 Hello my friends and welcome to the Heroes of Might and Magic 3, Skills Teal List. This is the third video in the Heroes of Might and Magic 3 Teal List series. The first video I did was all about the creatures in the game. Every single creature crammed onto a single teal list and you can see a link to that in the description below. And then the second video I did was covering all the spells in the game and I really thought, for completeness sake, it was important that I come back here to tell you all what I think about the secondary skills in the game. So most of you will be familiar with this idea. You have the four primary skills, attack, defense, spell power and knowledge. And then there are 28, at least in the base game, 28 secondary skills that your heroes can learn and they can learn up to eight of these particular 28 skills. So similar to the previous videos, I'm going to be working my way through nice and slowly. The intention is to be a bit of a chillaxing, chilled out experience where I'm going to wax on about the skills, tell you what I think of them, find a spot for them somewhere on this scale. Now, once again, just to reiterate what I've said before in my previous videos, I prefer to play Heroes 3 on the vanilla shadow of death settings that build up the game that you'll typically get when you download the game from good old games or from whichever vendor you are or installing it from CD or whatever else you're doing. A little bit about how we're going to rank. So essentially we're looking to put skills that are taken regularly higher up the order and skills that are taken less frequently down the order. That's a loose kind of sort of guide rail for how we're going to score them. But then there are going to be specific things that we're taking into account like versatility, robustness, the applicability of the skill, how frequently it then shows up, how well it integrates with other skills, how much of a specialist you have to be, how much of a specialist your hero has to be in order to really get the best out of that skill. Now I've shuffled everything around. I'm not doing it alphabetically. These are in really no particular order at all. And I think that's a good way of keeping the mystery and magic alive as we step through the entire list. So we've got about 28 to get through. Probably be a shorter video than the other two were, but I'm not really trying to rush. I'm going to take my time because these skills are just too awesome to gloss over or rush with. Okay, so quick tweak to my tile size here and we'll get started. First Aid is the first skill off the first cab off the rank. And what this does is it allows your first aid tent to work better than it would by default. And I actually had to look up to remind me how much better it is. It adds an additional 50 health of regeneration to the top creature on top for basic first aid right up to 100 health for expert first aid. So the idea with this is as it scales in the late game provided you've got lots of access to first aid tents and you're playing a faction and or you have access to a faction that has them. If you've got tier seven creatures with 200 HP the top stack is getting healed by 100 each turn assuming that it's taken enough damage for that healing to trigger. Now you will almost always have some damage on your soldiers in any reasonably close fight or any fight that isn't an absolute gimme. And so I actually find first aid to be pretty good as a skill. It does require you to have access to the tent though. You need to be able to get a tent and then to buy replacement tents because the tents tend to get destroyed by the AI in particular in combat and focus down. I don't know where to start. Usually the first few that I put on the list need to then be tweaked afterwards but I feel like first aid is an okay-ish skill and I'm looking at the B minus category, potentially the C plus category for first aid. I think we'll give it a B minus for now. We'll be generous for now because I tend to err on the side of being mean as we go. Next one I've got here is scouting. Alright now scouting is traditionally a skill that I think most of us probably find to be pretty bad. It takes up one of our eight skill slots and the way here as three works is that the fog of war once it's revealed it stays revealed. That particular part of the map is revealed permanently and not only does it not sort of half fade away you can see exactly what's going on with god-like vision for the rest of the game in that part of the map. So that makes scouting a really kind of weird thing where getting out early and revealing that piece of the map and the early part of the game is actually really important. I played a campaign recently or a scenario rather using Fiona who is the Cerberus hero from the Inferno and she has scouting. It's not her specialty but anyway I found myself in the early game with her going out on this extra large map levelling up her scouting all the way up to expert and it paid huge dividends going from scouting radius whatever the default is up to plus three additional hexes in all directions. Early in the game is actually really really good and really really powerful and Fiona did go on to become an important hero in the rest of that campaign it wasn't like she was a throwaway sort of hero. So before I played that scenario I actually probably would have given this a D minus. I actually think I want to put it up the ranks a little bit. It's not a skill you're going to be especially excited about but there's such good utility in the early game especially on a large map that I don't think it's junk. I don't think it deserves junk status so we're going to give it a D minus. Okay. Maybe this will be a short video because I'm kind of flying here. Alright. The next one I have here is Armourer and what Armourer does is at the expert level it reduces all damage incoming to your troops by 15%. It goes 5, 10, 15 at the basic advanced and expert level. This is good. As long as you are playing a hero as long as your hero is someone who plans to be fighting a lot with monsters and creatures. So it tends to sort of suit the heroes of might a little bit better than the heroes of magic. You get to amplify the impact of your high defense if your hero has a high defense score. But even on heroes that don't have good defense reducing incoming damage by 15% is just still going to be quite decent. And you can be reasonably happy like if you've got no choice but to take this for example or it gives you this a choice between this and