an instant aoe attack is still too strong especially when they can crit you with it and its so easy to spam being a one action thing on a tier two unit

I don't think the spell does enough damage to be a real threat if you try to skew build against humans.

Has this been tested?

i kinda fail to understand the problem of it's ap cost here; It DOES do aoe damage, but:

`Unlike the web ability of spider mounts (which does similar damage) it doesnt root and CAN miss

`Unlike other spellcaster 3-point casts, it does not apply secondary effects of any kind

``The only value added by it being a 1-point cast is that the caster can move and shoot; the counter to this is still to just put someone on their face so they have to take opportunity attacks to cast again... and the unit is still a caster, with low hp/resistances...

In order for this discussion to even make a tiny amount of sense, you'd need to show an example of how an army of these casters kills armies of higher tiers.... and you can't. Its just a sub-par replacement for an archer, considering how strongly archers scale with enchantments (as individual units) and how casters kinda just don't scale at all (as individual units).

I'd like to add my two cents here, the fact that it is only 1-point in cost gives the wild witch an advantage over other battle mage aoe due to the added mobility of it. The fact it can freely move and position itself and still do the aoe is significant due to how arguably important positioning is to combat, and arguably more so than raw damage numbers.

I think the barbarian culture should be primarily about melee damage as that is their focus and the unit should be in a more supporting role that purpose so as to match the identity of the faction. Seeing as barbarians value the rush attack approach in general I would keep the one ap attack but tone down the damage, to give the unit the ability to keep up but make it less overpowering so its more of a support role than the main force but the run and shoot allows it to keep behind the melee attackers and pitch in with extra damage.

Can they kill groups of tier III by themselves? No, however that's an odd way to judge if a tier II unit is too strong. You really need to compare it to other tier II units.

Here are the other tier two aoes.
From the base game:
Pyromancer 16 damage 3 ap 90% burn 6 range
Hunter spider 12 damage 3 ap 60% immobilize 4 range
Ice Spider 12 damage 3 ap 30% frozen 4 range
From this mod:
Arcane Ranger 12 damage 3 ap Sunder Resistance 4 range only does 50% aoe

That's it. There's a few cone aoes with a range of 1, but nothing else.

In my opinion the witches are by far the best tier II unit in most situations. They have an effective range of 10+, the ability to run in from outside of the enemies range and do a massive amount of aoe damage is a huge advantage, something no other unit in the entire game can do. They do more raw damage than other tier II mages and are harder to stop, since they can back away then still cast.

They also do 2 more damage on their base attack vs pyromancers, for whatever that's worth.

I'm not against barbarian mages having a 1 ap cost aoe, I just don't think it should have a range of 6. If you shortened the range (a lot), increased the cost, or made it something like a cone spell I think that would help.

Originally posted by Eeo:

``The only value added by it being a 1-point cast is that the caster can move and shoot; the counter to this is still to just put someone on their face so they have to take opportunity attacks to cast again... and the unit is still a caster, with low hp/resistances...

Only is downplaying how much that matters, quite heavily, in my opinion. It's a 66% range buff on their first attack, that's what happens. It basically guarantees that they will alpha strike you.. with an aoe. Which is exactly the problem. It doesn't even matter if you could facecheck it, because you can't, it will outrange mounted units after movement. The only way to stop it is leaving the majority of your army 4+ hexes behind your checking unit or a massive spread of your forces. It just isn't realistic (or very fun), especially against barbarians. Even if you do, it's not actually stopped by running into it's face, because it can still move away and still has the range and ability to aoe, _despite having been checked_, just with reduced damage in most cases.

Is it unbeatable? No, surely not. You can play around aoe, but aoe is extremely strong in the right circumstances and the wild witch makes those circumstances much, much easier to achieve. It ends up forces either a very specific approach or just sucking up that it's going to get much more value than any other tier 3 battlemage could hope to get in most scenarios, with no real tactical investment on the part of the player using them (unlike the other tier 3 battlemages, which are relatively easy to stop from aoeing, because they have much less range, need to be actively defended and are actually worth going into melee for, because they won't just tank the hit and do it anyway).
I would second the suggestion that if it is to remain at 1 ap, it should be penalized on range so that checking it would actually allow you to control where they can't aoe, which is not a thing currently, when they're used correctly.

