 Hello my friends and welcome to the Heroes of Might and Magic 3 Spells Tier List. A few months ago I did a video where I crammed all of the creatures from the game into a single tier list and based on the feedback I got from that video I thought it would be fun to do the same thing again with every single spell in the game. There's a link to the creatures version in the description below if you're interested in that. What I learned from the last video though is just to make sure that I really explain up front what type of Heroes 3 I'm playing. I'm a massive fan of the nostalgia and Heroes 3 for me is a very nostalgic experience and I really enjoy playing the original version of the game. So essentially the version that you would download off good old games, the patched Shadow of Death version I think technically is what it is. I have massive respect for the Horn of the Abyss and all of the community development. I'm in awe of the guys who do that stuff and generally in massive agreement with a lot of the balance changes that have been made and all of that kind of thing. So not meaning any disrespect to that and for those of you who prefer the Horn of the Abyss version. Hopefully a lot of my rankings and ratings and conversation will carry over. Obviously some of the spells are modified in the community patches but anyway we'll talk about that a little bit as we go. So to get started, before we crack in just to say a little bit about how we're going to figure out the rankings. So the question is what makes a spell special in this game and what makes a spell useless. So as a starting point my starting point generally is going to be whether or not the spell gets cast. So does the spell actually get cast from the time that it's unlocked. So some spells are unlocked very early in the game such as Magic Arrow that we've got here. Others you don't get until the very late game. Level five spells that are much harder to unlock. Critically though if the spell is getting cast and it's getting cast frequently and regularly long into the mid game or late game in the case of an early spell it's going to find its way up the tea list. For spells that arrive early in the game and never get cast and just take up room in your spell book that you never and you never want to use them they're the ones that are going to find their way down into the E's and F's. So we'll talk a bit more about that as we go. Starting off with good old Magic Arrow. Now Magic Arrow is a very special spell. It has a footprint across all four of the schools of magic so air, water, fire and earth and that's the order that we're going to be going through the schools. I'm going to work out my way through from level one up to level five cycling back through the four schools each time. So we've got the air version of Magic Arrow shown here for demonstration purposes. Magic Arrow is a really ubiquitous spell. I mean you're very very happy for your heroes in the first few weeks to know this spell. You want them to know this spell. If you know it you will cast it. You'll use it to help clean up wandering monsters in the early game unlocking different areas. In the late game you can still sometimes find yourself casting this just to tidy up in a fight that you've already won where you don't want to waste a lot of spell points. So yeah the spell is absolutely at least a C. I think that you know you're not going to break the game with it. It's not going to be your favorite thing all the way through to the end game. Somewhere in the B minus category for now. I might need to do a tweak and move some spells around as we go once we see how many other spells want to find their way to these sort of middling regions. But Magic Arrow a really solid start regardless of which school of course it's coming from. Now the first air spell we're going to talk about proper is Haste. This is kind of a poster child spell for the school of air. Gives a single ally plus three speed and then as you upgrade your knowledge of air magic you go to advanced air magic goes up to plus six but then the real killer is when you get to expert air magic and it's plus six speed to all seven stacks of creatures in your army which is extremely powerful. So we've got a spell that it's useful it's not as useful as magic arrow on day one I wouldn't say on week one and week two not really but it's still going to be it's going to see play in its basic mode and in its advanced mode but then it's going to be very very relevant potentially in the late game with a fully hasted army of plus six you make sure that you get the first turn in the subsequent rounds of the combat you're going to be able to fly over walls in in win one go when you're doing a siege you're going to be able to engage otherwise powerful but slower mid-range units something like for example a minotaur pit lord or something like that you're going to get them all the way over to the other side of the battlefield immediately and engaging with the the the targets on the other side that might be arches or whatever they are so as a general strategy just making all of you guys really fast getting the first turn getting to act sooner alpha striking your opponent really really useful spell there's a special relationship this spell has with slow as well in the earth school and we're going to talk about slow pretty soon I think haste it's just it's too prominent it shows up everywhere you're going to cast it frequently tentative a minus for haste okay next on the list is view air view air is an adventure map spell you don't cast some combat and what it does is reveals the location of unclaimed artifacts this can be quite handy I tend to end up using it mainly to try to decode what bits of the map still exists so on the surface world there's ocean where there aren't any artifacts and underground there's big tracks of the underground that are just you know where there are no underground caverns when you cast view air and it shows you where the remaining artifacts are you get a sense of where the rest of the map is it's not really much more useful than that beyond that takes up a slot in level one so it builds your mage guild you get view air and you're kind of going you know it's okay not uncastable not useless like one spell point a handy thing to sometimes do during the game I think we're down in the D category for view air for that reason okay let's keep moving on we're going to this is actually all of the level one spells that the air school has it's got a big pile of level two spells that we'll cycle back to but we're going to move on to level one in the water school and the first cab off the rank is bless bless is kind of the haste of of water it's a spell that causes a single one of your allied stacks to deal maximum damage in combat and there are some units that have a range most units have a range of combat from minimum to maximum that they'll deal and bless replaces that and replaces that with the maximum which is obviously really great for units that have a wide spread so there are certain units like lizard warriors ironically Cerberus and hellhounds in the inferno which for flavor reasons I tend not to cast bless on even though I really really want to whenever I have the opportunity to which is handy and okay it's kind of like hasting a single stack for plus three at a basic level it's just okay it's not too bad when you get up to expert water magic bless affects the entire battle your entire army the same way haste does and it's really excellent when that happens so it's in a similar category to haste I think it might be ever so slightly better than haste for that reason you know it's a spell that you cast it when it comes online you won't be immensely happy casting it once it's online in the early stages of the game but by the late stages of the game you're going to still be regularly casting it so it's a great spell it's a really good spell and I'm going to give it an A again I might demote them both to be plus I'm just going to see because there's a lot of spells I like a lot and this tier list might actually end up being a little overloaded at the top so I reserve the right to still just maybe tweak with these a little bit okay next spell in the level one of the water school is cure cure is a really cool spell and a very very important utility spell cure heals your creature or creature stack for a small amount but the main thing it does is it removes all negative status effects so if your units have been you know slowed cursed blinded whatever it might be cure undoes all of that which really for an enemy hero if an enemy hero has expert curse cursing your whole army if you're an expert water mage you can cast expert cure and undo the curse and effectively it's a it's a wash undo that and allow the fight to continue extremely useful and important to have cure in your bag of tricks as a as a spellcaster even if you're not an expert water mage I think it's a solid B I don't I'm not desperate for it early in the game I'm going to pick it up at some point later in the game and I'm and it'll find some use somewhere in the sort of vicinity for cure related to cure is dispel okay so dispel and cure basically do this well they do a similar job so what dispel does is it removes all status effects from all troops on the battlefield so again if we're in that scenario that we just talked about where your whole army's been cursed dispel does the same job that cure does cure actually is a little bit better because it gives you a little bit of a HP recovery effect as well but what dispel also does is it debuffs all of the enemy's buffs at the same time so it depends very much as question of circumstance and situation as to which of these two is going to be more preferable and of course an expert water mage is almost certainly going to know both of them anyway when they're when they tend to be casting them towards the mid late game is though really where this comes alive you're not going to be doing a lot of curing and dispelling in the early game and I think for that reason they need to be they are they are they can be crucial though in a late game battle expert dispel when your opponent's done something nasty to your army I'm going to leave them here I'm going to leave them here in the B- next to the magic arrow for now okay get my hands on each icon as I drag them over here so protection from water this is the first of the protection series protection from water protects or reduces the damage that your units take from incoming water spells here's the thing there aren't many incoming water damage spells ice bolt is about as bad as it gets and ice bolt only affects one stack of monsters as you become an expert water mage when you cast the protection it will protect your entire army from damage from water spells but the ice bolt can only attack one creature at a time so sadly I don't think I've ever cast this I've never wanted it on top of that it's a level one spell which means when I'm in my mage guild finally save the 2000 gold I need to build a mage guild goodie let's go for it man I'm a water mage I really hope I get magic arrow I'm really hoping I get bless let's see what we get roll the thing open up the thing what have you got after you've built your mage guild protection from water you are very disappointed and you're never casting it so this spell actually might be the worst spell in the game it's going to be hard to to beat let me up I moved it so far down that it's behind my camera this might be the worst of the four protections actually just due to the fact that water doesn't do any damage like not really right it doesn't really do damage except with ice bolt fostering I'm not going to bother protecting my soldiers against that I've got I'm going to have something else better I can do um worth to say actually and when it comes to combat where everything we've talked about here is a combat spell except for viewer the key thing a pivotal point around the game design that's worth really calling out here is that every hero may only cast one spell per turn no exceptions so even like the lowliest you know ridiculous hero who's barely bought himself a spell book and has 10 spell points up against a level 20 wizard who has he's an expert in all the schools of magic and he knows all of the amazing level five spells they can only both cast one spell per turn and it's one of the reasons why dispell and cure are actually quite important spells um there's no artifact in the vanilla game that I'm aware of that breaks that rule that allows a wizard or a hero sorry to um to cast more than one spell per turn and that's how and why it comes to pass that the spells even the junior spells in the level one can be so important um because if if you are choosing one spell in a given turn it means by definition you're not choosing all of your other spells so you're choosing this spell to the exclusion of other spells and that's just I supposed to double down on what I was saying earlier this point about how we can measure virtue based on whether or not the thing gets cast as opposed to in other games other fantasy games where your hero might have four or seven things he could do on a turn and he might cast three or four spells and attack with a few monsters or whatever it might be um because you can only pick one spell um the one you pick is it's going to have to be pretty special right especially in the late game when it's competing against all of the other spells in the game or in your spell book protection from water anyway there was a bit of a sidecar protection from water um sadly worst of the worst um and total garbage this spell coming up next is summon boat another adventure spell map you can stand on the coastline um with your water mage and conjure a boat into existence out of nowhere now this is a really handy spell really really useful um I've used it many times um to try to get from one uh location to another in a situation where I don't have access to the underground or I can't uh find you know move and unlock other areas it's like well one thing I could do um is summon a boat and uh and move on over boats are expensive especially in the early game a thousand gold and 10 wood that's that's a lot you know especially if you are playing on a resource constrained start which is the start that I would generally tend to prefer playing on um so summon boat very very handy spell um solid c plus for summon boat am I excited am I ecstatic when I find it in my mage guild not ecstatic but I'm but I'm happy like I like it it's a good spell so I was actually surprised I had to just check there that summon boat is level one it is a level one water spell I don't know if anyone else might be surprised to find that out um let's move on the third school of magic we're going to be talking about is fire and the first spell in that school we'll talk about is bloodlust now bloodlust what that does is it increases the hand to hand damage uh caused by your units in combat um and it does have a noticeable effect like if you're in a situation where you have high damage output uh creatures bloodlust can be a good way of sort of doubling down on that and trying to end the fight quickly and this is a bit of a theme that runs through the entire fire school bit of a two-edged sword I think as in terms of a virtue for a particular school as we'll as we'll talk about later when we we get to some of the nastiest spells later on uh and similar to bless and haste it has this thing where yeah you can bloodlust one of your guys one of your creature stacks if you've got one big stack you can bloodlust it and be pretty happy kind of does a similar job to to what what bless does but in the late game if you're an expert fire mage cast bloodlust you will bloodlust your entire team uh so depending on your army composition that can be uh very very good all else equal I'd probably prefer to just bless them um it's probably going to be better it it tends to feel better um but bloodlust and then expertly bloodlusting everyone in the late game how excited am I when I unlock bloodlust in the early game not very and then do I use it a lot not really I don't use it a lot um it tends to get out competed by other things I could be doing instead um but it's okay it's it's castable it sees play so it