something garbage you can take this and be pretty happy. You can be pretty happy. Yeah, I think it's a universally robust skill that interleaves nicely with the other skills. So for Armourer I'm going to say C plus-ish. Is it a bit better than that even? Yeah, I'll put it up towards this end of the seat. Is it better than first aid? Yeah, I think it might be slightly better than first aid actually. I might swap these two over. Okay, a little bit of dynamism is required as we go with these. There's far fewer than in the other videos. The creatures had like a hundred and something creatures and we've only got 28 to get through here with the secondary skills but I think Armourer is a bit better. I wanted a bit more than first aid. I'll tend to take it more frequently than first aid. Okay, who's next? Leadership is a really good skill. Now, if you are a knight, you have this skill by default and what it does is it increases the morale of all of your troops by plus one, plus two and then plus three in the case of the expert leadership you can see here. So I had to just go away and remind myself what the impacts of obviously having the positive morale are in terms of percentages and I don't mind, I'll shamelessly read them out here. The idea though is that by the time you ramp up to expert leadership or if your troops for whatever reason could be the glyph of gallantry, whatever it might be giving them plus three morale that gives all stacks a 12.5% chance to earn a second attack after they've completed their first action for the turn. So perhaps they move, perhaps they attack, you roll a dice or a dice is rolled and 12.5% of the time they get to attack again which is just so awesome and really, really powerful and it can really break a combat open. Typically on the flip side having the enemy enjoy a morale flash is one of the things that you're most worried about and so for that reason morale is really good in this game. Having high morale and it's worth even biasing your army composition in order to try to stay on the same alignment in order to get the plus one bonus to morale for that reason and I often in my games will go out of my way to do that to really maximize on morale. So yeah, I really like leadership. Obviously it doesn't work on undead and there's a bunch of other stuff like golems and things that don't care about it so it depends on what your hero is doing. Necropolis heroes I think are banned from, I don't think they can take this skill and they're rarely underwanted anyway I suppose. But overall yeah, it's a really good skill. It's a really really solid skill. I think I might give it a B plus. Again potentially subject to change as we go. The next one I have here is the first of School of Magic we'll talk about it's the School of Air Magic. Now here's the thing about the schools of magic. There's this thing that happens with magic. I've talked about this a lot in my last video on the spells where you can only cast one spell per turn. So your hero is going to tend to gravitate towards the most effective spells that really match with his or her overall tactic or army composition. Being an expert air mage in the case of air magic here isn't much good if you're also an expert fire mage, expert earth mage, expert water mage. There's not much point in being an expert in all four. It's almost always going to be better to take one or two at most. So I guess in terms of ranking this I'm going to try to rank it in absolute terms. So I'm imagining that you're on week one, week two. You've got maybe a couple of other skills. You're offered air magic. Should you take it? Normally the answer is going to be yes because air magic is a really really solid school. Again, if you've got access to good air spells, if you've got a mage guild that's being built, if you are investing in magic in general, as opposed to might maybe, air magics are just a really really solid choice, a really great choice to go into. If you're a hero of might, you might still go to expert air magic as a priority in order to haste your entire army and be doing that regularly. You also get access to cool things in the late game like the dungeon door, which even a hero that doesn't have insane amounts of spell points can still get a lot of utility out of or fly as another example. How ecstatic am I to see air magic show up? I'm probably about as excited normally as I am to see leadership in the early game, in the mid game. Yeah, maybe about the same. It's probably not something you're going to desperately try to take in the late game. By that point, you'll already be an expert at something else, and you won't be necessarily looking to pivot into air magic. Yeah, but air magics are really really good. Really good secondary skill and one that I'm happy to see show up. Alright, the next one I've got on the list here is luck, and expert luck increases the luck of all of your troops by plus three. I talked in the spells video a little bit about how luck doesn't quite click together, there's no real luck build where you can cast the fortune spell in the air school and stack it with luck, you know, but I did have a hero in my last campaign that had expert luck, and it kept triggering, and it was really good. It's just free damage, right? So it's kind of like blessing your army. Imagine if you could bless your army, but for free it just happens, it just goes off for free, and you don't actually need to waste a turn. You know, you don't need to waste a spell turn or a casting turn blessing everybody or casting prayer on everybody. If everyone's got expert luck, you've kind of got it by default, and obviously when the luck triggers, you deal excess damage and double damage, and so on. So it's a little bit like leadership, except not quite as exciting as leadership. You can be lucky and be a golem or a vampire, I think, and so it's a bit better than leadership, a bit more versatile in that context, but I just think in terms of overall wow factor, it's just okay. It's not quite as good as leadership, although it shares a sort of a similar vibe. Do I like it better than Armora? Just for the flavor, yes. I think they're similar. I think they're similar, but luck seems to be, to me, something I'm a little bit happier to see than Armora in the round. Okay, let's keep going. Where are we up to? How's this looking? I'll just check how the image is coming through for you guys on the screen. All right, the next one I've got here is Artillery. And what this does is it improves the power level of the Ballista. Obviously you really need early