One army syndrome, blood/tears hero limitations

[ledger]

Let's open this discussion listing how many different ways this game tries to fight the "one-army-syndrome" that was present in the previous installments:

1. The bottleneck of 1 action per turn for a hero, weakness of mass spells in general in comparison to the single target ones and the importance of Heroic Strike ability to unlock racial benefits make you want to bring fever, better supported stacks with your hero.

2. The split of might and magic creatures. This would suggest that to get the most out of your units, you'd want to have at least one might and one magic hero, especially in the early- and mid game.

3. The town conversion system that makes you want to stick to your faction, meaning you can't only mass the might type heroes from all factions to a main super hero.

4. The area control system, especially how often maps are designed with external creature dwelling boosters attached to these forts mean that defending and assaulting multiple locations simultaneously is extremely crucial in multiplayer. And how the Town Portal spell is nerfed for H6 to be accessible but much less powerful.

5. The 'powerful secondary heroes' setting and skills like Mentoring.

Then it starts to get really inconsistent.

1. The blood/tears rep system that greatly enhances the power of skills is only available to your main hero, which is so weird, and pushes you back the old boring non strategical 1 hero gets all -type gameplay. I think this is very uncool and secondary heroes should have access to it too.

2. The skill system, namely too high number of skill points available in the endgame compared to the number of skills you can spend them on. There are some cool limitations, like not being able to get some T3 skills depending on the affinity, but still, the difference between magic and might heroes start to disappear when it gets to lvl25 and beyond.

The suggestion

I'd love to see some sort of point dumps (abilities that you can spend multiple points in) in the first tiers that affect morale, luck, might power, spell power, might defense, magic defense and so forth so that the end result is much more specialized heroes with much more manageable set of utility in the endgame.

Skills like Logistics, Pathfinding, Enlightenment and such seem to be designed to be these "point dumps", but unfortunately every hero will have them, and they don't really promote real customization.

Thoughts?

[ywhtptgtfo]

Agree with most of your points. It'd be nice if the skill trees are a bit more complicated and specialized so that a heretic wouldn't end up being almost the same as a necromancer and so forth.

As opposed to having 3 tiers of skills, they should be 6 tiers instead so that a 25th level hero will actually have some distinctively different feel compared to a 20th level hero... Also, the wait from level 5 to level 15 is annoying. Opening a new tier every 5 levels would be great.