Potential is pretty much a wasted skill point as it is now.

It's not even really worthwhile then, because you're only going to be fractions of a level ahead of where you would be until you reach level 20 (21 with Potential), at which point you'll start to be 1.X levels ahead; you won't get a second full level ahead in a normal game, since that second full level comes at level 41 (43 with Potential). Since most spells don't scale with level, and those that do are 2 damage per level or less, the damage bonus is rather negligible, especially since you'll fall behind in the Evoker line relative to where you 'should' be. Knowledge, on the other hand, gets you a full level ahead at level 12 (13 with Knowledge), and the second full level comes at level 25 (27 with Knowledge); Knowledge and Potential combined get you an extra level at level 11 (12 with the traits), and another full level at level 16 (18 with the traits), and gets its third full level ahead at level 24 (26 with the traits; this is the first extra real trait). This is assuming that you take the bonus traits at as low a level as possible and don't have any other experience boosters. Regardless, I still think that by the time the damage per level spells are worth casting, the extra 1 or 2 damage (plus bonuses from as much of the Evoker tree as you have, and any items that you have) isn't really worthwhile.

My advice, if you do have other experience boosters, is to use them, and if you have access to Knowledge you can take that because it's a large enough bonus to be useful; Potential, on the other hand, is best replaced by other bonuses rather than complemented by them (unless you have, say, a 10% bonus from an item and add Potential to that, which makes it look kind of like you have Knowledge; if you have at least a 25% bonus to experience, then Potential's bonus is too small to really matter - going from a 25% bonus to a 40% bonus gets you an extra level one level earlier, and might get you a second extra level if you're focusing on only a few champions, judging by how the three champions I generally use in games tend to stall in their low- to mid-teen levels; if you're really focused on getting a single champion up to astronomical levels, then stacking any experience bonus you can will help, but I don't think it's worthwhile for champions being used for a more normal army leadership role).

What about in combination with Altarian Henchman stacks? If you design an Altarian sov with air (+10% from blood) with General (+25%), take Potential (+15%), and then take the various training Commander perks (+10% each), cast Tutelage (+25%) then design henchmen with the Unit Potential pick (+25%, +10% for Altar), cast Tutelage on each (+25%) and take Potential (+15%) as first perk, does that create a feedback effect that is worthwhile?  I know that that used to be very powerful in FE, though it's not quite as easy to spam henchmen in LH.

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OP modded Potential to 50% and it wasn't overpowered then, he said it resulted in the Sov to make the lost skill up at level 11.  That's not early, that's kinda mid game / early and maybe a good use of skills.  

The problem, if it is a problem, is the mage getting knowledge (25%) and combining with Potential when Mage skills can be more powerful on a per level basis.  Mages are already powerful and don't need buffing compared to say Defender.

You can't really take the Potential trait away from Mages without changing the way that the General Traits tree works. It's certainly possible to make trait choices mutually exclusive, but it isn't done in the base game for any set of traits aside from the class you choose.

Additionally, Rescue would be practically useless for a mage - the only particularly valuable use would be to get the mage out of melee range, but if the Mage is in melee range with an enemy in the first place, that probably means that I either cannot control the lines or my front line has already been broken, which means that switching my Mage with another one of my own units is likely to be, at best, a temporary solution to the problem. Besides which, there are better abilities for repositioning a Mage (see Thunderstrike), and most of the time my Mage is already one of the units furthest from the enemy anyways - and since Mages in this game don't belong in the tank line except perhaps in the leather-and-basic-weapons-or-earlier stages of the game, there's little good reason to even have the Rescue ability.