access to a Ballista. Like when you give your hero this skill by choice, you need a Ballista ready to be purchased and they're expensive. They're two and a half grand for a Ballista. Some heroes come with a Ballista for free as part of their setup when they arrive. And there's one hero I think Christian in the castle town who has both. He starts with Artillery and a Ballista to shoot with. So he's kind of a pre-cooked, ready-to-go Artillery guy. And the Ballista is really, really good. It does help to have higher attack strength for your hero to have higher attack strength to really get the most out of it. Having the double damage with two shots with a ranged attack, again, for free, in addition to whatever else the rest of your army is doing is pretty good. The Ballista as well is really quite hard to destroy right the way through the early and mid-game even though the AI will often attack it. It'll usually survive. It's actually quite hard to destroy. Now, it does require a lot of setup and you have to forego other things. You've kind of got to be married to this idea of having the Ballista and for it mattering. And it is capped, obviously, in terms of... It can't scale. It can't scale to bonkers levels of damage. You know, the way that something like Expert... Being an Expert Airmaid with Chain Lightning can. Where do I want to be? I think I want to be in the C category for Artillery. And I think I like First Aid just that little bit better. It's not a massive difference but just a little bit better than I like Artillery. Solid skill though and provided you've got the right abilities leveraged early in the game can be very, very strong. Okay, next thing I've got here is Mysticism. And I don't really like Mysticism. Okay, so the idea with this is that you get free extra spell points regenerated each day. So by default each hero only gains one spell point per day. Now the way to break that is to spend the night in your town where your mage guild is. You can also visit the... Mana Vortex in the dungeon if you have that. And then there's the Wishing Wells all the way through the Adventure Map. I tend to find it's usually the case that you're going to be able to do one of those other things. Especially the Wishing Wells. Like if there's a Wishing Well anywhere in your regular part of your empire, back and forth as you're moving trips around and exploring different parts or whatever. Even one or two Wishing Wells on the map near where you are completely invalidates Mysticism. So it can be actually quite handy if you've got a hero who you've sent off early and they're off exploring and they're in an area that's got really bad terrain and they're moving slowly and chunkily through the terrain revealing new bits of open terrain with no roads. Having Mysticism actually can be quite handy for them because they're strong enough to defeat the wandering monsters that are nearby and they're actually engaging in fights. Casting spells, casting blind for example. And then yeah, within a couple of days, Expert Mysticism, I've earned those spell points back. But it's a bit corner casey. It's a bit corner casey and I think it's probably the worst spell we've seen so... the worst skill, sorry, that we've seen so far. Is it an E? Mysticism? I'm just scanning here on some of these others who am I going to make Fs and Es and everything. It's pretty bad, right? It's a pretty bad skill to get. I'm not going to condemn it to E just yet but I might have to if we come back. Alright, what's next here? Tactics. Tactics is cool. It means that every single combat, before combat begins you get to configure your army, put your vulnerable squishy units behind your strong, chunky units, and or if you're playing in a very offensive strategy, move everybody forward, five or six squares, whatever it is, and then if you've got the first turn you're able to leap on the defenders that much faster. So it's an extremely valuable skill, much, much more useful for heroes of might that are really fighting with big armies where you've poured effort and energy into making them really strong in terms of attack and defense and you've poured money into having really good armies with seven stacks of really meaningful troops and not just, you know, not just tokens or tiny stacks of troops in the seven. Tactics generally is going to be a pretty premiere choice for heroes of might. I'm taking it most of the time. You know, if I've got Kraghack or something and I see Tactics, yeah. I think it's an A grade skill. It's better than leadership most of the time. I'm going to give it a low A and we might come back and promote it a bit higher even. It's a really, really good skill to get and I prioritize it pretty highly more than I would prioritize these other ones. So I'm going to give it an A for now. Okay. The next one's a tough one to rank. So this is Wisdom. Okay, so with wisdom you've got heroes of might and heroes of magic. The idea broadly speaking is that and there are some exceptions I think that the heroes of magic start with basic wisdom. The heroes of might can then choose to take basic wisdom as a skill further down the tree and the idea being that if you have basic wisdom you can learn spells that are level three and then advanced wisdom allows you to learn level four. Expert wisdom allows you to learn level five. So what we talked about before, the idea of an air mage, someone taking basic air magic, the idea was you could become an expert in that school as a hero of might but never bother to get wisdom and simply use the level one, two and three air spells and just have a great time with expert haste, lightning bolt, you might do disrupting ray, that kind of thing. There's interesting utility spells in air that you might use without ever bothering to become capable of casting the really powerful stuff like chain lightning and dimension door. So how do we rank this? You can't actually give it a score in the context of a hero of magic because they come with it by default. They have no choice, they can't choose it. So I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to rank wisdom on a scale of S to F based on whether as a hero of might I end up tending to take it. The answer is I don't take it that often but I sometimes do. It's not an absolute no brain, it's like, oh yes, wisdom, great crag hack, I can give him wisdom. You're probably saying no to wisdom in the early game. In fact, you're almost certainly saying no to wisdom in the early game, a lot of the time. Imagine being offered luck or wisdom on a hero of