Some skills are said to ignore defense, which may make them better than regular attacks in maybe 1 out of 100 cases, if you manage to remember you have them.

The archer AOE attacks are very good, the melee ones seems rather weak in comparison.

Most skills are worth using and some are downright incredibly. Don't forget they also scale with stats so as you get better gear and lighter levels then you can easily make them out scale regular attacks not to mention AOE damage

It took me a second to realize that you have to left click to use a skill instead of right clicking to attack. Once I did this I was impressed with the AOE skills.

引用自 bork9128：

Most skills are worth using and some are downright incredibly. Don't forget they also scale with stats so as you get better gear and lighter levels then you can easily make them out scale regular attacks not to mention AOE damage

But you can never get these stats to get anywhere near high enough to compete with normal attacks, the armor ignoring skills are the only ones that stand a chance at that ever happening

Oh you most certainly can but they might require high levels

they scale of stats, so it can be useful to increase the stats associated with the skills you want to use instead of picking a new skill.

i really dislike the skills, which is especially annoying since i play with a full hero stack.

Most of the skills are for when you are defending (who even does that?) or for buffing non-hero units (useless in a hero stack). The remaining few are then spilt in half again with the active ones being bad like OP says.

In EL1 i loved going around with a single hero and being able to take on full armies solo. A single hero from that game would wipe my full hero stack here.

I mean you are free to run a hero stack but one stack isn't enough to do everything you want. As for defending kin and aspects get explicit bonuses for defending that can easily turn battles by soaking damage and letting you wear people down

I'm not finding that defending helps with soaking damage, because unless you get really lucky with terrain you don't have a way to force the enemy to attack the defending unit.

Most skills provide AOE and a secondary effect.
Also, they rely on attributes for damage. So you can't just use them randomly and expect an effective attack.

引用自 View The Phenom：

Most skills provide AOE and a secondary effect.
Also, they rely on attributes for damage. So you can't just use them randomly and expect an effective attack.

Quite a lot of skills do not have AoE and secondary effects are pointless when compared to the "secondary effect" of the enemy being dead.

Defending just don't work at all. Is there a point to defensive heros? Even my giga death murdermachine is so tanky (just from having an armor item slot) it gets ignored in favor of the AI attempting to kill at least one of my units

引用自 Guedez：

Defending just don't work at all. Is there a point to defensive heros? Even my giga death murdermachine is so tanky (just from having an armor item slot) it gets ignored in favor of the AI attempting to kill at least one of my units

i build defenders mostly as buff characters. they can be amazing at holding a choke point, you just have to choose your battlefield carefully, and even than it is very map dependant (which is why i build them as buff characters, always useful)

the defenders can give your units a passive buff on their defense stat with "paragon of defense", which is active at every moment they take dmg from an attack. although how useful that is depends on what other skills you have that scale of intuition (which is racial dependent)
most races have some exp skills which scale with intuition, allowing the defenders to become some sort of war academy for lvling your units.

like i said though, it also depends on your faction,
the aspects for example have the "mutual aid" as a hybrid skill for defenders, which gives shield to adjacent allied units when you defend. it scales of resilience, which is also the attribute for "defensive stance", a aspect racial skill which gives defence stat to all units of the army).
combine those 2 skills and build resilience and your units can take quite the beating.

引用自 Zarquon：

i really dislike the skills, which is especially annoying since i play with a full hero stack.

Most of the skills are for when you are defending (who even does that?) or for buffing non-hero units (useless in a hero stack). The remaining few are then spilt in half again with the active ones being bad like OP says.

In EL1 i loved going around with a single hero and being able to take on full armies solo. A single hero from that game would wipe my full hero stack here.

What you mean to say is EL1 was poorly balanced and heros were rediculous