r/heroes3 • u/FerynaCZ • Jun 22 '23
Bad skill buffs part 4/5
Previous post: https://www.reddit.com/r/heroes3/comments/14coz10/bad_skill_buffs_part_25/
In general, I aim for solution which should be easily moddable and make the skill more considerable pickup.
Original: After a won combat, allows you to learn all skills your opponent used against you, with chance of 40/50/60 % individually. Max level of spells is 2/3/4 (requires Wisdom).
Specialty: Increases learning chance by 2/2.5/3 % per level additively.
Artifacts: Increases learning chance by 5% (treasure misc) / 10 % (treasure misc) / 15 % (minor misc) additively.
Why change: I think many people described why they hate this skill. Devs probably too, as neither of the newer towns (Conflux/Cove) has a hero starting with that skill (and to add insult to injury, an Inferno hero does not have this as specialty, so no chance of reaching 100 %).
In general, most spells can be learned via towns, and if you defeat your opponent's main, you usually will eventually get that town. It might be good for farming scouts with strong T4 spells (Jedite, Solymr, Aislinn) if you give them a chance to use them and not flee. But since the AI does not even use some spells, the usage is severely limited.
A very fringe use-case might be to feed your opponent a spell scroll, which you can then learn into book and distribute with scholar.
Changes:
"Allows you to trace enemy's spell usage up to 2nd level, channeling 20 % of its mana cost and giving you 40 % chance of learning it."
- Base chance increased to 40/55/70 %.
- Learning spells does not require Wisdom (?)
- Allows a magic channel (see familiars) with 20/30/40 % of mana cost. (Also improved by specialty) -
- (Other solution, not sure if allowed) Allows to learn "casual" hero spells of neutral units.
- (Other solution, not sure how hard to implement) Allows to learn the spells immediately during combat.
- Combined artifact of Eagle eye stuff [insert name here]: Increases magic channel by 20 % and maximum level of learned spell by 1.
Reasoning:
The first two changes are supposed to fix the concerns of limited usage, the third change is to make the specialists be worth something and to also be useful in later stages + solo PvP.
The optional changes are the most frequent ones I have seen proposed. Another one (related to magic) is to learn the adventure spells, but I wanted to stay in the combat area (and again, I am not sure how hard would copying let's say TP scroll would be easy/hard to implement if there is no interaction).
The combined artifact is only to add to the common theme of combos (though I am not sure if HotA can actually create a new one, as the newly added combos were already considered in SoD). Learning a level 5 spell does not seem to be OP in any way, given Scholar is still capped and Wisdom mostly gets eventually picked even by might heroes.
The chance is increased by 10 % at max level, so that having all the artifacts already makes it 100 % (specialists still get bonus to magic channel).
The magic channel can serve as poor man's mysticism. I admit that this might get out of hand (if you have two level 25 EE specialists who spam earth elementals against each other, there would be many draws by timeout), a solution might be to make the cap let's say 15 mana. That could be already too many words in the description though.
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u/Hunter-North Jun 23 '23
Problem with Eagle Eyes is you usually dont benefit from the spells you learn in late game. So instead of or in addition to learning, make it disable that spell from your opponent spellbook would be quite useful.
1
u/timmysoboy Jun 22 '23
I think learning creature abilities as spells is what is required here (ie. Poison/venomous from wyv). Eagle Eye simply has no value if it can't be used until after final fight(s).
2
u/FerynaCZ Jun 23 '23
Why it cannot be used until after final fight? The point is exactly that enemies might have skills that might come in handy for the final fight (it is your responsibility to learn the spells before).
It's not about one fight even if you disregard artificial stupidity of army splitting (you might fight more enemy players).
1
1
Jun 23 '23
Eagle eye is supposed to be bad. The whole premise of a medieval turn-based game is to have misfortunes, plagues, and disasters; not to be a near-perfect utopia of who has the best of best. That is why Heroes 2+3 were so successful, because it's unfair, unbalanced, and imperfect as hell.
If anything, I would propose any future modifications of bad skills to making them worse: and I'm not suggesting nerfing the %. For example, giving eagle eye a negative trigger effect of draining mana if it unsuccessfully poaches a spell.
3
u/gertgertgertgertgert Death Knight Jun 22 '23
The mana channeling is significantly better than Eagle Eye, but its a completely different skill.
Not needing wisdom would help on paper, but I don't see it actually making an impact.
Eagle Eye is uniquely bad because every other bad skill can be made usable with tweaks--even learning (if learning gave, say, 200% experience bonus it would be desirable). The only way I see eagle eye being situationally useful: X% to learn ANY spell in opposing heros spellbook--regardless of whether or not they cast it. Maybe 60/50/40/30/20 for any level 1/2/3/4/5 spells or something like that.