I my opinion it deals too much direct damage to be a 1 AP cast and it leaves no room for counter play. If a Pyromancer moves up with 2 actions you have a turn to stop him casting, kill him, stun him, engage him in melee. You don't have time to stop the WW from casting its nuke and it doesn't feel good to play against. All other mages need the Tier 3 tome of teleportation Phasing unit enchantment to be able to move and cast in one turn.

The white witch is a tier 2 tome battle mage, it has a 1 ap spell that effects one target for 14 damage with a chance to freeze them (freezing blast). If the wild witch (WW) hits 3 targets it deals 54 damage, 72 against 4 in the same amount of time, that’s a lot better than a chance to freeze. Considering all t3 units have base 3 stat resist so it will most likely only work on t1 and 2, and frozen can be removed with spells and burning. I don't think it makes sense for barbarians to have a 3 AP ability BM however, they have an aggressive roster, the WW would just get left behind if it had to stop moving to cast. Some alternatives I think would work for a barbarian battlemage that cost 1AP are:

Caustic Brew: 1 AP, 4 range, 18 blight damage, inflicts 2 sundered defence, cooldown 1 turn. This would combine well with barbarian culture by lowering a target’s defence before a heavy charge strike, which cancels defence mode. Meaning a unit would have -4 armour against a Berserker charge. Also sundered defence lowers stat resistance, meaning a T1 warrior would benefit from increased stun chance on shield bash. Balanced using White Witch as a reference. Chance to freeze is probably better than +4 damage and 2 sundered defence, but the White Witch is a tome unit and frozen can be removed on the enemies turn.

Hieromancy: 1 AP, 4 range, inflicts 10 physical damage to adjacent ally (or self if this isn’t possible), gives friendly target 3 fortune, 2 strengthened, 2 evasion for one turn. Hieromancy is telling people’s fortunes based on the entrails of a sacrifice. Again this has good synergy with barbarian culture, could be cast on a hero/unit before an attack, the evasion helps defend against ranged attacks as barbarians are mainly a melee culture. This was balanced against a chaplains bless ability, instead of 2 bolstered resistance it gives 2 evasion, this makes more sense as the ability is about fortune telling and prediction. It gives 3 fortune instead of 2 as it causes damage to friendlies.

Release Pestilence: 1 AP, 6 range, affects one target but jumps to 4 others with in 2 tiles, inflicts demoralized, poisoned and 1 random negative status effect, cooldown 2 turns. I’m not sure how well balanced this is as I couldn’t find a good reference for comparison.

I think the second two suggestions are more in line with what support does rather than a mage, I’d recommend giving it the first ability and one of the other two, to make up for Caustic brew being weaker than freezing blast.

TLDR: In conclusion I think the WW AoE spell is too good for one AP, phasing enchantment exists to let battle mages move and cast in one turn. Secondly, I think cultural units should have some sort of synergy with other units in that culture, the barbarians are all about melee, primal strike, shieldmaidens and berserkers. At the moment the Wild Witch is just a ranged dps, I think it should have 1 AP short range spells that damage/debuff enemies or buff allies in melee. I think they should have short range to make the Wild Witch keep up with the barbarians.

I hope you don’t mind me making suggestions, I didn't want to just say it was bad without thinking of alternatives. I love your mod, I haven't played without it since I got it and the amount of updates you put out is amazing. But Artica ♥♥♥♥♥♥ me with wild witches and I hate them.

Originally posted by Mr. T:

Originally posted by Eeo:

``The only value added by it being a 1-point cast is that the caster can move and shoot; the counter to this is still to just put someone on their face so they have to take opportunity attacks to cast again... and the unit is still a caster, with low hp/resistances...

