Quote from: Ross Przybylski on August 31, 2009, 05:11:21 PM MT
If you continually opt to use this ability, you’re hurting your potential to cast new spells and gain an advantage. An enemy mage properly wielding spells and attacks can easily overcome this; units that will find difficulty are lone guardians. And, if such a game does come down to Guardian vs. Summoner (or any mage for that matter) the probable outcome is always victor to the Mage. Realistically, guardians have a small window to defeat a mage before they recover magical energy or they are doomed to defeat (unless you can form an agreement with another surviving mage to help you get your revenge).
Again, context:
Sorceress easily has potential to roll 20+ attacks for 2 cards, but only if she is positioned in line of sight of several enemies.
Fighter Mage has potential to outrageously boost his own or allies stats for 2 cards, but in doing so sacrifices potential attacks to multiple enemies and his ability to cast new spells.
Wizard has potential to chain an incredible combo of magic assuming the proper cards are drawn and that he is not threatened by enemy attack (his low Defense of 12 very often assures he never gets this opportunity).
I think that the real problem is that the summoner can make his attacks without ever being in LOS of an opponent. Even then, if you put together a good strategy and finally get your opponent in LOS, he can get away and heal back to full (every time, as opposed to other wizards with a heal card or two).
For instance, if I'm fighting a sorcerer I can stay out of LOS and maneuver within melee range before the sorcerer can hit me. With a summoner, though, he can throw a skeleton in the path (or paths) open to me and never enter LOS, causing me to take occassional damage (which I can't heal without a lucky draw or a paladin - ie 2v1). Since I can never sprint and attack, the odds of me ever getting off a melee attack (even with FM flash) are pretty low.
Maybe you could consider some alternative fixes to this. One would be to greatly reduce the range a summoner can summon a free skeleton (I'm thinking 1 to 4 squares away - they are supposed to be guardians afterall).
Currently a solo summoner's strategy is to just keep running and whittle down the opponent through skeletons. This would be a fine tactic, but the absolute only way to catch a determined summoner in LOS is to get lucky and draw a teleport card. Even then, you only get one chance to kill him before he just sprints athrough a choke point and blocks it with a skeleton.
This is the problem with the summoner. It's not that any particular power is too good, but that there's absolutely no way to combat the proper tactic with a summoner. Even if you drop the skeletons as soon as they appear, that just leaves the summoner with more movement than you because you'll rarely be able to sprint.