can it can it can be a C it's not a D uh for me now weirdly the fire school has two of these kind of poster child spells there's another one here curse level one uh fire spell what this does is the opposite of bless so curse is the sort of counterspell to bless if if you uh curse a blessed unit the bless is deleted and replaced with curse instead of dealing maximum damage in combat they'll deal minimum damage in combat uh now again in the early game depending on what monsters you're up against cursing a single enemy stack of monsters not useless not you know incredibly amazing but become an expert fire major and you can curse the entire army and it's actually really strong it's really really strong when that happens um yeah so I think it probably belongs in the same conversation as bless uh in terms of these are probably a little bit too high are they well we don't have it I mean the spells list isn't as big as the creatures list I'm gonna leave these in the A minus category right for spells that have good utility uh in the early and mid game but then at expert when you're an expert in the school really switch on and you're going to cast them quite frequently uh during the game uh right the way through to the end of the game but potentially there's lots of times I'm playing a late game with an expert fire major doing expert curse on turn one or turn two is just really part of your routine so it's a it's a good spell for that reason protection from fire uh this one it has the same disease as protection from water except at least the fire school has some damage in it right there's fireball inferno um I've never used it in an Armageddon scenario um but another beef I have with the fire school is that it doesn't have the boutique damage dealing that you would expect fire as a school to have um all four of these spells are more or less useless this one's probably a lot less useless than protection from water it might have some application I might even promote it here we go give it some kind of I'll give it some sort of life above the F tier you might cast it I don't know if it's a thing universe's Armageddon I haven't fought you know I haven't found a situation where I'm like oh man I wish I had protection from fire right now oh it would be so good against this not really right but to acknowledge that it's better than protection from water or put it there and that's the end of tier one for the fire school and we're ready to move to the earth school and the first tier one spell we'll be talking about is shield shield has the effect on a single stack of reducing the incoming hand to hand damage by I think 30% something like that very very handy very useful if you've got a critical unit that's sort of soaking up damage in the early game you can cast shield and it has an effect it might save you a couple of troops by the end of the combat similar properties to what we're talking about with the other guys though an expert earth mage can shield the entire army and that's actually really really good and worth doing you're going to be casting that well into the mid game by the very late game as an expert earth mage you've got access to some other incredible spells and it's hard to find time to do shield because you've got so many other things that are calling on you to be cast I'm kind of in this ballpark here for shield a handy spell and okay doesn't help you against incoming ranged attacks isn't going to be a panacea for everything but at expert earth competency earth magic competency a pretty good spell what's next here we've got stone skin very similar spell to shield just makes your guys harder to kill gives increases their defense strength as an expert earth mage expert stone skin ripples its way across your entire army but sort of struggles from the same thing that shield does is that by the time you're doing that you're going to have better earth spells to cast than this despite the fact that it's okay it doesn't have the wow factor of curse or haste in terms of you know what happened you know what happens when you stone skin your entire army you know your opponent isn't going to be like not really right it's it's it's fine but it it's just okay like it's it's nothing to write home about if you see that see that spell in your mage guild in the first week it's like yeah in fact the more I'm talking the more I want to just maybe demote it a little bit it's a little bit worse than bloodlust next cab off the rank is slow okay so slow unsurprisingly is the opposite of haste in the similar way these two guys are kind of counter spells for one another if a unit is hasted and it gets slowed the haste gets deleted and replaced with slow slow has the effect of more or less halving your the enemy stack in terms of speed now in the early game it can be pretty handy and pretty useful to slow things if you are lucky enough to have some archery units if you're master gremlins type build at the beginning slow is great right hasting your master gremlins not as good they they shoot first in the turn but the bad guys are still coming over to kill the gremlins at at their normal speed slow is the spell that gives those master gremlins the extra two uh attacks extra two turns of shooting which could you know be critical to to their survival or to to you winning the combat with minimum losses generally speaking slow will have far more utility and applications out there on the adventure map fighting against random wandering monsters when you're up against enemy heroes if it's not a siege slow still is probably slightly better than haste most of the time it does depend on the compositions of the two armies if you're the guy who wants to rush across and kill things in combat in melee haste is probably the better one um if you're a an archery army slow is going to be way better than haste um and then yeah in a siege situation haste probably does pip pip slow in that situation i haven't explained but it should be obvious by now that if you're an expert earth mage you have the movement of your the entire army um when you cast this spell now for that reason uh this sees play right the way through right the way into the mid game you're going to do it on turn one in the very very late game even though you've got access to some incredible earth spells that we're going to be talking about later slow is special it's a really really special spell like you're never sad to see it it's like oh good i've got slow nice one i can lean on that and if i become an expert earth mage i'm going to be casting it every single combat right really really important spell in the game slow there is one more level one earth spell it's called view earth and it's the exact same thing as view air except instead of showing artifacts it shows unclaimed resources similar story i use it for the same purpose that i use view air which is not very much um most of the time uh even in the random maps i play where it is truly unknown where the stuff lives and so it's a map i have never played before by definition still not really using either of these that much um so probably don't need to dwell on that for too long and we've come to the end of level one and already we can see a nice smattering all four schools have something going for them at this early stage earth is starting to maybe show its face as a little bit of a favorite uh and we'll talk a little bit at the end maybe uh about which school i think is the favorite i do have a favorite uh it's not like i'm going to make my decision when i get there to the end once we've done all the all of the rankings um but it's nice that we do have a smattering of really important utility spells up here a bunch of kind of just okay things going on here interesting adventure spell at level one there with summon boat as well um so let's move on now to level two and we're back to the air school to begin our journey through level two and the first spell that we have here is a really tricky one to rank and scale i've figured out where i'm going to bring the spells in um i'll start them off down sort of in this in this region while i'm talking about them um disguise this is a really really weird one so the idea is out on the adventure map you cast disguise uh before you end your turn and it means that enemies that are mousing over or or looking at your army get a bum steer they get uh wrong information about what's in your army so i think this has quite a big application in multiplayer well it would at least have some application multiplayer it's not really clear in single player how much of an effect this has i've casted in single player before but then the ai will do things in its own turn in accordance with its own wishes and you're not really sure if disguising did anything so this is i don't really know where to rank this one um it gets cast but not very often and it's not exactly pivotal so i don't think it's a big deal i'm just going to leave it down in the doldrums in the d somewhere and i'm not going to feel too bad about it i don't want to wax on too much about it it's not a spell i rely on or care about too much uh disguise at level two in the air school the next one there's actually quite a lot of these there's more spells at level two in the air school than there are in any other level of any other school the second one is disrupting ray disrupting ray reduces the defense uh rating or the defense score of a single stack of enemy monsters um which sounds a bit like um instead of doing that i could increase the damage ideal when i attack that monster uh or i could or i could bloodlust the guy that's attacking it so you can reduce the defense of the target it kind of as it does a similar thing so in a one v one situation bloodlusting your guy or disrupting ray his guy it's going to be about the same right so we're already thinking maybe not that good however there is this one interesting thing that happens with disrupting ray where uniquely among most i think it's uniquely it can be stacked you can target a single pile of uh creatures multiple times with this spell and repeatedly pummel its defense uh rating down um now at expert level it doesn't hit every enemy stack it doesn't hit all seven of the enemy stacks it's still you still have to pick an enemy for it to hit and it's just that it hits it harder now what is the value in iteratively continually piling in to reducing something's defense the defense strength of something well it's not like you're going to wait five turns before you start attacking it until now it's finally got its defenses down i'm ready to begin attacking it you're going to be piling into that creature kind of on the first turn you cast it which means that it'll be a smaller threat by the second turn and a small threat again by the third turn it really only has application when you're up against one particular gross looking stack of of creatures that you really need to pile into quickly so its application is actually rather limited uh that's being said i have cast it i've cast it before and i've done the multiple stacking thing and i've i've i've gotten some utility from it but not really so at level two it's just a kind of a worse bloodlust most of the time um and the stacking ability not that cool it reminds me of searing blow in slay the spire um for those of you guys who might be familiar with that game where you know you can continue up continually pile onto the card and continually put your resources onto it and you get you supposedly get this one massive payoff then but reducing someone's defense strength over and over again in an iterative turn based fight just it's not going to be that relevant compared to the other things you could be doing instead okay so that's disrupting right i mean i could wax on and probably i'm waxing too long uh on some of these some of these spells and we do have a lot to get through um fortune is the next spell level two in the air school this increases the luck of uh a stack of creatures and by the late game by the time you get to the late game uh it increases the luck of everybody uh let me just absolutely sure that's right yeah increases everybody's luck by plus two um not useless actually i like i was about to say not very useful it's not really very useful at all until you're an expert if you're an expert earth mage and you can increase everybody's luck by plus two and you've got a big army okay that's good so the whole point of being lucky is that when luck triggers uh it's basically like being blessed you deal maximum damage and if you've got expert luck luck is actually a secondary skill as well and you can end up dealing double damage when the trigger when the trigger sort of procs or when it goes off um yeah giving everyone plus two luck it's just okay i mean obviously part of the problem is it doesn't synergize with luck if your if your hero has luck as a skill which is an extremely strange thing to say isn't it having luck as a skill um but if your hero has luck as a skill all of your soldiers are already at two or three plus two or plus three luck there's no point casting fortune on them so there's no build where you go for luck and for and fortune which is kind of a shame um yeah it's just okay it's just an okay spell half it's not going to get cast a lot right it's down here in the d's probably it's it's not woefully bad it's probably not up here it's probably more like down here right and i might just do a little bit of a rejigging here to line everything up just bring that one there and bring that one there yeah fortune at level two it's just okay right you're not particularly excited if you find it in your mage guild the one you've all been waiting for uh level two air spell lightning bolt this is an absolute poster child for the air school this idea of damage dealing people will tend to use lightning bolt to refer to you know just damage as a as a concept dealing damage to someone i'm lightning bolting them it's because lightning bolt for the matter that you spend it's about eight spell points whatever it is um deals the most damage per mana spent it deals much more damage than magic arrow it deals more damage than ice bolt that we'll talk about in a second and on a single stack of monsters deals more damage i think than fireball and these other the fire spells are the lower level fireball anyway um lightning bolt yeah it's the spell you want if you're an expert air mage you really want to get hand your hands on lightning bolt so you can just start pie you know just destroying the enemy uh creature stacks with this spell a lot of the other spells in the game kind of have to be compared to lightning bolt because it's often the thing you'll be doing instead so like for example instead of hasting my guy here instead of slowing his guy instead of shielding my guy i could just lightning bolt the enemy there's nothing just like killing them and that's what this spell does so it's a is it special is it better than these it's more exciting than these yep is it special not quite but it's an extremely good spell and you're going to be very very excited to grab hold of it in the early game and you'll still cast it quite regularly in the late game um but it does lose out to the more powerful damage dealing spells in the late game um but just massive massive utility out of this spell lightning bolt man like who could say no to lightning bolt it's an a grade spell no one watching this who's played the game would would disagree with that would they let's find out um next we have precision precision increases the damage dealt by your ranged units and um all of your allied troops with ranged attacks are a buffed if you have expert air magic when you do this this can be a thing if you have a you know like if you're going for grand elves and maybe you've um you know you've got your hand on a good tower town and you've got some majors and master gremlins and you've got like this kind of shooting army precision is pretty handy you know there's lots of artifacts that buff the damage output like the bowstring of the unicorn and maybe i can't exactly remember all the artifacts but how pumped am i oh yes precision who not really right it's not going to have as much utility as these spells up here um it's not going to see play very often D plus D plus for precision for now uh