Pseudo-SC building question

[Stormbinder]

Few small comments:

Originally posted by Cheezeninja:
From what i've been able to glean from this board a good SC in general is someone who more or less has these traits in one form or another.

1. Life Drain - most important - wraith sword, soul vortex (awesome spell), Life Drain

You can't rely on Life Drain for you SC, unlike Soul Vortex it is one-time-only spell.

2. Quickness - Bless, boots, or 1 water path

or jade armor if you don't have leg spot.

Queen of elemental Air with-

Wraith Sword
Elemental Armor
Ring o Regen
Amulet o Resilience

Set to cast Wrathfull skies, mistform, mirror image, attack rear.

Good setup but I would replace amulet of resilence with luck amulet on your air queen, since you are sending her into melee.

[LintMan]

I really recommend the Stymphalian Wings for the armor on your seige golem. It provides 3 main benefits:

- Flying: useful in battle, but even more useful for being able to get your SC where it needs to be in a hurry on the strategic map. You can also more easily raid behind enemy lines this way.
- Fear: nice effect to help route enemies
- Trampling: Against normal masses of units, a quickened size 5 trampler (ieL a seige golem with stymph wings) will decimate them far quicker than a quickened seige golem just swinging its hammers will. Faster killing = more kills before they route and less likelihood of getting afflictions.

As a bonus, the Stymph Wings use the same path/gems you already have for the seige golem.

If you can manage it, I'd recommend the normal golem over the seige golem, because it has hand slots (for a charcoal shield, and/or shield of valor or shield of gleaming gold), and astral magic to cast body ethereal, astral shield, luck, antimagic, and maybe astral weapon or twist fate.

If you go with a seige golem and the Stymph Wings, I'd also add:
-Wraith Helm - Ethereal is awesome, and this gives you a few chaff skels to distract the enemy slightly (your golem shouldn't route when they die). If this is too pricey, I'd maybe go with a Horror Helm to boost the fear effect.
-Stymph Wings - discussed above
- Boots of Quickness
- Pendant of Luck
- amulet of antimagic or missile protection

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by Stormbinder:
You can't rely on Life Drain for you SC, unlike Soul Vortex it is one-time-only spell.

Buh? Life drain owns hard on anything that isn't lifeless. How's this different from Soul Vortex? A Wraith Sword or Blood Thorn is nearly a must-have.

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by Norfleet:
Buh? Life drain owns hard on anything that isn't lifeless.

You should learn to read more carefully. He was referring to the spell, which was listed in the previous post.

[Stormbinder]

Originally posted by Graeme Dice:

quote:

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Originally posted by Norfleet:
Buh? Life drain owns hard on anything that isn't lifeless.

You should learn to read more carefully. He was referring to the spell, which was listed in the previous post.

---

Indeed.

[tinkthank]

Siege golems get no hands? Bummer. What can I take instead? A normal golem isnt nearly as neat...

[LintMan]

Originally posted by tinkthank:
Siege golems get no hands? Bummer. What can I take instead? A normal golem isnt nearly as neat...

If you look at the Seige golem picture, you'll see they have hammers where their hands would be.

The two normal golems I have sitting at #2 and #3 in the HoF in my game, with 650+ kills each beg to differ! (My highest-ranked Bane and Wraith Lord SC's lag 200+ kills behind despite being around as long/longer.)

If you really don't like regular golems, some other ideas:
- some people really like Ice Devils: they have W3 magic, full slots and are pretty tough.
- If you can manage to get to Death-7, Tartarian Gate can produce some awesome SC material for a measly 10 death gems. But many have afflictions that need to be healed and/or they need to be Gift of Reasoned, to use as an SC. They're well worth the effort, IMHO.
- Bane Lords and Wraith Lords are always good SC choices. Banes are much cheaper, but Wraiths are ethereal and have Death-3 magic to cast Soul Vortex.
- In my SC thread, someone suggested Firbolgs. They are pretty tough, but their one extra ability ("Standard (+25)") doesn't really benefit them in the SC role, compared to the beneficial abilities that a golem or wraith lord has.
- I've been thinking about GoR'ing an Iron Dragon. They have full elemental immunities (IIRC), and kick some serious butt. I just don't know what slot they'll have though, to make it worthwhile.
- As Cheezeninja suggested, a Queen of Elemental Air could also work well.