School of Earth Magic
is about the characteristics of the earth school spells. For the secondary skill, see Earth Magic.
School of Earth Magic is one of the four schools of magic. Others are Air, Fire and and Water. School of Earth Magic is related to the secondary skill Earth Magic, which allows heroes' to cast earth school spells more effectively and at reduced cost. The cost reduction is the same regardless of whether a hero holds the skill at basic, advanced, or expert level.
Comments & Debate
School of Earth Magic is perhaps the strongest of all the schools, because it has a wide variety of all kinds of spells, Implosion being the stronged in terms of single target damage (the Fire Magic spell Armageddon might be a better spell in terms of whole battlefield damage).
The most powerful of them all is Town Portal, which with expert Earth Magic enables the hero to teleport to any allied town with a mere cost of 20 spell points and 300 movement points. Nothing beats travelling the map really fast, especially on big maps when one does want to defend ones cities by just porting there on sight of the opponent.
This alone would be excellent feature if it weren't often blocked on contest maps, but what makes it a truly great spell is that a hero can cast Town Portal unlimited times, provided that he has spell points or movement points left. In comparison, Dimension Door can only be cast four times a day at expert level - and might not suffice to get to the next down, especially if it was gotten to by the opponent the last turn.
Other powerful spells in the School of Earth Magic are Resurrection and its undead counterpart Animate Dead - coupled with Necromancy the latter makes for no lost units and steady replenishments if Shackles of War and a good sane group of undead is supplied.
Resurrection (or Animate Dead) combined with Blind may save an entire army with enough spell points - Blind keeps the enemy from fleeing, Animate Dead revives undead that stay alive and well even after combat, Disrupting Ray may also help.
Additional Spells are. Force Field, Earthquake and Slow.
Force Field is not so useful against human players, but in wandering creature stacks it becomes extremely tactical spell.
Earthquake can be handy in siege battles without many flying units (Dungeon units with their 3 flying units (Scorpicore/Manticore, Black Dragon/Red Dragon, Harpy/Harpy Hag ) and their 2 shooting units (Beholder/Evil Eye and Medusa/Medusa Queen would perhaps find it less useful - Minotaur/Minotaur Kings would not be left out though).
Last but not least is Slow, which is a counterpart of Haste. Like Haste, Slow is also so powerful spell cast at expert level, that it rises the question why is it a level 1 spell.