Posts from Balance in HotA.

Regarding magic, it would be interesting to make the spells Town Portal, Dimension Door, and Fly common to all schools, so that the player isn't forced to take Earth and Air in every game. And the restructuring, imho, is good as it is currently done in SoD, except for the library in Tower.

Even if all other magic is left as in SoD, this immediately makes all schools usable. Slow doesn't play a fundamental role on Jebus Cross, and Bless with Curses are also good skills for the start. The only one that suffers is Air, since aside from Haste there's nothing else. Well, Fly could be left in Air. In my opinion, this would greatly enrich and diversify the game.

There were many ideas surrounding a reasonable redesign. I don't recall seeing this specific one, and it doesn't seem to be the most reasonable of the proposed options, but let's keep it in mind just in case.

In my opinion, after adding portal gates to the map, from which you can teleport to any Castle without an Earth Expert (and without Wisdom), control spells naturally become universal.

I don't understand why it's impossible to draw good ideas from Warlords or somewhere else. Why is moving Slow and Teleport to all schools considered a bad idea, while adding 2 control spells to Fire and Air being acceptable?

Besides, neither Slow nor Teleport is ideologically tied to Earth/Air. It's clear that it would be wrong to put Slow in Air, but here they are clearly neutral spells.

In my opinion, after adding portal gates to the map, from which you can teleport to any castle without an Earth expert (and without Wisdom), control spells are a natural fit for all schools.

The icons for Flight, Dimension Door, and Teleportation are clearly designed in the color scheme of their respective elements, so if they are moved without changing the icons, these spells will look strange and out of place within the "frames" of other elements (and will simply appear as air and earth spells unless you specifically remember that the icons have been changed).
The gameplay will have the side effect that each of the 4 elemental books will effectively provide full control on its own. This looks a bit messy, and it's unlikely that this is what you want to achieve. In the case of adding new control spells, each book provides something unique, rather than everything at once.
Logically, only Flight is really associated with air, while Dimension Door and Teleportation are not particularly associated with anything (especially since Teleportation is used in water in some Might and Magic games).

I completely forgot to ask, I don't know if anyone has asked this before, why was the feature of rearranging 2-hex units on the tactical map removed? Did it ever occur to you that they are positioned one cell ahead at the beginning of the battle, so they should have the same advantage on the tactical map! If you wanted to somehow balance this, you should have given them the function to step back one cell on the last cell of the tactical map by default.

Well, you could make it so that Town Portal and Dimension Door are only available in the Air and Earth spellbooks (artifacts) or remove Town Portal and Dimension Door from the spellbooks altogether (Dimension Door remains in the hat) and increase the chance for the Town Portal scroll.

I don't understand why you can't draw good ideas from Warlords or somewhere else.

It's simply because it was an obvious bug in the AI code. A feature that is only accessible through temporarily enabling auto-battle is a flaw in the mechanics, not a feature. The fact that the advantage of 2-hex units is offset by tactics was deliberately implemented by the game developers. Their logic is understandable – the tactics skill allows you to position troops within N cells before the battle, and it's not clear why larger creatures should get more space to maneuver (+1 cell) right in front of the enemy. But, giving a similar option through the interface wouldn't be so bad. It might not be very intuitive, but with enough effort (in my opinion), it could be done.

Massive changes to spell placement across levels and schools also alter the game beyond recognition.

Seriously, it's just a reasonable suggestion to allow witches and wizards to decline a skill. But the response is, "No, it's not classic, it doesn't fit the atmosphere..."

Would it be atmospheric to allow players to decline both new skills offered during a level-up? And what about an atmospheric object on the map that would allow players to forget one of their secondary skills, freeing up a slot for another?

market of time, a classic object, conceived by the developers themselves.