2.Blessings and Grace effects
- Blessings and Grace effects
Blessings and Graces are skills which function by providing a combat buff to x amount of Immortals in your march. This buff is not permanent (like with Auras) but instead temporal. They last for varying amounts of time but provide powerful buffs to your Immortals while active. Once the buff timer runs out, these skills will no longer provide value for the remainder of the fight.
Blessings and Graces are always applied at the beginning of a fight. Meaning that for the first x seconds of a fight your Immortals will have the buff active. Once it runs out or is dispelled it no longer provides value.
Examples of these skills are Blessing of Defense, War, Rage and other skills of the Epic tier like Oaken Guard and Resist. They provide powerful combat buffs for the beginning of the fight and are valuable in a front-loaded setup.
For instance, Blessing of Defense provides a defensive buff to all of your Immortals for the first 12 seconds of the fight, reducing the damage taken on each Immortal by 25% (at max rank). After the 12 seconds, the buff has run out, you take full damage from incoming hits and crits.
How do you know if a Blessing effect will work well in your setup then?
They provide the same buffs regardless of setup. The key to Blessings and Graces are in the purpose of the setup you are trying to build. For instance, if we are using a pure-earth setup with Charles and Zenobia in it, we are providing a lot of defensive capability to our team which over the course of a long battle will provide very high value. As such, the first 12 seconds of our fight is NOT where we are winning the battle. With this type of setup we win the battle by sustaining high troop counts throughout a prolonged battle instead. Contrary to this we could take a fire setup.
With fire, we have squishy Immortals that provide high damage and no sustain power. Our fire dragon likewise provide massive up-front damage, with very little effect in a longer battle. As such, Blessings and Graces work particularly well here. The entire purpose of the setup we want to create for our fire march is one that needs to win the battle in the beginning of the fight.
We want to deal overwhelming damage to our enemy’s troop count early on and in order to do that we want to maximize our fighting strengths in the first 12-20 seconds of the battle. Hence Graces and Blessings work excellent towards the overall purpose of our setup.
The same goes for a more tricky setup like the earth-wind hybrid, despite having strong sustain power with Zenobia, we win the fight by having Hannibal Barca and Alexander pumped up to deal massive front-loaded damage early on – sometimes almost killing the entire troop count of both enemy frontline immortals before they even get a chance to cast their ultimate’s.
All in all, Blessings and Graces are very powerful skills because of the way troop-count advantages interact in Infinity Kingdom damage calculations, but they are not for every setup.
Published: 13-12-2022