Splinterlands Card Feature: Armoursmith
Today is an incredibly rare double posting day for me as I had completely forgotten about the Splinterlands Card feature that I had wanted to write about. So, here is a second post for the day... something that is unlikely to happen for quite a while!
First up... let me say that we need address the problem of how to spell Armor... it really needs a "u" and for any non-native English writers, this is the way that you should write it! Armour... (yes, it does drive be incredibly nuts to have keep writing center instead of centre every time I write a post in markdown...).
So, with all of that out of the way... the Armoursmith is one of these "must-have" cards. At an incredibly cheap 2 mana in deployment costs, he is a great match for the Armour-heavy Life Splinter. The default Alpha/Beta Summoner gives everyone on your team a single armour point buff and this means that all unboosted Physical/Ranged attacks will be wasted on defeating that single point of armour!
As any experienced player will tell you, survivability is one of the keys to winning, and the combination of Healing and Armour repair makes for a team that is hard to kill... staying alive long enough to whittle down the opponent's monsters.
In fact, I make it a habit to include the Amoursmith on every Life splinter team except when the battle conditions (Silenced Summoner or No Armour) makes him useless. Even then, I'm likely to just include him out of habit and finger memory! Although his mana cost is only 2 which makes him cheap from that perspective, he does take up a scarce battle slot as well... which when you include a healer monster, you have only four potential damage dealing slots... of which one is likely to go to a Lord Arianthus!
Featured Battle
In this featured battle, I'm showcases the Armoursmith's alternate use as a "healer" when the Healing skill is forbidden due to the battle condition.... interestingly enough, it appears that my opponent is also making use of the same skills... but with a less effective formation.
So, the principal battle condition in this case for me was the No Healing condition... which meant that the survivability of the monsters depended highly on the Armour ratings. Taking a quick glance at the opponent's line up, it appears that he has prioritised the Reverse Speed condition to field a slow but heavy hitter in the tank slot.
In my first position, is the Silvershield Paladin... A pretty decent tank with the damage reduction and Magic Reflection skills, he(?) also has a high Armour rating which is boosted to 5 points with the Summoner skill. This should stand him in good stead with the Armoursmith regenerating his armour over the course of the battle to stand in for real "healing".
Second position is the Divine Sorceress... with Magic damage to try and get around hitting directly at armour (I always suspect that the enemy is going to play a similar armour regeneration tactic in No Healing mathces). The additional Divine shield skill is just another aspect of prioritising survival over damage.
Of course, the rest of the line up contains the all important Armoursmith... and then I'm starting to run low on mana, so I have a Silvershield Archer to round out the damage dealing part of the formation... and the Furious Chicken... because I have a slot free... and I don't want to get hit too quickly from the rear.
As expected, much of the damage from the enemy team is waste on the armour of the Silvershield Paladin... and to make matters worse for them, it is all physical damage which is reduced by the Shield skill. The Halfling Alchemist's skill of damage halving is a bit annoying, but the Silvershield Paladin wasn't ever supposed to be the damage dealer... just a damage sponge!
An enraged Clay Golem does look pretty scary with the 5 damage attack, but then I have so much armour (and the damage reducing Shield) to just siphon off the damage. Luckily for me, the enemy Silvershield Archer has gone after my Divine Sorceress, which means that my own Silvershield Archers will take out their counterparts in short order!... and move on to the Halfling Alchemist (who isn't actually hurting the Silvershield Paladin!).
This ends up being a painfully slow game... with my Silvershield Paladin absorbing all the physical damage into armour despite the scarily high damage of the enraged Clay Golem.... which allows the Divine Sorceress and the Silvershield Archers to slowly (and I REALLY MEAN slowly...) whittle away at the enemy team.
Conclusion
Armour is one of those slightly risky plays... if the enemy team is magic focused, then you are a bit stuffed!... that said, in the right situation, an armour heavy team can give you enough survivability to let your damage dealers slowly deal the death by a thousand cuts.
In games where there is NO HEALING... the Armoursmith can act as a "healer", as the Armour stat is the only attribute that can regenerate in these conditions. The mana cost of the Armoursmith is minimal compared to the support power that he provides to an armour heavy team with the true cost coming in the form of a used battle slot.
However, in this particular featured battle, the mana limit was very low anyway... which means that the Armoursmith has even more of an outsized influence on the outcome as I wasn't able to fill the entire battle roster anyway!
Splinterlands (aka the best blockchain game out there!)
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