Blizzard vs Decay
For along time into Warcraft 2's life, people believed that Blizzard and Death and Decay were exactly the same spell with different graphics. People believed that they both did the same amount of damage to the same units and buildings. Of course, this was found to not be true. There are a couple of subtle differences between the 2, that make them 2 completely different spells! After you read this page you may be surprised...

Against Units
It is generally well-known what the differences between the 2 spells are when it comes to units. If you have played this game for along time, you get a feel for the different intensities that the 2 spells have on your units. Blizzard does much more damage on units than death and decay does...significantly more. That is why Blizzard ends up being your main source of offense and defense when you play an orc player. If you don't believe me then it's easy to do a simple test. Make a map but give a specific unit (grunts for example) 1000 hp for each one. Group about 36 of them into a square and cast 1 cast of Blizzard on them. Get a new pair of 36 grunts and try casting 1 cast of decay on them. Add up the total damage and compare the 2.

When you are playing a game, you will notice this when a human player Blizzards a group of 9 of your units. By the time you click (or press spacebar) to move your ogres out of the way, several of them will be dead, and the rest will be hurt pretty bad. But when an orc player does this, you will be able to save most, if not all of your ogres if you react with exactly the same speed.

A mage bomb! The ogre react and come to kill my wizard but the enemy doesn't notice and lets his ogres stand within the remaining shards of Blizzard.

The result is complete chaos. Nine ogres are lost to my 1 mage simply because of how damaging Blizzard is on units.

Against Buildings
Here is where it might surprise you how these spells work. Most people believe that death and decay damages buildings more than blizzard does, but this isn't exactly the case. These 2 spells actually have different effects on different size buildings.

Death and Decay does more damage to buildings that are the size of 2x2 or 4x4. Those of course, would be farms, towers, and Town Halls.

Blizzard does more damage to buildings that are size 3x3, such as barracks, blacksmiths, ogre mounds, mage towers, shipyards, and so on. I can't explain why the 2 spells work this way, but they do! Make a map where you start with both races and test it out.

This information is useful when you decide what you are going to target with your spell. Wallins are usually made up of farms, so you can rip down a wallin in seconds using decay. Two hasted death knights will also take out a Town Hall, whereas 2 mages won't even come close to killing it. On the other hand, a couple of mages can take out a couple of barracks, or easily take out the enemies mound/stables, where death knights take alot more mana to accomplish that.

This picture is the aftermath of a deathknight casting 10 casts of death and decay on 5 of my buildings. The letter F represents farm and the T represents the tower. This death knight razed all 5 of my buildings by casting right on top of the tower.

The same test is done with a mage and full mana. This time, the mage easily kills the tower because it has so few hit points, but most of my farms survive, simply because Blizzard does not do as much damage to 2x2 or 4x4 size buildings.

Try to remember this next time you are playing. You will be able to deal out much more damage using your mages and death knights. This knowledge is also the basis for becoming a good human player...because Blizzard is the best weapon that humans have.

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