WHAT? So,can Ice Snake heal Ice Dragons? If this is true, I will hate you for making me replay the game as Soothsayer (mage) .... still playing Viking/Warrior. :) And by hate I mean love. I need a good reason to play again.

Oh man, with Demonologist + Creation powers.... so many demons....

Is there anyway for valkyries to generate mana? Like the old Mana Accelerator?

Hilda's arrows do that, but you need to kill enemies with it. In the later stages of the game, this will require quite some setup work (especially if you want to kill more than one stack). The maximum is 10 rage + 10 mana per enemy stack killed, I believe.

Yeah, that's way too little and too hard to do the old Armored Princess setups.

Thanks to the stupid rage level cap, I'm stuck at 7/7 mana/rage.

I only use Hilda arrow for damaging spread out enemies. Works well against dragons. :)

This is a mini-spoiler but after you do the quest to catch the ice spider that guy will sell you a big stack of them.

I never knew that ice spells healed ice creation units. I'll have to try that out.

Ice spiders are cool. They are the only shooters that can shoot even when engaged into melee.

You can get TWO of the snake rings, and the snake boots. I feel that'd allow a wizard (two artifact slots) to do some pretty insane snake things.

It says so in the description (for once, the description is helpful) ;-)

@Zechnophobe: I haven't got the snake boots (yet), but two of the rings. I intend to try out what royal snakes can do with that. Was getting two rings possible in a previous KB game? I had a snake team once, but I do not remember if it was with ring + boots or two rings (+ boots?).

Yes, I've had at least one game where I got two Rings of the Snake King (and yes, with Royal Snakes they're digustingly hideous). Unfortunately, I think that was my first game, as a Warrior, and I didn't know about the "tricks" (single stack army, invisible, Magic Spring with Sleem's poison cloud, and so on); I just played it straight through with brute force. One ring was in a box, and the other showed up in the dragon castle after the Dragon's Heart quest with Galena.

That same game I also had two Snake Boots--I wound up with a LOT of "two of item X"--so my pimped out Royal Snakes could max at 8 init, 5 move, with 14-18 damage (assuming I had a wife that wore boots and I equipped the whip and dagger weapons as well as both rings).

.

My current TL game I'm a Mage, and found two Staves of the Great Druid (+4 INT, +50% attack to animals); unfortunately I could only use one with froggy Feonora (total 250% of base attack for Royal Snakes). Then I found a second Staff of the Archmage (+5 INT, +20% Lightning damage) so I divorced Feonora and got Xeona just so I can use three of the four at the same time.

So I can either have:
200% of animal attacks (like Feonora)/+13INT (4, 4, 5)/+20% Lightning damage,
OR
150% animal attacks/+14INT (4, 5, 5)/+40% Lightning damage,
depending on what I'm facing/what army I'm rocking (Demonesses w/Anga's Ruby if I need high initiative, or Royal Snakes, or Demons/Griffins for always retaliate, or whatever).

While everyone's discussing Snake Rings, I have THREE on my mage playthrough, although I'm not entirely sure where I got all of them. At least one is from the Witch in Isterreng.

i actually haven't found any items for spiders or snakes but i do have that item that doubles thorn damage, making a dryard/faun/thorn/thorn/royalthorn army kinda cool...

except it loses morale because all those summoned stacks of thorns die and i think the way morale works on that item is anytime a stack of thorns die -morale and anytime none die in a battle +morale? not sure any confirmation?