still got two to go at level two of the air school protection from air yeah protection from air it lightning bolt is one of the key things you're going to be facing from enemy heroes uh right the way through the mid game and protecting your units against that spell uh particularly if you know that the enemy hero has it isn't nothing it's okay you know it's going to have more utility than protection from fire although protection from fire might find its way to being relevant i think i might just read i'm going to move fire up a little bit i think protection from air is slightly better than protection from fire because there's a little bit more like for example chain lightning is a really important spell we'll be talking about later that protecting your whole team against it's probably going to have a little bit more relevance um you're still very disappointed with protection from anything in your mage guilders like oh protection from thingo you're not really going to be looking forward to casting that um right i could just keep waxing on but i know i need to keep moving visions is an adventure map spell uh that i find actually to be very useful uh you cast visions and i can't remember i i do have the wiki here just to help me out and i hope you guys forgive me for that um just to remember what you actually get shown the idea is you cast visions and then you mouse over an enemy hero or an enemy stack of monsters uh it tells you you know the composition of the army what's in it and by the time you become an expert uh it tells you the enemy town statistics and garrison composition and the quantity um right so then tells you everything that's there i don't exactly know how it interacts with um disguise uh i'm not sure it's ever come up in in my gameplay but yeah visions has saved me from blundering into a silly fight uh on more than one occasion uh i'm happy to put it up here somewhere uh i use it i do use it it's about as good as these things here um is it that high up as a b probably not it's probably trailing at the tail end of this sort of little train we've got going um which i'll just just bump along a little bit uh yeah i think it's probably at the back end of that back end of that train um right that's the end of level two in the school of air now we must turn our focus to level two in the school of water and the first spell we're talking about is ice bolt ice bolt is the poor man's version of lightning bolt uh it's the exact same idea it's a little bit less mana to cast it and it does an annoyingly less amount of damage like it's probably about 80% as much damage and it costs 80% as much spell points um but the the bang for buck is really in lightning bolt you you want the extra damage you you know you can only cast one spell per turn i've got the spell points ready to go i want to kill the enemy which of these two spells i'm going to cast have a guess it's going to be lightning bolt every time is the one you're going to is the one you're going to cast if you're stuck without lightning bolt um and you only have ice bolt you'll still use it you'll cast ice bolt i think you'll cast it more than bloodlust you'll cast it more than stone skin um you know we're we're looking at maybe heading towards this sort of region again with yet another spell we're in the sort of b- category sort of here uh so i'll find a way to make it a b- for now um kind of in here it's a it's a spell that gets cast you'll use it in the mid game you might rely on it quite heavily actually all the way through the mid game if you're expert water mage and you never learn lightning bolt ice bolt's fine it it doesn't okay job you're okay it's it's it's i mean what are you worried about don't even worry about it remove obstacle this is a really interesting one so the idea is that on the battlefield there's going to be various obstacles you can have you know skeletons of gigantic creatures you can have just massive logs or cliffs and things like that that um stop uh ground units from passing um removing obstacles i think is kind of underrated it's probably something that i overlook in the sense of like okay what i'm going to do on turn one here i think i probably tend to approach too many fights where i'm like okay there's a massive crevasse or a huge log or whatever right in front of my most important speedy guy how am i going to play around that and i don't look at remove obstacle or look for remove obstacle fast enough so the way i play i probably don't play it enough and i would tend to put it in the e category because it's a level two spell taking up room in my spellbook that i never use but i think it probably is a little bit underrated um it probably can find its way in somewhere to the d minus is it as good as no hang on i'll wedge it in here i'm going to pop it in here um remove i think it can sometimes situationally be quite a handy thing to have to the ability to remove an obstacle uh just a critic at a critical moment to give something potent that you've got uh access it's obviously a very it's kind of a very offensive spell in that way if you've got a defensive shooting army with dwarves and elves or whatever you'd like to have a spell that creates obstacles right so you can think of this it's kind of like haste it's a it's a sort of like a poor man's haste it's a way of getting to the enemy quickly uh remove obstacle in the water school just checking my levels checking everything's cool all right uh now we're still in the water school at level two and we have scuttle boat uh cool idea the idea that you can summon a boat and then having summoned into into existence you've got this kind of divine godlike power to create and to destroy um i have scuttled boats in the past um so it's not an e but it's nowhere near as good as summon boat like nowhere near as it's nowhere near as much utility as summon boat so where are we i'm probably scuttling boats down here in the d in the d zone and i'm starting to get nervous and worried about the the getting the order of these right which i'm probably being too perfectionist and too panicky it's clearly worse than summon boat but it still has some applications it might be more it might need to be more sort of down here but all these spells are kind of in this don't really use them very often every now and then they're kind of okay shrug so you could equally pick all seven of these up and randomly change the order of them and i would agree with it um maybe just by telling you guys how i feel that's good enough rather than having to always show it necessarily graphically a lot of pressure on me with this you know like i yeah i with with the creature's video i got tons of content like the creature's video has actually become in a couple of months my most viewed video in the whole history of the channel and it stirred up so much controversy which is exactly what i was setting out to do by the way um so as i'm talking i'm like oh hang on am i am i sure i'm am i sure i'm actually covering the basis as i go here with this but um engaging with you guys in the comments is the thing that makes this fun it's the thing that makes it worthwhile for me so um anyway hopefully i'm explaining things well enough in terms of my opinion as we go the next one is weakness um weakness is a spell that reduces the attack strength of uh or of of an enemy uh unit i'm as you can tell i'm doing a terrible job of pretending like i'm not just double checking the wiki to make sure that i get it right your attack rating is reduced by three by six if you're advanced and that's for a single stack and then if you're an expert you can reduce everyone's attack strength by six all every enemy stack has their attack strength reduced by six sounds fantastic um the thing is that late in the game when you're an expert water mage the stuff you're up against is going to have attack of like you know 20 and 24 and crazy numbers like this and reducing it by six is good but you know what's really good is just cursing everyone if that's what you want to do is just make your opponents creatures more toothless than they were well you know you can just curse them all i mean another way to do that is to shield all your guys and give them 30 um give give the damage coming in a 30 percent haircut that way so weakness is fine like it's okay but it's level two whereas it's up against shield and curse which kind of and stone skin which are level one uh and for that reason weakness is just okay have i ever cast it before yes have i cast it more than precision absolutely um and you see it show up all the time when dragonflies attack and that might be why i might be overrating it it might actually belong more down here um just because it's like oh yeah weakness gets cast all the time every time i play the game but it's being cast by the dragon flies uh so that's it's not really fair to include that you know for the purposes of this this this test is about whether or not the hero wants to cast the spell right so it's just because it shows up in the game it doesn't isn't going to promote it up the order of this list in particular okay probably over explaining but um i think that's it for water we're finished talking about water at level two and we're going to move on to fire now there are only two spells one of them is incredible and one of them is not so let's do the best one first blind is i actually have i think on one in one of my streams of my youtube postings of myself playing the game i talk about blind the the spells in the game being divided into into those spells that are blind and those that aren't but blind is absurd it is just so good so where do we begin what the effect is pick a single enemy stack and once blinded that enemy cannot move or attack it's out of the fight completely until it is attacked by you or your ballista by accident um or until the spell wears off or until the enemy hero cures or dispels and cure and dispel is an answer to blind okay but here's the thing you're going to blind the meanest monster on their team the meanest the meanest stack of creatures out of the game big pile of arch devils blind right archangels blind see yeah you're just parked you park that unit and you get to fight the rest of the army by the way if the rest of the army is still too big just blind someone else on your next turn and then you you really can it's like cutting the cutting your lunch up into four into into bite size segments and you just fight a subset of the enemy until you're done so against wandering monsters that don't have don't have to spell and don't have cure to save them against a big basket of wandering monsters blind is just the best spell it is the best spell to cast and this is the thing it's almost regardless of who you are this is the other amazing thing about blind all of the other spells we've talked about really get switched on when you're an expert in that school of magic so slow not actually that good until you're an expert earth mage bless haste you want to be expert water expert air mage with blind blind can be used by mages that have never studied fire magic with equal proficiency and effect as someone who is an expert fire mage in fact even the stupidest hero hero of might let's say who's barely bought himself a spellbook has no wisdom it's a level two spell right you don't need wisdom can cast this if you've got it does cost 10 spell points right but if you've got the 10 spell points goodbye dolly yeah you need a bit of spell power in order to get the duration okay you need the unit to not just be blinded for one turn you need it to last um so you need spell power three or four any any what's what I'm saying any hero with spell power three or four can make massive use of blind so does it get cast yes it gets cast so much all through the early game all through the mid game big hunks of the late game and situational situations where you'll be blinding still in the late game anyone can cast it right anyone can use it and it actually is a one of the weaknesses of the fire school is that it's it's very best spell okay spoiler alert I think it's the best fire spell um it's kind of it's a it's a citizen of all the schools it's a citizen it's something for everyone kind of weakens fire as a prospect which school of magic will I become an expert and well I'll we've all got blind so I don't need to be an expert fire mage I might as well pick air you know whatever but that's a bit of a side card just talking about the weakness of the fire school um yeah this spell is beyond special right it's it's it's awesome I think I like it and I'm more excited by it than I am by slow having said that I want slow uh by the late game okay so it's more likely that I'm going to cast slow in the late game than I'm going to cast blind but in the first two to three to four weeks what are the spells I'm looking to show up in my mage guild I want both uh but oh blind blind's going to be hard to beat there are some incredible spells we'll talk about though coming up so it's not it's not top of the pops I haven't made my decision I like to save my decision on who's the most specialist until the end that worked really well last time with the creature's video but I like it better than slow um oh it's just so good there's nothing like blind oh great spell have I sold you maybe not maybe I have maybe I haven't I hope I'm coming through nice and crystal clear here right how my levels I hope I'm not right my my my audio is okay um there is another fire spell at level two in the school of fire it's called fire wall and what this does is it puts up literally a wall of fire now any enemy passing through the firewall takes damage great well you know let's say that you put the firewall up in front of I don't know some gogs or some elves or some marksmen or something like that to really discourage the enemy from attacking it well here's the thing the enemy just gets to make whichever decision is best for them so what I mean by that is uh if what's hiding behind the firewall is absolutely deadly and has to be it has to be destroyed at all costs the enemy can just walk through the firewall and take the damage it doesn't deal like it does deal decent damage to them as they walk through it but and if the thing that you're hiding behind the wall isn't that big a deal well I'll just not I'll not walk through it then and I'll just avoid it so this thing's competing against uh there's another spell we'll talk about later in the earth school called force field force field actually puts up a barrier that is impossible you cannot go through it you can't land on the those hexes land units cannot walk through them far more uh definitive a far more definitive way of putting something on the battlefield and this is kind of like the create obstacle right we talked about before you got remove obstacle this is the create obstacle this defensive spell but it's not you're handing the initiative to your opponent and saying what do you want to do you know now against the ai you can probably put firewalls in silly spots and the ai will be too stupid to um navigate them I don't know if that's right or not but this spell is not good and I I'm looking at these ones here and I cast these I've cast these before this guy very very rarely looking to firewall something and almost every time I think I've ever cast it it didn't really do what I wanted it didn't actually affect the the battle the way I thought it was going to okay all right that's level two in the fire school moving on to the earth school at level two we have death ripple and earth magic has this whole connection to the necropolis heroes um and to the necropolis town um and this is a spell very much for heroes that have an army full of undead soldiers from the necropolis town specifically death ripple does exactly what it says anything that isn't undead takes damage um here's the thing though it's not a lot of damage in the early game I don't need to be doing massive aoe I'd love to do massive aoe I don't need to be doing light aoe damage early in the game right early in the game I'm up against wandering monsters in clumps of two or three and if I want to deal damage to them the best way to do that is probably going to be lightning bolt pick a stack and kill it as opposed to death rippling all three stacks the total amount of