I've said it before, but in my opinion by the time the Potential trait has bought you enough of a lead for this to have a real impact, the actual effect is negligible. Early-game, you're not likely to have the mana (or possibly the traits) that allow the use of the spells that have per-level effects, and you're likely to be of a low enough level that the Fire Damage you can do with Flame Dart isn't really superior to the damage you can do just by hitting the target with the sharp rock you're carrying. By the time you do have enough mana to be reasonably able to afford casting these spells, you're likely also a high enough level that the extra bit from the per-level component is more or less worthless - I'm not particularly likely to notice a significant difference between a level 10 Mage casting Flame Dart and a level 11 Mage casting the same spell, especially if one of them has one more level into Evoker than the other (we're talking less than 2 points difference on the max damage if the level 10 Mage has 1 more rank in Evoker than the level 11 Mage - in the level 10 Mage's favor, at that - and less than 4 points difference on the maximum damage if the two Mages invested equally into Evoker, this time in the level 11 Mage's favor). Maybe this seems like a lot, but remember that a level 10 or 11 Mage is able to do 20 or 22 maximum damage before Evoker bonuses; with full Evoker bonuses that goes up to 36 or 39.6. This is at most a 10% difference, which while nice isn't particularly great; casting something like Flame Dart additionally isn't really worth doing much before level 10 because the damage isn't significantly better than what you'd be getting by using a weapon you found in loot, except as a finisher or to keep a low-level champion away from the front lines but still contributing (slightly) to the battle, or to damage something you couldn't otherwise touch (like a banshee, or a high-defense monster - but if you're low-level you probably should stay away from high-defense monsters if you don't have a good supporting group). As the level of the champions involved gets higher, the relative difference caused by being one level ahead gets lower; as the level of the champions involved gets lower, the relative difference caused by having one extra level gets higher, but the actual value of the spell gets lower. Beyond that, it's simply unreasonable to expect a champion to have much more than a one or two level advantage over a champion without Potential/Knowledge who was given the same experience opportunities - Knowledge Mages get their first full-level advantage at level 12, but don't get the second until the mid-twenties; Knowledge-Potential Mages get their first full-level advantage at level 11, and a second full level advantage at level 16, but at that point they'll have the same number of real traits as the Mage who didn't take Knowledge and Potential, which means that aside from a few spells that have level-based damage bonuses (and level 16 vs level 18 makes that a 12.5% bonus, if they've invested equal ranks in Evoker, which doesn't matter much when your maximum damage before Evoker was already over 30, and with it should be pushing towards 60 if you're a damage Mage); Potential-only units won't get the full level advantage until level 20, by which point a single level advantage has long since ceased to matter for most practical purposes (if you're excited about a 5% damage bonus from being level 21 instead of level 20, I'd point out to you that, depending on what you're facing and what difficulty you're playing at, a level 20 Evoker IV Mage casting Flame Dart ought to be able to kill or nearly kill just about any individual target on the field, with up to 80 Fire Damage (plus bonuses from Fire Shards) per cast, and probably has enough spell mastery that virtually every target fails the resistance check).

In my case it's because I don't really feel it's worth the effort to really try to level up champions past the mid-teens or so - they don't really get much more powerful, taking them past that point requires enormous amounts of experience which could probably be better used to bring a lower-level champion up to a usable level (it takes as much experience to move a champion from level 15 to level 16 as it takes to bring a level 1 champion up to level 8; while I might not have a direct use for a level 8 champion, a level 8 Commander with some of the Administrator/Lore Master/Merchant traits and a level 15 champion commanding my main army is much more valuable to me than a level 1 champion giving a 5% unrest reduction and a level 16 champion who isn't noticeably more powerful than they were at level 15; for that matter, I could also use that same amount of experience to advance two level 10 champions up to level 11, which is a more noticeable increase in individual strength than going from level 15 to level 16 and which is still at the stage where the increase is reasonably useful to me if the champions in question are commanding armies).

@Joeball - I meant Knowledge, not Potential.  The one that mages get that others don't.  That should be tradeable just fine for Rescue which Defenders get that others don't.  BTW, it's nice that you tried to give a thorough analysis of how rescue would possibly play out on a mage, but you are kinda missing the point that you yourself are making.  Mages are strong enough as it is, they don't really need to be any stronger.  If they can't optimally use rescue, oh well.  Not like defender can optimally use half its' abilities anyway.  Who cares if a mage has 1 ability that is hard to use optimally.

