Dark Eagle

As promised my review of the spell dark eagle in the dark/wind spell book

All in all, personally I'd like to see the spell removed from the book. The dark/wind spells are as follows:
Dark Tithe - single target, auto hit stun
Dark Pact - mana regen
Winged Steps - Positioning skill
Wind Walk - Positioning skill
Death Coil - nuke or heal
Life Drain - channeling heal/damage
Unholy Aura - speed/regen
Skeleton Mages - minions
Vortex - channeling disable and silence
Whirlwind - stalling damage
Dark Eagle - minion production and weak nuke

As you can see the build is very oriented towards assassinations still, and with winged steps it now has the maneuverability to use the skills somewhat effectively. The skills that stick out are vortex, skeleton mages, and dark eagle. Now I understand skeleton mages is in the book because Rhys doesn't want invisibility in the m-books (which has cause many wind m-book at have a crappy f-spell) so I'm not going to put that point any further. Finger of death is a much better skill then vortex in my opinion for this book because it is more suited for killing a single target fast and running away, not staying around to channel a weak spell. Dark eagle is even more out there then the other spells. It takes 200 something mana to use, does very low power damage (3*power) and makes skeletons? The spell not only has nothing to do with wind but it has almost no synergy with the book, whereas suffocate, though slow offered protection to the mage from their victim, with this skill you can be expecting an orb to your face quite quickly. I don't know if this skill was intended to be weak to try and nerf the book, but honestly since the book can really only target a single mage, it should be able to do that quite well, and if dark eagle is trying to broaden the books capabilities it is 2 weak to do such and still lacks a wind element to it.

tl;dr summary
Dark eagle has no wind aspect
Dark eagle has NO synergy with current book skills
Vortex has little synergy with the book
Skeleton mages have no synergy with the book

Suggestion to fix
change vortex for finger of death
change dark tithe for pop
change dark eagle for a previously suggested dark/wind spell like chilling breeze
change life drain for wind elemental (to return to 5/5 balance)

any rebuttals are welcomed

Those suggestions sound good. I would be a little bit worried about Finger of Death in a book without Life Drain, but it should be ok.


I also agree about the M-spell. Sorry to be a bummer Rhys, as I hate to dis any of your hard work. But, I think it should be changed to have a silencing aspect and some additional damage.

no need to apologize. Suggestions to add a Wind flavor to it are welcome if you like. The spell will not be removed but I am not against moving it to another slot (like the F slot for example) and moving suffocate or infernal back in.

Also the rest of your suggestions are self biased and I do not consider them valid arguments for change in the book.

I understand that my balancing reason can be considered bias but synergies cannot really be argued. I do think the dark eagle has a place in the game, but its not this book. To be honest I think it would fit dark/fire more and personally i think the current dark fire spell kinda sucks, perhaps this spell as a replacement for it? And as for a replacement for this I've already suggested 2 spell that imo have really good synergy, but just for you I'll state them again.

Chill Breeze: The mage becomes a looming wind that goes to strangle the target. Upon arriving at the target they are silenced for 2 seconds and both mages lose 3*power life. The mage apeears behind the target mage.

Winds of Decay: Whenever the mage loses health all mages in the area lose 1/2 the health you lost. The max life that can be lost by this skill is 1*power.

I like the second one greatly, its a good suggestion!

Btw, Dark Eagle could be changed to Dark Pulse and replace Raise Dead. It would probably need a few more tweaks for balance and an animation remake in addition.


Btw, what is wrong with his suggestions for changes to the book being bias? We want Dark/Wind to be the best it can be, and I agree with him that those changes make it better.

Dragonheart91 wrote:

Btw, Dark Eagle could be changed to Dark Pulse and replace Raise Dead. It would probably need a few more tweaks for balance and an animation remake in addition.


