Berserk is an extremely powerful fire spell. It is the only spell in the game which allows fighting MUCH stronger armies than your own. The enemy has many stacks of very powerful creatures? Who cares as long as they are close to each other. Make them fight each other. In fact, its a 1 turn blind AoE, but better. This spell alone makes getting Fire magic to master level so berserk becomes AoE.
I have played HOMM3 so much, but i have overlooked berserk. Now i think its maybe the strongest spell of whole HOMM 3. In a late game, its game changer. With expert fire magic, you can easily manage much more stronger armies, than yours.
The thing about "Animate Dead" is that you'll only get it as necro, which means while it is situational that situation always apply to you when you get it. Also it is permanent at any level and you can get it in the mage guild earlier than resurrect at a higher chance. While you can get Resurrect as Necro and have it be a dead spell for you before getting a non-undead army. That's btw the case with Death Ripple too, as you only get it as necro.
Yes, good comments there I think that's right; makes Animate hard to rate, clearly a great spell when you're Necro; I still find Ripple to be poor though even then
@@paulgoes5494 Yeah I don't think Death Ripple is good as it has terrible scaling. I feel "animate dead" should be placed equal with resurrection as when you get it as Necro, it is much better for you than resurrect is for a non-necro town. It works on all your undead, while resurrection has more relevant immunities. And given that the "animate dead" necro hero can use it straight away and is more likely to be given the option to learn Earth Magic, I don't feel there is much doubt despite the fact that it is situational.
Counterstrike is great for some strong melee units like hydras, vampires. Teleporting a stack of hydras with counterstrike into middle of enemy formation is amazing
View Air gets much better with Air magic skill. At advanced level it shows you enemy heroes and at expert it shows you all towns. This gets useful in campaigns when you're trying to hunt down all heroes and towns.
That's clearly true, in fact I prefer View Air over View Earth, because View Earth is only useful if you are often lacking of a specific resource that you really need for your next building purchase what you must get in order to get benefited faster during your gameplay. Otherwise, it's better to be aware of your enemies and clearly see where they are coming from or at least where they currently are and where they are heading to. A lot of times, Tavern's Thieves Guild is just not informative enough or even giving false information about you and your enemies at times.
@@LanceVader Indeed. The arguments against it is that it is expensive to cast, harder to get and makes you go expert water. But honestly, once you get it, the mana cost is no issue, and it is very strong, with no counter. It does take away a slot from town portal & ressurection in the mage guild which is arguably another point against it. But assuming you already have those 2 spells, it would be great to get prayer.
Earth is so good of a school, and I love the other ones. In terms of potential I would love if water was worked on more back then. So many spells that look to be really awesome if you really think of it. I personally love the feel of water magic. Feel like Earth Magic is too powerful, air magic is about where it needs to be, and both Water and Fire need a buff in their design.
Armageddon works with dragons, of course, but it's also an amazing spell for Conflux. Four of seven units in Conflux (fire/energy elementals, earth/magma elementals, magic elementals, and firebirds/phoenix) are immune to it, making it really easy to build your army around using the spell. For similar reasons it's nearly useless if you're attacking Conflux.
Thanks Allan! Fair observation: I just really struggled to rate it (along with Archangels, Necromancy and Wisdom :). I didn't know Magmas were immune to it, I feel bad for giving them an F- now in the creatures video...
Its also useful when you have heroes with no armies, or when you know you are losing (specially if you have another army), which is never ideal but happens, i remember some multiplayer maps where there was just enough reusable exp to get heroes to cast it out of the gate, so you use them to screen enemies for your main army, we learned to fear the 7 harpy stacks heroes.
@@Williazzzz One of my favorites was having an inferno hero with an army of 7 mater Efreet or even just regular efreet and then just spamming armageddon for huge casualties. As long as the first cast knocks out their ranged units, I'd pretty much have free reign to get off a second cast. Between their speed and flying, I could take down some pretty huge armies even with only like 10 spell power (and inferno has the +1 SP building). And if not, I could just retreat and reup the spell points.
@@paulgoes5494na that are still complete garbage. There stat are at the level of 3/4. Unless you get the hero that specializes in them, then they are at least usable, still really bad though.
Hi good sir, and thanks for yest another good video where you explained your views and your beliefs in a good and understandable way. Very entertaining and I viewed it from start to finish ,sometimes shaking my head and sometimes nodding in approvement. 🙂 I know that getting good comments, with meaningful content, is an energy pill for a youtuber, so of course I will leave some sentences and statements on it for you and all the other followers. Let med just first say that I have played the game from beginning in 1999, with a short break when I studied and got my masters, and then back on it again after I landed a paying job after ended university run. So, I have followed the versions and like you, are so in love with the game. Its just the best game ever. The music, the strategy and planning, like a chess game, the cool units, the heroes with the skills they roll, the factions and the uniqueness of it. And of course, the mage guild where one hopes to see the best spells and get super exited, or we roll badly and get super frustrated and feel like we get punished badly. So, first, I have viewed a lot of your playthrough videos now. Necro, conflux, inferno, and factory. If you start to notice that you, and all others - me included, cast one spell at first round with any hero who know it on expert level. That spell is slow. It is the most casted spell in the game. You get it at level 1 and its good, but you only get to slow one stack, but if that stack is a ranged unit and you get to shoot it with your own archery units, its super good. On expert level, it is the best hindering spell in the game. That is why it ALWAYS get casted first round, because you control the battlefield with it like no other spell can do. I wanted to point out, that blind is good yeah, no question about it, but it never gets better if you are on expert level or not. It just affects one stack and that is it. With blind, you stop one stack from attacking. Fine. But with expert slow, you control every stack and dictates what the opponent can do. Blind is a A-tier spell for that reason, and if you view your own play of the game, you cast expert slow way more than you use blind. Even in late stage of game, expert slow is the first you do, and then decide what damaging spell you will go for after that. The slow just gives you the control, no other spells do that. I would say blind is A+, and slow is S+. It is simply better, and it is the most used spell in the game. Town portal is superb, no questions asked, but you do not get it most of the time and its not casted often because when the creatures in town are needed for defense or for other heroes, its not worth the spell points to town portal that often. It is a S, but not a S+ spell. Its super good, but it is not casted enough for the +. The excitement of getting it, is super high, as high as it gets, and the game is broken when you get it. A clear S-tier. Implosion yes. Clear S+. Same with resurrection. Dimension door and fly are good. Movement over the adventure map is key in the game, and they both do a decent job at it. In my book, DD is a clear S, but fly is just a A-tier. Animate dead is S+ if you are necro, but is a useless spell for any other faction, so it can not get a A-tier grade for me. One faction out of eleven in HotA version, and nine in original version, which gives a narrow usage of the spell. One S+ and 8 F-, it can not be a A-tier spell for me. In fact, if the awesomeness for one faction alone can get it up the ranks, then counterstrike used on vampire lords (one big stack alone as a single unit), is a S+ spell. But it just does not make a good case because for the other factions its just not true. The combination of blind and disrupting ray is a killer combo. Immobilize the opponents best stack with blind, and just loop with defend with all your stacks and make sure he does not get a turn, and remove the defense to nothing, and attack and kill it without losses. But on its own, its just OK ish. Summoning spells, Air, Fire, Water and Earth, I strongly disagree with you of the order. Earth is the bulky and useful one of the fore. In a situation where you defend a castle, and you do not care about the movement, because you are defending only, they are super hard to kill. They are excellent blockers for your ranged units in open combat or in castle defense. They are a tier five unit, and the defense, attack and HP of the stack is clearly better than air (tier two unit), water (tier three unit) and fire (tier four unit). A summoned stack of 40+ earth elementals with base stats of 10 attack, 10 defense and 40 HP, they are hard to shew for the opponent’s units. When we also add that they take NO damage from Lightning bolt and Chain Lightning, and you see where you placed those damaging spells on your list. Then you have a stack that is particularly good in usage. They are bad at speed, but good on everything else. And the case is that you do not want to carry a stack of them on the hero, yes 100% true, because of the speed. But, with summoning spell, you do not have to. You get the best of both worlds. Keep on the enjoyable content Poul. Look forward to next tier list or playthrough.
Hey thanks Wolfman! Great contribution as always. A lot there I fully agree on I must say. On the T1 Slow I agree it ends up being the most commonly done thing. One thing that I've been finding myself living in fear of is the old haste-riposte after you cast the Slow; but I usually conclude that I'm often in massive trouble to Exp-Haste regardless so just go for the Slow anyway. You have me on the order of the Summon Eles cannot dispute that logic at all totally agree. I was definitely biased by my hatred of the Earth Eles as an investment option in town (which as you say isn't relevant) :)
Dimension door + town portal is basically game over. You can acquire knowledge points because you can jump all over the map and you can easily get 15-20 knowledge. You just need 1 big army and 1 op Hero and no one can beat you anymore.
I really like how your breakdown shows just how relevant level 1 spells are which is really nice cause in most games level 1 spells tend to not be great. One of the many reasons I love this game.
I guess homm3 was never meant to be balanced. Else they would have made cure a great deal stronger and left out resurrect completely. Boom, water magic good.
Largely agree with the tier list, though for me personally I would put implosion at the top spot simply due to the excitement factor, and how fun it is to get/cast. Also there is the fact that I almost never get implosion.. all the games I've gone for a level 5 expert earth mage, only to never get implosion :(
It feels so good when your noob 10y old self had +/- the same idea about this as you have now, decades later . So good stuff! We watched it tg with my gf and had a bless!
As a rule of thumb, all the different buff and debuff spells are significantly better on might heroes than magic heroes. Vice Versa for damage spells. It also goes back to your previous video on skills and the question of whether to take expert x magic on might heroes with or without wisdom. Basically taking expert air/earth on a might hero for mass haste/slow alone is very worthwhile. However on magic heroes when your mass haste/slow competes with Implosion, Meteor Shower, Armageddon, etc, it suddenly becomes significantly less impressive. Of course still army composition dependent and still has its room even on magic heroes but it's a much narrower use for them as opposed to being automatic on might heroes. Speaking of magic heroes, you rated Firewall very low yet there is this 1 hero that specializes in Firewall, think it's a Conflux hero, which is arguably the best hero in the entire game to start with because Firewall is so powerful early on with that hero. I mean sure the base version isn't as good as the specialized one and isn't free right off the bat, but the power level is still there albeit not with the same tempo as having it unlocked on day 1. Prayer is definitely a A tier spell, arguably S, in terms of its action economy, 1 spell to get 3.5(+4 speed rather than +6 of the haste spell, and in a different school) spell effects, at expert you get mass prayer which is just insane. The only thing holding it back is that it's a level 4 spell which means it's much harder to get and of course requires advanced wisdom to cast, and you'll generally want to use it on your might heroes not magic. An advanced wisdom water mage expert might hero is incredibly powerful and opening with mass prayer can certainly be battle changing. Would definitely put in A tier, perhaps A- because it comes so late, but its effect is utterly insane. Speaking of lackluster tier 5 spells, cast fire elemental early on than when the battle is almost over sacrifice them(you can't keep them anyway) to resurrect your strongest high level stack. A very poor man's Resurrect for fire expert heroes. Kappa
Hey Owl, thanks for this and your other comment on the skills! Very fair points not much I disagree with really. I'm not sure I've ever played with Luna as my main hero but many people have pointed out her awesome firewall exploit so that's something I've learned! I probably just dismissed her ability as useless "since I never cast that". Interesting insight on the fire ele / sacrifice combo I must keep that in mind (saccing eles more generally I guess)
Great list, i personally put clone a lot higher because when you think about it, it is the highest damage single target damaging spell. You copy a fat stack of high damage monster you have (on it's turn !) and you basically get to smack an enemy stack for that amount, it's the same effect as a spell... so even if they dissapear when retaliated you deal a lot more with it late game than even with implosion some times and you eat up a retaliation if it's a fast creature clone some archangels/phoenixes/arch devils late game and it's lights out :) bonus: in consideration of who can use it it's better too, because for the high damage spells you need a lot of spell power for them to hit hard, while cloning works even with the so called "dumbass" champions that just stumbled over a spellbook
@@paulgoes5494 it is but try clone on archangels resurrection combo on knight with their poor SP. Requires expert water for tier 7 units. If you have a pack of archangels their resurrection is usually much stronger than the knights than you lose the clone on retaliation make a new one and so on. Also clone is good for fast demoning with pit lords. Doesn't require water magic. If the dead stack was demons it's actually limited resurrection combo but you must lose the stack ,less useful but may be. Also clone may be good on faerie dragons and master genies (for casts, if they are in only few stacks) and shooters and no retaliation melee units but that's not so interesting as resurrection combo
yes I love clone on a big load of Titans. Sometimes you can even get more than one round out of the clone or waste an enemy attack to kill it as you say.
