The problem is that it stresses the single minded (at loophole exploitation) over the actually powerful.
In other words, a powerful single minded magic hero should be powerful because they have a high ability value, not due to a quirk of the game system and a set of feats with a great deal of overlap.
Hero Wars game balance is among the simples to maintain of any game - make abilities of roughly equal value, and the game is balanced. Its that simple. Affinities and such have a high value because they are more useful, so people will tend to put more points into them - the end effect is to maintain affinities at roughly equal to other abilities.
This multiple augments thing throws that for an utter loop. Its a distortion in the wrong way.
Put it this way - when heroes clash, do you really think the contest should be determined by which one gets an extra round of augmentation?
> Which seems to me to be a good thing, even if it might
>have some real game-balance implications.
Its subtly wrong. But still wrong.
>
>It is no more or less unbalancing than the cumulative effects of
>spirit fetishes/integrated spirits, some of which don't even require
>the hero to be exploiting a major tactical advantage.
Spirit fetishes and integrated spirits are raised separately - its not an analogous case.
Having lots of abilities that can augment is not much of a problem if they are raised separately - raising abilities in order to use them to augment is not an efficient strategy. Having a single ability that can augment multiple times is another kettle of fish entirely.
>It does tend to mean the the best fighter in the land could still get
>badly beaten if they are tactically incompetent - whether that is a
>bad thing depends on taste.
Its advantage is large enough that it reduces 'tactical competence' to a single variable (rounds of prep) once affinities get high enough. Which is a pretty unusual taste.
Cheers David
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