damage dealt is lower uh than you get out of the lightning bolt um and you can use your superior ability as a human being to kind of govern the the battle by just just destroy one of the creatures or or or massively hamper them with lightning bolt it's just going to be better than death rippling um it's obviously also extremely situational it only works when you've got undead kind of strictly undead right like let's say you've got five soldiers in your army and for some weird reason you've also got a a non um uh undead uh troop stack well the death ripple is going to hurt that's that that non undead stack I'm just going to check here to make sure I understand what gets hurt by it right it's yeah it's non undead units so if you've got some gargoyles yeah other stuff like that um golems or something that don't care about morale in your army they're going to take damage from death riffles there's going to be something else you're going to do instead yeah I just think in the late game I don't I'm not going to car like when I when I am necro I don't tend to cast it um that said I do cast it uh you know it has been cast so I'm putting it at the back end of this quickly growing concertina of spells that are just kind of okay once in a while might be relevant sort of can be useful but you're not particularly enamored of it right um final spell uh at level two in in the earth's school is quick sand quick sand uh is a little bit in the same category as firewall I think it's better than firewall because um it puts random bits of quicksand over the over the field right which if you're playing a defensive tactic or a defensive strategy is fine it goes up to eight different random tiles but it's really only useful out in the open world in the open world adventure map um you know when you're fighting a siege if you're defending the siege putting quicksand around the place isn't really going to help much and if you're attacking it's obviously an absurd thing to do um because it's just going to restrict your ability to move around behind the castle walls once you've breached the walls uh so very situational right you'd almost want to be able to well I guess you could combine this with force fields and firewalls and have a kind of a strategy that way um but yeah like quicksand not really good enough um it's probably I'm going to put it down here next to firewall I'd like to put it in D plus but we're running out of room and I'm going to force myself into making some tough choices uh because I don't just want to double up and have the graphics just piled into D minus there's a lot of spells in this category I think is what we're discovering as I'm discovering as I'm talking about them as we're going through um as well all right we are finished level two we're ready to move on to level three we're going to cycle back up to the air school and we're talking about air shield now air shield is a spell that protects your guys against incoming uh missile ranged attacks uh for more information on what this is it's 25 percent less damage at first rising to 50 percent and then by the time you're an expert air mage and this is where it kind of comes into its own it reduces incoming damage from all ranged units to all of your allied stacks by 50 percent so this is kind of shield except for ranged and instead of giving 30 percent it gives 50 percent so is it good well I don't use it very often but it can be situationally quite useful in the late game I think it might be in this vicinity here but it's worse than stone skin because stone skin does do something in the early game and you can't expertly use it in the late game air shield really is nothing air shield is useless until you're an expert air mage okay and I'm demoting it for this reason right you need to be an expert air mage to use it the reason is that most armies very few armies have one massive stack of troops again unless you're in the late game if you've got an army with four or five different troop stacks well being able to shield one of them against air against ranged units range attacks is pointless shielding one of your guys that's a thing because you can see which of your four stacks is at risk which of which of my boys are going to get smacked up here I'll shield him you can't dictate who the enemy shoots right so if you're only a basic or advanced level you've got to pick one of your stacks to shield against range attacks but that just means the archer picks somebody else and the AI is smart enough to do that the AI in this game is excellent it's one of the other reasons why it's just an incredible game like I mean AI in any of these games you know with tactical combat is a challenge to to program and okay yes it misbehaves sometimes does some some things you're kind of going hmm but overall man I cannot speak highly enough of the AI I can't speak highly enough of this game in general it's just such an amazing game um air shield it's it's got that thing I said you need to be an expert air mage to leverage it and then you need your enemy to have lots of shooting so it's have I played it before yes do I care if I never discover it if I never learn it no okay uh that's how that works now air magic has this other spell which is very interesting called destroy undead again very situational uh you do a bunch of damage to uh every undead uh pile uh of troops uh friend or foe okay so it's the opposite of death ripple it's the complete opposite of that it's not like a status effect or anything where they counter each other but the it's it's the reverse side of that coin this is a handy spell to have in your backpack um you're not going to cast it very often okay will you cast it more often than precision probably so let's give it some kind of some kind of life um with my uh tiles that I'm pasting in here I couldn't get every tile to be the exact same size and as a result it's a little bit of higgledy piggledy higgledy pigglediness going on which I can't actually do much about um with the tools that I'm using here hopefully hopefully you'll forgive me for that okay so not too much more to be said about destroy undead I think it it feels like it hits the undead fairly hard when you cast it um if you've got a good application for it but it's a fairly niche scenario that you you're going to find yourself um casting it um and you're certainly not going to be sort of pining for it uh now there is a powerful final spell at level three to talk about in the air magic school hypnotize uh this promises so much oh man hypnotize you mean not only instead of blinding them whoa whoa wait a minute see that stack of archdevils instead of blinding them what if I hypnotize them oh not only are they out of the out of my hair he's on my team I'm gonna completely transform the entire combat like I'm gonna turn your best guy against you this spell is busted is it is it though I have played there's a hero in the wizard town in the in the tower town called astral who specializes in hyp hypnosis hypnotize hypnotize I think yeah hypnotize is the name of the spell okay his specialty is this spell and he casts it with increased effect or whatever and I've leveled him up I've gotten him to you know ridiculous amounts of knowledge and spell power and he still isn't able to hypnotize anything worth hypnotizing in the vanilla game I don't know maybe if the community tweaks have changed the way this works but in the vanilla game you just can't build up enough spell power to hypnotize something worthwhile so hypnotize promises a lot but it requires someone who is exceptionally powerful at spell casting to cast it on an enemy so you can hypnotize like a stack of four familiars and that will work fine but it's pointless right and it becomes just a kind of a poor man's blind it only works on small creatures that you don't care about anyway if you are the greatest spellcaster that wizardry has ever known then yes it's it's going to be a very special spell for you well done I would also point out that it doesn't work on a bunch of creatures right it doesn't work on undead and you can't cast it on anything that's not alive that said blind doesn't work on undead either as I found out in my last run through as I was reminded in my last run through so hypnotize no no it's just not gonna it's just it's not a good it's not an exciting spell to come across can it squeak into the sea I'm gonna be mean to it actually I'm going to say it's a D now I'm sure some of you guys are like oh no man hypnotize I used it on my last run through I did this that and the other amazing for me maybe they maybe that's so so let me know if maybe I'm being too unfair on it it's just the the the accessibility like unless you're an expert air and you've really got tons of spell power you can't leverage it right fireball we're over to the fire school level three I want fireball to be the poster boy of damage dealing in the game right it's it feels like from a design perspective fireball I just wish it was more scary it affects seven hexes instead of one hex like the lightning bolt but it just doesn't do enough damage it doesn't do enough damage there aren't seven can seven stacks of creatures conveniently clustered together for me to hit which like frost ring and stuff suffers from this as well which frost rings level three wow okay so I haven't talked about that one yet um fireball yeah like it's just okay like but normally you're struggling to get two targets like if you've got two targets it can be nearly as good as lightning bolt right it's level three lightning balls level two I don't end up casting it very often if I'm an expert firemaid you'll probably do expert curse and then start lightning bolting things instead of fireballing things look so for that reason it's it's a sea ish spell like it's not very good it's it's just not very good I'm sorry guys like fireball I you would think oh what's what's what do you expect the school of fire magic in a given game to contain fireball oh that's surely a very very damaging spell and a key component of a fire mage's spell book uh but there are no games where I'm like oh man I can't believe I haven't discovered fireball yet you know I feel like the worst fire mage that's ever lived the most unlucky fire mage I can't believe I haven't found fireball yet it's not really the case um and it just comes down to stats how much damage raw damage does it deal this thing's just better um right let's keep going we can make land mines so land mine is kind of similar to quicksand so similar idea similar probably more similar to like firewall um if you walk over the land mine you take very high damage it like it to be fair the land mine does hurt like like the proverbial when you step over it probably has a little bit more utility than these two I want to try to find somewhere for it in here running out of room at d tier uh and I think at the time has come to bite the bullet we are going to need to overlay a little bit here because we're just going to have a wide belly thing going on here in the d tier land mine it's kind of like in this region right remove obstacles something that you can cast it can have it can have a relevant effect on the battle um but you're not going to cast it very often so I'm going to do a quick tidy up here and um uh we'll start we'll start overlaying and overloading the d minus section um now what's next we have misfortune this is unfortunate it's kind of the opposite of fortune right like the idea is that you reduce everybody's luck by two here's the problem luck is non negative you can't be unlucky um in combat when you go to swing your weapon or something you can't there's no such thing as a trigger is or he has oh they swung with bad luck this time swing in a miss you can only have zero luck or neutral luck uh up to being super super duper lucky so you need this thing does the same thing right you can pick an enemy unit and make it unlucky reduce its luck if you're an expert firemaid you reduce everybody's luck but here's the here's the rub they need to be lucky in the first place fortune is something that we can take a very neutral someone who has no luck at all or an army that has no luck at all and you can make them lucky but misfortune relies on the enemy already being lucky so that it can be nerfed if the enemy is already at zero luck like misfortune doesn't do anything and like you know at basic and advanced picking a single enemy to reduce his luck come on you know so this thing okay it's tier three so in terms of punishment for being bad being level one and useless is worse than being level three and useless in my opinion okay as I was going to say how to find your way into the f tier a surefire way of finding your way there is to be level one and useless all right this might be level two I can't remember protection from water but this spell is kind of oh so ridiculously corner case that you're almost never going to cast it in a million years you're just not casting it I can't I don't know if we'll come across a spell that's just less useful and has fewer applications than misfortune apart from this one so I'm putting it down in the f like it's really really bad you don't want misfortune in your mage guild if you can help it which you can't you can just build the thing cross your fingers open the mage guild window and see what you've got and if it's got misfortune then well the irony is self-evident for everyone all right okay that was level three in fire level three in earth and earth starts to go a bit bonkers here spoiler alert earth is the best school and it's not even close animate dead is the first spell though at level three in earth and what this does is if you've got a stack of undead troops that have taken damage you can animate dead on their on their undead butts and they'll come back to life you'll get a restoration of hp on that stack of of troops okay and the power level the number of troops you get back is a function of how much spell power you have and whether you're an expert or advanced or basic um earth mage and this is a really really important and useful spell um assuming that you have an undead army or that you at least have an undead stack um that needs um reanimating uh it has it's a very close cousin of a spell we'll talk about in uh probably not for a while uh because it's the next tier up which is called resurrect which is a way of bringing living creatures uh restoring their hp but in the classical sense this and resurrect both are your classic heal right all games a lot of most fantasy style games have this concept that hurt damaged units can be healed and heal generally tends in a lot of games to be very very powerful and indeed it is powerful it is powerful in this game too i don't know how i wish we'd kind of done resurrect first because it's easy to it's easy to scare it's going to be a spoiler alert it's it's definitely way up here in fact it's probably in the special but we'll get to that animate dead it's yeah it's it's special for your undead soldiers so where do i want to put it on the ratings chart i don't know why i said ratings that way it's because i can't decide um excitement factor i'm more excited by haste in my mage guild than animate dead but if i'm a necropolis focused person i'm really going to want this it's like when you're casting it it's it's for a reason and you're delighted that you've got it you know animate dead but because it's situational i'm just going to put it here i don't really know if that's right but i'm kind of making the rules up of what dictates goodness as i go um so i'm just going to say you know what i'm not i'm just not going to get too upset about this is a spell this next one anti magic that i actually don't mind admitting i always forget what the heck this does which tells you something about how often i cast it right allied troops are immune to level to spells from level one to three at basic at the advanced level uh it's level one to four um in other words level five spells still hurt them and at expert if you're an expert earth mage it's still a single stack of troops you pick one stack of troops and you make them immune to all spells in the game um now the the magic elementals and black dragons that we talked about in the last video already have this property they've already had expert anti