Clone Archangels is a 0-loss recipe and the closest thing to the broken Berserk spell to take out mighty enemies. In these scenarios, clone is way more potent than resurrection and can do crazy damage. Clone is an A tier and definitely a much better spell than teleport.
Great spell tier list, I would put berserk at A too tier because while with expert fire it can let you do a comeback it's a bit to situational to be S-tier for my taste.
S Town Portal, Dimension Door, Fly, Slow, Resurrection, Animate Dead, Implosion, Blind A symm Earth Elemental, Armageddon, Haste, Stoneskin, Shield, Clone, Meteor Shower, Magic Arrow, Lightning Bolt, Berserk, cure B Bloodlust, Bless, Disrupting Ray, Antimagic,. Forgettfullness, Dispel, Curse, Summ water elemental The rest? I don't give a s
Altering offense and defense can do a lot to change the damage calculations. When dealing damage the game adds up your creatures attack and your heroes attack and compares it to the enemy creatures defense + the enemy heroes defense. Every point of difference is a 5% boost or reduction in the total damage. So for instance; expert weakness is -30% damage across the enemies entire army. Weakness is a lot worse on creatures dealing 1-3 damage than Curse, but a lot stronger on creatures with smaller or zero damage fluctuation. For instance Nagas don’t have any damage fluctuation so cursing them does nothing but weakening them is a big deal. Makes me wish Expert Disrupting Ray hit the whole enemy squad T_T
blind with expert fire mage gives no retaliation when blinded creature is attacked. you can setup up nasty lockdowns that way without taking any damage
Prayer is S-tier. In Conjunction with Haste... Giving your units +9 Speed... Can cause some fun stuff. Like Speedy Dendroids, or Zooming Zombies. With Loynis as your Hero, Expert Prayer+Haste Gives +12 speed to 1 and 2 level units... which can really throw a wrench in your opponents face. If you have the Combination Artifact Angelic Alliance, which sure already buffs the heck out of your units, but it casts Expert Prayer at the start of the combat for 10 rounds.. So You can literally have Phoenixes with +9 speed at the beginning of your combat. Albeit a bit overkill at that point. It's not however the most speed you can give your units... The absolute fastest would be Sir Mullich with Ring of the Wayfarer, Necklace of Swiftness and Cape of Velocity, using Phoenixes with Expert Prayer and Haste on Native Ground, would result in +16 speed to the Phoenixes ending up with 37 speed. Just Sir Mullich with Phoenixes is 23 Speed and makes for a very good Armageddon Hero, just because of that, toss on the 3 speed boosting artifacts and you're up to 27 speed and not even expert haste would make your opponent's creatures faster. But yeah, Prayer is S-tier.
I know the factory faction hadn't come out at the time of the video but you can use frenzy with crimson coutals in conjunction with their invulnerability to great effect.
I recently discovered you can rerole spells. Don't think every map allows it. I've not played the game for years but I've seen it in play throughs. Not that relevant to the video but interesting information I feel.
I think Firewall is definitely underrated here. I've seen some cheesy strats that use Firewall to great effectiveness. Much more so than Force Field. Same with Anti-Magic which can be almost game-breaking in certain circumstances. It can basically negate the entire strategy of a magic based hero. To a lesser extent i also think Disrupting Ray is underappreciated; if stacked against high defense creatures it can be quite good. Arguably better against a single target than Weakness which can't be stacked multiple times on the same unit. But i admit it is situational and it was a much more powerful spell in Heroes 2 when there were less other options available. On the other hand it seems to me that spells like Disguise, Visions and the View spells are pretty much worthless, i can't see them being anything more than F. But that just might be because i don't play multiplayer. I also see a bit of an inconsistency with how low Precision is rated. To me it belongs together with other very similar buffs like Stone Skin and Bloodlust. It's decent in the early game if you have a strong shooter stack. I agree with you on Misfortune in SoD, but i just wanted to add that in HotA you can actually have negative luck, so in that version of the game it would maybe be a tier or two higher. Still not good though.
I have enjoyed alot of your videos laitly and i have to say thanks. I dusted off the old computer and found a new appreciation for the game. Much thanks to you:) Wife is not too happy though. Interesting comments about the fire school. I have one tip for you about the sacrifice spell. Efreiths i find the best to ressurect. Have an army of different stacks and charge the enemy with your lowest number. It will die quick. Then sacrifise your biggest stack. The return is great:)
Will you be doing the Tier Lists of either the abilities/skills/talents, towns, heroes or even buildings as well? I enjoy your videos a lot! I find myself watching them in parts, before I sleep, picking it back up at morning. Thx for doing those. Very helpful. Cheers!
Hey DJ thanks for the support! I happen to have another one on the skills coming up, should be posted by end of the week. I could just talk about this game for days
Town Portal is so convenient that I find myself not finishing a lot of games on larger maps if I didn't learn it and/or earth magic before all my skills are filled in. When I know I've won but the computer runs around with a handful of scrawny heroes stealing random small towns and lumbermills I tend to just call it a game and move on.
Hey Justin, yes I wish there was a way to keep the game engaging once you've broken the back of the map / enemies. A lot of the games I adore the most have this problem (Civ, Total War etc)
With advanced and expert blind, the damage of the retaliation decreases, with expert blind the creature will retaliatie with just 1 dmg. Pretty useful if you have to deal with 50 behemoths or so, blind them, hit em blind em
so, firewall is generally pretty bad....but Luna is probably the most broken hero in the game as a fire wall specialist that can clear t5 stacks with a single sprite. just for that reason i wouldn't vote it that low. Conflux probably is kinda op in general
Fire wall would be much bettee if, for one, you get to put more fire walls as tou get expert fire, and second to do damage per turn, just like poison in heroes 5. It should be enough to discourage or do decent amount of damage to one or more units.
I like your placement of Forgetfulness. it is often overlooked and underrated, but it is pretty useful in clearing shooter stacks from the map without taking damage. the drawback is the high investment need, but in campaign this is not a big issue, and in jebus you can get water tome.
View air and earth are in most competitive modes in homm3 absolutely necessary! Hypnotise is good to steal speed prio in an end battle. Protection is also very good in my opinion!
Chain Lightning: I think most heroes WANT to learn air magic anyway. Might heroes may not have the power or knowledge to cast it effectively, but that kinda goes for Lightning Bolt, too. Still, if I had to choose only one of those spells, I'd still choose to have Lightning Bolt... Counterstrike: There may be an argument for Vampire Lords... but I still think that Counterstrike will rarely ever make the difference. Frost Ring: It does the same damage as Fireball, and cost 3 spell points less. And I think Water Magic > Fire Magic. Teleport: I'm surprised that you put it up so high. It's so rare that it's ever useful to me. Ancient Behemoths are definitely devastating if you teleport them over the walls, but then you can also use range or flying units to siege. Or cast Chain Lightning/Armageddon/Meteor Shower or even Frost Ring and Fireball. And there's the issue with Barbarians being unable to learn water magic, and Crag Hack is probably the best at holding a big stack of Ancient Behemoths. Maybe heroes like Mephala and Tazar will be able to use this strategy much better, but it's still such a niche use. Berserk: It is level 4, and there are too many issues with it. Fire Magic sucks, so if you get it, you most likely cast it at basic level, which is ok but still much harder to make great use of. Some creatures are immune to mind spells. Some immune to Fire spells. The spell itself has a lower rate of appearing than some of the other really good level 4 spells like Chain Lightning, Town Portal, Resurrection, and not to mention you can get Chain Lightning from Solmyr, and Ressurection from Jeddite and Alamar. And there's also the bug with the Badge of Courage in the vanilla game. I feel like everything in this game is just trying to stop players from using Berserk effectively. It's not like Blind where Blind is so common, we're gonna get it anyway most likely, and casting it at expert fire magic doesn't really help much more than casting it at no fire magic. Magic Mirror: I think it's beyond useless. Worst spell in the game. The biggest tragedy when it appears in the mage guild. There isn't a single use I can think of for it. I have never seen anyone using it, not even for the giggle. Sacrifice: Gold Dragons... It's a terrible spell. It's not Magic Mirror though. I hope you will do Artifacts tier list. I enjoy these videos.
Thankyou Giang for these great comments!! I think you've persuaded me just about everywhere there! For starters I didn't know Barbs couldn't get Water; and don't know about Badge bug (what is it?). When I look back at my 20+ years of playing it, I don't really end up casting Tele all that much in honesty; so I think you've got a good case. Might do artifacts at some point, I'd really wanted to focus on things the player has a choice over (I suppose Art Merchant is a thing of course :)
@@paulgoes5494 Badge of Courage in vanilla makes all your troops immune to mind spells, on top of +1 morale. It's fixed in HotA, but in vanilla, it has that hidden effect.
Nothing wrong at all with playing without mods. But one of the things i like so much about Horn of the Abyss, is how it feels so much like vanilla. The added stuff just fit right in, in my opinion.
Hey Thuras, yeah my next playthru I'm doing HotA, I also agree with so many of the changes. One problem though I'm having is the random maps are heavily modded to be less random, great for fairness in multiplayer but not as varied for single. My ideal would be if there was a menu at creation you could enable/disable various features WoG style
@@paulgoes5494 I'm not exactly an expert with the tool, so i can not tell you anything that is possible, but you are aware that HotA comes with an editor for random map templates, so you can create those to your own liking ?
Hey Thuras thanks again it will indeed be content if I can get a clear run on some more filming time. There is I think a knowledge gap out there as to just how good the template editor is and what you can do with it - I've been blown away by it
The problem is that you don't take into account the overall strength of the school of magic and its associated utility. Players almost always choose earth, then air or water, and only finally fire. Therefore, such a stone skin is much more useful in practice than a curse, because it can be used much more often in the expert version. Also, I don't understand at all why the stone skin is below the shield.
Hey Toxo, interesting - I guess you could argue the opposite though, in that SS has a lot more to compete with than Curse, as the latter is surrounded by mediocrity. Fundamentally - which one do I cast more often and which one excites me when I cast it? That would be curse all day. And with Shield, it just gets cast more often (by me at least). Appreciate the thoughts
I personally love the idea of how it would look to the other army to have some random leader with an army of phoenixes and dragons to just warp the field and be like "now fly over the land I just flattened".
Disrupting ray is only viable in HOMM5 with sylvan's triple magic ballista. Basically you fire 3 arrows into an enemy, each dealing some meaningful damage and cast disrupting ray onto that target. It's so good against 6/7 tier creatures as you watch their defense go down to 0!
I *suppose* Lightning Bolt and Fireball are supposed to be balanced in such a way that it indeed is a trade-off in whether you want to pick one or the other. Lightning Bolt deals Power×25 damage as a baseline (plus some flat damage in change) and Fireball deals Power×10 damage as a baseline (again plus some change). So technically if you hit at least three targets with Fireball, you already dealt more damage in total than you would with a single Lightning Bolt. So the tradeoff here is whether you want to spread the damage around or to concentrate it onto a single target and whether three or more worthy targets stack up together at the same time to begin with. Whether it’s worth it is another story of course.