They increased the casting times on all the powerful damage spells. That's why a (damage) mage needs the -1 now, and needs to take 3 passive traits to get there. I would call that a nerf. They also nerfed the Warlock profession from +50% to +25% damage. So the gap hasn't widened.

Still, the Defender and Warrior could use some buffs. Too many minor passive traits (mainly Defender) and too many useless traits (Warrior). But that's something for another thread.

Warrior has the most useful stuff before you start to run into having to take stuff that isn't useful.  

I've never found anything I like about Defenders at all.

Unless there was a bug, the defense bonuses were only in effect while defending in FE. So no, it wasn't a trait that gave Defenders the ability to stay with poor armor longer.

I think Mages gained hugely from multiclassing to Defender in FE - consider that by level 10 an extra +2 health per level meant that you had ~50% more health than you normally would have. It also gave you an extra 20 weight capacity, which meant that you could ignore picking up Strength or hoping for a backpack if you wanted your Mage to wear anything heavier than leather and still have a decent initiative level. That the other classes gained more from multiclasses doesn't mean that Mages gained next to nothing from it.

Mages also gained a decent amount from multiclassing to Assassin, because damage spells could get critical hits and an Assassin/Mage could have a reasonably high likelihood of attaining a critical. You think Horrific Wail from a level 15 Mage is good? Try Horrific Wail from a level 15 Assassin/Mage when ~half the targets suffer critical hits - even high-level late game units have trouble surviving that.

This isn't to say that other classes didn't lose out more when multiclassing was dropped.

Mages already have abilities which are "hard to use optimally" - see: the entire Fire branch of the summoning tree, which summons things which are either too weak for where they are in the tree or way too expensive to call. Also see anything that isn't Evoker or Prodigy or Savant in the damage side of the tree.

Also, let's consider what Knowledge would buy a Defender - after gaining the experience required for a normal champion to attain level 12, you're actually level 13 and have as many real traits as that level 12 normal champion. This means you have a whole 3 health, 1 accuracy, 1 spell resistance, and 1 spell mastery more than that champion. You might have an extra 1 or 2 damage, if you found one of the rare weapons with a damage per level bonus. At lower levels, you're effectively weaker than the level 12 normal champions, and you don't really gain too much more from continuing to level up - you've probably taken almost everything you wanted out of the Defense side of the trait tree by now, and the Spell Resistance line tends to have too little use for the passive bonuses to really be worthwhile even though some of the active abilities might be nice. Some traits from the General tree might be useful, especially if there's a decent Magic tree to go up, but for the most part a Defender (or Warrior, or Assassin, or Commander) champion is complete by the early teen levels. Warriors and Defenders start strong, but their most useful traits are mostly low in the tree, and you've probably obtained the others by the time your champion gets to the mid-teens, which means there isn't much point in advancing them past that point. Knowledge, however, is only just starting to pay off by the mid-teen levels - just when your Warriors and Defenders don't really need to level up any more (Assassins are a bit of a special case, since they kind of need everything out of all three main branches of their entire tree, unlike any other class in the game).

Let's compare this to what Mages have - by the early teen levels, Mages probably have more or less everything out of the side of their tree that they decided to specialize in, or they have access to the higher levels of their spellbooks, or they can have, say, Evoker II and Blizzard (note that this is an example, and I haven't checked the game to see exactly what you could get - this is purely for comparison purposes). So with Mages there's an actual benefit to continuing to level up at least a little more. And unlike Defenders, Warriors, and Assassins, the primary attack of a Mage (the spells that the Mage can cast) have a defense mechanism that scales with the level of the defending unit - which means that unlike the level bonus to accuracy, the level bonus to Spell Mastery is actually useful (and yes, I acknowledge that there are some cases where the level bonus to accuracy is actually useful - but it's much more of an edge case than those where the level bonus to Spell Mastery is useful for a spell caster).

