As you could see there's no in-game tips what hero skills could be chosen only on level 1.
I posted it some time ago on Heavengames, maybe it would be useful for someone:


Call Flames
Cold Protection
Cold Strike
Death Protection
Death Strike
Desert Concealment
Dominate
Doom Gaze
Fearless
Fire Protection
Fire Strike
Holy Protection
Holy Strike
Hurl Stones
Ignition
Life Stealing
Poison Protection
Poison Strike
Regeneration
Snow Concealment
Steppe Concealment
Trail of Darkness
Underground Concealment
Venomous Spit
Wasteland Concealment
Web

Thank you for posting that list. I knew many of them offhand, but it is nice to have something to reference.

By the way, guys, what are your preferences about choosing starting hero's race, attributes and skills?

I'm quite found of Life Stealing and Regeneration.

Probably not the best picks for hero vs hero fights, but it increases your hero's longevity when smashing up armies of weaker opponents.

I love dominate on my leader. Especially if you pick the evil side. Most dungeons, crypts, etc. have evil alignment units guarding it. So besides the treasure, I increase my army as well. :)

I'd go so far as to say that Dominate is the most overpowered skill in the entire game and should be pretty much banned from multiplayer games. The Domination of a single strong unit early in a game can tilt an entire map in your favor. :-)

Very true but you can not dominate flying units :(

Complainging that it is not overpowered even more? :-)

Yes. =D

In my first PBEM game ever with Dave and Greyhuntr I had this cunning plan to take over the divine dragon. =x

O, thanks for noting, it's cool that after all these years there's still something to be added in this game's 'Tome of Knowledge' :)

But doesn't game indeed inform of skills available only on 1 Level? IIRC there should be a mark about it in skill descriptions, isn't it? If not, so whence I had put this list together back then? :/

Not that I've noticed.

And, thanks for the intel. :)

Indeed, I just checked it yesternight, there's no info about it in-game. And I have found the source of my "intel", it was the article dedicated to AoW on once very good Russian gaming site LKI that is in archive state from 2012.

Now I try to scour through the Net in search of some additional sources of knowledge about this matter (i.e. AoW hero first-level-only skills). Stay in touch.

[1] My Russian is very poor (I'm still learning the alphabet!) so a Russian site would not help.
[2] I'm not going anywhere in a hurry. :)

1) I've mentioned that Russian site just to disclose my info source, not for you to practice Russian :)
2) And now I'll try to find out the primary source of this info on which that Russian site might have been relying upon. They should have taken it from somewhere, did they?