Talk:Eagle Eye
We need more Greg Fulton here[edit | hide | hide all]
Q: When HoMM3 was in development, did the team think Eagle Eye would be a viable or competitive secondary skill? I've seen players say it was meant to be a bad one to balance out with the good ones, but things like the boosting artifacts, a few pre-made Seer Huts and Witches high learning chance tell me otherwise.
A: Regarding Eagle Eye... it was a holdover from HoMM2. While we knew it was a ‘lesser’ skill, we didn’t consider it ‘useless’. In hindsight, I should have cut it, but like I said... it was a legacy skill from HoMM2, and there was a desire to maintain some consistency between HoMM2 and HoMM3. So, to directly answer your question, we never intentionally created ‘bad’ skills to balance out ‘good’ skills.
Originally, the concept of Eagle Eye was simple. An Allied Hero ‘sees’ an Enemy Hero use an unlearned Spell, and upon seeing it, the Allied Hero learns the Spell. In practice, it didn’t work out so well.
First, there was only a ‘chance’ to the learn the spell. Second, an Allied Hero typically fought and defeated lesser Enemy Heroes, thus rarely saw a Spell the Hero didn’t already know. Third, Enemy Towns are not necessarily difficult to acquire, thus Enemy Spells are not necessarily difficult to acquire. Also, big maps tend to give plenty of opportunities for learning ‘other’ Spells.