 2 suggestions for skill increase for example Occultism and Sorcery. Do you know what happens if you visit the same witch hut with a Might hero? You will not be proposed Occultism and Sorcery. It will most certainly be Combat and Leadership. All those things are done manually for every skill.

By the way you said that Sorcery looks really strong. Sorcery is is the Magic class variation of the Might class Leadership. As you can see a hero that has Sorcery never has Leadership.

Expert Leadership gives 50% for 0.4 initiative increase. This means that army average initiative is increased by 20%.
Expert Sorcery on the other side increase the Hero, who only acts once, by 36%.
Once again those are numbers that cannot be measured because questions such as "is the hero strong as 2 unit stacks? or less? or more?" have to be answered. And the answer depends on the stage of the game the luck factor of artifacts and so on. Final line - it cannot be determined.

Combat and Occultism are also Might and Magic counters.
Combat increase Might hero army tactical advantage.
Occultism increase Magic hero spell effect/damage.

Occultism tree is all in numbers, Combat has barely any numbers. How do you measure that? Although unmeasurable they are both accepted equally.

There is no universal way to equalize heroes primary, secondary skills.
It is like measuring man and women.... it just does not work that way.

We did it the other way around. We started with how we want it to be as an idea and then started iterating propositions. The core skill system was iterated a lot lot of times. There were major changes in every edition up to RC8. You can check the moddb article history. I believe the mod was put online around version RC3 or RC4.

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P.S.

To give some information how skills that cannot be compared with numbers are made equal. You make the skills and then try the best way to exploit them. Then you try to find the best counter (if possible). Then the effort is calculated -

Does the same amount of effort is needed to take the exploit path then to counter it?

the good stuff is that we got a lot of people to test so blind spots are reduced as much as possible. The final result is not just my decision or Magnomagus decision but an average of all opinions with regards to logic of course.


Cheers