Only is downplaying how much that matters, quite heavily, in my opinion. It's a 66% range buff on their first attack, that's what happens. It basically guarantees that they will alpha strike you.. with an aoe. Which is exactly the problem. It doesn't even matter if you could facecheck it, because you can't, it will outrange mounted units after movement. The only way to stop it is leaving the majority of your army 4+ hexes behind your checking unit or a massive spread of your forces. It just isn't realistic (or very fun), especially against barbarians. Even if you do, it's not actually stopped by running into it's face, because it can still move away and still has the range and ability to aoe, _despite having been checked_, just with reduced damage in most cases.

--The idea of countering long range units is typically with short range ones, but we also should all be aware that most high value units are also backline units. We can counter WW with unit compositions, much like their own. Yes, I said (and meant) that the counter to ranged units is face checking them. I also didn't mean to say that you shouldn't recognize that irritating units are irritating, and you should probably bring some of your own. At this point I think every faction has either Skirmishers, Archers, or both; have some.

The ideal counter-play to an alpha strike is to sit just outside the range of it with an alpha strike of your own. Archers and skirmishers, if trained up to Legendary with the Seeking Arrows enchantment, have 6 range and can attack multiple times, or much much harder than a WW, which means that if a Witch moves up to blast your units, you can take the very next turn to kill them outright, with little to no loss.

Yes, WW have a range of 10 for the first hit. Archers can too, innately out dps everything a Witch can do in a fight over exactly 2 turns, and a Witch will never catch up afterwards. Even a squad of spider-mounted scouts has a higher capacity to do terrible things in a fight than a squad of Witches will ever have.

I'm not saying that WW isn't useful, but tbh it's far worse than even a T1 archer that just didn't die for a long time. Aoe healing skills exist, combat spells exist (hold the line, prediction of victory, mass rejuvination skill all are very good)...

Then again, if you just decided to never invest in making your armies good with your mana, your armies will just kinda suck and get run over by anyone who DOES enchant their armies. In that sense, yes, WW are very good, because they are good at killing weak armies. The play in that respect is to scout to see if the dudes near you are Barbarian cultures, then build armies and focus on strengthening them if there ARE barbarians near you.

Is it unbeatable? No, surely not. You can play around aoe, but aoe is extremely strong in the right circumstances and the wild witch makes those circumstances much, much easier to achieve. It ends up forces either a very specific approach or just sucking up that it's going to get much more value than any other tier 3 battlemage could hope to get in most scenarios, with no real tactical investment on the part of the player using them (unlike the other tier 3 battlemages, which are relatively easy to stop from aoeing, because they have much less range, need to be actively defended and are actually worth going into melee for, because they won't just tank the hit and do it anyway).
I would second the suggestion that if it is to remain at 1 ap, it should be penalized on range so that checking it would actually allow you to control where they can't aoe, which is not a thing currently, when they're used correctly.

The question here is less 'playing around aoe' and more 'utilizing your resources effectively'. Knowing that an army has aoe spells means that you should also have some counter to that before you engage it; whether you're fighting a t5 dragon or a t2 witch. If an opponent runs at you with 3 armies and you have 1, are you going to be mad that you have to play a specific way to win that fight too? That's an extreme example, but what I'm trying to say here is two things:

a)People and AI will do stuff. That stuff will, to varying degrees, generally be to your detriment; their goal is to win the game, and so is yours, so they're not going to do stuff that doesn't increase the likelihood of them winning and you losing. Making a complaint that a certain enemy type forces you to respond in a specific set of ways, in light of that, is just spouting pointless words.

b)The point at which a unit/ability/strategy is op is the point at which there IS no effective counterplay to it. WW is useful. It isn't strong in the sense that a t1 unit with 4 enchantments can beat armies of t4 units with 8 enchantments, but it IS somewhat more 'useable' than other casters of its tier. However, if you are losing fights to the fact that a t2 caster is allowed to cast, you're probably doing something else wrong, either in resource management (read: you have no mana to cast the spells that make casters nuking your armies meaningless), or in a general tactical sense in that fight. I assume that people aren't just running at each other like lunatics in manual combat, but I could be wrong...

