I have almost never used battle orders . Its just not worth the action...
I think they are by far the worst abilities. Wounded prey and veterans are pretty shitty as well, but at least you have a small chance to get some use out of it. How they are now, I wouldn't notice the difference if they simply didn't exist.
Actually I think Veterans and Wounded Prey are worse, but I'll admit we are splitting hairs on what's at the very bottom of the barrel.
Veterans is awful - it can't trigger against solo mages, and generally won't trigger meaningfully against buddy builds. It can and will against swarms, but then it can't trigger more than once per creature, so it's not even like you get a big payback there. Too many restrictions, and the one it should have (Soldiers) isn't present. Veterans should be errated to say "Whenever a Soldier comes into play under your control, put a Veteran token on it" - then it's always predictably useful, and based on your book, not your opponents. It gives a decent, but not broken power increase to what is widely held as the worst mage, and almost universally held as in the bottom two.
Wounded Prey similarly suffers from restrictions - it can't target the mage, and it can't target non-living, then it only works once they are damaged, but not yet dead. So between those you can rule out all solo-mages, all necromancers, anyone leaning heavily on golems, elementals, incorporeal creatures, etc and you can rule out L1 swarms too for the most part. For the small part of the metgame left you then have a reasonable boost, but one that ill fits the mage that gets it.
Both Veterans and Wounded Prey both suffer from the problem that they are only useful maybe a third of the time (if we are generous), and they don't come close to paying off sufficiently when they do. My pet theory is that when MW was being designed, and early testing, it was seen as a more 'thematic' epic battle with hordes of creatures on both sides. In that environment, both abilities are perfectly reasonable (as is Priest's Holy Avenger - the third contender on everyone's list of worst mages). Exposure to a full playerbase, competitive play, etc has refined ideas and playstyles a lot, and those kind of army vs army matchups are a minority, not majority. I doubt they were designed as obviously bad abilities, I think they were designed as reasonable abilities for a metagame prediction that turned out to be false.
Battle Orders are both better and worse than Veterans and Wounded Prey. They give a better ability, with three choices, one of which is almost always worth something in most scenarios. They are worse, because they cost an action to use, and an always useful minor ability is rarely worth an action. Any Warlord that finds himself with spare actions and/or not enough mana for a 'proper' spell on anything like a routine basis should be playing Meditation Amulet - and many of them do. If you have 1 mana, and an amulet, you will almost always meditate over casting a Battle Order, so really they are only used for books that don't plan on this circumstance, but just occasionally end up in it once in a blue moon. I agree changing Battle Orders to a Ready marker 'free action' would then see them being used.