Hey vax! Yes good analysis. I think the problem is compounded because dealing a bit of damage to (say) 3 stacks is rarely as good as pinpoint destruction of the most threatening stack; So even if they are clumped into 3 (say on Turn 1), you'll stick pick LB targeting the Marksmen for example
Splash damage is good for inferno town. Cerberus and Magog do it so you can help them to defeat army which stacks. But you need to use it in certain situations but it definitely helps. I always aim for high spell power with inferno as priority while keep my fighting hero able to run around map fast and be also good fighter. Fire ball is however so much good spell but still useful for other factions. Inferno spell is much better. Problem with frost ring and fire ball is their cost imo. Reason is they cost 15 mana which is comparable with meteor shower. While meteor shower cause more damage. People always look then and thing about spells from late game perspective. But for me is very important spell especially for inferno town. My fav spells for them is curse, lightning, blind, firewall, bloodlust, then fire ball. If you building and advancing your town you come to the point where you need to buy 2nd level of mt to upgrade pits. So you can do it also prematurely from there is just little step towards 3rd level of mt. I guess you want kennels and Cerberus, you want rather fast army and level your hero fast to help him cast spells enough. I guess many people rush towards level 7 units but for me inferno should and could wait with it due to strong army composition like Cerberus, Magogs (splash), demon farming, and Efretty which are fast and strong archer stompers immune for magic arrow and fire spells. With combo inferno offers fire ball is quite useful and should be included. Let do not forget melee penalties are reduced by bloodlust and offense skill which also can be useful for inferno as a town.
Firewall is incredible, Luna is basically broken and conflux is better because she can solo so much of the early game with 1 small stack of pixies cuz the AI just runs through it.
You are sleeping on prayer here. I can't blame you, since water is the second worst school of magic, but prayer is easily one of its best spells, maybe the best buff in the game. I mean, haste is good. Look how good haste is. It's amazing. But now I want you to imagine a haste+ spell that increases damage by 10-20% and reduces damage taken by the same amount. Oh, and it's no longer erased by the slow spell. You basically get to cast three spells in one turn. Bloodlust, stone skin, and haste, all in one turn.
So I watched this video as well as the other video where you rank creatures and I think something that's very relevant (and maybe can give you an idea for future videos) is the idea of separating the game into 4 stages - early, mid game, late game and very late game. A very late game would be after month four or five, where you have 8 heroes and two or three main armies, the computer players have stacks of 15+ arch angels, 20+ Ancient Behemoths, maybe big stacks of 200+ crusaders, etc. You get some ridiculous stats there. I don't think many of us have played such games since around month 3-4 you already know if you're winning or losing the game and by month five the game is over versus an AI, but then again you could do a challenge where you skip month 1 (and maybe month two) in order to play a very late level game. That's where the creatures and spells have very different properties that you care about, the resources aren't as abundant, you get a lot more excited about different spells, different heroes, you want to take advantage of different things and it makes for a different game overall. Anyways though, I love these videos that you do, I'm leaving a like for the algorithm as well!
Hey thanks for the support Ivan! That's a pretty good idea actually as a lot of the time I'm ranking things having to take into account all the different contexts. I might run a poll or two to see what the appetite is :)
I watch the whole video and i agree on almost everything, even as kid i saw the amazing power of ligthing Bolt and slow, they are never bad to have . I would disagree on the elemental spells being so low, because they may be a nich but when you have them is probable because you have a very high level caster, this spell allows you to sweep critters with no army with one hand and have your actual army with the secondary hero. That can be very powerfull.
Firewall is a really strong spell early on, especially if you have fire magic skill with Luna on conflux. You can literally beat way way stronger stacks of units (due to stupid AI) early game and snowball very hard with it. There are some yt videos regarding this strategy. (somebody with 6 spirits beat 120 griffins from the conservatory with this or on another fight, it has beaten 40+ nagas with 7 pixies).
I wish so much they had made fire damage spells more damaging. the spells being categorized by their elements, and fire being viewed as the destructive force throughout the human history for very obvious reason, it would make perfect sense if fire damage spells would deal the most damage, while earth, water and air magic would lean more towards the utility, thus leaning less damage than fire spells. balancing the spell schools this way would also make the choice between the spell schools more tactical rather than very obvious pick or skip. whether you want to deal maximum spell damage or deal less damage but have more certain type of utility on your spell power. the more i think of this the less i can understand the thought process of the devs on the damage aspect of the schools of magic. another things about magic are the town portal, fly and dimension door spells. at their current state they are completely broken, but only because they cost so little amount of mana regardless of the size of your army. they're very cool spells to have in the game by their basic function, but if they would scale with the army size or cost a flat large percentage of your maximum mana like flat 25 or 50 or even 75% for a single cast it would force the caster to strategize the use of the still extremely powerful spells, rather than spamming them each round near endlessly like it pretty much is at the end game, the whole purpose of the game almost being a race who gets the first access to these broken spells. coming back to the school balance things, it would be awesome if dimension door would be a fire spell to balance things out, as there's no obvious reason why manipulating dimensions would belong in any specific school of magic over another. (the same goes with implosion btw)
Excellent thoughts Eye and I agree with you wholeheartedly. In my last run I began dabbling in the template generator that comes with HotA, and I was able to ban TP completely (along with Eagle Eye and Diplo). I would love to tinker deeper though and (for example) double the damage of fireball and inferno, and do tuned nerfs to the adventure spells you mention as well but I don't have quite the modding knowledge or skill
@@johanbressendorff6543 not if they are directly adjacent to a creature. Fly lets you pause in the middle of impassable terrain and just take an artifact
I would say that curse just doesn't feel the same as bless, as long as you're goal is to take everyone down fast without letting them do the same to you. Upper-end B at best to me. And by the way fire wall can be very useful in the early game against AI. I remember decimating dozens of dimwitted AI goblins with a single wall put.
Frost ring and fireball deserve to be in different tiers. It is so much easier to hit combos with frost ring because the most common situation for 3+ enemies to be clumped together is when they're engaging in melee with your dudes. There are many situations where the enemy is trying to focus down one of your dudes, and in that case, put your dude in the center of a frost ring and he'll be protected while all his attackers take damage. I think frost ring is even cheaper to cast. Meanwhile bless is overvalued a bit. It is incredibly useful in some cases but how useful it is will depend very much on what what troops you have. Bless has little to no effect on many creature types, like angels, or all necropolis units. As a general rule it is more benefit to large stacks of weaker dudes. My favourite to use it on is master gremlins, or like you said lizard warriors, when I'm fortunate enough to have maintained them in my army. However the weak ranged units are the hardest to keep around because they attract lightning bolts at every enemy hero encounter. To put it in context, consider you're playing Tower, with expert Bless. You will see damage increase like this across your army: Gremlin 100% Gargoyle 60% Golem 33% Mage 25% Genie 18% Naga 5% Titan 22% Now compare casting some other buff like expert prayer (more or less +20% damage all troops) or even expert precision (+30% gremlin, mage, titan). In both cases the noticeable loss of damage imo is in the lowest 3 tiers of creatures. Of course in the case of prayer the attack bonus is only a small part of the value of the spell. Speaking of which, Prayer is a definite A tier. I'm glad you came to your senses at 1:45:30 , even if you did relapse almost immediately. As you've reiterated throughout, spell casting comes at steep opportunity cost, so the fact that you can do multiple types of buffs with one cast in incredibly valuable. It has the potential to pay itself back for every turn until the end of the battle if the enemy doesn't immediately dispell it. I am always excited to get Prayer if I have any hero building expert water magic. You made some very compelling arguments about Blind, and I'm afraid I've been sleeping on Blind far too often. I should try to employ it more.
Hey Perc thanks for the thoughts! A lot of detail in there and I love the mathematical breakdown on the Bless buff!! Coming to my senses only to relapse immediately is what I do in general across most aspects of my life
I'd say the two fire spells "fire shield" and "protection from fire" are some of the core reasons to spec into fire school of magic skill (as well as berserk). Blind can, as you say, be used regardless of your magic school proficiency, but in late game fights fire shield becomes very relevant as it allows you to deal damage that bypasses natural creature defense and hero skills and makes it much more painful for the opponent to actually engage you - regardless of whether they're throwing T7 creatures onto your low tier shooters that should normally stand no chance. And thus protection form fire becomes relevant because it specifically counters some of fire shield's damage (also relevant when you go up against Efreet sultans as guards or to flag dwellings as Inferno). There is a lot more potential than one would expect, especially compared to protection from water. Protection from fire also uniquely enables the Armageddon strategy if you get far into the late game, where you just bank on beefy units and protect them, then you spam Arma till the enemy is no more. Yes you will still lose some army, but if it's a match-deciding battle then it's absolutely worth having it in your arsenal for a momentum swing that few players prepare against. Also Haste is absolutely amazing and deserves S tier no question. It's cheap, with expert proficiency it can apply to your whole army, it can help ensure you gain first turn for future spell casting, it can enable most of your slower army units to still connect their attacks early on, it helps you kite enemy creatures that can't keep up, and it sets you up for abusing wait turns which is the end-all be-all of fights where you don't just have a massive advantage to begin with. Slow allows for much of the same of course, and have its own positives and negatives depending on the context of the battle. But both Haste and Slow definitely deserve to be ranked equally in S tier imo.
Hi Mister thanks for these comments. I have never found myself armageddoning 'fairly' with prot fire by I want to try it now! I think I am probably underschooled on how to get the best from fire in general (as per my whinging about Sacrifice etc in the vid), I think I tend to just discard it as the worst and steer toward the other 3 too much. Respect that view on Haste also
@@paulgoes5494 I can understand that, I did too for many years to be honest and never gave true value to most fire spells, but over time I've realized how influential they can truly be. Usually from my experience fire spells aren't used nearly as frequently as spells from other schools of magic, but when they are used, they can often be used with great influence and effect - such as mass berserk, fire shield, and arma under the right circumstances. But they often require a lot of pre planning and an intended game plan. They're great as fight swinging aces in the sleeve that can catch the opponent off guard if they don't respect the potency of well used fire magic, and since they tend to be treated as a niche category, many players (and AI for that matter) rarely take the proper precautions against fire spells in general. Anyways, I'm enjoying your list videos, keep up the great work!
Lots of spells deserve a higher tier: 1. Armageddon completely breaks the game and can very often come online in time to not just be a "win more" mechanic. I play dungeon and as everyone knows your great payoff for playing that is Black Dragons, to get them your mage guild only needs to be upgraded once after that for a 20% chance to roll Armegeddon and is an instant win on the spot, both against human and computer opponents. The Impact of the spell is waaay higher than lightning bolt and chain lightning, It belongs in S tier and arguably at the very top. 2. If you end up with expert water magic Prayer is basically haste with an upside, you even said it yourself and yet you rated it lower than haste. 3. Firewall is a underrated by you, should be higher on the list. It does good damage and an NPC opponent gets completely meme'd by it. Very useful spell.
Not sure blind is before implosion. Why blind a unit to take it out of the fight when you can simply kill it. Also blind can easily be dispelled or cured of which there is more likelihood of happening being a lower cost more accessible spell. Whilst units can be resurrected from implosion, your not guaranteed to undo as much damage was done, but resurrection is less accessible and more costly. So implosion is better as it's less likely the opponent can reverse its effect
I love both but I agree with Blind because it comes so much earlier in the game. Yes given both you’d probably pick implosion, but a lot of the most crucial parts of a campaign come before lvl 5 mage guild when blind can be your work horse.
Magic mirror won't be good if it always protects you, because then there won't be a reason for the enemy to cast on the unit. So the reflect won't happen. At that point it does nearly the same as anti-magic. The % should be higher though. High enough for the enemy to be willing to cast, so around 50% would be ideal. Mid to low tier regardless.
@@paulgoes5494 Covering whole team with a lower/ similar % could also work. Mana cost should be high, but 100 sounds a bit too much. There is still counterplay by using spells that don't target units.
