Spells and creature speciality

i think it would be cool if magic arrow and ice bolt scaled with hero level instead of magic power(not 1:1). on maps with little to no magic power items those will be better, unless the hero gets lots of magic power per level up (warlock). ->less feel bad for getting defence. i would love to see a reasonable distinction between ice bolt and lightning bolt (other than: im exactly at 6 or 12 mana). So both spells have their part when they excell at the game. round this up with the sorcery skill being restricted to magic classes, and maybe not even appearing in might-town mage guilds, so it wont be a dominant strategy for barbarians for example. (modern games give heroes a "basic attack" anyways). "magic fist" could be the counter part to magic arrow, which uses magic power instead of hero level. (maybe also for death ripple and holy word)

creature speciality always seemed kinda off for me. if i want to focus on a certain creature and actually use it, some perish and therefore i lose a lot of later potential. choosing a ranged creature is literally the same every time and/or faction.
WOG does keep track of certain stats (or flags) of creature stats. imagine this: the mummy specialist reaches lvl 10. now his/her royal mummies get a flag for "trained". this might mean some extra stats or abilities or some magic resistance. sharing, mixing and splitting the stack just distributes the "trained" flag. these trained creatures may also be acquired at certain creature banks or events. trained royal mummies would cast curse on enemy creatures with lesser defence than them. necromancers have little defence while knights have quite a lot. yes this could (or rather will) blow up the scope. but maybe one creature per faction that can get such a acquired upgrade via hero or creature bank ?

why do pikemen not have bonus damage vs fliers and 2-hex creatures ?

thank you for your work so far, you are a blessing to us all

Hi super_flo and welcome to the forums

There are many reasons why we don't have plans of implementing these suggestions. One of the reasons simply is that we don't have much programming work going on at the moment and these would all require that.

Another thing is that I find these new mechanics, in particular your creature specialty idea, rather complex and more in the lines of what is used in WoG. H3SW is aiming for classic Heroes gameplay where the interesting stuff is happening between adventure map exploration, city building, fighting battles and leveling up heroes. Imagine fighting an enemy mummy that is suddenly able to cast a strong debuff spell on your troops (aging, poising etc.), because it is "trained". If you didn't recognize your were fighting a mummy specialist from the hero portrait or didn't individually check all creatures to see if they were special, you would have no clue to why this mummy was able to debuff you beyond the usual curse ability. I am very much against such implementations, as I would find it annoying to have to check all creatures and their level of training before making decisions. It will create unnecessary complexity which doesn't add much interesting to the game compared to all the bothering.

I don't quite agree with your statement about magic arrow and cold ray being obsolete to lightning bolt. In most situations MA and CR are more effective in damage/spell point cost than LB. This is then of course balanced by the fact that dealing the same amount of damage with MA and CR takes longer time.

I will not say that we will not change either spells or creature specilities, but currently only some changes to the spell system may be in priority for the next release.