This week's Battle Mage rule set challenge was Fire and Regret in which every monster gains the return fire ability at the beginning of the battle...
Fire and Regret general strategy....
- The obvious thing would seem to be avoiding using ranged attacks, certainly large ones as return fire returns half the damage.
- However this will mean you're selecting a mixture of melee and magic attacks (or all of one) and that leaves you open to being countered by reflect, which is just as bad as return fire for counter damage, or melee counter measures such as thorns.
- So if you play avoiding ranged, there's a 50% chance you'll be countered very effectively, same goes for debuffs such as Void and demoralise.
- So personally I don't beat myself up about avoiding ALL ranged, I might even leave one low damage ranged attack in, especially if it's useful and a self-healer.
- Void shield is especially useful and repair - because that defends you against pretty much any 'not ranged counter' - so Grand Master Rathe springs to mind as a decent summoner.
- Besides this any of the magic or demoralised counters or debuffs mentioned above could be useful, but you've only got a 50-50 chance of getting them right!
- It's a tricky one this 'guess the counter game' so personally I tend to rely on a defensive strategy for this ruleset... i.e. void shield, repair, heal.
Fire and regret very low damage against very high damage WIN battle exemplar
The battle below features a line up with GMR with only 4 active damage against my opponent's 13, and a victory!
Mana and rulesets:
32 Mana and return fire only.
Summoner - Grand Master Rathe - Void shield, shield and amplify
- Shieldbearer - With void shield and awesome taunting tank
- armourer - repair
- chicken - 0 mana soak
- venari crystalsmith - heal
- adelaide brightwing - main damage dealer and repair
- angel of light - resurrect!
The battle...
- rounds 1 and 2 - we trade blows for no loss
- round 3 - I lose my Shieldbearer but he's resurrected and healed immediately.
- round 4 - I take out living lava, he isn't resurrected, hah!
- round 5 - I lose my Venari to return fire, but he's lasted pretty well and done his bit
- round 6 - I lose my shieldbearer and Taunt, but I take out the radiated brute too. My opponent's attacks are now split.
- round 7 - no loss
- round 8 - I take out the disintegrator
- round 9 - I take out the Scorcher
- round 10 - I take out the Serpentine spy, NB my repairs are just now nullifying all my opponent's attacks!
- rounds 11-13 - it takes a while for my magic damage to take out the Striker, but I get there!
VICTORY!
Final battle analysis
I certainly made the right choice with the defensive strategy and I won with no problem despite my opponent's impressive attack power.
NB I should have swapped out the Venari for the other magic healer, my bad!
Double repair was absolutely necessary here and countered all those melee attacks well, that's the problem when you rely on one type of attack, it worked when both taunt was active and when I was getting attacked front row, sneak and opportunity, very effective!
Note my opponent probably expected more melee attacks, what with shield and demoralise, but he didn't get that, he got defence and was ultimately defeated by that pitiful 2 magic damage against which he really had no defence himself!
Fire and forget final thoughts...
Go defensive and enjoy the cunning play on words here too!