might. So later in the game if you've got access to really good spells in your mage guild being able to send your powerful hero of might in there to learn them. It switches on and something you then care about. So I think I'm going to leave it right parked bang in the middle of our tier list. Just to reflect that, it's a strange one. Half the heroes in the game already have it. So for them it's actually extremely special and important because it's integral to what they're doing. But in the context of someone who is given the choice of choosing wisdom it's probably not actually, I'm going to even demote it a little bit, it's just okay. If you don't already have it what is the probability that you're really dying to get it? I'll put it back here, I'll put it back in the middle. Toughie. Next we have fire magic or the school of fire. What's it called? Fire magic is the secondary skill. Similar to what we talked about with air magic. So this unlocks all of the expert features inside the fire school. Now spoiler alert for those of you who haven't seen the spells tier list, I think fire is the worst school. And there isn't a huge amount of point becoming an expert fire mage. It allows you, a hero of might will be able to cast expert curse and expert bloodlust at quite a high proficiency and usefulness. You can ignore wisdom and just cast those two spells at expert level. You'll also get a discount on blind which is a key spell you'll be casting a lot as a fire mage. But it's a key spell you'll be casting a lot anyway regardless of whether you take this choice. Now as for a hero of magic if I'm being an expert fire mage I've got to try to get utility out of awkward things like sacrifice. It can obviously be a massive thing if I am building towards Armageddon. And you can get like the tome of fire magic to deal additional 50% damage. You can get this idea of I'm building around this I really want to be an expert fire mage with really high spell power. But most heroes that come across fire magic are probably going to pick something else I think. They're going to maybe hold fire and say I don't want to be an expert fire mage I'm going to hold that, see if I can pick up water or earth instead or air. Now with that said, this icon that we're looking at is the coolest icon of all of the skills it just looks so awesome. There's the flaming globe and everything. I just think it's the coolest icon out of all of the icons. And I probably take expert fire magic just because of how cool it looks. Even though it doesn't look like that it looks like there's a basic version with a different icon that you take at the beginning. A school of magic is something it's better than scouting. But it's not the school you're going to want to go into very often. You're usually going to want to be in a different school or at least another school in addition to it. In terms of incidentally when it shows up how often do I want to pile into it? Not that often. I can cast blind. I don't need to be proficient. I don't need to have expertise in the school to cast that spell. C- for now? Yeah, I'm going to pop it down here. C-ish. Despite how cool it looks. All right, resistance. Now in various, like in the community patch of the game and in competitive play this skill is often banned I think. In the Shadow of Death default game as it comes, as you play it I've always found it to be just good but not broken. At the expert level it gives you a 20% chance to resist the impact of incoming spells. So all of your soldiers, for example if your opponent is going to cast lightning bolt on one of your stacks if you've got expert resistance there's a 20% chance that the spell doesn't work. And I have just always found it to be pretty good like just an okay skill. I haven't found it to be utterly busted or broken like a beeline, oh yes resistance I can't wait to take this. It's just okay. It doesn't help you against wandering monsters when you're trying to unlock the map it's more of a late game thing where enemy heroes that have built their strategy around high damage magic spells have a harder time getting their message across but 20% isn't 50% right? It's not busted. I just think it's a handy skill and one that I'm happy to pick up and happy to level up into the expert level so it's like 5% resistance to start with 10% for advanced and then at expert level you get 20%. Yeah, maybe it's a bit better than being able to resist. I'm going to leave it here, B+. I think I actually like leadership a bit more than I like this typically when I play the game. See what you guys think of that actually those of you who play the community patch version maybe can shed some light on the rationale behind why it got banned for me though it's never been busted I've talked about it long enough. Okay, how are we doing? How are my levels coming through all right? Hopefully this picture looks right for you guys. Next on the rank is Ballistics. This improves the performance of the catapult when you are attacking a town. Now there are lots and lots of heroes and army compositions and builds and games where you're going to find yourself wanting to capture a town having a big army but not really being able to deal with the fact that there's a big wall and a big moat and the three archery towers that come with the defense of the town. That happens all the time. Even in a situation where you have good flyers in your army and you've got maybe some ranged units in your army it will often be the case you've got at least some aspects of your army that are just ground guys like minotaurs Dungeon is a classic example of this because you've got the harpy hags medusas, beholders manticores and dragons all of which can either shoot through the walls or walk up and get shorter range and shoot through the walls or fly over them and it's always the manticores not manticores, it's the minotaurs it's always the minotaurs who are just like, man I don't get to play I just have to sit around while the rest of the army does all the work and wait hopefully for maybe some defenders to walk out of the gate or for eventually the catapult to breach one of the sections of wall even in army composition builds like that you can still be pretty happy with ballistics being able to take out one of the arrow towers especially the big arrow tower in the first couple of turns of the game if you do need to get a little bit lucky it's not guaranteed firing two shots at that arrow tower could save yourself lots and lots of losses from your most spongy unit say for example the beholder is in that