I can’t imagine any cleric, paladin or priest, soloing Guardian or Old man, with their being good.  Chancel’s align also seems randomized, and he seems to tilt between the evil and good side of neutral.  Hell, I’m the #7 cleric and I don’t even bother with Earan cuz he’s such a pain.

BTW, Heimy passed me on the cleric list.  This is akin to a total fish at the poker table stacking a bunch of chips but you know you just have to wait him out.

It is very rare ill solo Chancel without spells or help, and usally that is just letting him burn not a toe to toe fight.  (as a fighter) and forget about the rest of them.. ill stick with a silver ring and amulet of fire.

I’m back

So, I know there is still a problem with Paladins being slightly better at buffing than Priests, which is not how I want things. I could take a buffering prayer or two away from Pallys and give them to Priests ... but my preference is just to add goodies to Priests.

Which one would you prefer:
Desperate Aid: instantaneous healing prayer for 1/2 to 1/3 of a Priest’s max-mana; the healing would scale with the mana used, or
Chastise: targeted stun against intelligent opponents (say, Below Average+) of lower-than-Priest’s alignment, or
Grace: increases Dexterity, stackable w/ Bless?

Belegost - 01 October 2008 02:08 PM

I’m back

So, I know there is still a problem with Paladins being slightly better at buffing than Priests, which is not how I want things. I could take a buffering prayer or two away from Pallys and give them to Priests ... but my preference is just to add goodies to Priests.

Which one would you prefer:
Desperate Aid: instantaneous healing prayer for 1/2 to 1/3 of a Priest’s max-mana; the healing would scale with the mana used, or
Chastise: targeted stun against intelligent opponents (say, Below Average+) of lower-than-Priest’s alignment, or
Grace: increases Dexterity, stackable w/ Bless?

I’d love to see DI tweaked so it isn’t as random , and turn undead, seems there is no difference between priests’ or pally’s version, seems old turn managed damage/mana usage/# of targets a bit better than current version.
Also a fix for protection or alignment of npcs.  anything else is a bonus

I’ll work to even out the randomness on DI & Turn a bit - I’ll take a closer look at how Rose managed it in the previous iteration. Note that there will always be some randomness - that’s the trade-off for the possibility of insta-kills.

Alignment in regards to PFE is a bit tougher because Alignment (as a concept or category) isn’t really something that I can change. I did have a random thought that I’ll try out though ...

What I believe priests need is some form of single target “spell” damage. While I understand that they are probably just whacking some random bad guys until their mana gets back to DI levels, I believe DI ends up being their only prayer to use on large prey. Because of DI’s random factor, a priest could spend countless amounts of mana and appear to do very little damage as a result.

This is -only- based on my conversations with priests, cause my dude went the pally route. So the single target damage prayer could be a more reliable source of “some” damage for a much more reasonable amount of mana.

Priests can already give a rather significant dex boost via bless, so you’d probably want to go the aura route. Perhaps a priest could give an aura akin to a monk’s healing aura. I thought about suggesting a mana regen aura as well, but that would be much more difficult to balance.

While on the topic of auras, I think that righteousness could use a little tweaking. Perhaps, instead of a weak (and missable) single limb blast, it would attempt to do the cone special on everything you’re in combat with, but the multi-target cone has a chance to miss. This would make it more like the opposite of courage.

Anon

id say the stun out of the 3 options, but i agree with Anon, I dont have a priest myself, but from what i hear they are lacking some killing power.

while i understand the whole evil/undead gig for priest.. dosnt meant they cant have lesser prayers that does effect good/living people.. im not saying a DI or Turn type power.. somthing more along the lines of the mage spell lighting blast (or blast lighting?) the single target spell for 30-40 mana or whatever.. similar power tho that is resistence based not alinment.

I think the Grace thingee could be good for priests as it increases offense.  The other fixes seem to be in line as well.  I have noticed that protection doesn’t always hit specials.  I noticed this when I was whacked by a perfect falling star from the High Monk.  Though I died, I have regained nearly all my exp and I am still ahead of “The Funky One” in the Cleric standings. Pffffffffffffffbttttttttttttttttttttttt!!!!!!

Added new prayer for level 15+ Priests: Good Graces. Uses same formula as Holy Might, but boosts Dex - thereby adding offense & defense. Stacks with Bless but not Holy Might.

Let me know how it works out.

I looked into PfE today while laundry was drying, and made some very minor tweaks. Here’s why they were minor.

PFE is designed to protect against damage from Evil things, not Good things. It will always provide protection when the damage exceeds a low, positive threshold (read: it won’t reduce healing and it won’t reduce from the lightest of glances). It will always protect against everything Neutral and worse, and there is a one-third chance of it protecting against someone who is Wholesome.

The type of damage is also calculated in, but not in a negative way. That is to say, there is a default protection provided and then bonus protection against damage most often associated with Evil.