I disagree that Trainer was the best trait line for Defenders - three or four levels put into traits that give a 10% experience bonus per trait, which aren't likely to come until you've attained a level where the additional experience isn't likely to gain you any more levels any time soon, and which still isn't sufficient to overcome the penalty for stacking champions? No thanks. And if you're using Trainer to make the regular troops stronger, you've essentially made it so that your troops will outshine your Defender in all but a few cases - troop health grows far faster than Defender health ever grew (even the average three-figure unit gets 6 health per level and at level 1 has 24 health - a base health of 6 and 2 health per level, all multiplied by the figure count, before any other bonuses - and even in FE where the Endurance traits each gave +1 health per level a Defender couldn't have any more than 8 health per level, which is equal to the average four-figure unit's health-per-level bonus), troop armor is probably on par with champion armor, and troop damage is at least on par with champion damage unless you get a really good weapon. Taking Trainer essentially amounted to "I know that the troops are superior to the champion I chose to play with, so I'll get a few levels on them so that they can outshine me (a Defender) at the one thing I'm supposed to shine at - tanking".

This is incorrect. In FE, the Evoker traits were +25% spell damage per level, though there were only three of them; on top of that, Warlock was +50%, and Path of the Mage granted an additional +50% spell damage. I may be bad at math, but it would seem to me that a +175% bonus to all damage spells clearly outshines the +105% bonus to all damage spells; moreover, FE champions and LH champions don't seem to progress at significantly different rates (if anything, the LH champions seem to progress a bit more slowly). The only real difference between the games, as far as mage champion spell damage goes, is that in LH you can guarantee that you have a certain amount of bonus to your spell damage by a certain level, whereas in FE you only have a probability of having a certain amount of bonus (excepting Warlock, which you either do or do not have from level 1; FE Warlocks or non-Warlock Mages are additionally on par with LH Warlock Mages with Evoker I even if the FE Warlock isn't a Mage and the FE non-Warlock Mage has no Evoker traits, an FE non-Warlock Mage with Evoker I is on par with an LH non-Warlock Mage with Evoker IV or an LH Warlock with Evoker II or III, and an FE Warlock Mage without any Evoker traits is on par with an LH Warlock with Evoker IV and clearly superior to an LH non-Warlock Mage with Evoker IV).

In short, Mages didn't lose "just a few percentage points", they lost about one-third of their damage potential. In exchange, you can now more easily guarantee that they'll have a certain damage bonus by a certain level - but it falls far short of FE's +100% spell damage bonus on a level 4 Warlock-Mage, which is comparable to LH's +105% spell damage bonus on a level 9 or so Warlock-Mage; moreover, FE's level 4 Warlock-Mage can continue to gain additional damage bonuses, while LH's level 9-ish Warlock-Mage has capped their damage bonus for anything but Fire spells (which can get an additional 20%, for a 125% bonus, which the level 4 Warlock-Mage can potentially match at level 5 if you get offered Evoker at that level up - and the FE Warlock-Mage is still better off since they have the 125% bonus to all damage spells, not just Fire damage spells). And Mages in LH certainly are not comparable in their damage potential to Mages in FE unless there was a spell damage buff between FE and LH (and it's only really Defenders who had significant health nerf, so there isn't an argument for relative damage potentials either).

What it means depends heavily on what level your caster is, what spells you have available, and what shards you have. A fireball without any Fire Shards isn't going to kill large units, particularly if they have a few levels on them, even with a 125% damage bonus unless it gets a critical hit, and a Flame Dart from a low-level caster isn't likely to be worth casting unless you have lots of Fire Shards. The loss of the early large bonus makes much more difference than the lower potential maximum - a Flame Dart with a 50-100% damage bonus by level 4 is competitive with the kinds of weapons you can expect to get at around that point in the game (assuming it's your sovereign or an early champion that we're talking about) and might be worth casting, but with a 0-25% damage bonus is about as bad as a dagger, while a level 20 Mage casting Flame Dart doesn't really care if the damage boost is 100% or 1000%. Yes, I focused on the later bonuses where it doesn't matter as much - but Mages as damage spellcasters were nerfed pretty heavily at the lower levels, while the other classes as whatever their class focuses on are still fairly similar to how they were in FE. FE Mages are guaranteed a 50% damage bonus at level 4, LH Mages can only have a 20% damage bonus by level 5, at which point the FE Mage could potentially have a 75% damage bonus; this amounts to taking away roughly 1/4 to 1/2 of the power of a damage Mage at low levels, with the result that low-level mages are either support casters or warrior-type units, if they're to play a role in any battles.