example I gave you there, well happy hags ballistics will still pull its weight is what I'm saying and for that reason I think it's amazing it's not an auto-pick well in the early game it's an auto-pick, I can be very happy just taking it in the late game I might still quite often be looking for it and wanting it so I think it's a special skill ballistics, it's really really good it just gives you, it just makes you can relax I don't have to worry too much anymore I can have a big army full of ground guys and if I've got expert ballistics then I'm gonna be okay, it's gonna be alright I can attack any town I come across with confidence without having to have a plan or invest in flyers which are often less powerful pound for pound than their ground moving counterparts ballistics is a special skill is that right? yeah, ballistics is special I'm gonna say that ballistics is special alright let's keep going I've got necromancy next necromancy is very hard to rate you can't choose it all of the necropolis heroes have it and or start with it, sorry and then everyone else is banned from learning it you don't get offered it when you level up, I think there's ways you can accidentally learn it like from a scholar and stuff so it's a really really hard skill to rate it's a very important and useful skill for the necropolis heroes and so I'm not gonna overthink it I'm just gonna say that it's very good I'm just gonna say that it's very good but I'm not putting it, it's not special because you don't always end up building a strategy around it as an necropolis hero so I'm gonna give it just a good B plus which I've done with a lot of stuff in this category of like, yeah it's good but there's an asterisk because of the context so I had archangels and I was talking about spells like animate dead and stuff in the last video where it's kind of like, yeah of course they're amazing but in the context of what we're trying to do we're trying to rank them we're trying to rank these skills in terms of desirability when you're offered them and you never offered this yeah so I've got to put it somewhere I think for the necropolis heroes it's a pivotal and important skill but not necessarily up here because you aren't just B lining your strategy towards necromancy at least not every time I just want to tell you how many skulls there are in these diagrams there's tons more as well next skill I've got here is scholar and the idea being with this that at expert level you can learn and teach fourth level spells to other heroes in your army or in your empire very useful if you've got a big sprawling empire and then quite a combo in the late game if you have town portal on one of your more important heroes town portaling around teaching the entire empire how to cast town portal can be quite quite good even in the early game though scholar can be quite handy one thing I do find it has massively diminishing returns you really only want one hero to be a scholar and you don't really want a second scholar in your roster that much so I'll pick it I'll be happy but I won't be I won't be ecstatic about being a scholar if I get off of that yeah it's just a C being a scholar I think it's okay alright next is offense and what this does at expert level is it increases the hand to hand damage that all of your troops deal by 30% so you really want a good sized army and you want a hero that is doing a lot of fighting it does help if he has a higher attack strength but if he's a more defensively minded if the army is more defensively minded and he has a high defense skill perhaps through an artifact or something growing expert offense is still going to be useful even then because 30% is 30% it takes whatever you would have dealt and multiplies it by 1.3 and you can't win fights as a big hero of might with a big mighty army without actually dealing damage so the offense is always going to be good I think it might be a little bit better than armorer right it's obviously it's obvious to compare it to armorer for that reason that armorer does the opposite thing it gives a higher buff than the armorer gives but that's because armorer affects all types of damage this is just hand to hand damage how excited am I to get it I think it's a high B region here kind of like resistance leadership yeah I like offense I like picking it I go out of my way to pick it I might just promote leadership a little bit here as well and we'll just do a little rejig of the graphics I don't need to bunch them in too close together because we don't have that many to get through yeah offense is a solid solid skill when you can be happy picking up I don't think it's an auto pick I don't think it's really really a grade a grade but it's it's good alright next skill I have is logistics and this increases your movement over land and in the underground just extends the reach that your hero has on a given day given their army composition and giving the other whatever other modifiers are there and in the vanilla game this is just awesome every single day being able to do that much more with your hero opens up all these additional strategic options that you didn't have before like being able to concertina your run with you know meeting up and exchanging troops and artifacts with other heroes racing down to sort out a problem and then racing back again to solve a different problem the next day there's just so many ways that logistics pays you back every single turn even on a small-ish or medium-sized map this is going to be great on a big map though on a larger extra large map which is the maps I prefer to tend to play this is an auto pick it is just great I'm going to do a spoiler alert there's no better skill in the game than logistics in my opinion it's just it's awesome and there's just no hero who doesn't want it and I can't get enough of it logistics I can't even tell you off the top of my head how far how much further you get to run you get 10% additional movement at basic 20 and then 30 at expert yeah it's just it pays you back in so many important and subtle ways every single day being able to move an additional 30% just awesome can't speak highly enough of it maybe I'll come back and wax on about how amazing it is again at the end there's no better skill I'm saying now the next thing I've got here to talk about is archery this one is an interesting one basic archery is really useless it gives you a plus 10% it gives you a plus 10% damage from your ranged guys but then it goes to 25 and then 50% at expert level so all of your ranged troops deal 50% more