Most useless spells?

[Delterius]

Don't call it the Deck of Many Things. That sounds too wonderful. Call it the Cursed Set of Ironic Misfortune. Maybe then the little shits will be slightly more respectful of the powers that be (yours).

 

[octavius]

Death Blossom in Might&Magic 6 is really underwhelming, especially compared to Meteor Shower and Starburst. Or is there some special technique involved in using the spell?

 

[Severian Silk]

The Ultima series intentionally included spells that were cool but functionally useless, such as this one: http://wiki.ultimacodex.com/wiki/Eclipse

Not to mention the famous Armaggedon: http://wiki.ultimacodex.com/wiki/Armageddon

But I guess that's not quite the same thing.

If a little more work had been done with NPC schedules, and if the game had relied on them a bit more, some of the useless spells could have been very interesting. Like the rain spell in Ultima 7 or even the fireworks spell. The magic lock spell too was pretty useless, though it didn't need to be so. If the game calculated safe/unsafe areas dynamically, or if the NPC schedules were actually simulated, it could have been a pretty cool spell.

Early versions of the game *did* have a lot of stuff simulated like this. They were taken out due to hardware limitations. PM me I can send you the source code.

 

[Mr. Pink]

Seek Guidance miracle in Souls series. If I wanted to refresh messages I could just reload the game.

 

[MilesBeyond]

Since this thread has been necro'd and I've been playing the crap out of HoMM 3 lately, let's talk HoMM 3. Holy hell. Despite being one of the best strategy games out there, it has abysmal spell balance. You've got a good chunk of useless spells, then an even bigger chunk of spells that could be useful if they weren't completely outclassed by other spells.

Ironically, almost every level one spell is pretty solid and will remain useful throughout the entire game so long as you've got that school as a skill. The Protection spells are the only exception. But once you get into levels 2 and 3, man you get some stinkers.

Disguise
Disrupting Ray
Fortune
Remove Obstacle
Precision
Weakness
Hypnotize
Misfortune
Mirth

And that's being super generous. There's a lot of very very niche, battlefield control spells like Forcefield, Landmines, Fire Wall, etc that could easily go on that list too.

Level 4 gets a bit better, but you still have some super niche spells: Fire Shield, Frenzy (great for nuking an enemy's defense if you really really need to), Slayer, and Sorrow. Then at level 5 you've got the aforementioned Magic Mirror, the very niche Sacrifice, and the IMHO very underwhelming summon spells (though I know those have their fans).

And then on top of that, most of the semi-useless spells are regularly outshone by a few standouts. Meteor Swarm will almost always be much better than Inferno, for example. And then, of course, there's the fact that army size often scales faster than spell power can keep up, which means the longer the game goes, the weaker direct damage spells become, and the stronger unit buffs and debuffs get.

And to me, the really funny thing is that spell probabilities don't take this into account. So not only is Hypnotize an incredibly useless spell, it's also one that will almost never show up. Which is a good thing, really, but I think it's funny that the spell has literally nothing going for it.

 

[Nathaniel3W]

Who leaked the Ultima 7 source code? I started the series with 6 and loved it. 7 was good too. But the series really ended poorly with 8 and 9. I hated 9. It was awful. Full of bugs--gamestopping bugs even. I escaped from the puzzle dungeon by stacking up everything in my inventory to make a set of stairs to bypass the puzzles. I didn't even learn how to cast spells until I looked it up on the internet. By then I think I had opened up maybe six or seven circles of magic. And you end up romantically involved with that backstabber Raven whether you want to or not. I was thinking "If it were up to me I would have left her in that dungeon."

And just for a moment let's recognize that we're griping about games that came out in 1999. (Ultima IX and Heroes of Might and Magic III were both released that year.) That was 18 years ago. We hold some long grudges.

 

[MilesBeyond]

And just for a moment let's recognize that we're griping about games that came out in 1999. (Ultima IX and Heroes of Might and Magic III were both released that year.) That was 18 years ago. We hold some long grudges.

I mean there's a reason for that though. We're griping about HoMM 3 because it's such a fantastic game that it still gets a ton of playtime among most strategy fans nearly twenty years later, so it's still kinda relevant. And we're griping about Ultima 9 because it's one of the most legendarily awful RPGs ever made, singlehandedly killing the genre's most venerable series. It's like the RPG version of Phantom Menace.