Death benefit is a timeless Forsaken wastes theme that spans a multitude of races while incorporating various different runes in each. I would go so far as to say it is FW largest and most flexible theme available. Death benefit as a theme is very demanding with respect to timing and in my opinion is one of the best ways to learn how the FW full faction bonus works. Since I’ve been playing quite a lot of it as I take a break from my other decks I thought I’d open a discussion about it. Types of death benefit include damage / hp amp, nora gen, death nova, and death charge stacking. A list of prominent death benefit runes can be seen here: http://poxbase.com/deck/cu=c6c3qc8z...pctTc4Wco4ctYcuMs4Is4Os5fs8psQs5ds1Ls2_e2Be2J and http://poxbase.com/deck/r2hrmrvr1r8 Death AMP Damage and hp amp death benefit has been my favorite so far to use in combination with death charge stacking. It has a solid win condition and now amps well with humans and undead depending on what mix you use. Its major weaknesses of course are its speed, setup, and need for certain draws. Foul rite has proven to be a fun spell and much better at trimming the ramp up time after the patch. Vendetta is bit slower but offers the great combo nora gen and damage. I worry that Vendetta will be made useless later as Q/A has revealed displeasure towards hero equipment and powerful equipment in general. Stand out champions for damage amp on the human side are corruptor for his soul harvest, and elsarian reaper for his expensive but death 25% hp + attack damage. Undead super champs include Serkan, Ravenwriath and Essence Devourer. Serkan is very good with his equipment and makes a solid ranged super champ. Ravenwraith has all the abilities needed for an amp champ in melee. Souldrinker, vengeful, vaporize and 50% magic resist make her the total package when it comes to a melee super champ. Essence Devourer comes with Titan stats at a 50s nora cost and enables a steady churn of deaths from the graveyard. His guaranteed death churn as well as his stats and reach again make him a good champion to play with. Devourer faces some issues though. Essence devourers Achilles heel proves to be very costly. He’s basically tied to the hip by the relic Graveyard. So much so that his 50s cost should really be considered 100+. Graveyard is basically auto include along with Tome of Hate. 2 extra rune slots lost per devourer. His devour life abilities is very flavorful and useful ability but it also takes a very long time to pay out. A miss timed round or a loss of the devourer himself can prove extremely detrimental. Essence Devourer’s limited deck availability should be expanded somehow and it’s devour life should be made smoother/easier to track. DB amp decks in general feel to locked into graveyard /tome of hate for steady death churn. Nora Gen Nora gen DB feels behind. After all the buffs to nora gen in other factions I don’t feel the key rune that makes it happen, Death harvester, is cutting it anymore. Even after the reintroduction of nora globes to graveyard 14 nora every two rounds isn’t big. Especially considering the 60 nora investment for the bird, the 90 investment for the graveyards, the 45 nora for the tome and the sheer amount of rounds to get it going. Death harvester will also rarely ever hit it’s nora cap of 12 because most DB runes that constantly die are very cheap. Expensive runes will almost never be made to die for profit. Death Nova Death Novas seem overall reduced in availability. They were never that great to stack to begin with and now they just seem out there. At least bile zombie + corpse explosion is still a thing. More interactions like the void howler death nova or the elsarian siren possession with less suck would be cool. Death Charges Death Charge stacking is fun. I combine it with my current damage amp BG using stitched seamstress. Honestly I’m surprised there hasn’t been more talk about stitched seamstress. After the revamp they pretty much got propelled into undead cleric support role viability in my opinion. 3 flavors of aoes, a charged heal every turn and plenty of range to support from. You get two rolling with Essence Devourer churn and they become their own little unit offering 20 hp in heals each turn and 19 aoe damage after dots every 2 turns. Lichbone staff offers even more aoe. I wish here were more charge abilities and champs with death charged in FW. There’s a good production of the charges just nothing to really fill it out side healing or death knell. So that’s it for now. I’ll post the decks I’ve been playing around with later. What do you like about death benefit in its current state? What’s been bothering you about death benefit? Undead death Amp: http://www.poxbase.com/deck/C4mCoOCqlC9gCtTc9dC4WCo4S4IS4fS1LS5prTRmR1E2J Pretty much bunkers around despoil throwing revs, berserkers and death guards while their globes are swept up until bigger units are ready to push forward. elder + vamprism helps with the much needed healing serkan and devourer lack. Death guards are great body guards and make it very easy to push when devo and serkan get their stats in order. Slots that are swapped a lot are the throw bones in spells and the slot for forsaken follower. Throw bones it great for devo at 7 speed to give him 8 speed attack potential as well as the global heal going off often. I sub throw bones with repurpose, and lichbone frequently as I can't decide what I like the most. Forsaken follower is the newest test for my ranged slot. I have also tried rip witch and shade striker. Range in this bg is going to be an investment. There's no real way around it. The damage variation is nice though. Foul Rite: http://www.poxbase.com/deck/CfJCiNC9aCwaCqjCaBCaVco4s3gS4IS4OS7pS7DrTRmr1R1a Desecration is there for font reveal on shadow spawned relics. Corrupter and elsarian reaper are the big super champs because of their attack potential and effects. This deck bunkers around despoil again to continuously curse and amp ritual of ashes which procs a global heal from revel in misery. Don't need vampirism or dagger because of revel healing from each witch hit. Very good damage variation even from big hitters so soul reave is left out. Not much else to say about it. Looking to make it as efficient as possible but not much swaps out in this bg.