If this really is a problem for so many people, reducing the range by 1 would probably solve the issue entirely. Maybe reducing damage by 2 would also help, but I'm pretty sure doing both of those things would make building WW just about pointless.

PS: A lot of what I'm reading here(in the entire discussion) seems more like avid theory-crafting than actual gameplay experience; 14 damage one time one a cooldown of any kind is not nearly as strong as people are making it out to be, even if it hits 7 people every time it's cast. And if people are spamming WW for some reason... that army just dies. It really isn't difficult to kill them at any point in the game as long as you're building army at a respectable pace, and if you're not building army... you probably SHOULD lose the game overall anyways (the easiest way to kill a person is still to just kill them, after all).

Okay so I’ve been brainstorming on this topic for a bit now. The wild Witch was designed with the Barbarian philosophy of a fast, high damaging opening attack (similar to primal strike). And the to fill the niche of the “Witch of the Wilds”, “Hag”, or “Wild Woman” stereotype in tribal and pre-feudal folklore.

The AoE was designed to be high damaging, as it lacks any kind of utility, and relies on enemies being grouped together to be truely effective. However, the general consensus seems to be that the Wild Witch is overtuned, so I have been experimenting with changes.

The current list of potential changes to the Wild Witch are below (only one will be applied):

Reduce Wild Witch AoE abilities range and damage, but add a high chance of sundered defence to give it synergy with barbarians heavy physical focus.

Replace AoE ability with a resistance based polymorph ability. This keeps the Wild Witches flavour identity alive, provides it with utility, while culling its offensive power.

Start with the AoE on cool-down, though I feel this may kneecap them too much.

Let me know what you think.

I don't see the reasoning for comparing the Wild Witch with anything other than tier 2 battle mages, that's the role its made to fill, that's the point of reference for establishing balance. The only other tier 2 battle mage with a 1 AP ability is the White Witch, which is a 4 range, single target, 14 damage, chance to freeze ability. The Wild Witch has a 6 range, 1 hex AoE, 18 damage ability for the same unit upkeep and AP cost. And the White Witch is a tome unit, which means there's an additional cost to unlock it.

In terms of damage its the best tier 2 battle mage, the Evoker and Pyromancer will have done more damage on turn 5 of combat assuming they each get their damage over time effect on 3 enemies and it lasts the full 3 turns, and even then its only just more. But raw damage is more valuable than damage over time, and 3 tier 1 tomes have ways to remove negative effects.

Compared to archers, over 3 rounds a fury would do 108 damage (12 per attack). A Wild Witch would do 60 in attacks (10 per attack) and 36/54 with blight rain (2 targets vs 3 targets. For a total of 96 and 114 respectively. But that's physical damage vs blight damage, Anvil guard, Dawn defender and Barb warrior all have 41% physical resist and 0% magic resist base, they also have shields which is another plus 3 physical resistance unless you are flanking meaning 57% physical resistance. So the Wild Witch is doing nearly double damage compared to the fury.

Yes after you get some enchantments, and rank ups the Wild Witch can't compete. It falls of like all the other tier 2 battle mages. No one cares about the Wild Witch or any tier 2 mage after turn 40. The problem is that you can spawn with them on turn 0, and you can build them before turn 10 for a 100 gold in 3 turns. After turn 35-40 there's plenty of stuff that is better, but before then nothing else is. And before turn 35 you don't have any way to counter it, what enchantments or spells do you have at turn 20 for example? sundering blades, frost arrows, single target heals, spell-tempered shields at least gives you plus one magic resist for 10% less damage, magical wards doesn't give blight resistance. You have a hero, 3 t1 melee a t1 archer and a t2 support in a stack, there's no meaningful way to stop the witch casting or reduce the damage in there yet. And you don't have any strategies except go to them or wait for them.

Secondly the barbarians already have the best melee units at the start of the game, they all have primal strike, the T1 warrior has a stun, the T1 sunderer hits for 12 melee and has a javelin, and their cultural spell book has amazing melee buffs. They shouldn't start with the best early game ranged dps to.