magic cast on them that's how you can think of it um this could have some niche applications where you have a late game build a composition made up of only one stack of monsters you've got one big stack of let's say i don't know phoenixes or archangels you get the first turn you cast expert anti magic on them and all of a sudden you've got a bunch of black dragons that are even better than black dragons sure okay fine but most of the time you're going to have four or five different stacks maybe seven stacks of units in your um uh creatures in your army and casting making one of them completely immune to magic means that the spellcaster on the other side of the field just picks one of your other guys so it's two corner case it doesn't get you it doesn't get used enough for me it probably gets used more i imagine out there than some of these other things i think we're back down in this region aren't we we are we are and i'm gonna have to do that uh little tweak again so we'll do that okay so anti magic uh again in that kind of sometimes maybe category uh a few more here at level three in the earth school we've got earthquake uh this is a spell that damages castle walls uh it's literally only going to be cast when you are attacking in a siege and yeah you could damage the castle walls or you could just kill their guys whatever or you could haste your guys over the wall your flyers over the walls um there might be a certain example of times where you've got a particular army composition that's very ground based and you're not shooting through the walls um and really you don't have a lot of other choices you've got to get in there and you're in a hurry you don't have time you don't have enough spell points to kill them with lightning bolts you need to get your melee troops through those gates earthquake can help sure but very situational and you know it's gonna usually be better to do to do something else right get you guys over there some other way or use a different hero use a hero that has ballistics uh you only need to breach the wall in one place really in most fights um so damaging four and it goes up to six or whatever different sections of wall it would be better if it would be better if you could use the earthquake to utterly annihilate one section of wall you know maybe even if it's still randomly chosen but because it spreads its damage around different parts of the walls which is very realistic of course um the realism comes at the cost of the spell not having a great deal of utility i am going to cast it more often than these two you know um so we'll let it sneak into c- for the earthquake now hope you guys are still with me we're on to forcefield now we talked about this a little bit earlier we compared when we're comparing you talk about firewall forcefield has a little bit more utility it's gonna see play a little bit more often i think i might promote the views i'm looking at these all these spells that don't get cast very much i think i'm i'm okay with the views actually making their way up to d-plus so that we can make a bit more room here for spells like this is it as good as gull boat yeah it's okay right i think i've cast it before i think i've used it um it can be a nuisance but i don't care if i never learn it or if it's not a thing okay the final protection spell protection from earth right earth has a couple of spells we're going to be talking about coming up that deal massive damage uh one of them is an aoe effect okay and the other is the most powerful damage dealing spell of the entire game so i think protection from earth is probably the best one even though okay it's level three but you're not going to use it you're going to need it until you're up against things that are level five so its level doesn't really matter um with that said because it's level three it's not chewing up slots at level one and two that the others are which makes it better for that reason as well anyway so this spell has a lot more um a lot more going for it than the other three uh it's not better than this other stuff i've just been talking about but it might you might cast it to protect every soldier in your army to give to give them a 50 percent reduction against the two spells that we'll be talking about coming up um so not in the junkyard but yeah it maybe it's even too high up here maybe it's swap with death ripple or something i'm going to i'm going to make that swap okay against a specific enemy heroes in the late game that are doing expert earth damage it probably does have an application you know a situational but but but there can be some value there that's the end of level three now that means we're probably about halfway maybe a little bit past halfway um so if you're still with me thank you let's kick on now back to level four up to level four it's back to the school of air and the very first spell very famous and well celebrated spell popular spell in the game uh by anyone's measure is chain lightning imagine if you will a lightning bolt which is already up there very good that then ricochets off the first target and deals additional damage to a secondary target and then a third and then a fourth on top of that it deals far more damage pound for pound so as an air mage casting lightning bolt on a single target compare that to that same mage casting chain lightning on that target with the ricochets the chain lightning deals way more damage um now direct damage is like in a lot of games and like healing just great right you want to deal massive damage like there's a problematic unit over there a spongy soft archery unit that's got high dps and lat and bad uh defense chain lightning is the answer to your prayers right it's a great spell it's really really good if you've got the first turn you can cast this up and down a little ricochet down the enemy's lines before the fight has even started and you've dealt a huge blow right off the bat now you've foregone the opportunity to slow the whole army or curse the whole army or bless all of your army or haste all of your army but that will often be worth it just by the sheer amount of damage chain lightning does um so yeah this spell is an a uh how am I going to compare it to lightning bolt okay how shall I compare the level four harder to access lightning bolts much more useful to heroes that don't know air magic or aren't very powerful for an expert air mage it's obvious which one's better right it's really obvious which one's better so which one has the bigger wow factor and excitement factor given that it's level four you're going to have to go around your town's building level form age guilds you might not get it straight away you've got an air mage and then when you do get it you're like really happy um so it's better than lightning bolt for that reason um and again looking at this from the outside you might think how can these two how can i be so idiotic to compare these as similar power levels it's not about power levels right it's about excitement factor utility how much value does this spell how much how often does it get cast in a campaign lightning bolt gets cast way more often than this does um it's everything to everyone this this thing this is my point about blind blindism is is so awesome and important on this Richter scale of measurement because of its utility to everybody in the game chain lightning yeah like an idiot who's never studied air magic can't leverage this that's not even truly they can it's still good right but it's going to chew up all their spell points they're going to get to cast it once one big blaze of glory you know there's going to be times where the ricochets come over and hit your own guys that's a thing by the way a downside of chain lightning um so anyway they're two different spells for two different purposes and and and they they lead different lives but they're both a grade spells uh for for those different reasons that i've outlined there in my view counter strike is a level four spell probably would have more uh will be more impressive at a lower level um and i don't cast it very often but the idea is that you get to retaliate more than once okay all allied troops can retaliate three times in total at expert level so this one's kind of a weird one it depends on your composition if your composition is made up of you know really combined arms where you've got marksmen and zealots as an example and then a bunch of other castle troops doing melee counter strike doesn't seem that great to me because you know the spongy stuff if people are attacking your zealots for example having them fight back three times i get it depends if you've got a balanced force that's a lot doing a lot of melee uh and especially if you're doing say say if we stay in the castle town imagine we're flying over the walls with griffons uh we've got a big army of you know griffons of your different piles maybe we've got some angels as well uh you can picture casting expert counter strike they all arrive on the other royal griffons are a really bad example i just realized because they have infinite retaliations anyway oh look yeah does it have some application yes expert counter strike i could see myself casting it i just don't remember a time where i ever have lent on it very heavily um is it going to be better than precision probably not probably not right it's it's it's okay but i think it's expensive for what it does uh what's the point of retaliating three times if your guys are already dead you know what i mean um i think this spell could be more busted and breakable if there was a mechanic in the game that say there were certain units in the game that really worked well in defense so royal griffons are like oh i work really well in defense i retaliate multiple times it's like well if you had a way of making it so that your units did double damage in retaliations or something like that where when you get attacked bad things happen to the enemy there's nothing really like that in the game it's almost always when your unit does something to the enemy like it does you know a petrifying attack or a paralyzing attack or an aging attack when i attack this thing happens to the enemy not when i get attacked bad things happen to the enemy so you know the boros boros reckoner um effects for those of you who understand magic the gathering and i'm sure many of you do um yeah so counter strike not that great really so he's down here okay okay yeah so i realized that i've actually made a boo boo and i skipped level three it is level three i skipped level three of the um school of water and i went straight on to level three of school of fire and then i finished off level three of earth went back up and did level four of air and now i'm coming down to do level four of water i haven't done level three of water so i thought about undoing and redoing the video for linearity and posterity sake but i can't be bothered i'm going to wedge level three of the water school in here and then i'm going to actually move straight on to talk about level four of the water school so get ready for a day at the water park for the next 10 or 15 minutes i don't know how long it might take me uh to to get through but um let's spend some time in the water school shall we now forgetfulness hilarious thing happened in my last playthrough uh again link in the description um where i discovered forgetfulness early on i got tormented and i was really disappointed like oh forgetfulness and then i went on to get given a whole pile of grand elves for free uh out of pandora's boxes and stuff and um i built up this really sort of defensive kind of army and i also came across a couple of really really nice looking um artifacts and prizes behind that were guarded by this big pile of marksmen and then another separate one of i can't remember what the enemy was but they were strictly just one massive pile of ranged units and forgetfulness um turned out to be great turned out to be really really good so i was gonna well happily put this in the e before i played that campaign the idea is as an expert water mage when you cast this every single ranged uh unit on the other side of the battlefield just doesn't do anything now i don't know if yeah i'm trying to remember how it works so they do they they will walk up to you and attack you in melee and that's what happened with the marksmen i was up against like you know 150 marksmen with my small army would have destroyed my army would have utterly obliterated me cast forgetful i had the speed divided cast forgetfulness on turn one and they all started walking towards me and i just got to go and slaughter them like obviously in melee combat they stink they're not very good um i think i had archery of my own as well and i was just able to completely pummel them into the ground as a result uh of forgetfulness um i'm also really drawn to the flavor of forget like i just love this idea that after the battle it's like you know bob you had one job to do what do you what do you like and and he's like bob's like well i'm sorry i just just forgot i mean what do you mean you forgot he had he how can you just forget it's just so funny like and look at him look at the artworks like oh crap i was meant to shoot my crossbow um so i'm giving this a good score i know it doesn't deserve it right i because it's too situational um but it the hilarity of it um gives it gives it this right it's probably in the most clinical competitive sense it's probably a spell that belongs in this region down here at best but i have to give it a buff i have to give it a bump and a bit of a shout out because um it was so fun it was just really fun casting i i it was it was it was a good time forgetfulness all right um frost ring frost ring is like fireball um even though i should have talked about it before fireball uh in the strict order of events that i was doing things frost ring is fireball but with a hole in the middle so there can be a unit standing in the middle of the frost ring that takes no damage it i find is better than fireball it does tends to just do more damage when i'm using it i can't be bothered looking up to see which one does more damage but it feels they feel comparable anyway i mean there's not a huge difference difference between them um i do probably cast frost ring a bit more often than i cast fireball um so we'll do that i'm going to yeah quick edit here i'm just going to just do some slight rejigging uh frost ring yeah it's it can actually be quite good it can be quite good and you might do it instead of ice bolt if the enemy has configured themselves you can get if you can hit three guys with frost ring it's way better generally than than um ice bolt's going to be um as a water mage okay all right uh now we're not done there's tons of there's tons of these level three water spells um okay this is an interesting one mirth mirth increases the morale okay so it will if you cast it on a single target as a basic or an advanced mage it'll increase the morale of that of that uh stack and then as an expert water mage it'll increase the morale of your whole army um how much does it increase it by you ask the answer is two uh it increases the happiness of the army by two and yeah um this is kind of okay like it can be good you need to have you need to be the expert water mage and you need you know to have troops that care about morale who aren't already morale so so yeah like it it's fairly situational um how much more damage as your dude's going to deal as a result of having plus two morale it might not be a hell of a lot different to being blessed you know when all is said and done statistically it might not actually work out to be much better um it'll have a higher variance as well like when the morale triggers it means your unit is attacking a whole second time which is awesome but it doesn't trigger very often whereas bless is just going to work all the time all of your attacks are at maximum damage bless why would i do mirth when i can just bless so it goes here is it up here maybe just barely no i don't think so it's just not that it's just okay let's squeeze it in here mirth mirth along counter strike you know and again i'm even looking at these view air view the views are moving up in the world the views are actually all right compared to these it's better