Armageddon B tier????? You only need few effrets and then attack with Armageddon and retreat, rinse and repeat, and melt someone's 200k army for like 15k gold
With mirth, the advantage of a second turn for a unit shoupd bot be underestimated. Yes bless gives max damage and second turn does in a way too. But against 2 stacks the 2nd turn is better than being blessed
Hey Aaron! I think I tend to build armies with high morale and I've often got artifact slots with incidental badges of courage; so mirth rarely gets cast by me. But you make a good point and if starting at 0 morale with big stacks in late game it could be excellent
As far as I remember summon boat only gives you a free boat if you have advanced or expert water magic. In fact, is one of the few reasons I would take water magic. If the map is water intensive and there are no easy boats
Agree with your rankings 90%. Disagree strongly on Summon Elementals; IMO this is an S-tier spell, especially on expert level magic, as it lets you fight big enemies with small armies, as small as one creature. No other spell can do that, except for maybe Armageddon with fire-immune creatures. Resurrect with Summon Elementals is a godly combo: let the elementals do the damage and at the end of the battle resurrect your creature. Beyond the offensive capabilities, consider also the defensive ones: you can summon elementals to protect or divert attention away from ranged shooters or that one big stack you're fighting with. Next, I think you overestimate the usefulness of Blind relative to other spells. Many creatures are immune to Blind, esp. undead and higher level creatures and it can only affect one stack. I think Slow easily overtakes Blind, I'd put it at #2 right after Town Portal. Implosion is amazing but too overpowering and makes me feel like I'm cheating, so I try to use it only when absolutely necessary, such as when fighting Fairie dragons and or massive stacks of one creature. Dimension door: yes, this spell lets you reach underground places you couldn't with fly while taking less movement points, but the value-for-spell-points (distance travelled) is lower and it's clunkier to use, so I almost always go for Fly. Obviously you can also combine them. Counterstrike should be at least a B-, considering that it allows your creatures to deal practically twice the damage by retaliating. When fighting large stacks of dragons and high-level creatures, it can be a game-changer.
Great comments thanks Alex!! There are a few themes you've picked up on that others have said there as well but I think you're the biggest fan of the elemental spells in the comments so far! I am just not a counterstriker but it's probably more that I haven't stumbled on a good use for it the way a lot of you have :)
It’s the worst because it doesn’t have any broken spells like aoe berserk, town portal and dimension door. If you have it it also lowers your chance of rolling the other magic schools
Agree with the majority of the rankings some great points in vid and in comments. I will try and give Beserk and Visions more usage. I would mark bless/curse a bit lower certain creatures less affected by them and I always dread that the opposite spell will be cast against me straight after. Earthquake seems a bit useless I think even with a powerful earth mage cast it twice in a row and still hadn't broken anything. Clone can be great - as spell power is less relevant it's probably best of all used by a 'might' hero who manages to have wisdom or a scroll and a load of Titans(ranged) or ArchDevils(no retaliation) are my favorites with this spell.
I love that lightning bolt is your answer to everything! xD "Should I cast this spell? Nah I'll just lightning bolt.." Agree with your S-list, all those spells are awesome and you are praying to get them all. BUT, I might consider chain lightning to just be S tier as well, although A+ is pretty close. And I think you undervalue the best water spell in the game: Prayer. It's basically an improved version of mass haste that cannot be countered. Like if you haste all your troops then it will suck if the opponent cast mass slow in response. If your troops are prayered, yes you can still be slowed but you won't lose the effects of prayer. So in spite of being slowed your troops remain fairly fast and with added attack+defence. It doesn't give as much damage bonus as bless would, but again bless can be countered, and prayer just gives all-round more bonus. The only negative thing about prayer is that it is harder to get than bless, curse and haste. But it is by far the best mass positive spell you can cast on your troops. I think it is almost comparable to slow once you get it and expert water magic, but because you always want to be earth mage and not always want to be water mage, slow is just better. And slow has some applications that prayer just doesn't. Another thing with prayer is that I think Loynis is simply the best castle hero because of that spell (well aside from sir Mullich who isn't available always). He makes the spell even far stronger than it is. The only negative thing about Loynis is that you do get learning by default which blows, but worth it anyway. Simply put, prayer is amazing, and you can do no better when you want to buff your army, assuming you are a water mage. Also I would say, nice list and thanks for the video :) I agree that earth school is by far the best, but I would say air is by far the 2nd best. Air and water are close to each other in combat spells, but air is just far better in adventure map utility spells through dimension door and fly. Like not even a competition. Fire magic basically has no utility spells on the map, only combat spells. Curse is great, berserk allows you to do some crazy things (which is probably the biggest reason I'd go fire), and Armageddon squad can be amazing but a bit difficult to do so fire should be at the bottom yes.
I think this is a good broad list, there are a couple I think you have maybe undervalued like Prayer and Firewall but I think it's also fair to say that some of the spells that require a decent setup to be really good maybe rank a little lower generally.
Thanks Hex, yep agree it is hard to rank some of the powerful but situationals. Interested to know where and why-fore you think Firewall is better - do you ever really use it?
@@paulgoes5494 It's incomplete to rank Firewall without mentioning Luna (Conflux). Luna is one of the, if not the most broken hero because of Firewall..
@@paulgoes5494 I've seen some expert level Players use Firewall like it was no one's business... especially in a 1 hero only challenge. With Luna. After all, her specialty is Firewall does double damage. MeKick uses it sometimes. He made a video about Early game Fire Wall abuse with Luna in December 2021, where he played a XL map with Luna on Impossible Difficulty. Talking about the ins and outs of the strat. And when it comes to Heroes 3 knowledge, MeKick is the first person I'd ask about anything. His YT is TheKnownWorld.
45:08 The argument just cursing everyone instead of using weakness isn't really fair since you are most likely not expert in both fire and water at the same time. Same goes with lightning and ice bolt comparison. Ice bolt might actually do much more damage than lightning. Pitting two expert level spells from different schools against each other is in my opinion not a reasonable way to rank spells
Prayer I would say would rank in A+ tier. Clone is cheap damage B. Bless actually increases your max damage at expert, so A+. Summon Boat is E-Tier, useless unless on water maps with a ton of water. Slayer is actually decent at expert to increase your damage vs lv 7 creatures.
Summon elementals might really be C, but if you realize how the AI uses these when it gets its hands on it in Hota, it is S tier but beyond disgusting.
I really do think Prayer should have been above bless and haste in A tier, as it gives you everything at once. Yeah its abit more expensive, but really if you have prayer and expert water, its just better than bless. So surely that merits it a spot higher than bless?
Hey Chris, well let me make my argument this way: if you had to choose one spell to be banned from ever casting again - across all the games you will ever play, with heroes of might/magic wisdom/no wisdom, which do you pick - Bless or Prayer?
@@paulgoes5494 Ah, that's an interesting perspective. I would agree that Bless is the one to keep. I do think the power of Bless, as a 1st-level spell, outshines the power of Prayer, which is a 4th-level spell, simply due to its ease of acquisition and use. Perhaps I just have a soft spot for my man Loynis.
I'd argue that Prayer is S tier. It gives 2/3 the value of Haste, Stone Skin and Bloodlust. With your rating that means 2/3 of an A tier + 4/3 of C tier worth of spells in 1 turn. For it to be worse than haste would mean that you prefer 1/3 of Haste over 2/3 of a combination of Stone Skin and Bloodlust. As you mentioned the value you get/ turn is very important and Prayer does this very well. Also in order to give all these bonuses to your team you'd only need expert water. The spell is most common with Castle, that has a good amount of late game melee units. Aside from the crusaders the speed boost will be eenough for the other 3 to reach the other side/ choose which enemy to hit. About soundtrack compositions: try final fantasy (search for Final Fantasy Music - 25 Top Songs).
@@paulgoes5494 Something I forgot to mention about it is that it doesn't get countered by slow. You'll end up with both speed modifiers and a +20% damage increase and a -10% damage received (assuming att and def values were equal). Your speedy boys will be slower, but your slower units will be faster. Slow can also be removed by cure, which also heals your units a bit. So expert water for buffs and earth for damage is a good combo imo. My main problem with it in vanilla is that you need to wait till tier 4, but you want to choose your first school of magic way earlier. Castle has a 20% chance to get prayer (same for chain lightning and meteor shower), but for (most) support spells it's mandatory to have expert, but for damage spells this isn't the case. With horn of the abyss you can research and replace spells you don't want, so it's less of a gamble.
This list shows he issue with “might and magic”. The game is somewhat even between might and magic for the early and most of the mod game. But when you approach late game almost all the spells are all but useless. You really grasped at straws for many of the spells.
Berserk is an extremely powerful fire spell. It is the only spell in the game which allows fighting MUCH stronger armies than your own. The enemy has many stacks of very powerful creatures? Who cares as long as they are close to each other. Make them fight each other. In fact, its a 1 turn blind AoE, but better. This spell alone makes getting Fire magic to master level so berserk becomes AoE.
Thanks tak! agree with that
I have played HOMM3 so much, but i have overlooked berserk. Now i think its maybe the strongest spell of whole HOMM 3. In a late game, its game changer. With expert fire magic, you can easily manage much more stronger armies, than yours.
@@ctiborvenus3747 it still has its limits and counters, like everything in homm3 but is pretty strong
I wouldn't say only, Armageddon is a thing after all.
If you ever play through the Dragon Slayer campaign, you'll never overlook Berserk again. Good luck getting through 4000 Naga Queens without it.
The thing about "Animate Dead" is that you'll only get it as necro, which means while it is situational that situation always apply to you when you get it. Also it is permanent at any level and you can get it in the mage guild earlier than resurrect at a higher chance. While you can get Resurrect as Necro and have it be a dead spell for you before getting a non-undead army.
That's btw the case with Death Ripple too, as you only get it as necro.
Yes, good comments there I think that's right; makes Animate hard to rate, clearly a great spell when you're Necro; I still find Ripple to be poor though even then
@@paulgoes5494 Yeah I don't think Death Ripple is good as it has terrible scaling.
I feel "animate dead" should be placed equal with resurrection as when you get it as Necro, it is much better for you than resurrect is for a non-necro town.
It works on all your undead, while resurrection has more relevant immunities.
And given that the "animate dead" necro hero can use it straight away and is more likely to be given the option to learn Earth Magic, I don't feel there is much doubt despite the fact that it is situational.
Counterstrike is great for some strong melee units like hydras, vampires. Teleporting a stack of hydras with counterstrike into middle of enemy formation is amazing
IMO, Town Portal is such a game changer that it alone is worthy of picking Wisdom as a Might character. And yes, it is better than blind! 😛
Yes, once a hero gets town portal the game is pretty much over
Town Portal, makes Town Defense Oh so much less painful.
View Air gets much better with Air magic skill. At advanced level it shows you enemy heroes and at expert it shows you all towns. This gets useful in campaigns when you're trying to hunt down all heroes and towns.
Thanks Sailor fair point there absolutely. I think I probably under-use both the Views
That's clearly true, in fact I prefer View Air over View Earth, because View Earth is only useful if you are often lacking of a specific resource that you really need for your next building purchase what you must get in order to get benefited faster during your gameplay. Otherwise, it's better to be aware of your enemies and clearly see where they are coming from or at least where they currently are and where they are heading to. A lot of times, Tavern's Thieves Guild is just not informative enough or even giving false information about you and your enemies at times.
Prayer also increases Attack and Defense. Great especially when playing with Loynis!
It's a haste spell that also gives you stone skin and bloodlust. And can't be completely countered with slow.
@@LanceVader Indeed. The arguments against it is that it is expensive to cast, harder to get and makes you go expert water. But honestly, once you get it, the mana cost is no issue, and it is very strong, with no counter.
It does take away a slot from town portal & ressurection in the mage guild which is arguably another point against it. But assuming you already have those 2 spells, it would be great to get prayer.
I think that antimagic is a good spell when you want to cure your ranged unit from blindness and not let it be blinded again
True most of the spells here are ranked corectly however antimagic should be B tier
Town portal and Berserk are both game breaking spells! I would rate them both higher than blind
Fair enough JP!
Earth is so good of a school, and I love the other ones.
In terms of potential I would love if water was worked on more back then. So many spells that look to be really awesome if you really think of it.
I personally love the feel of water magic. Feel like Earth Magic is too powerful, air magic is about where it needs to be, and both Water and Fire need a buff in their design.
dimension doors and town portal should be just spells of all schools of magic, like magic arrow.