The duration of PFE is affected by a few factors: your sub-class, the power of your prayer, and the damage it takes. PFE does not lose effectiveness with use, just duration - like normal armour.

Finally, if it matters, the PFE prayer reduces damage before it even reaches your physical armour.

Next on my To Do list for Clerics is: recoding Divine Intervention.

I don’t want to actually summon a short-lived NPC to protect & fight for you. I’m thinking more along the lines of direct intervention from the gods themselves - but what form would that intervention take?

Currently there are a lot of variables involved in this complex prayer (the dang thing is more than 500 lines of code). Sometimes they come together for some neat effects, like healing you while damaging opponents, giving mana to you or your nearby party-mates, or healing nearby partymates. I like those kinds of effects.

I will be removing the chance for insta-death from DI - I’m sorry. It can switch to massive damage, but there just can’t be insta-death. If Unleash Chaos doesn’t have insta-kill and neither does, say, the most perfectest Ambush, then DI can’t either. Sorry. (DI insta-killing Quest NPCs just doesn’t strike the right balance between Risk & Reward for us Wizard-types.)

So no Summons, no insta-kill. Various positive side-effects from DI. Those are my thoughts. Here’s your chance:

What would you like to see on a new DI? What would be cool/ what would be fun? And what’s realistic/ fair/ balanced?

Sound off!

I kinda liked the 1st version of DI, it distributed damage to multiple opponents more so than the current version.  As for chance of insta-death, I’m assuming you mean vs something that is meant to be difficult to kill ie. quest npcs, but seeing I’ve put in alot of hours lately it seems in general the chance of insta-death to non-quest npcs is fairly random already.
I don’t know the code but something to consider for DI; being that it is divine intervention, whatever damage/affects should calculate the npcs’s weakness and deal accordingly.

an aside, I’ve notice alot lately that stun seemingly ceases all combat, not just the npc’s.

I’d love to reserve DI as a last resort kinda prayer (as it was with devotional clerics), but if this is to be the case I think we need something more in our arsenal to aid us in our fight vs Evil.  Maybe be able to summon a plague vs attackers, flamestrike? those are some of my old favorite cleric spells.  I’ve never had a mage on here so I don’t know where the lines are.  I understand mages have some mass area affect spell and agree that priests shouldn’t have that type of ability as well.

I definitely like the first version of DI, when I just hoarded mana items and instakilled everything neutral and below, then died because I was out of things to kill and I started trying stupid things like Suits.  I guess it was the Karma of the Exploit Fairy.

I’d gladly surrender the chance for instakill for more consistency.  I mean I don’t mind having the damage vary, but I am of the opinion that it should vary from “somewhat kickass” to “brutally kickass.” Of course priests could use a serious hand with offense.  One on one, it’d be cool if DI turned into like an uberUBER bless, complete with specials, extending the length of your prayers until the fight was over, heals and mana boosts, etc.  This kind of single combat DI would only last until you broke combat, but it would be enough to do some serious harm, probably killing just about anything once you get to a certain level (roughly my level hehe).  That was the cool thing about Moira DI, with it you could kill most things if you planned ahead with healing items and such.  Alternately, maybe the single combat DI could do those things, and lock in your prayers so you didn’t have to re-bless, but cost a certain amount of mana per round allowing you to go negative, so you if you killed something really out of your league, you can do it, but the cooldown is longer. 

This sort of things would scale with enemy strength, perhaps in some of the following ways:

Raising your level/stats to what the enemy has (or maybe an average of yours and theirs, depending on what that would do to power).  Maybe Strength, Dexterity, and Wisdom get raised to this level, but Con gets raised to half this level, making it more of an offensive prayer, and keeping you from drinking 6 40’s back to back to heal/retain mana.  Also, Charisma could be halved during this prayer, with the role-playing excuse being that you turn into an overbearing prosletyzing jerk, and the balance result being that deaths are more serious in this state.

Make a pool of cool specials, and for every special the enemy has, you get a random special from that pool.  Basic stuff would be enemy debuffs, dot effects, direct damage, damage increases, extra attacks, stun, blah blah blah, but also some cooler stuff I’ll leave it up to the creative minds.

Defensive abilities of the prayer would be limited to extending the length of protection from evil, and negating or greatly reducing stuns, as I said, it’s a mostly offensive prayer.

Well that’s my idea for the one-on-one version of DI, I plan on coming up with ideas for Multi-on-1 and 1-on-multi versions, but I figured I’d get this out there first and let it get discussed.  Discuss.

With my re-work of Divine Intervention done, Clerics are hopefully fairly stable and playable. I don’t expect to be doing too much more with them over the coming months.

I have a small special project that I’m working on, and then it’s on to Fighters for the summer.

flamestrike and wall of thorns then you’ll be finished!