Caster Lord Buff/Overhaul
I really like playing caster lords, but I’ve always felt there’s a pretty big disparity between them and their combat focussed counterparts. You can build a combat lord whatever way you like without them ever being a chump, but a caster lord without their spell tree is generally pretty bad. The changes CA made were a great step, but I don’t think they went quite far enough.
What this mod does:
– Gives every dedicated caster lord access to their first four spells in their basic form from level 1. ‘Master’ Necromancers actually know how to raise zombies now!
– Gives Teclis access to all his spells from turn 1. His brother is an absolute monster from the word go, but poor Teclis lags pretty far behind.
– Drastically overhauls Teclis’s tree. You now gain the relevant lore attribute when putting a point into one of his spells, with the remainder rolled into his High Lore skill. The previous Lore skills have been removed, and in their place are a set of 4 mutually exclusive skills that unlock new spells or abilities or buff his existing ones. See changelog for further details.
– Gives The Fay Enchantress, Gelt, Ghorst, Malagor, Mazdamundi and Kemmler access to the basic form of all their spells, to make them stand out a bit more from generic caster lords.
– Gives each Chaos Sorceror Lord access to Burning Head, Penumbral Pendulum, Soulblight and Golden Hounds respectively. I felt they’re a bit too low impact as combatants, and I’m tired of seeing sorc lords with only two spells.
– Gives Morathi a bound Doombolt skill, based on the Tome of Furion item.
– Drastically overhauls Morathi’s casting tree, including two new skills and some different spells. From what I’ve read she’s supposed to be an amazing caster, but compared to her son she’s really not that great without a significant point investment. See changelog for more details.
– Adds a use-ability for every lore. Some are probably OP as heck and way better than others. Some are very rough on graphics.
– Generic caster Lords get one charge/battle at creation for their respective ability, raised to 2 charges once they get Arcane Conduit. The previously mentioned caster LLs and Wurrzag get 2 charges at creation and an upgraded, infinite use version at Conduit. Any LL with casting ability and The Red Duke gets one charge at creation and +1 conduit, with the exception of Archaon, who only gets 1 charge at Diviner.
– Arcane Conduit has been changed for Heroes. It now has 2 levels, with the second level granting 1 charge of their respective Lore ability.
What this mod doesn’t do:
– Buff ability-based casters, like Runelords or Volkmar.
– Change proper caster/combat hybrids, like Vampire Lords, Malekith or Durthu.
– Do anything to Azhag or Loremasters.
– Change anything about the spells themselves. Cost, cooldown etc are the same as in vanilla.
– Change Slann aside from Mazda, because they’re a pain to recruit and I’m not entirely sure what they’ve got going on. Sorry.
– Change Norscan Sorc Lords. ♥♥♥♥ ’em.
The ‘basic form’ means what you get if you put one point into a hero’s skill, so no overcasting or cooldown and cost reductions. All changes affect the AI as well. Hopefully they make caster lords a bit more fun to play with, and a bit more dangerous to play against.
Compatibility: Save game compatible, but Morathi and Teclis will lose all their points invested in their spell lines. The only lords with altered skills are those two, so any mods that don’t affect their spell lines should be compatible.
!!Update 7/12 (wow that was a gap), should be save game compatible but will remove the point in Arcane Conduit for all lords that got effected before and for all heroes that were changed!!
There is a fairly high chance that if I update this mod it will break the skill tree of at least one of Teclis or Morathi, if not other caster lords. If this might bother you, you can go to your steam/warhammer2/data folder, select CasterLordOverhaul.pack and make a backup of it somewhere. If something breaks, just put the backup back into the data folder (don’t overwrite in case steam re-dls the mod), tick ‘enable out of date mods’ in the launcher and re-enable it.
To come:
Changes to how Morathi do.
Some sort of capstone spell for dedicated caster LLs.
A non-placeholder ability for Wild when I can think of something decent.
Balance changes to abilities?
