Part 68: Air: No Troubles, Life is the Bubbles.

No Troubles, Life is the Bubbles



Now that I am free and my god is free lets talk Air Blesses. I mean to do this earlier but landlords. Air magic has a pretty variety of okay to good blesses. Let us take a look, yes?

Minor Shock Resistance
This offers 5 points of resistance against lightning damage. Shock damage is not especially rare and nations with air magic will throw around lightning pretty liberally. 5 points isn't going to save you from a thunder strike point blank but it can mitigate lesser lightning and splash damage and make thunder weapons a non-issue. It costs 1A so it's a good value.

Precision
Also for 1A and you can take it multiple times. For each air bless point you get +1 precision which means your sacreds will be more likely to hit what they are aiming for with missiles and spells. If you have spare points and sacreds who will be lobbing a lot of those it isn't a bad idea.

Farshot
This costs 2A points and can be taken multiple times. Each time your sacreds will gain another +30% in range for their missile weapons. This doesn't effect breath weapons and the like though, if relevant. There are not a huge amount of sacred archers and it is debatable if you should be picking this even if you have them. That said Agartha has sacred boulder hurlers I am pretty sure...

Swiftness
This costs 3A and can ALSO ALSO be stacked like the others. Each stack gives +30% combat speed and +1 defense. Quickness lite. The improved combat speed means in addition to covering more ground in combat you are more likely to hit first. It's pretty good for it's cost.

Major Shock Resistance
10 shock resist for 3A right here my friends. It can't be picked multiple times but you can pick major AND minor shock res once each for 15. It is worth noting that one of the major battlefield clearing spells (Sparking Field or something) is electric damage. (the other is Firestorm but resisting both fire AND electricity? what a pipe dream... .... ...)

Charged Bodies
For 4A this is pretty hilarious actually. With this the first time a blessed sacred is struck both the attacker and the sacred will take 10 shock damage. Charged bodies offers no shock resistance so you'd have to come up with it somewhere else, in bless form or otherwise. If not, well zzzzap to you too.

Wind Walker
The first of the incarnate air blessings. For 5 points your sacreds will have +6 map move, meaning they can move about one more province on the strategic map in general. That kind of mobility is pretty powerful especially for some nations. That said your commander and all your troops need to be sacred because a squad only moves as fast as its slowest troop.

Air Shield
The next Air bless, for 6 points, is the classic Air Shield spell. Any missile coming at you (including SOME spells. Like iron blizzard) has a 80% chance of being negated, rendering you pretty resistant to getting focused down by archers. This bless is pretty situational. Missile users are very common but not always crucial. You want a plan to deal with the guys walking toward you with the big swords after all. But it has its place.

Thunder Weapons
Oh hello what kind of loser takes this awesome 7 air point bless? An incredibly cool one that's who. The +1 extra armor negating shock damage is nice but the real good thing is the stun after that leaves the enemy helpless to followups. Thunder weapons on fast passable troops can absolutely shut enemies down. Thunder weapons Nazca was an early and powerful breakout strategy in Dominions 5. The smidge of fatigue damage is mostly icing on the cake but is good vs supercombatants and gods that have to be worn down.


Air is pretty okay but a few of the options feel kind of situational or marginal or whatever. It feels like it needs a few more options. All bless categories do, really.