than these these are better than these and so i have to just shuffle i gotta be treated myself we are picking up a lot of d's aren't we though uh right there is one more i can't believe this is a level three spell like you're kidding me it's level three teleport very powerful spell very powerful spell on the battlefield you can um teleport your guys around now here's the thing if you're an expert water mage you can actually jump behind castle walls um yeah you need to be an expert for that to work you're going to be an expert probably by the time you're casting this and that lets you move um teleport into the castle and start wreaking havoc which is really really good if you've got an army composition where you do have one big nasty stack of you know the best unit i can think of for this would be behemoths right which you just are going to stand outside the walls getting shot waiting for an opportunity to do something teleport game changer right massive game changer so very much um uh specific to a siege is where this shows up and wants to get used but way just it's going to be so much more effective than earthquake right so we're not we're not a c-minus is it better than these yeah i think it's in this category up here teleport i i'm going to have to move forget for this it looks ridiculous there obviously like it can't stay there um teleport yeah let's put it up here i think it's good enough to be up here actually in the sort of b plus region these are the kind of utility spells you need them you use them but they don't break the game open this is a spell that's cast off a lot less frequently but when you do cast it it's whoa not as good as animate dead okay a little bit of power play going on oh i'm torn let's leave her about there teleport good spell okay we're staying in the water school and moving to level four and apologies again for messing up the order but hopefully you guys will forgive me this spell is good too uh although with an asterix this is clone okay and what we do is get our best unit or our most nasty unit and copy it um and if you're an expert water mage you can copy archangels and dragons and stuff well you can't probably can't copy dragons because of the um you know um immunity thing but in general if you're an expert water mage you can pick any unit um in your army and copy it now this works best on fast units that are about to swoop in and attack something and deal massive damage or on ranged units the reason is that the clone dies as soon as uh it takes any damage so it's like a hologram um uh phantasmal image uh for those uh magic gathering uh fissionados it's a phantasmal image of the um it's a phantasmal image of the of the of the unit and yeah if your opponent can't get to it like if you copy a huge stack of grand elves and um just shoot away and there's like there's a bunch of melee guys they can't get to the get to the copy and and kill it or kill it with a magic arrow uh then it's really really good but you do need yeah you need things to go your way for that to work um i'm minded to wedge it in here a little bit better than i'm going to put it above shield i'm going to just put it in here i think it's okay it's a good spell i've used it plenty of times um it's a late game spell it doesn't take up room in my spellbook when you know in the in the earlier part of the game uh yeah it's it's worth it's worth casting and you can do good things with it right still in water at level four we're talking about prayer prayer is just bless on speed uh it does the blessing part it does the mirth part and i think it is also it does also give a buff to speed yeah it increases speed by four actually so i think that's the only spell that does that apart from haste so yeah you get to go mirth bless haste all in one go and uh i don't mind telling you it's really good it's it's it's it's great if you've got a good beefy mealy ish army um go ahead prayer them clone them remove some obstacles go and attack water the more i'm thinking about it the more i'm realizing that make make your opponents forget to shoot the water school is kind of well configured for big melee armies um more so than maybe i ever really thought about or realized is it better than teleport uh no yeah yes it's a bit better than teleport um pop it in there prayer is a b plus i'm happy with that it's not an a well could it be an a minus prayer uh we might need some rejigs i'm not sure if i've got enough amazing spells up in the a's and s's yet but prayer isn't really an a grade spell is it no i'm saying no right there is one more oh i can you believe it water walk allows your hero out on the adventure map to spend his turn walking around on water as if it was land um now the problem is it sounds great right and there's lots of other adventure map breaking spells that we're going to talk about coming up there's three more that we're going to talk about um this is the worst one of the four that do it the problem is that it's often going to be the case that you could just use a boat uh and waste a turn so this thing is kind of saying while traveling water save a turn how many turns does it take it takes you a turn to get in the boat and a turn to get out of the boat so technically it could save you two turns if you can just if you can see an enemy that you want to go and fight or a hero you want to go and tag on the other side of an estuary on the other side of a you know uh what do you want to call it a fjord or an inlet or something like that i can just walk over there and smash him right now with waterwalk whereas in a boat i'd have to get in the boat sit there that's the end of my day sail over and land on the beach that's another day and then i'm going to be finally ready to go and have my fight but by then it's like you know battle of hastings and stuff like by then the defenders are red like they've seen you coming right whereas with water imagine that uh king william order yeah king william imagine that he could have just marched his army across the channel anytime he wanted instead of waiting for months on end for the right weather and the rest of it like um so that's the upside of waterwalk it's going to have those really corny cases like yes i've got waterwalk i can just punish this guy out of nowhere but most of the time it's just going to be the worst of the adventure map breaking spells for you um it's going to be pretty rare that you're an expert waterwalker that doesn't know summon boat right so for that reason i think it might be a sea really something like that i think i'd rather summon a boat than waterwalk but if i know waterwalk i'll waterwalk uh you know what i mean i'd rather have summon boat i'd rather have a guaranteed access to summon boat in my journey than a guaranteed access to waterwalk um like it a bit better than bloodlust yeah okay all right we're back on par we're back on par we've caught back to where we were supposed to be we've done all of tier three all of tier four's in air all of tier four in water and now we're onto tier four in fire which is a really long list it's as big as air level two and the first one unbelievably is armageddon and this is such a difficult spell to to to rate it blows up the entire battlefield and kills everybody that's what it does sadly you know and for beginners in the game and people who are learning the game as i was playing the game years ago playing the campaigns it's like oh you can cast a nuclear explosion whoa i cannot wait to become an expert firemage and cast armageddon but you can't use it it get murders your whole team like it's an unusable spell it's it's totally useless it belongs as an F-minus why would i want to blow up the whole battlefield like okay i might win the fight but at the cost of just destroying my entire army so of course very clever people have pointed out long ago that the idea is you have an army composition that is immune to armageddon and there's a few different creatures that are immune like phoenixes and ephrates and you know black dragons gold dragons magic elementals you just have a couple of them in your army and then you armageddon and it deals more damage to a large army than any other spell in the game will um so fine you know like if you've gotten the opportunity to build towards that composition um go ahead and do that so i almost don't want to rate it because in a normal straight laced game of heroes of might magic three uh where you're going about your business if it's a large map by the time you've got this kind of drag again thing going the game will probably already be over on an extra large map where you've got lots and lots of these upgraded level seven units and you've got an opportunity to be an expert firemage and get some leverage out of armageddon you know it's really really good um like for that so this happened to me a little bit with the archangels in the last video where my experience of archangels is i'm winning more with them a lot like i'm they're just mopping up the map after i've already kind of broken the back of the game and they're extremely expensive they're not you know turning the tide of the game from losing to winning because they cost five grand each and it's like it's just how much utility do i get out of them and that that's how i that that's the measure of how much i'd like to rate these spells and rate the creatures in that video rating the spells in this video using the same method how much utility am i getting out of armageddon really on a day-to-day basis during the course of the campaign it's not until i've specifically engineered that build around it that i get it and i gave archangels a b for that reason it's just like i don't know where to put you i've got to put you somewhere you're obviously not an f uh for that reason but so i'm gonna just awkwardly wedged in here knowing that tons of people are gonna hate that but um hopefully i've explained why uh you know it's not finding its way into um the special tier uh for that reason no one's obviously arguing the power level of the spell in terms of the impact it has when you you cast it in that happy time that you've configured your your army appropriately now i think make sure i get these right i there's there's two spells that look the same frenzy and berserk i think this one is frenzy and i'm just gonna double check to be absolutely sure um i've got the wiki next to me here no that one's berserk okay well we'll talk about berserk first then i was wrong this is berserk then yeah and then there's another one called frenzy we'll talk about in a second so berserk now berserk is a really cool spell um what happens is you pick an enemy and you make him berserk normally berserk is a word used in these types of games where you know you picture it being a buff on your own guy like you know the vikings would go berserk it's it's like the bloodlust you would expect this spell to do something like what bloodlust does it's the opposite okay what it does instead is what's not the opposite pick an enemy unit and make them berserk and what they'll do is they will attack whoever is closest which will usually be one of their friends especially if you've cast it cleverly on a sensible target and that's massive that's a that's like blind but better right it's better than blind it's kind of what it's it's what we wish hypnotize was with hypnotize the difference is you actually get to control the unit this thing's uncontrollable it will just attack whoever's closest i don't know how it does tie breaking whether it picks friend or foe as a tiebreaker or if it's just rng um as you become an expert fire mage not only instead of targeting one this is a really peculiar thing with berserk you can uh the the the the the the spell becomes an aoe and it grows into a seven hex thing when you're advanced and it grows to 19 hexes which i imagine is three a radius of three um if i've sat and thought about it a long enough i'd convince myself that it is um and which means you can actually berserk half of their army and they'll and berserk units will attack each other without realizing that each other is berserked and i've used this to quite good effect against gigantic armies that don't have a hero supporting them um things like nagers um basilisks things like that where they're on their way over to you and when they get here it's going to be really bad they're going to annihilate us but not if you berserk them all and they're all just attacking each other and you're just throwing whatever else you've got at them lightning bolt whatever chain lightning maybe uh so yeah berserk is a really cool spell a really fun spell um does require a few things to go right you need the enemy not to have dispel and cure you need to not be embroiled in combat you can't have all your units in amongst all their units in this fracker and then go berserk it just won't work the berserk guys will still just attack your guys so for that reason i'm not going to give it an a or maybe i could maybe i could be just start to be a bit more generous with these spells i think i'm going to start getting a bit more generous with these spells right i i love these and they're so uh perennial and awesome but there's a couple of spells here where i'm really looking at them going yeah you guys actually probably could be called a grade spells um and i think maybe we could make these a grade spells animate dead prayer berserk is a really really good spell um and there's a fun factor too like with forgetfulness there's a huge fun factor with berserk watching all of their guys attack each other is just like love it you know absolutely love it um the next spell on my list is actually fire shield we'll talk about frenzy now in a second i don't know why that is it's just the order that they appear uh in this menu that i've had to look at so fire shield um does like what the efreet sultan's fire shield does um i might even be the exact same thing um and whatever damage the unit takes is dealt back uh at a ratio of 30 percent which okay yeah so okay i want to hurt your unit one way of doing that is i cast a fire shield on my guy so if you attack me you're going to take damage back another way of doing that is just lightning bolt in your ass right i can just lightning bolt yeah if i cast fire shield on one of my seven units my opponent will just attack one of the other six fire shield on the efreet sultan's isn't even that big a deal like it's not really like it does it's annoying when you when you do a massive attack on a big pile of efreet sultan's and they deal a big fire shield thing back it was like oh it's annoying it's an extremely annoying ability but am i really going out of my way to make to give one of my troops a 30 fire shield on yeah like i'm not going to do that in the late game and it's a fourth level spell um so i'm sorry fire shield i think you're actually down here um are you worse than fire war it's probably about the same like they're just not very good fire shields just aren't worth them it would be different if you if you're when you cast it it put a shield on all of your whole army like this is normal shield right normal shield reduces the damage coming in by 30 percent this thing reflects 30 percent back well why can't it be level four and it does all of your troops instead of just one troop maybe that's too powerful a little bit compared to some of the other spells we're talking about it like it wouldn't be that insane right it would probably need to be nerfed a little bit if it affected all stacks and spare it's 30% maybe it needs to be 20% anyway i don't know um but not a very good spell um and there's a bit of this going on in fire i'm afraid at the top this next one is called frenzy um i don't cast it so i needed to recover remember what the heck it does increases your attack rating um by that's right that's right this is what this does i can't yeah this is a problem right this is a design problem for me it it's a bad spell okay frenzy increases your attack by 100% and reduces your defense to zero if you're an expert fire mage it increases your attack to 200% and reduces your defense to zero um there are going to be situations where yes the enemy has one big annoying stack of creatures and you've got one good opportunity to hit it with a decent creature and you work it out you work