[Dragar]

I'm no expert, but have played a fair bit of SP abysia in EA and MA this last week, preparing for my first MP game, and here are my thoughts.

I thought an E9 bless would be the way to go and played with it a few times. Yes, its great in the early game, your Burning Ones/Lava Warriors are devastating, but as capital only sacreds they lose relevance as the game progresses. Burning Ones won't number enough and are susceptible to AP attacks - crossbows are very painful for instance.

What you have left in terms of sacreds are mages, and really you need to use your mages in the mid to late game to get anywhere. While the reinvig is handy for them it isn't game-changing, and the protection is virtually worthless - if they are using it you have problems.

I'm trialling Astral now, 10 bless, and minor blesses of earth and blood. Twist Fate is very handy for your melee troops, the MR will presumably be excellent in MP, and I like astral as a school for your pretender, it seems to have one of the best set of Strike from a Distance spells, and is probably easiest to gather a lot of gems for. If you can do that (use your mages to search heavily for astral sites in the early game) Acashic Record becomes an option, helping to cover for your lack of magical diversity and letting you alchemise back into astral.

Given that you only really need fire gems (get plenty natively), astral gems (alchemise from everything else) and blood slaves for your magic, you should in theory be pretty much set.

Between earth, astral and blood you also get a lot of good combination spells to cast in the higher levels.

lastly, hopefully a 10S pretender will be a good mage killer from range in the late game

My one major problem so far is overcoming the very very poor precision of abysian mages (even worse in MA), given the complete lack of nature and air magic. Thankfully you can keep lobbing fireballs at the melee and your troops don't care if they get hit, but an awful lot of spells hit no-one at all.

One last comment - I find rushing for Constr 6 seems to be pretty useful. Lightless Lanterns, with your abundance of fire gems, pretty much double your research in one turn and make the other schools so much easier. Your troops are good enough to get you to this point without needing aggressive magic.

Any major flaws in this please let me know, it is mostly conjecture!