Bay 12 Games Forum

... seriously, for their cost they're actually pretty good. 40g for 3 research (more, with y'alls magic scales) isn't terrible and 1 (S/D/N/B) is pretty useful -- they're about as cost efficient researchers than R'lyeh's starkids, which was the most gold efficient research R'lyeh had (at least unless a game lasts 120 turns or something ridiculous like that). Actually, crunching the numbers at it, the goblin hags are Jotun's most cost efficient researcher (13, vs 15 (gygs) and 17 (skratti)), before randoms -- randoms would bring gygs either on par or slightly ahead, I think, but skratti would still be way behind cost wise -- which is... odd, but okay.

Then you can bring along a banner of the northern lights (or bring along a 2S gyg set to power of stars/northern lights/pass out) and have all those 1/4th 1S be 2S (stellar cascades!), pass around skull staffs for raise dead spam (or just have the huge hoard of D random ones do plain skelliespam) or do ruinous things to morale and/or fatigue with a dozen frighten/ghost grip spammers, throw imps everywhere with the blood randoms (or just have 'em summoning scout imps or whatever), do some alright buffing and debuffing with the nature random... there's a good handful of N1 spells that are darn solid en masse... all sorts of stuff, basically. Even a 1X caster can be frisky when there's twenty t'thirty of 'em, especially when half of 'em are communion capable via either astral or blood.

They are flimsy and old, but when you can get 5-6 of them for every giant caster you get, that's... not too bad. Doubly so if you can nab Gift of Health.