I’ve been playing this game for over 25 years, I don’t think I have EVER used remove obstacle or disguise.
Armageddon works with dragons, of course, but it's also an amazing spell for Conflux. Four of seven units in Conflux (fire/energy elementals, earth/magma elementals, magic elementals, and firebirds/phoenix) are immune to it, making it really easy to build your army around using the spell. For similar reasons it's nearly useless if you're attacking Conflux.
Thanks Allan! Fair observation: I just really struggled to rate it (along with Archangels, Necromancy and Wisdom :). I didn't know Magmas were immune to it, I feel bad for giving them an F- now in the creatures video...
Its also useful when you have heroes with no armies, or when you know you are losing (specially if you have another army), which is never ideal but happens, i remember some multiplayer maps where there was just enough reusable exp to get heroes to cast it out of the gate, so you use them to screen enemies for your main army, we learned to fear the 7 harpy stacks heroes.
@@Williazzzz One of my favorites was having an inferno hero with an army of 7 mater Efreet or even just regular efreet and then just spamming armageddon for huge casualties. As long as the first cast knocks out their ranged units, I'd pretty much have free reign to get off a second cast. Between their speed and flying, I could take down some pretty huge armies even with only like 10 spell power (and inferno has the +1 SP building). And if not, I could just retreat and reup the spell points.
@@paulgoes5494na that are still complete garbage. There stat are at the level of 3/4. Unless you get the hero that specializes in them, then they are at least usable, still really bad though.
Damn I always liked the idea of those spells as a kid, and then sadly realised they are getting overwhelmed just by simple spells like slow or blind
Im never getting tired of this game. Thank you for the video Paul!
Me neither! You are welcome :)
Hi good sir, and thanks for yest another good video where you explained your views and your beliefs in a good and understandable way. Very entertaining and I viewed it from start to finish ,sometimes shaking my head and sometimes nodding in approvement. 🙂 I know that getting good comments, with meaningful content, is an energy pill for a youtuber, so of course I will leave some sentences and statements on it for you and all the other followers. Let med just first say that I have played the game from beginning in 1999, with a short break when I studied and got my masters, and then back on it again after I landed a paying job after ended university run. So, I have followed the versions and like you, are so in love with the game. Its just the best game ever. The music, the strategy and planning, like a chess game, the cool units, the heroes with the skills they roll, the factions and the uniqueness of it. And of course, the mage guild where one hopes to see the best spells and get super exited, or we roll badly and get super frustrated and feel like we get punished badly. So, first, I have viewed a lot of your playthrough videos now. Necro, conflux, inferno, and factory. If you start to notice that you, and all others - me included, cast one spell at first round with any hero who know it on expert level. That spell is slow. It is the most casted spell in the game. You get it at level 1 and its good, but you only get to slow one stack, but if that stack is a ranged unit and you get to shoot it with your own archery units, its super good. On expert level, it is the best hindering spell in the game. That is why it ALWAYS get casted first round, because you control the battlefield with it like no other spell can do. I wanted to point out, that blind is good yeah, no question about it, but it never gets better if you are on expert level or not. It just affects one stack and that is it. With blind, you stop one stack from attacking. Fine. But with expert slow, you control every stack and dictates what the opponent can do. Blind is a A-tier spell for that reason, and if you view your own play of the game, you cast expert slow way more than you use blind. Even in late stage of game, expert slow is the first you do, and then decide what damaging spell you will go for after that. The slow just gives you the control, no other spells do that. I would say blind is A+, and slow is S+. It is simply better, and it is the most used spell in the game. Town portal is superb, no questions asked, but you do not get it most of the time and its not casted often because when the creatures in town are needed for defense or for other heroes, its not worth the spell points to town portal that often. It is a S, but not a S+ spell. Its super good, but it is not casted enough for the +. The excitement of getting it, is super high, as high as it gets, and the game is broken when you get it. A clear S-tier. Implosion yes. Clear S+. Same with resurrection. Dimension door and fly are good. Movement over the adventure map is key in the game, and they both do a decent job at it. In my book, DD is a clear S, but fly is just a A-tier. Animate dead is S+ if you are necro, but is a useless spell for any other faction, so it can not get a A-tier grade for me. One faction out of eleven in HotA version, and nine in original version, which gives a narrow usage of the spell. One S+ and 8 F-, it can not be a A-tier spell for me. In fact, if the awesomeness for one faction alone can get it up the ranks, then counterstrike used on vampire lords (one big stack alone as a single unit), is a S+ spell. But it just does not make a good case because for the other factions its just not true. The combination of blind and disrupting ray is a killer combo. Immobilize the opponents best stack with blind, and just loop with defend with all your stacks and make sure he does not get a turn, and remove the defense to nothing, and attack and kill it without losses. But on its own, its just OK ish. Summoning spells, Air, Fire, Water and Earth, I strongly disagree with you of the order. Earth is the bulky and useful one of the fore. In a situation where you defend a castle, and you do not care about the movement, because you are defending only, they are super hard to kill. They are excellent blockers for your ranged units in open combat or in castle defense. They are a tier five unit, and the defense, attack and HP of the stack is clearly better than air (tier two unit), water (tier three unit) and fire (tier four unit). A summoned stack of 40+ earth elementals with base stats of 10 attack, 10 defense and 40 HP, they are hard to shew for the opponent’s units. When we also add that they take NO damage from Lightning bolt and Chain Lightning, and you see where you placed those damaging spells on your list. Then you have a stack that is particularly good in usage. They are bad at speed, but good on everything else. And the case is that you do not want to carry a stack of them on the hero, yes 100% true, because of the speed. But, with summoning spell, you do not have to. You get the best of both worlds. Keep on the enjoyable content Poul. Look forward to next tier list or playthrough.
Hey thanks Wolfman! Great contribution as always. A lot there I fully agree on I must say. On the T1 Slow I agree it ends up being the most commonly done thing. One thing that I've been finding myself living in fear of is the old haste-riposte after you cast the Slow; but I usually conclude that I'm often in massive trouble to Exp-Haste regardless so just go for the Slow anyway. You have me on the order of the Summon Eles cannot dispute that logic at all totally agree. I was definitely biased by my hatred of the Earth Eles as an investment option in town (which as you say isn't relevant) :)
Dimension door + town portal is basically game over. You can acquire knowledge points because you can jump all over the map and you can easily get 15-20 knowledge. You just need 1 big army and 1 op Hero and no one can beat you anymore.
And if you are warlock, you can go home for vortex and forth back into a town closer to the enemy, it is so broken after a while
I really like how your breakdown shows just how relevant level 1 spells are which is really nice cause in most games level 1 spells tend to not be great. One of the many reasons I love this game.
Thanks Alexander absolutely agree!
I guess homm3 was never meant to be balanced. Else they would have made cure a great deal stronger and left out resurrect completely. Boom, water magic good.
Great idea for a patch actually!
Cool content for listening without seeing. Much appreciated
Largely agree with the tier list, though for me personally I would put implosion at the top spot simply due to the excitement factor, and how fun it is to get/cast. Also there is the fact that I almost never get implosion.. all the games I've gone for a level 5 expert earth mage, only to never get implosion :(
Hi Christian, thanks for the comment and sorry to hear that, you'll have to keep an eye out for that tome of earth magic next time :)
It feels so good when your noob 10y old self had +/- the same idea about this as you have now, decades later . So good stuff! We watched it tg with my gf and had a bless!
Thanks NJ! Glad you liked it
Firewall on Luna is an early game turbo strat :-)
Town portal is S tier
As a rule of thumb, all the different buff and debuff spells are significantly better on might heroes than magic heroes. Vice Versa for damage spells. It also goes back to your previous video on skills and the question of whether to take expert x magic on might heroes with or without wisdom. Basically taking expert air/earth on a might hero for mass haste/slow alone is very worthwhile. However on magic heroes when your mass haste/slow competes with Implosion, Meteor Shower, Armageddon, etc, it suddenly becomes significantly less impressive. Of course still army composition dependent and still has its room even on magic heroes but it's a much narrower use for them as opposed to being automatic on might heroes.
Speaking of magic heroes, you rated Firewall very low yet there is this 1 hero that specializes in Firewall, think it's a Conflux hero, which is arguably the best hero in the entire game to start with because Firewall is so powerful early on with that hero. I mean sure the base version isn't as good as the specialized one and isn't free right off the bat, but the power level is still there albeit not with the same tempo as having it unlocked on day 1.
Prayer is definitely a A tier spell, arguably S, in terms of its action economy, 1 spell to get 3.5(+4 speed rather than +6 of the haste spell, and in a different school) spell effects, at expert you get mass prayer which is just insane. The only thing holding it back is that it's a level 4 spell which means it's much harder to get and of course requires advanced wisdom to cast, and you'll generally want to use it on your might heroes not magic. An advanced wisdom water mage expert might hero is incredibly powerful and opening with mass prayer can certainly be battle changing. Would definitely put in A tier, perhaps A- because it comes so late, but its effect is utterly insane.
Speaking of lackluster tier 5 spells, cast fire elemental early on than when the battle is almost over sacrifice them(you can't keep them anyway) to resurrect your strongest high level stack. A very poor man's Resurrect for fire expert heroes. Kappa
Hey Owl, thanks for this and your other comment on the skills! Very fair points not much I disagree with really. I'm not sure I've ever played with Luna as my main hero but many people have pointed out her awesome firewall exploit so that's something I've learned! I probably just dismissed her ability as useless "since I never cast that". Interesting insight on the fire ele / sacrifice combo I must keep that in mind (saccing eles more generally I guess)
Great list, i personally put clone a lot higher because when you think about it, it is the highest damage single target damaging spell. You copy a fat stack of high damage monster you have (on it's turn !) and you basically get to smack an enemy stack for that amount, it's the same effect as a spell... so even if they dissapear when retaliated you deal a lot more with it late game than even with implosion some times and you eat up a retaliation if it's a fast creature
clone some archangels/phoenixes/arch devils late game and it's lights out :)
bonus: in consideration of who can use it it's better too, because for the high damage spells you need a lot of spell power for them to hit hard, while cloning works even with the so called "dumbass" champions that just stumbled over a spellbook
Hey thanks Pw! Very good insights there, we should probably all think of clone as a direct damage spell; provided you have that fat stack online.
@@paulgoes5494 it is but try clone on archangels resurrection combo on knight with their poor SP. Requires expert water for tier 7 units. If you have a pack of archangels their resurrection is usually much stronger than the knights than you lose the clone on retaliation make a new one and so on. Also clone is good for fast demoning with pit lords. Doesn't require water magic. If the dead stack was demons it's actually limited resurrection combo but you must lose the stack ,less useful but may be. Also clone may be good on faerie dragons and master genies (for casts, if they are in only few stacks) and shooters and no retaliation melee units but that's not so interesting as resurrection combo
yes I love clone on a big load of Titans. Sometimes you can even get more than one round out of the clone or waste an enemy attack to kill it as you say.
Clone Archangels is a 0-loss recipe and the closest thing to the broken Berserk spell to take out mighty enemies. In these scenarios, clone is way more potent than resurrection and can do crazy damage. Clone is an A tier and definitely a much better spell than teleport.
Hmm interesting take thanks George!
love how the video timeline segments just kind of gives up at quicksand
Yeah I noticed that! Imagine if I just talked about it non stop for an hour
@@paulgoes5494 that would be hilarious, click bait to be honest.
Blind has saved me several times, especially during late game sieges.
Great spell tier list, I would put berserk at A too tier because while with expert fire it can let you do a comeback it's a bit to situational to be S-tier for my taste.
Love this old game. Thanks for the video. You had me cracking up about the Forgetfulness spell, that was hilarious.
