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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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HeWhoLurks said:
Rite of Way was also a pretty simple BM and still cost us 3 AP base alongside the extra 1 for fixing the problem. If you go by the logic the MMM was a simple BM and thus higher tier BM like Pit of Shades would cost more than 1 AP, it stands to reason that making similarly high tier BM could put the base AP cost at 5+.
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MMM only cost 1 AP because we rolled extremely high and had the inventor (or the guy so good at it that he named himself after it, one of those) as a tutor for it.

Pit of Shades, as the second hardest BM, I would expect to cost at least 3 AP assuming average rolls.

And that for a spell we still wouldn't be able to use reliably.

The extra time investment for mist-based spells that we invent ourselves is absolutely worth it.
 
ReImagined said:
We are looking to take advantage of the Staff of Mistery, whose effect includes fog based BM, making it FC, and thus available for us to cast in the same way that we've been using Dread Aspect and other FC spells.
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Thinking about the Staff of Mistery's ability to downgrade the difficulty and enhance the effect of spells, isn't there a category above BM? The spells that can only normally be cast in a Storm of Magic.

If so could we try to learn those (if there are any Uglu ones) at only BM difficulty.

Do those stronger spells even exist or am I mistaken? I seem to remember them being refered as catastrophe level spells or something.
 
I would vote against learning any battle magic except maybe something fog based.

My benchmark is that no matter how many bonuses we stack there is always a 1% chance of rolling a nat 1 on the "first cast" roll.
We can't choose if we have nat 1s or not, but we can choose if we take the actions where a nat 1 is most likely to result in death. Sometimes we may judge the risk worth it, sometimes not.

There is a set of scenarios where the "best" action for us to take involves casting some battle magic we don't currently know, but unless the odds of those scenarios multiplied by the difference between taking that action and whatever the second best thing we could be doing.
Or to express it mathematically:

(Chance of BM miscast) * (Harm of miscast) > (Chance of BM being useful) * (Good of using BM - Good of whatever non BM thing we would have done instead.)

For a calculated risk, do the math.

Now a lot of this is subjective, but by my judgement most of the scenarios where casing battle magic we don't already know is the "best" thing for us to be doing are rather involved. Furthermore with all the other great options we have (dispelling, MMM, dragonflask, sword, scouting, etc) even where BM is better then our other options, it's not that much better.
 
Sparsebeard said:
Thinking about the Staff of Mistery's ability to downgrade the difficulty and enhance the effect of spells, isn't there a category above BM? The spells that can only normally be cast in a Storm of Magic.

If so could we try to learn those (if there are any Uglu ones) at only BM difficulty.

Do those stronger spells even exist or am I mistaken? I seem to remember them being refered as catastrophe level spells or something.
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Cataclysm spells, but we are very unlikely to get access to them.

Boney said:
You're evaluated for whether you should be trusted with access to Cataclysm spells if you achieve impressive things with the highest levels of sub-Cataclysm magic.
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Boney said:
BurnNote said:
Which would mean that they're almost certainly a battle mage, and therefore living in a gilded cage and under observation. Maybe some LMs, who are assumed trustworthy, though not beyond suspicion, and most of those would be former BMs too.

Presumably, it works on a similar principle as with those chaos rituals. You get put on the list of people who know stuff about Storms of Magic, and if one pops up, people will be looking at what you were doing at the time. You might get an escort of Magister Vigilante and Sigmarites for the duration, to make sure you don't get distracted in handling it (both by doing nefarious things, and by people who want to do nefarious things and don't appreciate interference).
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Partly that, but also partly for the much simpler reason that if you need more firepower and you haven't learned all the Battle Magic, it's easier and safer and more practical to just learn more Battle Magic instead of skipping right to the Cataclysm magic. Also if you can break out a Pit of Shades and a Pendulum of Doom and that isn't enuff dakka for whatever it is you're trying to achieve then it's probably reasonable for the College to start wondering what the hell you're getting up to.
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Sparsebeard said:
Thinking about the Staff of Mistery's ability to downgrade the difficulty and enhance the effect of spells, isn't there a category above BM? The spells that can only normally be cast in a Storm of Magic.

If so could we try to learn those (if there are any Uglu ones) at only BM difficulty.

Do those stronger spells even exist or am I mistaken? I seem to remember them being refered as catastrophe level spells or something.
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We could-

Boney said:
Yes, though it would still be as difficult as Pit of Shades or Occam's Mindrazor. No Storm of Magic needed, but you would probably need favourable conditions.
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It would still be on the upper end of BM difficulty and require favorable conditions, but we could.
 