Btw, what is wrong with his suggestions for changes to the book being bias? We want Dark/Wind to be the best it can be, and I agree with him that those changes make it better.

cause I know how to over power it, and he doesn't trust me to keep it fair D:

Once the new Dark/Wind spell came out i made a that mage as well (I think i got it before diaster). Noticed a bug as well: About 50% of the times i cast Dark Eagle my mage starts channeling Vortex instead. Also i made that mage in a -an game and by the time i got to level 40 the troops were maybe at upgrade level 25 and it was time to but a point into Raise Dead. So at some point i accidentaly cast it and noticed that it just kept fighting troops like some [Insert Tough Guy's Name Here], so i checked it's stats and discovered that 1 skeleton is the strongest unit in the game. Then the game quickly turned in my favour (3 skeletons finished off all the towers). early game they are still quite useless but after about level 10 you can start useing them as hero killers and after level 25 the enemy mages seem more like insects in your way.

So what i'm tring to say (with a lot more words then i expected) is that Raise Dead could use a bit of balancing, especially since Dark Eagle can summon you about 10 skeletons for 10 minutes.

PS. Sorry about any possible grammar errors, i'm on some very strong pain pills.

I can't agree with changed life drain to wind elemental. So many movement bonuses and assassination attacks that adding a 30% ms/reduction would just be overkill.

That's the point. We want to make the book the best it can be. Fire/Lightning is plenty good, as are a variety of others. I see no reason to make it bad.

well ya gotta figure bash, its really only good 1v1, and in a team game the really doesn't count for a whole lot.

the thing is that the -30% ms reduction is for everyone on their team. That makes everyone elses attacks far more sucessfull. I believe that Rhys is working on the weaker builds first, this is not one of them.

Switching spells around to make something the best it can be doesn't take much work. Besides, we already did the work of making the suggestions, he just has to make a decision. (Which is work too I guess.)


Anyway, it mostly sounds like you think Wind Elemental is imba.

In the regular pure wind book, no. In this particular M-book, yes.

That's ok. No one has suggested making the Fire/Lightning M-book worse, and I think it is generally considered to be the best. We want the books to be the best they can be.

Dark/Wind was one of the weakest books after losing invisibility which is why I remade it and gave it the mspell. The raise skeleton thing is severly way to powerful, i did not imagine it to be that strong when I buffed them and obviously it was way to much. You can expect raise dead (and that means dark eagle) to be severly nerfed next version by way of either A)Removing there HP upgrades or B) Removing there Attack upgrades. They will be keeping one but I have not decided which is best to get rid of of a balance. I am thinking the attack will say bye bye.

Instead of killing one...why not nerf them both to a lesser extent?

I would rather have them die easily to AoE damage but have powerful attack.

I'd rather they be based on the heros stats and it become the dark/fire m-spell, but renamed Dark Eruption and its animation would be a flamestrike with the dark aura on the units hits, and after the flame strike the undead lich dying animation would rise from each of the targeted units. The initial damage it would do could be based on one of the fire spells.

I suggested to nerf both attack and hp upgrades before, but it seems he wants ut polarized

If anyone is interested in seeing how the uber skeletons work i have uploaded a replay of a -an game i had.

Uber Skeletons

The troops reach about level 25. It's a long game so anyone who watches it might want to fast forward it a bit.

New Dark/Wind spell

Dark Eagle

Mage conjures an (untargetable) shadowy apparition which flies around a small/medium/large area around the mage. The eagle will pass through the souls of enemy units in the area, dealing 1/1.5/2 times the mages power. After the eagle has gone through all the units in the area, it will return to the mage and deal 25% of the dmg done to enemies to the mage directly.

Just seems more dark/wind based, thoughts?

im aware of the brokenness of the skeletons and I would put out an update to it quickly like right now but we are under going a major project for mmm right now that halts my ability to put out a release at the moment.

Oooh, sounds interesting.

Well rhys I'll stop bugging you about removing this skill if you can do this, which should be simple if the skill really should say. Give me 2 example of combos possible with this skill and other skills in the book, that actually work well. I will drop it if you can do this, otherwise I request you put this skill in the dark/fire book instead.