out the math and it's like you know what expert frenzy here just wins the game sure that will happen but you know what else could happen instead before you attack if you're going to cast a spell just cast lightning bolt does the same thing now on the crack back if if you calculate wrong with frenzy on the crack back you have to fend zero and your defense is this is the thing almost always there's going to be other units on the battlefield that are going to point and look at you and say hmm that's interesting i see that you now have to fend zero how long does it last it doesn't like it's yeah i think the whole idea with this is it's multi-turn it's like you know prayer or bless like you're frenzied once you're frenzied you're frenzied you deal massive damage but uh you get destroyed in in in response um so i don't know maybe is it for arches maybe it'd be amazing on arches that face no like if you're in a situation against wandering monsters and you've got just tons of grand elves frenzy is probably great actually right really ends the game quickly much much better than lightning bolt fine that there's there's a there's an example of an application for but it's almost exhausting telling me like like i'm trying to explain just how like so because i could i've successfully thought of an application for it so i'm going to let it live down here and we'll just do a quick editing um tweak to make it work and we have inferno just had a little graphical hiccup there hope that looks all right still looks okay inferno is a big fireball so there's fireball there's inferno they do the basically the same idea except the inferno takes up more hexes maybe it's the 19 hexes or whatever and it deals more damage i often find though that the inferno it's hard to place it in a surgical way that really makes sure that i are i'm not incinerating my own guys um and a big part of my design beef with the vanilla game is that in particular the inferno town it would be good if the inferno troops apart from just the ephrates were immune to the effects of fireballs and infernos i think it would help make that town a little bit less clunky uh and obviously that that is the town that's the kind of the uh i keep using that phrase post child i should stop i should mix up my dialogue a little bit and use different metaphors but it's the it's the main town that wants to be fiery and cast fire magic um anyway so there's a bit of a relationship there between fire magic and inferno i yeah inferno is okay um you will use it more uh in the late game than a lot of the other late game spells we've talked about uh am i more excited about it than i think it's probably in this area it's okay i'm gonna be casting inferno it's kind of a b- i'm gonna give it a b- and do the formatting okay that's inferno next we have slayer cool artwork of the guy you know on his knees with his massive sword and he's just killed this huge monster um now uh unlike the band slayer uh this is not good um this is not a good spell um um as for the band you should be listening to slayer uh while playing heroes three as much as possible although i will also just acknowledge that the original music of the game heroes three is among the best composition in any computer game ever uh and you know i can't even think what else maybe command and conquer the original command and conquer of 1995 uh can can can compete with it i don't know but just amazing soundtrack in um in heroes three just another reason oh man it's just such a good game everything about it um however unlike the band slayer the spell is rather terrible like so i actually even had to look up to remember how bad it is it gives plus eight to your attack strength more but uh for a single unit so you're saying to me okay but surely by the time i'm an expert fire mage it it gives that to all units uh no it doesn't it still only affects one unit and it's still just plus eight all that being an expert does is widen the monsters that it affects so slayer doesn't just give you plus eight when you're attacking gremlins it only works on dragons and angels and tier seven stuff and then being an expert just means that it also works on all the other tier seven units so it's so ridiculously situational like it's so cornerstone instead of all of that i could just bless my whole army massively increase i could just prayer right or i could anything bloodlust is better than this that's just like this just does nothing it's just so bad at tier four like so disappointing um so i get like it's with a heavy heart like because slayer i don't know why this particular tile is a bit bigger i might just shrink it a bit um it's just such a shame because it's such a cool concept you know um but you're not casting it ever i don't think i mean maybe does it deserve a a gap from the other f t f tier stuff i don't think it does it's just not a good spell uh i can't remember ever casting it or ever wanting to there's almost always gonna be something better you can do as a buff slayer really as a guy as an idea should be that you turn one of your if you if it's only going to affect one of your units it needs to make that unit an absolute nightmare and not just plus eight attack strength like come off it it's just not good enough get myself all worked up and it's not necessary i don't i shouldn't i shouldn't right it's a video game like calm down not you guys i'm talking about myself here um which i like doing uh let's move on tier four in the earth school and this is where things start to go a little bit bonkers uh and there's some room in the s tier for a very bespoke and specific reason which is that the earth school starts to get crazy um the first cap off the rank is meet your shower is it actually meet your storm you ask i think it's meet your shower is the name of the spell and it's an aoe spell that deals big damage meet your shower is the name of the spell it deals serious damage um the radius is smaller than inferno but the damage is higher and because your expert earth mage also is probably going to know resurrect if you accidentally meet your shower your own guy you're probably gonna if you're in control of things you're probably going to be able to resurrect them uh later on so or you know towards the end of the combat meet your shower great spell really really good spell um it's an a grade spell i'm gonna put it behind these other evergreen cool um spells in the uh other three schools though uh just because otherwise earth just gonna end up occupying the entire top half of the uh diagram which brings me to a resurrection resurrection every person who knows this game prays for resurrection well i shouldn't say that it sounds blasphemous i mean in the world don't we all um resurrection is awesome the heroes that start with resurrection are coveted you want to hire the heroes that know resurrection alamar or whatever they're uh whoever the whatever they're different i i i should know the names of the heroes who have it better than i do alamar i think is the wrong guy he's a i'm not sure um the idea is your your enemy your your uh allied troops have taken a pounding they can even be dead you don't even need any left alive on the battlefield you cast resurrection targeting the dead corpses and they all come back as if none of this ever happened and if you've got plenty of spell points and plenty of time you can take on some really nasty enemies and just be like resurrection you can time your resurrection just so so that you really completely minimize losses while walking through lots and lots of different wandering monsters with um i had this combo in the last campaign where i had resurrection and the shackles of war and i was able to at my leisure the enemy hero couldn't run away i'd murdered almost almost all of their soldiers and i'm just busy resurrecting everything and then when i'm ready only when i'm ready will i kill the last stack because you can't escape because the shackles so i've got all the time and the shackles allowed me all this time to resurrect things at my leisure and i was taking minimal casualties and walking through the late game as a result of it it almost felt unfair uh and it was unfair to be fair uh is it as good as slow is it as important as slow uh i think i want to put it above slow resurrection man resurrection yeah it's that good it's that good it's it's so special it's amazing you can just break the game open it's like heal but uber heal there's like the only other healing in the game apart from anime dead is cure and cure just heals such a small amount of hp the the game almost needs like another medium cure like a big cure for one stack resurrection is just insane though right like you heal massive hp if you've got plenty of spell points like what you get back is really really good relative to what you um have to spend in terms of spell points okay let's keep moving uh this is an interesting one a tier four earth spell that isn't insanely good uh and in fact it's insanely bad this is sorrow sorrow decreases the morale of the enemy soldiers at expert level all of the stacks are reduced by two uh this is kind of the opposite of mirth um i the guys must have patched this in the community version of the game i don't know but i cast sorrow at expert level in the last campaign i was in and my opponents were all on neutral morale and i cast sorrow and it didn't do anything it didn't make them unhappy so unlike with the luck thing we talked about before uh with fortune and misfortune where you can't have negative luck so what's the point of misfortune something that is already at zero well the answer is there isn't it turns out the same problem happens though with sorrow you can't turn a neutral uh army into a deeply depressed army even though negative morale is a thing in the game so it's such a strange quirk of the game i don't know why it was made that way but this spell is not sorrow the graphic is misleading you okay it's false advertising you can't make the army sad all you can do is make them less happy so that means that you already need to be happy in the first place in order for the spell to work so look and this happened with the magogs in the previous video the way the game ships the way it's played when you download it um in the shadow of death version the spell is terrible um it's less terrible than these all right because it could be the case that you're up against an enemy knight where his whole army is a plus three morale and you're looking at crusaders and stuff going oh god sorrow might actually be a thing it might be a thing um it might be a thing it might be a thing it might sometimes show up as a thing so maybe e-minus okay for sorrow but uh like terrible terrible there's one more level four spell left to talk about people and i'm just going to leave it here it's at f not even go let's move on i am joking of course this is oh my god town portal right is one of the big four adventure map cheats of the game we've got waterwalk town portal and two air spells that we're going to learn about now in a minute um what this allows you to do is teleport if you if you don't know anything about um earth magic you can teleport to the nearest town okay um and i don't know what the difference is between being a basic earth major not knowing earth magic exactly but you teleport to the nearest town by the time you get up to expert earth mage you get a reduced um movement uh point cost because it does deduct movement points when you do it um and you are allowed to go anywhere or the at the sorry the advanced effect does that too as long as you're advanced or expert you get to go to any town on the map provided there's no hero standing in the front uh entrance of it and obviously that's something that you is within your control now i should rephrase that it's not as good as what i just said you can't invade an enemy town from like it's not like you can't just teleport uh to war straight away with an enemy but you can teleport to any friendly town now on an expert uh i always get that run away on an extra large map this spell is the best of the bunch it's the best of the big four adventure map cheat movement cheats that you can get um because you can cast it multiple times a day you can visit your entire empire with your best hero in one day hoover up all of the creatures you want oh i haven't learned chain lightning yet that's over in the remote corner of my empire i'll just teleport over there and learn it for the cost of a few movement points in a bit of mana you're also you can you've got the discretion of ending your turn in a town and replenishing all of your mana if one of your towns is a dungeon with the mana vortex you can just visit it on the way amidst your journey and earn double your spell you just get the best of everything you just get to go all around your empire having the best of everything if someone comes near one of your towns your army can be on the other side of the planet and you'll teleport back and gallop out and murder them um it's an extremely powerful spell this is a ridiculous spell i can't even believe like it's it should be you can only do it once or twice a day or something it's too good um how special is it is it more special than blind um i think it is it is it is it is right it's just so good i can't stop talking about how good it is did i talk for this long for blind maybe we should measure how good a spell is by how long i talk about it um is it better than blind which one causes me more ecstasy a town portal town portal does win that fight okay it's just so good unbelievable spell um it's almost at a level where you know i might i might start in my future run throughs nerfing it myself or like intentionally not taking it or something i don't know it's like it's extremely broken powerful spell um anyway let's move on we have to cycle back up to air school of air to finish off our list with um the level five spells so the next cab off the rank is actually another one of these cheats uh map cheats the dimension door dimension door costs 25 mana and you get to literally do what this looks like um you can teleport through cliffs uh over the other side of water like waterwalk um obviously it has more applications than waterwalk right because there's more places you can go than waterwalk would allow um you can cast it multiple times in a turn as well um and similarly to town portal it uses a little bit of movement points as you do it but uh the amount of map you can cover is massively increased as long as you've got the mana it's 25 25 spell points per hit is it cheaper if you're an expert uh is it cheap if you're an expert uh to dimension door no it just it increases the amount of times you can do it per day you can do it four times a day as an expert but you gotta do it like twice a day as a um as a as a moron um yeah this spell again highly covered and breaking open the adventure map getting your heroes to move around where you need them to move uh doing what you need them to do awesome uh spending a lot of time doing what you need them to do awesome uh special spell i'm saying it's a really really good spell um but it's it's not town portal it's it's not as special as that i'm gonna have it down here in the bottom of the special it counts as special but uh there's special and then there's oh yeah okay now right next door to dimension door is another spell which kind of blends waterwalk and dimension doors which is fly you can cast this spell and allow your hero to fly around as though obstacles weren't there however in the underground caverns if there's a impassable chunk like there's a piece of cavern here and a piece of cavern there uh you can't fly through rock um so whereas you can dimension door through the rock um now it's almost always going to be the case that dimension door is better however there could be a scenario where you're on this surface and you've got a bunch of errands to run and the errands are all at different places past different obstacles you can just cast fly and fly around and do them all and come back to where you started or land wherever whereas with dimension door you need to cast it four times that's 100 spell points whereas the fly would only cost you 20 spell points so there will be applications where fly is better than dimension door but generally