HEROES ABILITIES by PACIFIST

Pacifist send these strategies while we were still playing D1 and they may help you to choose your best leader even in D2.

I will just give my opinion (subjective...) on the importance of the abilities chosen by heroes at each level.

Since we are only allowed to choose 7 of them and 6 are related to the Lord chosen at the beginning (2 for each Lord), I will only consider the abilities that are common to all :

1. Toughness for a knight, artifact lore for the others. The added hit points are important at lower levels and for melee fighting. For the mage or the ranger, artifacts or tomes might be more interesting at this level.

2. Leadership for all (accessible from level 3 only ) allows to enroll 2 giant creatures dividing the experience gained in combat by 3. In any case, one more unit, even if it slows down the progression, will ease the progress.

3. Banner bearer is one of the more important for me because it confers the advantages to all the units in the group, contrary to artifact lore that is only beneficial to the leader.

4. Artifact lore if artifacts were found or leadership again if allowed.

5. If the map is large and does not contain enough magical items, pathfinding is a must. In any case, I choose it at a moment or another because the speed of traveling is really important (specially when trying to capture enemy towns and still be out of reach of thieves).

6. Arcane knowledge compensates the difficulties of traveling and I didn't consider it at first absolutely necessary until I discovered an original use for it and changed my mind. With the tomes of elemental protection against the first attack in a fight we also have total immunity against those attacks on the adventuring map! This allows to travel in the lands of the enemies with the corresponding tomes and to laugh of their vain spellcastings. Beware still that some factions have damage spells from different types of magic (Legions of the Damned for example). Only the undead magic is not concerned and this makes the Undead Hordes more dangerous that they actually are. The only equivalent spell is a level 5 spell of the Empire.

7. Might in any case, even the sorcerer.

In some cases the special abilities related to a Lord are a plus, like natural armor for the knight (+20 armor), precision for the guildmaster (perfect for the baroness and the banshee that can get 90% of precision!), swift for the mage that gets 60 of initiative and casts his spells before the opponent.

-PACIFIST