For a Death Charge BG with Ruubgaal, what would you split with? SL seems to have a plethora of Death Charged champs (The Doctor and Ritual Cultist fill similar roles to Seamstress, Negamage can either gimp your opponent's nora gen or use Eradicate for massive damage, and Netmaster gets okay ranged damage), so would you split with them, or with something that brought another kind of utility to the table?
I pretty much disagree with this entire paragraph. Devourer is only easiest kept up with using Graveyard. Summoned Skeletons, WotD spawns, Haunt spawns, Corps-a-pult corpses and the like do just fine keeping him fed. And Tome is just a solid include anyway, since it lets you scry and use Immortality/Scorn units with impunity. Devourer does however take a lot of finesse to use. If you have a hard time managing hp and potential hp of your units, he'll be eating things that you don't want eaten. The biggest problem is that the ability activates on the first turn dropped, which makes him quite literally an impossible first drop, unless you pair him up with something like Deathguard/Broken Bones. But then, in that case, you might as well consider his cost higher because you're doing extra to put him down. Devourer is a rune that needs to be played when the board is ready for him. Dropping him with a Graveyard might work, but only because it's the easiest way to do it, which also makes it the least efficient. Drop him after WotD procs or Haunt obliterates a relic, or your cheap meat summons have amassed to a point where it doesn't hurt to weed the flock, he becomes pretty darn efficient. This is still a work in progress; DB Test 1 Cheap Spam, and a plethora of answers for difficult threats (Double Shank, Double Sac/Altar), and ridiculous amounts of meat to throw on the board, just killing stuff, to feed that one lonely Devourer. -edit- damned if I know how to get the upgrades to stick... bulk of the champs in that list use some of the cheapest upgrade paths possible.
The quickest answer to that is 'not IS or KF,' as they don't have any death-charged units. Easiest answer would be SL, as they, surprisingly, have the most. You want to really mess with your opponent, make a Nora Hex hybrid. Double Stitched Librarians to feed off of cheap FW spells, Double Nega-mage to feed off things dying. Eventually, your opponent quite literally has no nora to do anything. This is hardly perfect, and I kind of just threw it together, but something like this I think would be a good starting point -edit- Bear in mind this is more an 'alternate wincon' type of deck. It's meant to stall and grind your opponent's nora gen down to nothing, while having relatively efficient answers for any threats they put on the board. Competitive? Probably not. Your biggest combat threat are the netmasters, though they still do a pretty decent job, methinks.
So as long as I can remember Devour life required a real champion to be sacrificed. I went ahead and tested a bunch of the new summoned and spawned state runes and was pleasantly surprised. He does work with a lot of the summoners, relics and spells. For someone who has to eat every other turn and the turn played I'm not to sure situational spells like Wake the dead, or Haunt that require opponent input to be cost effective can be listed as proper ways to feed him. Corpse pile and corpse catapult also serve different purposes and I can't see where they fall into something you want eaten. Corpse pile especially because the summoned unit has high base hp and is a swarm unit. Most these options also put your reserved meat in the line of fire when you want them safe for devouring. Thinking back to pre-revamp graveyard output around 25 nora in stats per skeleton so it pays for itself in 4 turns. The summoners at their current cost pay for themselves after about 9 turns of summoning. This puts graveyard up a bit still but options are certainly bigger than I though they were. The trade off being at least summoner can attack and support. I'm going to sub forsaken follower with rip witch to see how it plays out. As far as splits go I was interested in splitting with FS or ST for an unleashed memories power turn. FS being the better candidate as darkmarsh witch + salaman rook both death charge and steal nora ( nora thief + memories). Keeper of memories may be hard to make a workable split with yetis and FW. SL is interesting and I think there is something to be said for a mass mutation DB somewhere in there. I'm not sure about negation mage + librarian. My stitched seamstress ( death charge 3) get well over 150+ charges a game since I run double devourer death churn but even at that amount I'm not sure the negation mage build up is worth it. Especially at 1 charge a death. I also find spell spam counterproductive vs the champion spam you want to be doing to keep the kills going.
Haunting grip feels like it would be to high in nora cost to be a candidate for a spell spam rune. The turns to come off of CD would also becomes problematic. You would want spells in the 20-30 nora range to ease the cost and the turn wait time. I believe it's 5 turns at 30 nora or under. I haven't looked nearly long enough into negation deck to think of which spells could fit the bill and still keep the death benefit going. Honestly a FW /FS split with darkmarsh witch and salaman rook would probably be more feasible except it would have more upfront investment. You could come to the point that 2 rooks and 2 witches could be stealing a total of 60+ nora every 4 turns at minimum.