speaking it's not as good as dimension door um however if i get one of these three spells i'm really happy right it's what i'm moving oh my god yes get me that spell so that i can start doing broken things on the adventure map so it does need to find its way up uh into the special ranking but i'm gonna demote it down here it's not quite as good as dimension door um it's kind of the poor man's version um of dimension door okay i can't believe this is a fifth level spell this next thing anti no it's not anti magic it's magic mirror okay look i i think this has been changed by the community in the in the upgrade the community patch um the vanilla version of the game what this little helps you to do is that we talked before about anti magic the spell here right which makes it so that a single enemy a single allied troop is immune you can't be targeted by anything so okay cool what this does is it gives that instead of that it gives the stack of creatures a 40 chance to reflect the spell back at a random enemy so let's say you're facing an implosion 60 of the time the implosion gets through and kills your stack 40 of the time it gets redirected to who knows where maybe a useful enemy maybe not which one would i rather have which one is more manageable which one actually has a better um long term value uh as you know it's kind of like what's wrong with slayer and not like frenzy and stuff it's like well i i don't want to just go all in and cross my fingers that the mirror works like the mirror needs to work a hundred percent of the time there you're talking if the thing reflected spells a hundred percent of the time it's a way better version than of anti magic okay it would be ridiculous for it to work on every uh soldier in your army it still should be a single stack target okay but you could do broken things with that right you could really you could really break break the game open my doorbell rang there and i'd lost my flow but i was really giving off about this spell uh magic mirror uh at 40 it would work better you know what would work is if the spell was is if the stack was immune like anti magic and then on top of that it had a 40 chance of reflecting so it like you would want the prevention part to work all the time and then sometimes there's this upside of a reflection so it's a strict upgrade to anti magic instead 60 percent of the time the spell just does nothing this but the the enemy spell gets through and the enemy like the same problem with anti magic the enemy the enemy can just choose to target somebody else you know so this spell i think i'm a little bit out of breath because i ran up and down the stairs there under the door so this spell is in the f category we are going to need to start stratifying this f category out aren't we i mean okay let's start doing that um i think it's worse than slayer and i think it's worse than misfortune um is it worse than protection from water yeah i think it is uh i think it is right let me just double check what it actually does i don't think i've ever cast it magic mirror enemy spells cast on the targeted allied troop has a 40 chance of being redirected i'm just never casting that like i'm always i'm always finding something better to cast than that uh yep i just need to resize it as well on top of that it's just really just level five it's a level five spell i'm so just garbage um i don't know why i'm getting so emotional about it i need to just get a grip hang on i'm just trying to resize this as well i struggled a little bit with the tile sizings i don't think it looks quite as neat as the creatures one did um let me just see how it looks for you guys on this other second screen looks okay right i mean it looks okay oh it looks all right uh so that's magic mirror there is one air spell left to talk about which is summon air elemental okay this cool guy like a genie coming out of a bottle so there are four of these across the five school uh four of these across the four schools at level five um summon air summon water summon fire summon earth and all of the basic elementals are all kind of similar kind of mediocre um i don't remember what the rules are around keeping your elementals i think is that you get to keep them i can't remember how this works yeah no i get this confused with resurrection you don't get to keep them right so you can't just start uh summoning elementals in every fight and just build up a gigantic pile of them um they're there for the fight that you're in now the problem i have is normally by the time i'm a big powerful air mage i don't need to build it i don't want to waste my i don't want to waste the fight building an army on the fly you know and all the elementals they're just basic ground units the air elemental here doesn't have flying um it's a ground unit the fire elemental doesn't have flying the water elementals piece of garbage takes up two hexes movement five and the earth elemental is a walking joke it's like the worst unit in the game how often am i not going to use them like i like i'm not going to need i'm not going to need to summon myself a huge pile sometimes you do right and in if you're up against an enemy hero and you're out in the adventure map and it's a normal adventure map um combat with no castle having a big pile of mean elementals that can walk into the middle of the pitch and do something is fine it's okay right it's okay and so actually i think we've found a place for we've we found some spells that can start filling up this c category it's okay okay but at that stage of the game i'm going to be doing some spectacular things with my mana i'm going to be doing chain lightning i'm going to be you know spending i'm going to be town portaling three times before i enter combat um i'm going to be teleporting my stuff that kind of thing you know what i mean um i think it's all right am i being too harsh on it maybe they deserve to be a little bit higher up and these are the ones that deserve to go down something like that again i just wish that all the sizings were a little bit more uniform it's a bit of panickety perfectionism coming out there never mind all right and that is the end of the school of air and there's only one level five water spell and it's summon water elemental i hate water elementals um i don't really like them i hate earth more so i think what i'm going to do is make a little home here for the elementals and water is going to be the third worst one and we're done with the water school fire has two spells at level five before we get to the fire elemental first we have to talk about this one sacrifice oh man i have never got this to work like as fire the school of fire has so many of these okay so then here's the trick and again i'm gonna shamelessly pull up the wiki as well um while i'm waxing about it as if like yeah shouldn't you know this you know i'm claiming to be someone who's playing the game for like all this time yes i am i can't make this spell work i've never made this spell work target non undead troopers sacrificed and then another target dead trooper it has to be dead by the way it can't just be wounded uh is increased its health by a bunch of the blah blah blah whatever your power level plus whatever the destroyed creatures base health was plus a little bit more multiplied by the number of creatures and if you're an expert the bonus is a bit more man so it's a small siphon effect like the amount of health you get back is 10 more than the health that's destroyed in the sacrifice creature and then as a starting point plus your power on top of that oh hang on that's actually so yeah that could be so yeah so you've got power 20 um and the destroyed creatures creatures base health is say five if you pick a crappy unit um you get 35 back okay yeah right hang on right so look okay right fine you sacrifice a stack to bring back a dead stack but here's the problem right and yes you get more what i'm trying to say is you do get a lot more hp back than you sacrificed here's the problem you need a dead stack of really valuable allies so this is happening at a time when you're getting you're getting murdered by the ai but by your opponent like your opponent has you've got a pile of seven dead archangels on the battlefield or maybe if it's in the fire school we could imagine that it's a but but a pile of arch demons so you're in a situation where okay i've got to pick one of my surviving troops sacrifice them to turn them into arch devils and it won't work if the arch devil is on like if you've still got one out of the seven you can't cast you have to wait till he's dead like it's just so clunky i i i just i've never been able to make it work i've never found a way to make it work it might be that it's oh yeah paul like this is this is a great spell you the strategy is you charge in with your best unit you let it die and then you have some stuff in the background ready to sacrifice maybe i don't know i've never seen it done i and i've never done it i feel like i've been a lot more opinionated um you know on some of these spells about how about like you know i wasn't this mean to the creatures although earth elementals oh don't get me started um i just don't think sacrifice like it's got to be better than these other things here right like there must be some application for it there's some talented player knows how to use it and break it but not me so i'm just going to leave it down here the final spell in the fire in the fire school is the fire elemental which we made a home for just here he's slower than this i think so but he does more damage i don't know anyway maybe these two should swap over uh in the earth school let's do these in reverse order what i've got here the earth elemental is here summoning a bunch of earth elementals might be relevant sometimes uh even though i don't like the unit in terms of training them in the conflicts you might summon some elementals in the vanilla game sometimes and be happy with that you know they'll in a protracted fight they'll walk out into the field and do something um so we'll leave the the summon elementals right there in the bank of sea and then we have one last spell to talk about in the earth school which is implosion and implosion is the single greatest damage dealing spell in the game it deals more damage than any other spell to a single stack of enemies in the late game basically it's just the go-to choice like for for an earth mage um sometimes you'll pick meteor shower instead if the situation calls for it with aoe but between the two of them um implosion is just incredible like it deals so much damage um and it's so crippling because it's level five it works on gold dragons uh it works on well all the dragons except black dragons uh oh man it's just so powerful and you're just so often building that fifth level implosion implosion implosion so it's special it's really special um how special this is a toughy i've decided that i i think i've come to a decision i've decided that i love blind too much uh and i'm gonna put it behind it i'm gonna put implosion behind blind and that might just be me being a hopeless romantic i don't know even i'm torn i'm so torn even between all three of these for who gets the top spot but i'm sticking with what i've got i'm gonna put it behind blind and let that be the way it is you know that that's my score so town portal we're finished so town portal is the best spell in the game blind is the second best implosion is the third best and really between these three it is close it's it is really close um resurrection and slow not far behind at all dimension door and fly are both special spells uh and i don't consider them to be as special i'm gonna leave even though there's some blank space on the map i'm gonna leave it there because i'm trying to indicate the gaps of awesomeness that that exists between each stage so i couldn't find a b plus instead they've found their way into a minus this kind of thing um i might actually demote prayer that's something that that'll help visually actually i think prayer i'm okay with b plus for prayer so i will make that tweak um yeah okay with that yeah i'm actually okay with all of the rest of where a is sitting i'm just doing a bit of a sweep through i didn't really do much of this with in the creature's build um or the creature's tealist uh i didn't really sweep through and do a lot of changes at the very end we're maybe looking back at it i might have uh clone yeah i don't know how to score arm again and like it's i might just move him west clones a little bit better than this i think i'm happy with the rest of it let me have a look at how that panned out at the end i hope on whatever device you guys are watching that this looks okay i suppose also before we um sign off we should talk about what the ranking of the schools are the four schools of magic um well i think it's probably fairly obvious to anyone who's watched the whole video that earth is the best earth is the best and it's not even close earth is by far the best okay absolutely by far the best town portal implosion resurrection slow need i go on media or shower animate dead and then okay i'm into shield at that point after that but like those spells just blow the competition out of the water earth's the best now instead of saying what second well what's worst fire is worst fire is worse by far all the big spells that find their way to the bottom frenzy landmine misfortune slayer fire shield firewall fire ball is boring like right um the reason fire is easily the worst though is that it's very very very best spell in blind is not really a fire spell blind is an everybody spell everyone can get massive value out of blind which makes the fire school and studying fire magic one of the most pointless things you can do as a secondary skill um so fire is the worst earth's the best now with air and water being in the middle which one's better i habitually tend to fall on the side of air and the reason is that you've got well if you can see here from the way we've scaled this right the big damage spells lightning bolt chain lightning awesome right dimension door and fly beat waterwalk lightning bolt beats ice bolt you have this recurring theme you know where air is just a bit better than water now there is a bit of an exception bless i think probably is better than haste and prayer is very good you also have cool things like teleport and clone going on and that's actually quite nice to have that uh summon boat that utility that air doesn't have you know it has got you know stuff like counter strike precision hypnotize that don't really hit the mark so i think it's actually wears down to being pretty close between air and water um but if pushed into a corner and forced to pick one i'd go for air so i think the order of events is earth air water fire uh from best to worst i hope you have enjoyed uh if you've watched the whole video through i hope you've enjoyed uh the session and it's been a kind of a chill out experience which is really my intention uh to uh sort of step through this amazing game and talk about the game talk about the spells it's just such a cool game i can talk about it all day it's as much of a it's much of a therapy thing for me as um as anything else uh so my gratitude if i've had your company through the whole thing i really do appreciate it i got quite a lot of comments on the creatures tier list uh a lot of people you know really agreeing with me and saying how absolutely right i was um some of you however i can't i don't know the best way of rationalizing some of you disagreed with me which in all seriousness i um is exactly the kind of thing i'm trying to drum up here i'm trying to drum up some controversy get people talking get people engaging on the channel uh really makes it worthwhile for me so um to all of those uh who you've already probably been replied to by me on the comments of the last video who've commented thank you very much and if you'd like to get involved in the conversation tell me how much of a moron i am uh and how wrong i am about these rankings um hit me up let's let's go let's talk it through let's let's let's hash it out in the comments love to hear from you um but look that's it for now uh i hope you've enjoyed and i'll see you all again for the next one bye for now