Stacking Wither

I wonder about the stacking of the Wither spell also. I've used it to wipe out entire armies. I like that we can continue to wither units. But I think it gets out of hand. I like your idea of increased cost. Every time I've used it to kill units, I've never had any units auto-flee.

maybe 50% more cost for each successive cast (after a successful cast anyways.)

doubling it would be too much imho.

Also, if casting it would cause the army to go below 0 in any stat, it should be disabled. OR it should only bring non 0 stats down (and leave 0 stats alone, and bring half way stats to 0).

Once all affectable stats are 0, it should be non castable.

Sounds nice to try one time, didn't know that this could be done.

I don't think it was possible back in 0.85 iirc. Must be new to 0.86?

I prefer that it lower stats by a percentage, rounded up, so that once a stat gets below say, 6, wither won't lower it any more. And that will make it less effective the more it's cast, too.

Another option would be to have wither become easier to resist as it is cast multiple times during battle.

I think that either of those would be better than having it become more expensive as battle progresses. Wither by itself should not be able to decide a battle all by itself, except maybe against mites. Otherwise, all one would have to do is to stockpile mana in-between wither-ous battles, which really isn't that hard to do.

Try casting wither on mites. They become impotent after one casting and easy moppings for whatever hero happened to cast it, no matter how big the mite horde.

And the AI apparently doesn't recognize this. I just played a game where I withered a mite horde and cleaned 'em up neatly in tactical combat, then auto-resolved combat against a different mite horde and got my hero killed.

I like the percentage idea of wither

(might make wither more useful against 'strong' and 'leveled' units as well :))

Dont really like the percentage idea, I like stronger subjects being able to go through wither, though I did not realise it stacking, even before it stacked it seemed to be as one of the better if not the best combat spells to combat armies, especially if u have a couple of death nodes.

Even tho it might not seem big, bringing all enemy melee stacks down 2 attack value per monster is very much vs 5 stacked infantry with 10*5 attack to start with, and can easily turn a battle in one cast imo.

I do see alot of monsters having odd hitpoints due to the lower constitution after casting wither, dont know which unit i remember having 19 out of 17 max hp (19/17), don't know if this is intentional.

If it is supposed to stack, it seems rather powerfull itself, meaby even better than flame dart as a killer spell, thought it doesn't increase with the lucky mage levelling i had once.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

I don't know wether it is even resistable, as my newbie champion didn't have any trouble withering everyone on the map. It makes a huge difference indeed, and I find it a bit too good for the cost. The stacking makes it even worse.

The same happens with shrink. You can shrink opponents to completely ridiculous levels, especially with sculla's mace that does not seem to be resistable. 

No mass spells are resistable, hopefully they will fix this

Wither + Dagger class weapon + Impulsive + Resoln (to turn every shard into a death shard) = stupidity. I Withered a dragon to death and he only got two attacks on me. I'd say combine a few suggestions. Firstly, gotta make it resistable. Also, why not make it reduce stats down to 25% of their max, total. That way high str creatures will still have pretty high str afterwards.

It should be like in HOMM (at least 2 and 3): Each unit makes a check for resistance when a mass spell is cast, and the ones that succeed don't get the spell cast on them.