Hey Mitchell! Thanks for the kind words
S Town Portal, Dimension Door, Fly, Slow, Resurrection, Animate Dead, Implosion, Blind
A symm Earth Elemental, Armageddon, Haste, Stoneskin, Shield, Clone, Meteor Shower, Magic Arrow, Lightning Bolt, Berserk, cure
B Bloodlust, Bless, Disrupting Ray, Antimagic,. Forgettfullness, Dispel, Curse, Summ water elemental
The rest? I don't give a s
Altering offense and defense can do a lot to change the damage calculations. When dealing damage the game adds up your creatures attack and your heroes attack and compares it to the enemy creatures defense + the enemy heroes defense. Every point of difference is a 5% boost or reduction in the total damage. So for instance; expert weakness is -30% damage across the enemies entire army.
Weakness is a lot worse on creatures dealing 1-3 damage than Curse, but a lot stronger on creatures with smaller or zero damage fluctuation. For instance Nagas don’t have any damage fluctuation so cursing them does nothing but weakening them is a big deal.
Makes me wish Expert Disrupting Ray hit the whole enemy squad T_T
Excellent points, many thanks!
I wanted to watch this video, but Solmyr flew in on a faerie dragon and cast blind on me! I could hear him laughing as he flew away...
Blind will reduce retaliation strength by 50% on advanced, and remove retaliation completely on expert. So that’s one more thing it has going for it
blind with expert fire mage gives no retaliation when blinded creature is attacked. you can setup up nasty lockdowns that way without taking any damage
Prayer is S-tier. In Conjunction with Haste... Giving your units +9 Speed... Can cause some fun stuff. Like Speedy Dendroids, or Zooming Zombies.
With Loynis as your Hero, Expert Prayer+Haste Gives +12 speed to 1 and 2 level units... which can really throw a wrench in your opponents face.
If you have the Combination Artifact Angelic Alliance, which sure already buffs the heck out of your units, but it casts Expert Prayer at the start of the combat for 10 rounds..
So You can literally have Phoenixes with +9 speed at the beginning of your combat. Albeit a bit overkill at that point.
It's not however the most speed you can give your units...
The absolute fastest would be Sir Mullich with Ring of the Wayfarer, Necklace of Swiftness and Cape of Velocity, using Phoenixes with Expert Prayer and Haste on Native Ground, would result in +16 speed to the Phoenixes ending up with 37 speed.
Just Sir Mullich with Phoenixes is 23 Speed and makes for a very good Armageddon Hero, just because of that, toss on the 3 speed boosting artifacts and you're up to 27 speed and not even expert haste would make your opponent's creatures faster.
But yeah, Prayer is S-tier.
Hey Major! Thanks for this great breakdown, respect that view
Counterstrike on Vampire Lords & You don't need other units😃. Good on Hydras, Cerbers too
you don't need other units if you have Vampire Lords :D
You do if you are fighting Conflux or another Necro.
I find it funny that most negative things you said were worked on in heroes 5 no mod version.
I know the factory faction hadn't come out at the time of the video but you can use frenzy with crimson coutals in conjunction with their invulnerability to great effect.
Thanks for the comments Andrew, I'll be doing some Factory content at some point soon
I recently discovered you can rerole spells. Don't think every map allows it. I've not played the game for years but I've seen it in play throughs. Not that relevant to the video but interesting information I feel.
I think Firewall is definitely underrated here. I've seen some cheesy strats that use Firewall to great effectiveness. Much more so than Force Field.
Same with Anti-Magic which can be almost game-breaking in certain circumstances. It can basically negate the entire strategy of a magic based hero.
To a lesser extent i also think Disrupting Ray is underappreciated; if stacked against high defense creatures it can be quite good. Arguably better against a single target than Weakness which can't be stacked multiple times on the same unit. But i admit it is situational and it was a much more powerful spell in Heroes 2 when there were less other options available.
On the other hand it seems to me that spells like Disguise, Visions and the View spells are pretty much worthless, i can't see them being anything more than F. But that just might be because i don't play multiplayer.
I also see a bit of an inconsistency with how low Precision is rated. To me it belongs together with other very similar buffs like Stone Skin and Bloodlust. It's decent in the early game if you have a strong shooter stack.
I agree with you on Misfortune in SoD, but i just wanted to add that in HotA you can actually have negative luck, so in that version of the game it would maybe be a tier or two higher. Still not good though.
Town Portal is on Expert the Game Winner, because you can control all castles.
Advanced
I have enjoyed alot of your videos laitly and i have to say thanks. I dusted off the old computer and found a new appreciation for the game. Much thanks to you:) Wife is not too happy though. Interesting comments about the fire school. I have one tip for you about the sacrifice spell. Efreiths i find the best to ressurect. Have an army of different stacks and charge the enemy with your lowest number. It will die quick. Then sacrifise your biggest stack. The return is great:)
Thanks Franko! And apologies to your wife, mine calls herself the Heroes Widow. I'll have to try sacrifice properly at some point :)
Will you be doing the Tier Lists of either the abilities/skills/talents, towns, heroes or even buildings as well? I enjoy your videos a lot! I find myself watching them in parts, before I sleep, picking it back up at morning. Thx for doing those. Very helpful. Cheers!
Hey DJ thanks for the support! I happen to have another one on the skills coming up, should be posted by end of the week. I could just talk about this game for days
its the same dude on almost all of the artwork for the spells, he must be having a really hard day
Yeah you picture Sorrow being his last photo shoot for the day
Town Portal is so convenient that I find myself not finishing a lot of games on larger maps if I didn't learn it and/or earth magic before all my skills are filled in. When I know I've won but the computer runs around with a handful of scrawny heroes stealing random small towns and lumbermills I tend to just call it a game and move on.
Hey Justin, yes I wish there was a way to keep the game engaging once you've broken the back of the map / enemies. A lot of the games I adore the most have this problem (Civ, Total War etc)
DD, TP and fly are all gamebreaking spells. Getting either one before the opponents means youve won.
Hey Johan, thanks for the comments and views, some we're aligned others not so much but that's cool :)
With advanced and expert blind, the damage of the retaliation decreases, with expert blind the creature will retaliatie with just 1 dmg. Pretty useful if you have to deal with 50 behemoths or so, blind them, hit em blind em
Isn't expert blind make the creature can't retaliate if attacked
@@son_60han the description always stated that, but unless they changed it in hota, in the actual game it meant 1 dmg
so, firewall is generally pretty bad....but Luna is probably the most broken hero in the game as a fire wall specialist that can clear t5 stacks with a single sprite. just for that reason i wouldn't vote it that low. Conflux probably is kinda op in general
Fire wall would be much bettee if, for one, you get to put more fire walls as tou get expert fire, and second to do damage per turn, just like poison in heroes 5. It should be enough to discourage or do decent amount of damage to one or more units.
Man i love this community :)
I like your placement of Forgetfulness. it is often overlooked and underrated, but it is pretty useful in clearing shooter stacks from the map without taking damage. the drawback is the high investment need, but in campaign this is not a big issue, and in jebus you can get water tome.
Thankyou Lasz! Good to hear support for it cheers for that
View air and earth are in most competitive modes in homm3 absolutely necessary! Hypnotise is good to steal speed prio in an end battle. Protection is also very good in my opinion!
Thanks Juul, this is SOD so pre buff to protection
Chain Lightning: I think most heroes WANT to learn air magic anyway. Might heroes may not have the power or knowledge to cast it effectively, but that kinda goes for Lightning Bolt, too. Still, if I had to choose only one of those spells, I'd still choose to have Lightning Bolt...
Counterstrike: There may be an argument for Vampire Lords... but I still think that Counterstrike will rarely ever make the difference.
Frost Ring: It does the same damage as Fireball, and cost 3 spell points less. And I think Water Magic > Fire Magic.
Teleport: I'm surprised that you put it up so high. It's so rare that it's ever useful to me. Ancient Behemoths are definitely devastating if you teleport them over the walls, but then you can also use range or flying units to siege. Or cast Chain Lightning/Armageddon/Meteor Shower or even Frost Ring and Fireball. And there's the issue with Barbarians being unable to learn water magic, and Crag Hack is probably the best at holding a big stack of Ancient Behemoths. Maybe heroes like Mephala and Tazar will be able to use this strategy much better, but it's still such a niche use.
Berserk: It is level 4, and there are too many issues with it. Fire Magic sucks, so if you get it, you most likely cast it at basic level, which is ok but still much harder to make great use of. Some creatures are immune to mind spells. Some immune to Fire spells. The spell itself has a lower rate of appearing than some of the other really good level 4 spells like Chain Lightning, Town Portal, Resurrection, and not to mention you can get Chain Lightning from Solmyr, and Ressurection from Jeddite and Alamar. And there's also the bug with the Badge of Courage in the vanilla game. I feel like everything in this game is just trying to stop players from using Berserk effectively. It's not like Blind where Blind is so common, we're gonna get it anyway most likely, and casting it at expert fire magic doesn't really help much more than casting it at no fire magic.
Magic Mirror: I think it's beyond useless. Worst spell in the game. The biggest tragedy when it appears in the mage guild. There isn't a single use I can think of for it. I have never seen anyone using it, not even for the giggle.
Sacrifice: Gold Dragons... It's a terrible spell. It's not Magic Mirror though.
I hope you will do Artifacts tier list. I enjoy these videos.
Thankyou Giang for these great comments!! I think you've persuaded me just about everywhere there! For starters I didn't know Barbs couldn't get Water; and don't know about Badge bug (what is it?). When I look back at my 20+ years of playing it, I don't really end up casting Tele all that much in honesty; so I think you've got a good case. Might do artifacts at some point, I'd really wanted to focus on things the player has a choice over (I suppose Art Merchant is a thing of course :)
@@paulgoes5494 Badge of Courage in vanilla makes all your troops immune to mind spells, on top of +1 morale. It's fixed in HotA, but in vanilla, it has that hidden effect.
Nothing wrong at all with playing without mods. But one of the things i like so much about Horn of the Abyss, is how it feels so much like vanilla. The added stuff just fit right in, in my opinion.
Hey Thuras, yeah my next playthru I'm doing HotA, I also agree with so many of the changes. One problem though I'm having is the random maps are heavily modded to be less random, great for fairness in multiplayer but not as varied for single. My ideal would be if there was a menu at creation you could enable/disable various features WoG style
@@paulgoes5494 I'm not exactly an expert with the tool, so i can not tell you anything that is possible, but you are aware that HotA comes with an editor for random map templates, so you can create those to your own liking ?
Thanks Thuras! I wasn't aware so will look into that :)
@@paulgoes5494 you're welcome, i hope it can help to improve the fun you have. Who knows, could even be content.
Hey Thuras thanks again it will indeed be content if I can get a clear run on some more filming time. There is I think a knowledge gap out there as to just how good the template editor is and what you can do with it - I've been blown away by it
The problem is that you don't take into account the overall strength of the school of magic and its associated utility. Players almost always choose earth, then air or water, and only finally fire. Therefore, such a stone skin is much more useful in practice than a curse, because it can be used much more often in the expert version. Also, I don't understand at all why the stone skin is below the shield.
Hey Toxo, interesting - I guess you could argue the opposite though, in that SS has a lot more to compete with than Curse, as the latter is surrounded by mediocrity. Fundamentally - which one do I cast more often and which one excites me when I cast it? That would be curse all day. And with Shield, it just gets cast more often (by me at least). Appreciate the thoughts
Artifacts next please :D
Talking to yourself is very important thing to do
I only ever used remove obstacle once, to see how it works
I personally love the idea of how it would look to the other army to have some random leader with an army of phoenixes and dragons to just warp the field and be like "now fly over the land I just flattened".
Disrupting ray is only viable in HOMM5 with sylvan's triple magic ballista. Basically you fire 3 arrows into an enemy, each dealing some meaningful damage and cast disrupting ray onto that target. It's so good against 6/7 tier creatures as you watch their defense go down to 0!
Disrupting ray is used in combination with blind
I *suppose* Lightning Bolt and Fireball are supposed to be balanced in such a way that it indeed is a trade-off in whether you want to pick one or the other.
Lightning Bolt deals Power×25 damage as a baseline (plus some flat damage in change) and Fireball deals Power×10 damage as a baseline (again plus some change). So technically if you hit at least three targets with Fireball, you already dealt more damage in total than you would with a single Lightning Bolt. So the tradeoff here is whether you want to spread the damage around or to concentrate it onto a single target and whether three or more worthy targets stack up together at the same time to begin with.
