Artillery
| Artillery | ||
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Basic Artillery: gives control of the ballista to the hero, allowing one shot with a 50% chance to inflict double damage. | |
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Advanced Artillery: gives control of the ballista to the hero, allowing two shots with a 75% chance to inflict double damage. | |
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Expert Artillery: gives control of the ballista to the hero, allowing two shots which inflict double damage. | |
Artillery is a secondary skill that gives the hero manual control over war machine Ballista during combat and control over the arrow towers when defending a town during siege. Basic Artillery provides a 50% chance that ballista inflicts double damage. For Advanced Artillery this is a 75% chance and for Expert Artillery a 100% chance. Advanced and Expert Artillery also enable the ballist to shoot twice in a row, instead of once.
Heroes with Artillery as a starting skill:
Arlach the Overlord – Basic Artillery
Christian the Knight – Basic Artillery
Gerwulf the Beastmaster – Basic Artillery
Gurnisson the Barbarian – Basic Artillery
Ignissa the Planeswalker – Basic Artillery
Pasis the Planeswalker – Basic Artillery
Pyre the Demoniac – Basic Artillery
Vokial the Death Knight – Basic Artillery
Zubin the Battle Mage – Basic Artillery
Heroes with Ballista as specialty:
- Arlach the Overlord
- Christian the Knight
- Gerwulf the Beastmaster
- Gurnisson the Barbarian
Torosar the Alchemist*
- Interestingly, Torosar has specialty Artillery but does not start by default with Artillery skill.
Discussion
Though not the worst skill, Artillery is of limited use. Whereas it may be useful early on in the game, at least on resource-poor maps of impossible difficulty, later on it usually provides considerably less bonus damage to a hero's army than do secondary skills such as Offense or Archery (see Figure 1). Moreover, given that a ballista has only 250 health and acts last during the combat round, it may be destroyed in battles even before it can inflict any significant damage. Another disadvantage of Artillery is that the ballista is not deployed when attacking creature banks or defending against a siege. However, the control that Artillery provides over arrow towers in sieges can be valuable, also because it enables the defending hero to cast the first or last spell in each round.
Recommended for: Heroes in the early game with high attack (especially Barbarians), since a high attack skill increases the Ballista's damage considerably. Artillery is also a superior skill for secondary heroes whose only purpose is to defend towns, as Artillery gives control of the Arrow Towers during a town siege. However, be cautious of using this skill on main heroes if you think that you will be playing a long game, since Artillery quickly becomes weaker the longer the game goes on.