damage that can be extremely good and if you've got lots of ranged units in your army that is and you're able to build towards it very very powerful I think it's probably still only a B because you have to build towards it when you're starting with a hero that has it by default it'll be easier to really prioritise ranged units and max out the value of it later in the game as the game wanes on and waxes on you will have made a call and you'll be you'll already be hasting flying offencing tactic sing and it'll show up and you'll be like archery it's a bit late for that now I don't really have enough ranged dudes I can't pivot easily into this and then certain certain town types that just love it the dungeon loves it the tower probably loves it yeah it's a kind of a hard it's a good skill but there are going to be times where it's often to you and you're like oh no jeez hell no for some reason it's smaller than the other icons I don't know why where do I want to put it I'm not sure it's not an A grade skill I think it's there but you could swap take any of these four and sort of swap them around a little bit and I'd be in agreement you know I'm not saying that this is the right order of these four really leadership and decrement are a little bit better than these four archery could be could be a bit higher than this I think it's okay there though for now alright let's keep going how are we doing we're doing okay but water magic well water magic has a skill is it worth going into the school of water um yes it is I think it's a B minus I like the water school I'll take it I'll take it if even if I've already got one of the other schools I'll still take water sometimes it doesn't quite get me super excited the way air does by default so if I've got a default hero wondering around doing things wasn't expecting this oh here I am offered water how much more excited air or water how much more excited I'm a little bit more excited to be offered air usually and often that's because of lightning bolt like because it's a utility hero they're never going to be an incredible spell caster but you know um you know they'll know bless though a lot of the time and kind of thing becoming an expert water mage if you're a hero of might is sometimes better because of bless air and water maybe I'll just promote it a little bit I'm gonna say it's a bit worse than being a water expert sorry it's gonna it's a bit worse than being an air mage in the round by default over time um that kind of thing I don't I certainly don't hate it and there's gonna be times and cases in examples where water is a way better choice for you than air depending on what's in your mage guild um and the monsters you're facing actually in my last campaign I intentionally took water magic on one of my heroes to learn forgetfulness expert forgetfulness and that allowed me to unlock a pandora's box that I wouldn't have been able to access with any other means I didn't have any other means of taking that fight down without expert forgetfulness or none that I could think of anyway with the resources I had to hand expert learning or the learning skill this increases your every time you earn experience you earn 5% more experience learning's quite bad because certainly in the late game you never want to take it in the mid game you don't want to take it in the very like let's say it's offered to you on day 2 it's got to be if you're never taking it in the first you know if you're never taking it in the late game you're never taking it in the mid game because it's just always going to be worth it because it's just always going to be worth it to take something else like it chews up one of your 8 slots right so in the early game it better be awesome it better be your absolute oh my god yes learning now's the time day 2 day 3 I desperately want it well guess what a lot of the time you're going to see tactics and you're going to take that instead or you're going to see offence and be like oh no no offence is going to pay divs I'm taking offence learning yeah I would have taken learning but I found offence instead so in the round overall by the time you weigh up and do a weighted average of all the times you're ever offered learning it's almost always something you don't want so we're down in the the book artwork actually these guys are kind of have nothing to do with each other but they're kind of cousins in terms of how excited you are about them I think it's an E I'm going to give learning an E just because if you take it on in week 1 it will pay you back like it feels like it does pay you back over time although sometimes the impact can be hard to measure you forget you guys got it you know and then you look across all of your heroes and this particular guy has levelled up maybe he's got one more level than he would have had I don't know maybe it's not even that good maybe I'm saying that it's good in the early game but it's actually not even good in the early game so I don't know how bad is learning what do you guys think should it be just an F is it a straight F or is it good enough to still be playable in week 1 I do take it but I've never really done the maths and I've never really thought hard about whether I'm getting enough value out of it but in the round it's definitely an E just because of its uselessness in the late game this next one here is navigation okay there are some maps that have no water where this is beyond F on the assumption that you have a reasonable amount of water navigation can be quite good if you can get your navigator out on a boat quickly sail around reveal a map kind of pairs nicely with scouting on specific heroes that in the early game you have both of these skills you can mop up all the flotsam and bonuses that are out on the ocean before the other enemy heroes do but generally speaking it's not a skill I'm gonna take very often um in the mid game and late game really not taking this um early on it can be a back breaking thing to take though early on it's been like oh yes navigation awesome because I was about to jump in I need someone to jump in the water and go do stuff I'm just gonna give it a D plus I think it's okay in the round there's gonna be lots of time it's offered to you though where you're just like oh my god no please no you must be joking there's two things here okay happy with that we need to make some we need to make some sweeping decisions in order to keep the keep things moving next skill I have here is earth magic so becoming a expert earth mage as a hero of might who's offered this in the