I tend to think that if they really decide to redo the Defender and Warrior trees, it should be more along the path of merging the two classes - send the Defender's Army Support abilities off to the Commander, and stick the other abilities in the Warrior and Assassin classes where appropriate, and we suddenly gain a melee class that can be specialized into a more defensive or a more offensive role, and then create a class that's actually specialized for ranged combat to replace it, or create a second magic class. This is because I feel that a large part of the problem with the Warrior/Assassin/Defender classes is that they are all made for essentially the same role, and so we ended up with bits and pieces that don't really fit in properly, or that overlap heavily between the classes. Then, to flesh out the trait trees they added some filler abilities (Assassin Precision is one example - how often do you go "I really need more accuracy on my champion"?), made some traits into trait lines when the bonus is only really useful if you have all of it (Assassin dodge traits are a good example - most champions don't start with enough dodge to make a single trait of +4 or +5 dodge particularly useful, so you're stuck getting all of the dodge traits, including the one that grants dodge per level so that the level accuracy bonus doesn't make the other dodge traits you picked into even more of a waste), or stuck in some abilities that don't really fit the class (Defender army bonuses - the Defender is a tank warrior, and most of the Defender tree is made for making the Defender into a tank; then, at the end of the tree you have these army bonuses tacked on. Granted, they're an extension of what that particular branch of the tree does to cover the rest of the army, but was the Commander really so overflowing with traits that would apply to army command that they really needed to be stuck in a different class to fit in the game?).

I tend to agree here, though I think that Knowledge is in a mostly reasonable spot - Knowledge pays off soon enough that it can be worth getting, but the bonus isn't so overwhelmingly useful that I'd always take Knowledge. Summon/blessing casters have little need of the extra level or so that Knowledge can give you, and there is a bit of a trade-off for the curse casters since base-game curses don't scale with level and Prodigy traits are a far more immediate benefit to their strength than Knowledge is (even allowing for Brilliant), but I don't think the trade-off is really there for damage mages - they wouldn't really come into their own until they got to about the point Knowledge starts paying off, anyways, so they might as well take it.

the way you describe it, you played a very specific strategy in FE. playing with altar henchmen you can basically still play like this if you really want. one of the core changes of LH was to tone down hero levels and at the same time make hero development more predictable by removing the randomized trait options, so i think the removal of your preferred playstyle wasn't really a defender nerf but more of a general shift in game mechanics that hit defenders mostly because they happened to be the class that worked best for a hero stack of doom.

to be perfectly honest, i tried a strategy like that once. of course it worked very well, but it was plain obvious that it was based on broken mechanics and completely overpowered. i think removing this kind of sillyness from the game was a good move. 

i personally find defenders in LH more balanced and overall still very useful. in fact, i'd say that of all  5 classes, defender is probably the one i use most often. i have finished whole games without warriors, mages, assassins or commanders, but i can't really play the game without a good old defender, they shine in the early game and lose some of their greatness over time simply because armies of trained soldiers catch up and at some point they are tough enough to stand toe to toe with most monsters, so the defenders only true advantage in the later stages of the game is against specific mobs like dragons or elemental lords with nasty anti-group abilities like overpower and firebreath.

i disagree that the class is too weak. thanks to the trait trees (as opposed to the random trait selection in FE) you are now guaranteed to get the really important traits right at the start. namely the defense traits followed by the bonus health and armor proficiency. the other traits are really just fluff - nice to have but not required to get the job done. they may not be as tough as high level defenders in FE (mainly due to the reduced HP/level and removal of the related traits), but they are easily tough enough to make a big difference when it counts the most (early/mid game when monsters are still challenging)