Alchemy? Worth it?

[Metathron]

In my last game as mage, I maxed alchemy early on and upgraded a whole lot of spells (but certainly not all) to 3rd level. However, I ended up frequently using only about a dozen: battle cry, bless, resurrection, dragon slayer, demon slayer from Order; slow, precision, geyser, magic shackles from Distortion; fireball and flaming arrow (later made obsolete by fire rain), doom, and poison skull from Chaos.

Of course, that's not to say that the other spells are useless (though some certainly seem so...last hero - what the frell?), just that they require a different tactic.

[Smash]

Try use last hero with 1 troop and Armageddon . Working?

[Metathron]

Ah, I see!

Buuut...when do you actually find yourself in such a situation? Having to leave the rest of your army far away and divide it up among castles due to only 3 slot reserve in castles. Meh, seems like a bother.

[Smash]

First you have six in Darion.
Second why Armaggedon Mage would bother with rest of army in the first place?

[Metathron]

Hehe!

Unfortunately, in my last mage game, armageddon was the only spell I did not get. But I heard people saying it's not worth the mana needed to cast it in proportion to the damage it does. How does it scale in comparison to, say, fire rain (my favourite direct damage spell)?

[milo]

My end game mage does around a maximum of around 11000 damage with armageddon, fire rain max around 10000. Many armies have fire resistance, black dragons are magic immune except for armageddon so it can be incredibly useful, especially when enemy is split into many stacks such as battles in castles.

[Gatts]

Originally Posted by Metathron

Hehe!

Unfortunately, in my last mage game, armageddon was the only spell I did not get. But I heard people saying it's not worth the mana needed to cast it in proportion to the damage it does. How does it scale in comparison to, say, fire rain (my favourite direct damage spell)?

Well - it works on black dragons... so this may bring some new strategy points towards armageddon - like Milo stated

[Xargon]

Concerning alchemy: Having played the game on normal as a mage, I would say alchemy is very useful if you are playing for the first time, as there are a lot more spells which can be really useful than you might think judging from the first playing experiences (where direct damage spells are usually your best choice). I ended up using spells like teleport, helplessness (-60% defence can be devastating on lvl5 creatures of enemy heroes), magic spring, stone skin, phantom and others I don't remember right now. If you want to have a wide variety of spells and be able to try out different tactics for yourself, go for alchemy. It's not like you won't have enough magic runes to max out your other desired magic skills anyway. If you are powergaming, or don't plan to learn and try out many spells, alchemy will be useless.
[Note: At first, I did not consider alchemy to be that useful because I had a heap of crystals and just a few spells which seemed worthwile - however, in midgame I found more and more potentially useful spells and crystals came in at a lower rate. Your supply vanishes rapidly when upgrading spells like hypnosis, resurrection, demon portal or similar.]

@milo: 10k damage sure sounds nice - I assume you had a pretty high intelligence (plus that fire amulet and the dragon cloak, probably)?