Hello Professors, When I use the Heck Hound Card (now graciously part of my learned spells) it erases any and all pips I have. Why is that? It's quite annoying and it's not an attractive feature of using this spell. Helpful as this spell is, I tend not to use it as much because it keeps eating all of my pips. Do all the cards with an "X" on the top left corner of the card (place where the amount of pips used to cast this spell is) do this? If so, why?
Yes, all the cards with "X" as the pip count are per-pip spells. That means they take all the pips you have, and the more pips you have the stronger they are. Look at your Heck Hound card: it says how much damage per pip it will do. If you have two pips, it does twice that much. If you have six pips, it does six times as much damage.
The beauty of these spells is you choose how strong they will be by how many turns you build pips before using them. As a balance wizard, I have a per-pip spell called Judgement. I can cast it with one pip for 100 points (plus my gear boosts) or save up as many as seven power pips for 1400 points of damage (plus however many boosts I can place while saving pips). Dryad is another example; it does more healing the more pips you put into it.
If you want to use a per-pip spell but don't want it to use as many pips as you have, cast another spell first that uses up some of them and then cast the per-pip spell with the remaining ones. If you want to do the biggest possible damage in one hit, use small spells and spells from other schools to "bleed" off the white pips until you have saved up mostly power pips. Then BOOM!
Let me explain Heck Hound to you. First off, it is one of the most powerful Damage over Time spells there is. It does 120 total damage per pip over three rounds.
What that means, if you cast that spell with only one pip, it will give off 40 damage points at a time per round until all 3 rounds are completed totaling 120. The more pips you use the card with, the more damage you cast.
So, if a Fire Wizard has 7 power pips, that's a base total of 14 pips. 14 x 120 = 1680 Total Damage over 3 rounds / 560 per round. If you add a blade to that spell, then it's 2184 total damage over 3 rounds / 738 per round.
So Hunter, any spell that has an X uses all your pips to cast. The more pips you have, the more powerful the spell. I hope that explains it to you. I suggest you use it more for I think it's a very attractive feature. It's won me many a duel, not to mention battles.
The x means it uses the amount of pips you have. However, it increases damage per pip. I think i remember the heckhound being 100 or 150 over 4 rounds. this means that its 25 per round per pip, so yes it uses your pips but it gives you more.
Thank you all for all this great information....I appreciate the explanations. I tried it and it works great. Now all I have to do is figure out how to get my pips built up before I get "Defeated" ....lol
(plus however many boosts I can place while saving pips). Dryad is another example; it does more healing the more pips you put into it.