mid or late game it can be really handy because you can learn how to cast experts slow and as we talked about in the previous video slow is one of the greatest um things you can be doing at expert at an expert proficiency anyway but where this really shines of course is the heroes of magic who have access to wisdom and can unlock all the incredible level four level five spells town portal resurrection um there's animate dead there's um did I say town portal um there's implosion right uh which really come on really come into their own if you have the expertise to really get the most out of them with expert earth magic um I'm almost always taking it in the early game went off at it with just about any hero for that for those reasons for a hero of might I might turn it down though I'm probably going to turn it down in favor of one of these other cool things instead um but because it unlocks the most bonkers spells in the games in the late game because it has good utility for heroes of might as well it's better it's just better than this it's just you're going to take it more often I think it's a special skill ah just because of how special earth magic is um I'm going to say is it special or is it top of the I think ballistics deserves a promotion above it because of its universal appeal universal awesomeness no one's competing with logistics in a million years I'm just spoiler alerting that right now um yeah I'm going to give it an S to you just because of the insanity of the school of earth how great earth is um a hero of might who takes this might find themselves in the late game intentionally then taking wisdom in order to unlock those other spells that go with like it's just so good it's such an important part of the game there's such a pivotal pivotal thing in the game aside from all the other stuff you can also do expert shield I should point out an expert stone skin for heroes of might also quite good utility out of those those spells as well um looking at these five or six here and thinking I might want to promote or demote one of them sorry promote one of them into A I don't know yet um let's keep moving intelligence um what this does is increases the amount of spell points you have given your knowledge so the idea is the logic of heroes 3 is that if you have a certain level of knowledge that allows you to cast a certain number of spells before becoming exhausted or running out of mana if you're also intelligent that's that that stacks and scales so if you've got expert intelligence you have twice as many spell points uh as someone who is unintelligent but who has the same amount of knowledge and then the word wisdom is to refer to people who are able to learn more complicated spells than those who aren't so interesting way that the words knowledge wisdom and intelligence kind of get kind of get used and you almost feel like you could take all three words and randomly change what they mean and swap them around and the game would still work just fine um haven't thought about it in much depth but intelligence actually does pay pretty good dividends you can get to a point where if you've got knowledge 10 in the mid game well that's 100 spell points well expert intelligence that's 200 spell points and all of a sudden you've got tons more options you can do really expensive broken things and not worry too much about how much mana it's costing you so really high casting cost spells like chain lightning uh if you want to try and cast that a couple of times in a combat well you're going to exhaust yourself right you're going to need to find a wishing well uh after a single combat if you cast that twice um intelligence means that you can just last longer before having to get back to town and whatever um there is an interaction with the mana vortex as well and similar thing to the mysticism right if you if you have access to the dungeon you can be expert intelligence and mana vortex which uh just is bonkers and gives you huge amounts of spell points more than you can ever ever want um how excited am I to get it well as a hero of might I'm not very excited to get it I don't tend to take it with heroes of might heroes of magic I'll prioritize it pretty highly um I think it's a good skill it's probably in the same conversation as armorer and luck uh somewhere in this vicinity here a lot of bees aren't there but that's I don't premeditate on these I just start the rankings uh when I hit the record button and this is how I feel I think intelligence is solid it's a solid skill uh better than these other things in the c category here okay um now related to intelligence um and something that heroes that have intelligence will sometimes also have here is sorcery sorcery is a really narrow skill that it only what it does is it increases the damage dealt by your direct damage spell so when you cast a magic arrow sorcery adds more damage on how much damage you ask is it 50% no okay no no it's not 50% it's 15% at expert level now 15% if you think about it this way if you have spell power of a typical spell is going to scale with your spell power so if you've got spell power 12 um by having expert sorcery that will increase the damage you deal as though your spell power was 14 you know 13 and a half it's just not that amazing there are so many artifacts in the game that just give you plus 2 spell power that you're just kind of throwing away so I can't wait to replace this artifact it's not very good um so is this worth it is it worth taking this even for someone who is doing it running around the map doing implosions everywhere expert sorcery you could just take something else like you take expert armorer to just make your guys last longer or expert luck or you could give yourself intelligence you could make yourself a scholar do first aid um it's just more useful things you could be doing so I don't think sorcery is worth taking and um I don't know if I want to give it an F um but I think it's worse than learning I think it's a bit worse than learning I don't actually have yeah anything I really want to I'm not going to put I'm not going to put this in the F I think it's uh I think it's just an E if you have it it will eventually pay some dividends right magic arrowing your way through the early game with some expert sorcery that's okay but it's not very good use all these other cool things you'd be doing instead so that's that that's how I feel about that all right um pathfinding pathfinding removes the penalty eventually by the time you're an expert removes the penalty for moving over snow and