Talk:Nature Magic/@comment-686000-20150330042412

This spell school suffered greatly with the modded version nerfs (sprites no longer gain shooter upgrades).

Still, nature magic is all about synergy (eg. elven subtypes for shooter/mana/casting upgrades and fey for XP/mana/casting upgrades make better druids/rangers) and versatility. Its main strength is the fact that all seemingly disparate nature magic spells fall under one school - so while a player who wants a hero that can summon, nuke, debuff AND heal units would need to invest skill points in as many as three different spell schools, a druid, ranger or wood elf hero can simply sink all those points into the nature magic school. It's main weakness is that most nature magic spells don't scale well past level 2 - note for example that the druid class, the nature magic caster, gets Guardian Oak (+5 XP per level to treants) and Elemental Lore (+10 XP per level to elementals) as skills to help it upgrade its summoned units, which are far more effective than extra levels in Summon Treant and Elementalism (unmodded game - note that you need to invest 10 extra skill points in the apprpriate school to increase the level of most spells). Call Lightning also scales very poorly compared to similar spells. The only spells that scale well with levels are Gemberry, Entangle and Shillelagh, which are combat spells (ideal for the ranger class).

On the flipside there are distinct advantages to nature magic spells peaking at level 2. For one thing this allows druid heroes to invest more points in Charisma, significantly increasing the range of spells like Gemberry, Call Lightning and Entangle (note that Intelligence does not increase the XP of summoned units anyway). The base damage of Call Lightning and its nigh-undodgeability, combined with increased casting range, is usually enough to discourage rushes against druid heroes while they work on summoning more treants/specific high level elementals (in the original game elementals also required 2-4 army points, so high Charisma was definitely nice to have). It also allows rangers to invest more points into strength (for combat) and dexterity. Note that rangers do NOT get Ferocity, which is extremely important for any non-caster combat hero. See "http://www.moddb.com/mods/warlords-battlecry-iii-the-fifth-horseman/tutorials/what-is-combat" for an explanation on the importance of the combat statistic.