'spamming' WtD and Haunt should be fine. And with Haunt, it's more a matter of using your Banner offensively instead of just planting it in a far shrine. 50n for some relatively subpar minions seems inefficient until you realize your opponent has to work around the DMZ you just created, and if they want to get rid of the shades, they have to pump AP into them. All the while providing tasty little morsels for your Devourer. Corpse Pile obviously isn't a relic you want to try using to feed Devourer. Just on the chance of proc'ing zombie plague alone do you want to make sure you don't feed infected zombies to him. There is no way I'd ever suggest that. I just know there are better ways to feed Bumble that actually give you pressure on the front line. (And in case things get out of hand, you just feed Bumble to a High Warlock. Ravish = Insurance)
I've been playing a variety of decks since my last post. Outside of my Fw/X split projects I've comeback 2 my 2 death amp decks from time to time. While summons and spawns can keep the devourer going they skip all of the benefits deaths yield from real champions outside of death charges. Mainly damage and nora benefits. I was wrong about summon efficiency as well as it looks like they were 3 turns per summon and not 2. To keep one devourer fed that leads to 120 nora or so deployed in 2 summoning units and 9 turns in summoning to get their cost back. Padding sacrifices through spells or relics adds a lot of dangerous variables and inefficiencies long term. DB in general seems owned by humans more than undead in it's current state. Humans amp twice as fast, they heal better, have better reach, access to every FW debuff and damage variation. Not mention the ever present boon of flight and 7-8 speed. Whenever I played my undead death amp I would ask myself why play a deck with 2 or 3 strong champions when humans can make every unit strong at the same time at less cost and setup. It's an odd sticking point because I have become as fond of Essence Devourer as I have of bladed corpse and abomination but with the lack of death charge depth I find it hard to justify him. There's some neat things to be done with summons spells in splits to get around his upkeep but I don't think that's something I feel like pursuing. I'll keep flipping my undead DB until I'm satisfied I guess but amp seems out of the question.
Death Harvester cap is at ->7<- not 12, it is a 12% cut of cost. You get the max refund at 59 nora. Decks do not have trouble hitting that. Nora Generation is not a problem for FW at the moment; so long as you are willing to use it properly, it pulls its weight and more.
At first I thought this was another FW guide in its "becoming" stages. Then I noticed, 'my, much more input does this one have'. And then I noticed that it wasn't as much of a guide as it was more of an opinion, an input, an experience, an inquisition for discussion. Understandable. Thus the replies. That being said, for what its worth, nobody said your experience wasn't valid. Though some clearly disagree with it, I myself understand where you are coming from, particularly when it comes to the massive expense of building up the graveyard engine. And thus is why I recommend finding better alternatives to those graveyards. Every slot in your bg is a golden seed of opportunity that is flat-out WASTED (no pun intended) if what you have in that slot isn't exactly up to par with what you need to be doing during a game, DON'T use that sucker. There are many options in our faction, and regardless of theme, this decision making must be done to survive. Because let's be honest, full game balance isn't going to happen today or tomorrow. You have to basically adapt to the powerlevels and meta play to compete and win consistently, and that's for EVERY period of poxnora, no matter the expansion or the company in charge, full game balance was never a thing, nor was it ever really accomplished. Argue it all you want, it's fact. To say otherwise would be like arguing that life on planet Earth is/was at some point balanced for everybody and everyone's happy- no it's Firking not, and its never had a period of what we would consider complete, utter, uninterrupted peace. So what I'm suggesting for you is to look into Death Benefit options that would seem like better candidates than the two graveyards. And to run all of those things purely on the basis of a nora engine is cluttered to begin with. Once again, every slot is precious. Like a baby. Otherwise you will come to the conclusion that other factions have better options than you, simply because you weren't running as efficient of a bg as you could have been, while your opponent most likely was- otherwise they wouldn't seem op. And while there's never been complete across the board peace for all, in this game nor on this planet, that doesn't mean there isn't peace to be found across the board. You have to FIND it is the point. And the best place to look is right where-the-Firk you are. Look within (your faction). The answers are always there. That's what I firmly believe and it does indeed bear fruit on this game. That belief translates into zealously playing this particular faction, and dealing with whatever OP Bane Shift other people throw at me, and even my meta bg have a large amount of DB involvement, but much less clunky, and more nora generating oriented, no vengeful damage boosting. I find giving my champions reasons to mourn their deaths goes against my principles. So I let them do their jobs, and die as they should, and then redeploy them. I don't even run Serkan's equip. Hardly ever. It's simply not worth the slot unless you're running SPECIFIC things, and even then its a matter of option. Thanks everyone, that's my let's play. "Adapt with the bull Bane Shift" "Poxnora", episode 3,461. Like, comment, and subscribe. Next week we'll have episode 3,462 where I will make ten pages of explanations worth peer-reviews in a professional environment with the exception my tendency to cuss about other varying topics.