marshy ground and rocky terrain and stuff like that now this is kind of like a poor man's logistics but it is still really good you know I've had lots of heroes on large maps or extra large maps that have logistics and then are often pathfinding later and I take the pathfinding because logistics does increase your movement by 30% but it doesn't it doesn't help you in particular over rough terrain it just gives you 30% more than you would have had by having both of these together you can have a hero that can just traverse acres of space in a single turn I'm not looking to get both of these skills together on a hero that is going to then be town portaling dimension door and fly and that kind of thing um so yeah there's a specific hero who wants both quite often it can be the case though that you're just not offered logistics but at some point at level 4 or 5 or 6 you're often pathfinding and yeah you're doing a lot of exploring and you're on areas that aren't grass you know there's rocky, barren or terrain or whatever there's the lava terrain over the inferno all of which will penalize your movement to walk around on it the swamp I think is the worst of the worst though um and having pathfinding really really helps if you're stuck in a swamp area um so yeah great utility out of this spell but it's probably in the same conversation as the bees I think I want to promote leadership I'm going to give leadership a small promotion and that will allow us to just pop pathfinding in amongst these really good high beat plus things I think leadership is just that little bit cut above this other cadre of skills all of which I'm happy with all of which are paying dividends leadership's just that little bit better just that little bit better ok next we have estates and being an expert estates gives you 500 bucks a day from the hero the hero just prints you 500 bucks a day it's like having a whole other town um you know like if you have an upgrade if you have a town that has a um like just a town hall in it what does it do it goes town hall there's village hall town hall city hall so I think it might be the village hall I'm thinking of a town that has a village hall gives you 500 bucks a day so having this hero is just like having a whole other town in terms of income they cost 2500 gold to hire a hero this guy will pay for himself in the first five days if he's an expert he or she it's 125 gold a day for basic 250 for advanced and then 500 for expert this skill is great it's just awesome even like he can be really precious and say oh no this is my this is my premiere hero I need to optimize every single eight skills have to be perfectly chosen I'm gonna be an expert earth and air and I'm gonna take logistics and I'm gonna wait until I get ballistics and I'm gonna get yeah or you might just find actually a lot of the time forget that but if estates on the table take it it's just it's free money it's just it's such a good amount of money it will be different if it was 50 bucks a day or 100 bucks a day and you know it's gonna help you in the grind in the early and mid game it'll be down in this area here right 500 bucks a day you cannot sneeze at that is it special no I'm gonna say it's it's a it's a plus it's a skill you just take yeah I want it but I want these more right these are special these three they really are but estates is an A grade skill just for the sheer amount of money an advantage you can just do more stuff you've got more cash and unlocks unlocks more options for you in the game okay two to go I've got here the next one is eagle eye so what eagle eye does is allows your hero to learn a spell that is being cast by someone he's fighting now at expert level you get a let me just check exactly what the percentages are here you get a at expert level you get a 60% chance to learn spells of level four and below so a few things need to go right here you need firstly you need a fight to be happening between yourself and an enemy hero and for the fight to be going on long enough for the hero to cast a spell the second thing is it needs to be a spell that you don't know already or that you're not going to easily be able to learn in due course okay and then finally you also need to pass the 60% threshold there's a 40% chance you won't learn it when that happens so it's a bit situational but of course because it does give you that extra spell it's obviously quite special indeed I think we can probably we can probably put it up here the second best skill in the game I think eagle eye getting to learn spells for free of enemy heroes it's a pretty special sort of idea I think finally we have diplomacy and here's the thing with diplomacy if you're a beginner at the game you want to take diplomacy every time diplomacy is really just completely broken like when you attack a group of wandering monsters if they would flee instead they'd join your army and this is just so busted like it just completely destroys the game and I am aware that in the community patch version of the game the hall of the abyss and so on diplomacy is more or less switched off or nerfed or profoundly changed so in the vanilla game when I'm playing the vanilla game if I'm offered diplomacy I just don't take it because it really just ruins the game and it makes the hero you know you just you find yourself with a wandering pack of 70 unicorns that long for greater glory and join your army and you're just like hell yeah but then the game just feels easy after that it just breaks the game in half so I'm actually going to put diplomacy in the it's kind of it's not an F but it's unrated you can think of it like I'm just leaving it down here because it doesn't get a rating because it kind of isn't really part of the game at least in the version of the game that I play so so that's it that's my list I'm not going to do condensing and piling everything in together I think I'm happy to just leave the map the way it is shorter video I think probably than the other two were but for completeness now we have done all the secondary skills so look big payoff for me is jamming with you guys engaging in the comments especially those of you who violently disagree with me that's the whole point of this is to get some cool dialogue going so tell me what you think I've asked a couple of questions through there I won't repeat them just about clarifying how how valuable these skills are to each of you guys in the version of the game that you play let me know what you think I hope you've enjoyed and I'll see you again soon for the next one bye for now