TLDR: the Wild Witch is the best tier 2 battle mage by some margin and those are the units it should be compared to. In the mid game no one cares about, but at the start of the game its overpowered, and that's when it's available so it should be balanced with that in mind.

Originally posted by Digger at Arms:

Okay so I’ve been brainstorming on this topic for a bit now. The wild Witch was designed with the Barbarian philosophy of a fast, high damaging opening attack (similar to primal strike). And the to fill the niche of the “Witch of the Wilds”, “Hag”, or “Wild Woman” stereotype in tribal and pre-feudal folklore.

The AoE was designed to be high damaging, as it lacks any kind of utility, and relies on enemies being grouped together to be truely effective. However, the general consensus seems to be that the Wild Witch is overtuned, so I have been experimenting with changes.

The current list of potential changes to the Wild Witch are below (only one will be applied):

Reduce Wild Witch AoE abilities range and damage, but add a high chance of sundered defence to give it synergy with barbarians heavy physical focus.

Replace AoE ability with a resistance based polymorph ability. This keeps the Wild Witches flavour identity alive, provides it with utility, while culling its offensive power.

Start with the AoE on cool-down, though I feel this may kneecap them too much.

Let me know what you think.

I think reduce range and damage and add sundered defence, makes it work better with barbarian culture which should be about melee. Also early game a lot of important buffs come from grouping up. Feudal needs to stand around the Bannerman and get the stand together effect. Industrious and High T1 melee both have shield wall, plus 3 melee resist to adjacent allies. And for all cultures to hit melee units engaged in combat you have to stand on the tile behind the front line until you get some accuracy buffs.

Originally posted by Eeo:

PS: A lot of what I'm reading here(in the entire discussion) seems more like avid theory-crafting than actual gameplay experience; 14 damage one time one a cooldown of any kind is not nearly as strong as people are making it out to be, even if it hits 7 people every time it's cast. And if people are spamming WW for some reason... that army just dies. It really isn't difficult to kill them at any point in the game as long as you're building army at a respectable pace, and if you're not building army... you probably SHOULD lose the game overall anyways (the easiest way to kill a person is still to just kill them, after all).

I don't know what to make of you claiming you can only get 14 damage on a (effectively) 10 range aoe ability when it comes to you actually playing it in game but it's probably not good.

You are right though, it has not happened in my games that anyone went out of their way to hit only one unit for 14 damage with an aoe ability, then forfeit the fight before the cooldown was over so that they could only get one cast rather than backing up. Perhaps it's just our lack of gameplay experience and that's why people call me bad words when I lock down the terrain choke with freezes and make it effectively impossible for them to meaningfully advance, while the witches are throwing their mediocre aoes with complete impunity. I'll be sure to let them know that getting taken on the value train to pain town by my transition from the one of the most cost effective tier 1 units in the game to one of the most cost effective tier 2 unit in the game, long before they can assemble their mythical turbo archers, is because they tried to think about the game rather than just playing it. At which point I assume for some reason I will stop aiming my aoes and playing around my unit composition(?). Have a good one mate.


Personally I think its damage could easily stay the same, on top of the sundered debuff, if it's range is meaningfully hit, because as I see and use it, the range aspect is what's pushing it from irritating to too punishing to play against when it hits the field. I agree starting it on cooldown is not the move, and doesn't play into the theme, but both other options seem perfectly reasonable to me though.

Starting it on CD would be annoying for everyone, as well as leaving the strength there as long as you can run away for 2 turns first, which seems very counter to the barbarians. I think the range is definitely the issue, shortening it (a lot) would do the trick.

I also like the idea of the polymorph. I'm just not sure how strong it would be on the Barbarians if they can just polymorph the enemy front line unit and walk around them. I guess it would depend on the reliability, it would be interesting to try out and sounds like fun.

A weakening curse/poison that reduces defense/speed/resistance or whatever stat you want also seems to be on theme.

I'm eager to test these changes to see how the Wild Witch fits in to the roster now. Glad that some of the unique parts of the unit were kept intact while trying to re-balance it.