Whether it’s worth it is another story of course.
Hey vax! Yes good analysis. I think the problem is compounded because dealing a bit of damage to (say) 3 stacks is rarely as good as pinpoint destruction of the most threatening stack; So even if they are clumped into 3 (say on Turn 1), you'll stick pick LB targeting the Marksmen for example
Splash damage is good for inferno town. Cerberus and Magog do it so you can help them to defeat army which stacks. But you need to use it in certain situations but it definitely helps. I always aim for high spell power with inferno as priority while keep my fighting hero able to run around map fast and be also good fighter. Fire ball is however so much good spell but still useful for other factions. Inferno spell is much better. Problem with frost ring and fire ball is their cost imo. Reason is they cost 15 mana which is comparable with meteor shower. While meteor shower cause more damage. People always look then and thing about spells from late game perspective. But for me is very important spell especially for inferno town. My fav spells for them is curse, lightning, blind, firewall, bloodlust, then fire ball. If you building and advancing your town you come to the point where you need to buy 2nd level of mt to upgrade pits. So you can do it also prematurely from there is just little step towards 3rd level of mt. I guess you want kennels and Cerberus, you want rather fast army and level your hero fast to help him cast spells enough. I guess many people rush towards level 7 units but for me inferno should and could wait with it due to strong army composition like Cerberus, Magogs (splash), demon farming, and Efretty which are fast and strong archer stompers immune for magic arrow and fire spells. With combo inferno offers fire ball is quite useful and should be included. Let do not forget melee penalties are reduced by bloodlust and offense skill which also can be useful for inferno as a town.
Firewall is incredible, Luna is basically broken and conflux is better because she can solo so much of the early game with 1 small stack of pixies cuz the AI just runs through it.
Fire wall luna is game breaking though
You are sleeping on prayer here. I can't blame you, since water is the second worst school of magic, but prayer is easily one of its best spells, maybe the best buff in the game.
I mean, haste is good. Look how good haste is. It's amazing. But now I want you to imagine a haste+ spell that increases damage by 10-20% and reduces damage taken by the same amount. Oh, and it's no longer erased by the slow spell.
You basically get to cast three spells in one turn. Bloodlust, stone skin, and haste, all in one turn.
Hey Lance! Yes you've a good point. It's been a while since I built a maxed water mage with a big army :)
So I watched this video as well as the other video where you rank creatures and I think something that's very relevant (and maybe can give you an idea for future videos) is the idea of separating the game into 4 stages - early, mid game, late game and very late game. A very late game would be after month four or five, where you have 8 heroes and two or three main armies, the computer players have stacks of 15+ arch angels, 20+ Ancient Behemoths, maybe big stacks of 200+ crusaders, etc. You get some ridiculous stats there.
I don't think many of us have played such games since around month 3-4 you already know if you're winning or losing the game and by month five the game is over versus an AI, but then again you could do a challenge where you skip month 1 (and maybe month two) in order to play a very late level game.
That's where the creatures and spells have very different properties that you care about, the resources aren't as abundant, you get a lot more excited about different spells, different heroes, you want to take advantage of different things and it makes for a different game overall.
Anyways though, I love these videos that you do, I'm leaving a like for the algorithm as well!
Hey thanks for the support Ivan! That's a pretty good idea actually as a lot of the time I'm ranking things having to take into account all the different contexts. I might run a poll or two to see what the appetite is :)
Counter Strike is pretty good on vampire lords or on defending side of a siege on the likes of dendroids. Love the video btw ❤
Hey Seb thanks! Yeah a couple of others have pointed that out too, good stuff
I watch the whole video and i agree on almost everything, even as kid i saw the amazing power of ligthing Bolt and slow, they are never bad to have . I would disagree on the elemental spells being so low, because they may be a nich but when you have them is probable because you have a very high level caster, this spell allows you to sweep critters with no army with one hand and have your actual army with the secondary hero. That can be very powerfull.
Thanks for the comments Pep! Good insight there with the elementals
Firewall is a really strong spell early on, especially if you have fire magic skill with Luna on conflux. You can literally beat way way stronger stacks of units (due to stupid AI) early game and snowball very hard with it. There are some yt videos regarding this strategy. (somebody with 6 spirits beat 120 griffins from the conservatory with this or on another fight, it has beaten 40+ nagas with 7 pixies).
I wish so much they had made fire damage spells more damaging. the spells being categorized by their elements, and fire being viewed as the destructive force throughout the human history for very obvious reason, it would make perfect sense if fire damage spells would deal the most damage, while earth, water and air magic would lean more towards the utility, thus leaning less damage than fire spells. balancing the spell schools this way would also make the choice between the spell schools more tactical rather than very obvious pick or skip. whether you want to deal maximum spell damage or deal less damage but have more certain type of utility on your spell power. the more i think of this the less i can understand the thought process of the devs on the damage aspect of the schools of magic.
another things about magic are the town portal, fly and dimension door spells. at their current state they are completely broken, but only because they cost so little amount of mana regardless of the size of your army. they're very cool spells to have in the game by their basic function, but if they would scale with the army size or cost a flat large percentage of your maximum mana like flat 25 or 50 or even 75% for a single cast it would force the caster to strategize the use of the still extremely powerful spells, rather than spamming them each round near endlessly like it pretty much is at the end game, the whole purpose of the game almost being a race who gets the first access to these broken spells. coming back to the school balance things, it would be awesome if dimension door would be a fire spell to balance things out, as there's no obvious reason why manipulating dimensions would belong in any specific school of magic over another. (the same goes with implosion btw)
Excellent thoughts Eye and I agree with you wholeheartedly. In my last run I began dabbling in the template generator that comes with HotA, and I was able to ban TP completely (along with Eagle Eye and Diplo). I would love to tinker deeper though and (for example) double the damage of fireball and inferno, and do tuned nerfs to the adventure spells you mention as well but I don't have quite the modding knowledge or skill
Fly is mostly better than dd, it allows you to steal artifacts without defeating the guardians!
Hey Pablo thanks for this and your other comments
DD enables stealing artifacts as well
@@johanbressendorff6543 not if they are directly adjacent to a creature. Fly lets you pause in the middle of impassable terrain and just take an artifact
@@pablolongobardi7240 Correct! Fly is better for snatching artifacts. eg if the only "free" space is fx a dwelling.
lol I actually refuse to do that, you must slay the beast to earn your treasure :D
View air is great to find towns earth too
You should first learn Expert Earth or Expert Air to view the map the way to reveal everything you need to know.
@@Tibor0803 as I said? View earth and air?
I would say that curse just doesn't feel the same as bless, as long as you're goal is to take everyone down fast without letting them do the same to you. Upper-end B at best to me.
And by the way fire wall can be very useful in the early game against AI. I remember decimating dozens of dimwitted AI goblins with a single wall put.
Fair enough I just love a good expert-cast of curse. Also acknowledge the Firewall thing, I just don't use it often
Frost ring and fireball deserve to be in different tiers. It is so much easier to hit combos with frost ring because the most common situation for 3+ enemies to be clumped together is when they're engaging in melee with your dudes. There are many situations where the enemy is trying to focus down one of your dudes, and in that case, put your dude in the center of a frost ring and he'll be protected while all his attackers take damage. I think frost ring is even cheaper to cast.
Meanwhile bless is overvalued a bit. It is incredibly useful in some cases but how useful it is will depend very much on what what troops you have. Bless has little to no effect on many creature types, like angels, or all necropolis units. As a general rule it is more benefit to large stacks of weaker dudes. My favourite to use it on is master gremlins, or like you said lizard warriors, when I'm fortunate enough to have maintained them in my army. However the weak ranged units are the hardest to keep around because they attract lightning bolts at every enemy hero encounter.
To put it in context, consider you're playing Tower, with expert Bless. You will see damage increase like this across your army:
Gremlin 100%
Gargoyle 60%
Golem 33%
Mage 25%
Genie 18%
Naga 5%
Titan 22%
Now compare casting some other buff like expert prayer (more or less +20% damage all troops) or even expert precision (+30% gremlin, mage, titan). In both cases the noticeable loss of damage imo is in the lowest 3 tiers of creatures. Of course in the case of prayer the attack bonus is only a small part of the value of the spell.
Speaking of which, Prayer is a definite A tier. I'm glad you came to your senses at 1:45:30 , even if you did relapse almost immediately. As you've reiterated throughout, spell casting comes at steep opportunity cost, so the fact that you can do multiple types of buffs with one cast in incredibly valuable. It has the potential to pay itself back for every turn until the end of the battle if the enemy doesn't immediately dispell it. I am always excited to get Prayer if I have any hero building expert water magic.
You made some very compelling arguments about Blind, and I'm afraid I've been sleeping on Blind far too often. I should try to employ it more.
Hey Perc thanks for the thoughts! A lot of detail in there and I love the mathematical breakdown on the Bless buff!! Coming to my senses only to relapse immediately is what I do in general across most aspects of my life
I'd say the two fire spells "fire shield" and "protection from fire" are some of the core reasons to spec into fire school of magic skill (as well as berserk). Blind can, as you say, be used regardless of your magic school proficiency, but in late game fights fire shield becomes very relevant as it allows you to deal damage that bypasses natural creature defense and hero skills and makes it much more painful for the opponent to actually engage you - regardless of whether they're throwing T7 creatures onto your low tier shooters that should normally stand no chance. And thus protection form fire becomes relevant because it specifically counters some of fire shield's damage (also relevant when you go up against Efreet sultans as guards or to flag dwellings as Inferno). There is a lot more potential than one would expect, especially compared to protection from water. Protection from fire also uniquely enables the Armageddon strategy if you get far into the late game, where you just bank on beefy units and protect them, then you spam Arma till the enemy is no more. Yes you will still lose some army, but if it's a match-deciding battle then it's absolutely worth having it in your arsenal for a momentum swing that few players prepare against.
Also Haste is absolutely amazing and deserves S tier no question. It's cheap, with expert proficiency it can apply to your whole army, it can help ensure you gain first turn for future spell casting, it can enable most of your slower army units to still connect their attacks early on, it helps you kite enemy creatures that can't keep up, and it sets you up for abusing wait turns which is the end-all be-all of fights where you don't just have a massive advantage to begin with.
Slow allows for much of the same of course, and have its own positives and negatives depending on the context of the battle. But both Haste and Slow definitely deserve to be ranked equally in S tier imo.
Hi Mister thanks for these comments. I have never found myself armageddoning 'fairly' with prot fire by I want to try it now! I think I am probably underschooled on how to get the best from fire in general (as per my whinging about Sacrifice etc in the vid), I think I tend to just discard it as the worst and steer toward the other 3 too much. Respect that view on Haste also
@@paulgoes5494 I can understand that, I did too for many years to be honest and never gave true value to most fire spells, but over time I've realized how influential they can truly be. Usually from my experience fire spells aren't used nearly as frequently as spells from other schools of magic, but when they are used, they can often be used with great influence and effect - such as mass berserk, fire shield, and arma under the right circumstances. But they often require a lot of pre planning and an intended game plan. They're great as fight swinging aces in the sleeve that can catch the opponent off guard if they don't respect the potency of well used fire magic, and since they tend to be treated as a niche category, many players (and AI for that matter) rarely take the proper precautions against fire spells in general.
Anyways, I'm enjoying your list videos, keep up the great work!
Lots of spells deserve a higher tier: 1. Armageddon completely breaks the game and can very often come online in time to not just be a "win more" mechanic. I play dungeon and as everyone knows your great payoff for playing that is Black Dragons, to get them your mage guild only needs to be upgraded once after that for a 20% chance to roll Armegeddon and is an instant win on the spot, both against human and computer opponents. The Impact of the spell is waaay higher than lightning bolt and chain lightning, It belongs in S tier and arguably at the very top. 2. If you end up with expert water magic Prayer is basically haste with an upside, you even said it yourself and yet you rated it lower than haste. 3. Firewall is a underrated by you, should be higher on the list. It does good damage and an NPC opponent gets completely meme'd by it. Very useful spell.