Mopman43 said:
Sounds like a skill issue.

Melkoth uses the Mist as his favorite party trick, and that's an example to follow.
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Or as another example, we've seen Mathilde use smaller instances of RoW for individuals without a roll, but the codified spell may be BM scale only. So conversely, it should be possible for Mathilde to get other BM level effects cast at a personal level for spells she creates.
 
Derpmind said:
Or as another example, we've seen Mathilde use smaller instances of RoW for individuals without a roll, but the codified spell may be BM scale only. So conversely, it should be possible for Mathilde to get other BM level effects cast at a personal level for spells she creates.
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It's fog-based. The staff makes it FC rather than BM for Mathilde.

(It'd be cool as hell if we could get it to FC for everyone, but we'll see how the rolls go)
 
Zero Gravitas said:
Magnus the Pious didn't accept Altdorf to be warped by building the Colleges and treated Magisters like nobility in the Articles because he wanted more magical bling - he did it because magic is extremely useful in warfare and cannot be substituted by massed cannon fire.
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It is extremely useful in warfare and cannot be substituted by mass cannon fire, but that is entirely a separate matter from the discussed "a great daemon showed up" where it very much can be substituted by massed cannon fire.
 
Mopman43 said:
The only mist/fog based Cataclysm spell is Mist of Shadows, which is basically just mass teleportation- any units caught in the mist reappear around the caster.

Honestly, not worth it anyway.
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Well, if we want to increase our affinity with Uglu (magic score), learning a mist/fog based Cataclysm spell might be more efficient than learning another BM when we already know two of those.
 
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Obviously the solution is to accidentally get sent back in time to become the Dwarven Ancestor god of Stealth and Trickery that gets sealed away in a stasis vault to avoid a paradox that then opens up on the day we left.
 
BurnNote said:
But Mathilde also can create her own spells! So what might be contenders here?
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I'd also suggest the simple fog creation spell from 4e. It fits Warrior of Fog perfectly, gets boosted by our staff, is conceptually dead simple, and cripples the enemy forces' visibility, which is ideal for Mathilde's talents as a wizard, general, and infiltrator. I'm thinking it may also attract more Ulgu to the battlefield as a pure side effect, which'd make Mathilde's magic even stronger.

EDIT: The great majority of ranged spells require line of sight, which a simple fog spell would do a lot to counter, so it's pretty good for fighting enemy wizards.
 
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Personally, I'd be okay with learning some standard battle magics. However, if we were going to learn Pit of Shades, I'd be tempted to learn this instead:
Boney said:
Andres said:
Blood in the Badlands, page 81


@BoneyM, this spell is from the Cataclysm Siege Spells section. (So we can't learn it until Lady Magister+good reason iirc.) Would we be able to cast it as mere Battle Magic? Also, would we still need a Storm of Magic to cast it?
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Yes, though it would still be as difficult as Pit of Shades or Occam's Mindrazor. No Storm of Magic needed, but you would probably need favourable conditions.
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From my reading, this is approximately Pit of Shades on steroids with a fog theme, sized up to cover the top of an entire castle.

We'd need "favourable conditions", but I daresay that after the orbflex we'll pretty much always have the CF to have a Powerstone in our pocket, should unfavourable conditions arise.

Boney's said that the Colleges generally want you to learn other battle magics first before deciding you need Cataclysm spells. But we might be able to convince them that in the specific case of this fog-based magic, Mathilde thinks she can get more mileage out of the same risk compared to Pit.

I don't think we''re planning on getting in any big fights for our current job so we probably wouldn't do this any time soon, but I'm very aware that Everchosenbowl could kick off at any time with no warning.
 
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It does seem like the kind of thing that could be useful when laying siege to somewhere. Get the ladders or w/e into position, yank the defenders off the walls, and rush your guys in to create a foothold.
 
Andres said:
I'd also suggest the simple fog creation spell from 4e. It fits Warrior of Fog perfectly, gets boosted by our staff, is conceptually dead simple, and cripples the enemy forces' visibility, which is ideal for Mathilde's talents as a wizard, general, and infiltrator. I'm thinking it may also attract more Ulgu to the battlefield as a pure side effect, which'd make Mathilde's magic even stronger.

EDIT: The great majority of ranged spells require line of sight, which a simple fog spell would do a lot to counter, so it's pretty good for fighting enemy wizards.
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What differences does this fog spell have compared to Pall of Darkness? If it doesn't have a big advantage over Pall, we can just use that for cutting visibility.
 
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