Half-troll + regen

[Timo Pietilä]

Originally Posted by Derakon

Nope; you might have noticed that nearly-dead monsters deal very little damage with their breath attacks, when they decide to use them.

Monster spells, on the other hand, are based off the monster's level and remain potent even when they're almost dead. So watch out for those nether balls and mana storms!

Nether ball isn't that potent but darkness storm is. Without dark resist Sauron can make more damage with it than full health Dracolich with nether breath. Manastorm and darkness storm are only spells in the game that can make more damage than any high element breath.

Which is BTW why I suggested giving all balrogs darkness storm as spell. They are "demons of fire and shadow", and if you read LoTR they are strongly magical and intelligent, not big mindless beasts like the one in the movie.

I actually would like to see "storm" -variant for other elements too, with comparable damage to darkness/manastorms, so that you could give some high-level monsters spells that can compare to breath-weapons without always relying to those two spells.

[Derakon]

Originally Posted by Timo Pietilä

I actually would like to see "storm" -variant for other elements too, with comparable damage to darkness/manastorms, so that you could give some high-level monsters spells that can compare to breath-weapons without always relying to those two spells.

Good idea. It's kind of weird how heavily-focused late-game spell (i.e. not breath) damage is on mana and nether attacks. Firestorm, blizzard, ball lightning, corrosive glob, etc. would all make decent upgrades to the not-very-damaging elemental ball spells the monsters currently have access to.

[Twilight]

Originally Posted by Timo Pietilä

Nether ball isn't that potent but darkness storm is. Without dark resist Sauron can make more damage with it than full health Dracolich with nether breath. Manastorm and darkness storm are only spells in the game that can make more damage than any high element breath.

Which is BTW why I suggested giving all balrogs darkness storm as spell. They are "demons of fire and shadow", and if you read LoTR they are strongly magical and intelligent, not big mindless beasts like the one in the movie.

I actually would like to see "storm" -variant for other elements too, with comparable damage to darkness/manastorms, so that you could give some high-level monsters spells that can compare to breath-weapons without always relying to those two spells.

Beware the timestorm-caster!

Seriously though, this idea seems good. Got my attention enough to de-lurk anyway.

[debo]

Originally Posted by Derakon

Good idea. It's kind of weird how heavily-focused late-game spell (i.e. not breath) damage is on mana and nether attacks. Firestorm, blizzard, ball lightning, corrosive glob, etc. would all make decent upgrades to the not-very-damaging elemental ball spells the monsters currently have access to.

tbh the endgame of Vanilla reminded me a lot of the Final Fantasy Legend / SaGa games the first time I made it that far. In the SaGa games, you spend a lot of time building up resistances to different elemental and status attacks that monsters use against you. However, the last two bosses invariably use "non-elemental" attacks against you -- i.e. attacks which you can't defend against at all, and so you're just forced to out-damage and out-heal them, which sort of renders moot all that work you did to get there in the first place.

I'd agree that giving late-late monsters and uniques a bit more variety in their damage types would be more fun than just wondering when you're going to get manastormed again.

Edit: I like Timo's idea a lot as well!!