Thanks for the thoughts Nor I think many agree with you!
From what i see air and fire actully combo preety well together
Not sure blind is before implosion. Why blind a unit to take it out of the fight when you can simply kill it. Also blind can easily be dispelled or cured of which there is more likelihood of happening being a lower cost more accessible spell. Whilst units can be resurrected from implosion, your not guaranteed to undo as much damage was done, but resurrection is less accessible and more costly. So implosion is better as it's less likely the opponent can reverse its effect
Thanks for the thoughts Aaron and I respect that view man :)
I love both but I agree with Blind because it comes so much earlier in the game. Yes given both you’d probably pick implosion, but a lot of the most crucial parts of a campaign come before lvl 5 mage guild when blind can be your work horse.
@@TNMJAD I do agree it's more accessible. I'm thinking more of opponents counter move. Harder to counteract an implosion than blind than blind
Rate artifacts and sets! Internet loves tierlists!
Thanks toom might do that at some point :)
Magic mirror won't be good if it always protects you, because then there won't be a reason for the enemy to cast on the unit. So the reflect won't happen. At that point it does nearly the same as anti-magic. The % should be higher though. High enough for the enemy to be willing to cast, so around 50% would be ideal. Mid to low tier regardless.
Could it be 30% but covering your whole team? 🤔 maybe for like 100 mana? Multiplayer ban I imagine though
@@paulgoes5494 Covering whole team with a lower/ similar % could also work. Mana cost should be high, but 100 sounds a bit too much. There is still counterplay by using spells that don't target units.
Rating Hypnotize above ANYTHING is a mistake.
Armageddon B tier????? You only need few effrets and then attack with Armageddon and retreat, rinse and repeat, and melt someone's 200k army for like 15k gold
With mirth, the advantage of a second turn for a unit shoupd bot be underestimated. Yes bless gives max damage and second turn does in a way too. But against 2 stacks the 2nd turn is better than being blessed
Hey Aaron! I think I tend to build armies with high morale and I've often got artifact slots with incidental badges of courage; so mirth rarely gets cast by me. But you make a good point and if starting at 0 morale with big stacks in late game it could be excellent
@@paulgoes5494 will you rank vanilla heroes and finally all towns?
Hey Aaron maybe at some point although there's some other good vids on that by others
@@paulgoes5494 how about HOMM5?
Hey Aaron, no sorry man never could get into it. 2005 era 3D just makes my brain scream
Death Ripple is a poor man's dispel :). I stole that trick from AI in HOTA. AI actually unblinds his units this way.
Didn't know that was a thing! Awesome
As far as I remember summon boat only gives you a free boat if you have advanced or expert water magic. In fact, is one of the few reasons I would take water magic. If the map is water intensive and there are no easy boats
At basic, it just summons an existing boat and it has high chances of failure
Agree with your rankings 90%. Disagree strongly on Summon Elementals; IMO this is an S-tier spell, especially on expert level magic, as it lets you fight big enemies with small armies, as small as one creature. No other spell can do that, except for maybe Armageddon with fire-immune creatures. Resurrect with Summon Elementals is a godly combo: let the elementals do the damage and at the end of the battle resurrect your creature. Beyond the offensive capabilities, consider also the defensive ones: you can summon elementals to protect or divert attention away from ranged shooters or that one big stack you're fighting with.
Next, I think you overestimate the usefulness of Blind relative to other spells. Many creatures are immune to Blind, esp. undead and higher level creatures and it can only affect one stack. I think Slow easily overtakes Blind, I'd put it at #2 right after Town Portal. Implosion is amazing but too overpowering and makes me feel like I'm cheating, so I try to use it only when absolutely necessary, such as when fighting Fairie dragons and or massive stacks of one creature.
Dimension door: yes, this spell lets you reach underground places you couldn't with fly while taking less movement points, but the value-for-spell-points (distance travelled) is lower and it's clunkier to use, so I almost always go for Fly. Obviously you can also combine them.
Counterstrike should be at least a B-, considering that it allows your creatures to deal practically twice the damage by retaliating. When fighting large stacks of dragons and high-level creatures, it can be a game-changer.
Great comments thanks Alex!! There are a few themes you've picked up on that others have said there as well but I think you're the biggest fan of the elemental spells in the comments so far! I am just not a counterstriker but it's probably more that I haven't stumbled on a good use for it the way a lot of you have :)
Did you think why most of pros consider water magic the worst, while it has best spells in the game? Why?
Hmm, no - are you saying it has the best spells or are the pros saying it
It’s the worst because it doesn’t have any broken spells like aoe berserk, town portal and dimension door. If you have it it also lowers your chance of rolling the other magic schools
Agree with the majority of the rankings some great points in vid and in comments. I will try and give Beserk and Visions more usage. I would mark bless/curse a bit lower certain creatures less affected by them and I always dread that the opposite spell will be cast against me straight after. Earthquake seems a bit useless I think even with a powerful earth mage cast it twice in a row and still hadn't broken anything. Clone can be great - as spell power is less relevant it's probably best of all used by a 'might' hero who manages to have wisdom or a scroll and a load of Titans(ranged) or ArchDevils(no retaliation) are my favorites with this spell.
Hey Swan! Thanks for the comments and support
Funny that it was mentioned of forgetting lvl 3 water spells just when the spell was shown "forgetfulness", as if it was just cast on the caster
Hi Maciek now that is Meta! Wish I'd spotted that :)
Very nice!
I love that lightning bolt is your answer to everything! xD
"Should I cast this spell? Nah I'll just lightning bolt.."
Agree with your S-list, all those spells are awesome and you are praying to get them all.
BUT, I might consider chain lightning to just be S tier as well, although A+ is pretty close.
And I think you undervalue the best water spell in the game: Prayer.
It's basically an improved version of mass haste that cannot be countered. Like if you haste all your troops then it will suck if the opponent cast mass slow in response. If your troops are prayered, yes you can still be slowed but you won't lose the effects of prayer. So in spite of being slowed your troops remain fairly fast and with added attack+defence. It doesn't give as much damage bonus as bless would, but again bless can be countered, and prayer just gives all-round more bonus. The only negative thing about prayer is that it is harder to get than bless, curse and haste. But it is by far the best mass positive spell you can cast on your troops. I think it is almost comparable to slow once you get it and expert water magic, but because you always want to be earth mage and not always want to be water mage, slow is just better. And slow has some applications that prayer just doesn't.
Another thing with prayer is that I think Loynis is simply the best castle hero because of that spell (well aside from sir Mullich who isn't available always). He makes the spell even far stronger than it is. The only negative thing about Loynis is that you do get learning by default which blows, but worth it anyway.
Simply put, prayer is amazing, and you can do no better when you want to buff your army, assuming you are a water mage.
Also I would say, nice list and thanks for the video :)
I agree that earth school is by far the best, but I would say air is by far the 2nd best. Air and water are close to each other in combat spells, but air is just far better in adventure map utility spells through dimension door and fly. Like not even a competition. Fire magic basically has no utility spells on the map, only combat spells. Curse is great, berserk allows you to do some crazy things (which is probably the biggest reason I'd go fire), and Armageddon squad can be amazing but a bit difficult to do so fire should be at the bottom yes.
Thanks again Boss! Fair vote there for Prayer others agree with you
very insigthful comment
I think this is a good broad list, there are a couple I think you have maybe undervalued like Prayer and Firewall but I think it's also fair to say that some of the spells that require a decent setup to be really good maybe rank a little lower generally.
Thanks Hex, yep agree it is hard to rank some of the powerful but situationals. Interested to know where and why-fore you think Firewall is better - do you ever really use it?
@Paul Goes when I use it it's for winning battles when vastly outnumbered, early game typically - usually with the conflux specific hero specialist
@@paulgoes5494 It's incomplete to rank Firewall without mentioning Luna (Conflux). Luna is one of the, if not the most broken hero because of Firewall..
@@paulgoes5494 I've seen some expert level Players use Firewall like it was no one's business... especially in a 1 hero only challenge. With Luna. After all, her specialty is Firewall does double damage.
MeKick uses it sometimes. He made a video about Early game Fire Wall abuse with Luna in December 2021, where he played a XL map with Luna on Impossible Difficulty. Talking about the ins and outs of the strat.
And when it comes to Heroes 3 knowledge, MeKick is the first person I'd ask about anything. His YT is TheKnownWorld.
45:08 The argument just cursing everyone instead of using weakness isn't really fair since you are most likely not expert in both fire and water at the same time. Same goes with lightning and ice bolt comparison. Ice bolt might actually do much more damage than lightning. Pitting two expert level spells from different schools against each other is in my opinion not a reasonable way to rank spells
Prayer I would say would rank in A+ tier. Clone is cheap damage B. Bless actually increases your max damage at expert, so A+. Summon Boat is E-Tier, useless unless on water maps with a ton of water. Slayer is actually decent at expert to increase your damage vs lv 7 creatures.
Summon elementals might really be C, but if you realize how the AI uses these when it gets its hands on it in Hota, it is S tier but beyond disgusting.
Flaggy I have to say mate I've no idea what you mean. Maybe haven't played enough HotA to see it for myself. Does the AI just spam them more?
Counter-Strike really shines with vampire lords
I never thought of that, extra chance for them to replenish themselves.
Hey Paul. Nice Video. What is the software you used for this tier list? :D
Hey froze! I just used Excel
@@paulgoes5494 Thank you Paul. It didn't look like excel to me I would never say it haha
I really do think Prayer should have been above bless and haste in A tier, as it gives you everything at once. Yeah its abit more expensive, but really if you have prayer and expert water, its just better than bless. So surely that merits it a spot higher than bless?
Hey Chris, well let me make my argument this way: if you had to choose one spell to be banned from ever casting again - across all the games you will ever play, with heroes of might/magic wisdom/no wisdom, which do you pick - Bless or Prayer?
@@paulgoes5494
Ah, that's an interesting perspective. I would agree that Bless is the one to keep. I do think the power of Bless, as a 1st-level spell, outshines the power of Prayer, which is a 4th-level spell, simply due to its ease of acquisition and use. Perhaps I just have a soft spot for my man Loynis.
I'd argue that Prayer is S tier. It gives 2/3 the value of Haste, Stone Skin and Bloodlust. With your rating that means 2/3 of an A tier + 4/3 of C tier worth of spells in 1 turn.
For it to be worse than haste would mean that you prefer 1/3 of Haste over 2/3 of a combination of Stone Skin and Bloodlust.
As you mentioned the value you get/ turn is very important and Prayer does this very well. Also in order to give all these bonuses to your team you'd only need expert water.
The spell is most common with Castle, that has a good amount of late game melee units. Aside from the crusaders the speed boost will be eenough for the other 3 to reach the other side/ choose which enemy to hit.
About soundtrack compositions: try final fantasy (search for Final Fantasy Music - 25 Top Songs).
Hey Vincrand! Thanks for the thoughts, I think a few others a big Prayer fans as well, respect that, will check out the FF tunes!
@@paulgoes5494 Something I forgot to mention about it is that it doesn't get countered by slow. You'll end up with both speed modifiers and a +20% damage increase and a -10% damage received (assuming att and def values were equal). Your speedy boys will be slower, but your slower units will be faster.
Slow can also be removed by cure, which also heals your units a bit. So expert water for buffs and earth for damage is a good combo imo.
My main problem with it in vanilla is that you need to wait till tier 4, but you want to choose your first school of magic way earlier. Castle has a 20% chance to get prayer (same for chain lightning and meteor shower), but for (most) support spells it's mandatory to have expert, but for damage spells this isn't the case.
With horn of the abyss you can research and replace spells you don't want, so it's less of a gamble.
Thanks again Vin, good points man
This list shows he issue with “might and magic”. The game is somewhat even between might and magic for the early and most of the mod game. But when you approach late game almost all the spells are all but useless. You really grasped at straws for many of the spells.
Thanks Adam, yeah I quite like magic heroes but I think most people agree with your view though