Part 67: Nature: The Seaweed is Always Greener.
The Seaweed is Always Greener: Nature Blesses We are back with the next bless review in honor of, I don't know, finding Asphodel I guess.
Nature has more interesting blesses than Water in my opinion and is by and large has good and reasonable blesses.
Resilient
Resilient gives your sacred units +1 hp when blessed. You can take it over and over again. Want +10hp? Be N10 and go wild. It's fine.
Low Light Vision
Low Light Vision gives partial dark vision to your troops. Like 50 or something. It helps when it is dark from spells or caves. It's... not really great in my opinion. It's very specialized. Even if it is only like 1 nature point.
Minor Poison Resistance
This gives you 5 points of poison resistance. That's not bad for 1 nature point as poison is all around and can result in some sideways ways for your mages to die (foul vapors). 5 won't completely protect you though.
Major Poison Resistance
10 points almost certainly will though. Cloud effects were recently buffed to hit 3 times instead of one so this should take some out of the bite out of all that poison gas. It's OK for 2 nature points.
Forest Survival
This gives your sacreds the forest survival trait which is pretty map specific. Survival traits basically make it easier to move through that terrain and harder to starve in it. For 2 nature points you can do better.
Unaging
Costing 3N in addition to having positive magic scales Unaging is an OK idea for a nation with brittle old man mages like, I don't know, Ulm, Sceleria or Shinuyama if you are on a nature point budget. Your sacreds age 1 year for every 4 years, staving off old age.
Poison Weapons
Costing 4 nature points but more grimly having negative growth scales poison weapons are kind of suspect. The negative growth (aka DEATH) scale means you have an income hit to your candles and in addition a very light popkill effect causing your income to continually taper. 5 poison damage on hit is okay but the death scale isn't worth it in my opinion. The few nations that are cool with death scales probably don't want the bless anyway. They can do better.
Recuperation
Costing 5 points and requiring an incarnate god, Recuperation is good actually. All sacred units not suffering from old age (important for some nations) have a healing check to recover from afflictions every month. Even the really bad ones like feebleminded and disease. If you have a fight-y god this will help them shrug off any permanent afflictions they've accrued. Further, you can forge shrouds to put on non-sacred commanders to grant them your blessing, and thus the healing can begin for all.
Berserker
Haha ok Berserker. So this one is... not good. For 5 nature points all your sacred units AND SACRED MAGES become BERSERKERS and if they take damage they go into a killing frenzy, get bonuses and try to punch everything to death (you do not want your mages trying to punch anything). "Well" you say, smug as hell, "I just won't bless my mages" ha ha oh my sweet summer child even if your priests were blessing everything left and right once they go off script Illwinter pushed a 'helpful' change where sacreds can go berserk even if not blessed. You're welcome!!! Your best bet is to make sure your god is dead because this one is incarnate.
Barkskin
For 6 nature points and an awake god all your blessed sacreds get barkskin per the spell. This amounts to +10 natural protection (that stacks diminishingly with existing natural protection) but as a tradeoff you have a 10 point fire vulnerability (any fire damage you take is doubled up to a maximum of 10 extra damage). This is pretty good in the early game and in the late game you can take measures to cover up your glaring vulnerability.
Regeneration
Regeneration is a Real Good Bless. Your sacreds regenerate 10% of their maximum HP per round, stacking with other forms of regeneration. They only works for living units. Undead and constructs have their own versions of regeneration blessings in other paths. Regenerating units are also less likely to accrue afflictions from taking damage. (Any time you take damage you have a %% chance equal to about the %% of your maximum HP you lost to gain a permanent flaw of some sort like a limp, missing limb or a chest wound for example). The more HP your sacreds have the more use they will get out of this. This also combos well with beefy super combatants like an awake expander god. This is, of course, and incarnate bless. Affordably priced.
Nature is a good blessing path. Things are affordable and useful for the most part, and it seems to suffer less from weird math and doesn't demand exorbitant investment in the path to get the 'best' stuff.