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Curate/Priest Overhaul: Freedom of Religion - Turadis - 05-29-2022 The setting of Sigrogana Legends 2 is one loomed over by the history behind it's deities. The gods may just be the subject we have the most overall lore about. Though for a long time, playing characters with a strong connection to the gods and their memory has been somewhat challenging. Mercalans, as we all know, are well catered to by the curate class and it's promotions, and while I'm happy my favorite pick of the lot gets so much to work with, I do still think the rest of the gods struggle to find much representation. A player who decides to make a clerical character likely does so first, and then tries to figure out a mechanical build to loosely represent their faith. What I would love to see is a game where the mechanical options available are capable of inspiring more people to want to make clerical characters in the first place. That has inspired me to write this overhaul concept for the Curate and Priest. Taking some cues from one of my earlier class concepts, this would center around the introduction of a new keyword, similar to Elemental Impact: Divine Attunement, or just 'Attunement'. Keyword - Attunement: A skill or spell with the Attunement Keyword gains a different name and effect if the user has a Prayer Status with a god loyalty of at least 40, the exact effect depends on the specific prayer status. A skill or spell with the Attunement keyword cannot be used if the user does not meet these conditions. Spells with the Attunement keyword are considered to be of the relevant god's domain, as decided by their Divine Element. ( "Why use god loyalty? And why 40?" The God loyalty stipulation would prevent players from gaming the system by praying to a bunch of different gods to change their spells/skills on the fly in a lore-breaking manner, (with the exception of old beasts, which is intended.) 40 is the level of god loyalty given by the Pious Upbringing trait, enabling level 1 characters to use curate at proper efficacy without needing to resort to god loyalty grinding. ) Assume any skill that goes unmentioned has no changes at all. When a calculation would result in a decimal, always round down. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- CURATE New Skills New Innate - Divine Element (1 Rank): You have learned to expertly channel your god's power. All Curate and Priest skills and spells that deal Light damage instead deal damage of another element depending on what prayer status effect you have active,  and scale off of the appropriate elemental attack. A god's divine element also determines what Attunement effect they are assigned. Mercala, Glycon, Ryart - Light Great Old Beasts, Old One-Eye - Earth Old Grey Feathers, Old Scar Fur, Bai Kai - Wind Old Chipears, Amiras - Lightning Huggessoa, Zera, Ereshkigal, Old Longtail - Darkness Helondis, Hyatt - Fire Nameless God - Water New Innate - Divine Aspect (1 Rank): You have learned to channel the will of your god into feats of elemental magic. The Divine Element given to you by your prayer status now has it's associated elemental attack scale off of Faith. The original stat that grants a bonus to this element no longer does so. In addition, Faith no longer grants a bonus to Light Attack. ( This is not an exact copy of Luminary element, as elemental attack does not ignore scaling, and Will still contributes to all elemental attacks. Luminary element would override this. ) Modified Skills Aura (Attunement, Mass Compatible, Replaces Brighten): Bathes your surroundings in divine energy, having a different effect depending on if it targets an ally, enemy, or battlefield tile. Aura effects have a LV of 15 unless otherwise specified. Light - Brighten: Grants Brighten Status (+10 RES, +15% Light res, 15 damage light retaliation), Inflicts Glowing, Creates Light Shafts Darkness - Obscura: Grants Obscura Status (Identical to Brighten, but grants Dark resistance and Dark retaliation.), Inflicts Fear, Creates Dark Shafts (Identical to Light shafts, but PURPLE) Fire - Kindling: Grants Kindling Status (Ditto, but for fire), Inflicts Glowing, Creates Cinder Tiles. Water - Flow: Grants Flow Status (Ditto, water), Inflicts soaked, creates Flooded Water tiles. Earth - Calcify: Grants Calcify Status (Ditto, earth), inflicts Magnetized, Clears field effects. Wind - Galeforce: Grants Galeforce Status (Ditto, wind.), inflicts Lingering Wounds, creates Air Shafts. Lightning - Supercharge: Grants Supercharge Status (Ditto, Lightning), inflicts Magnetized, creates Static Fields (Field effect from Korvara. Deals LV Lightning damage when created, on new round, or when moved through, like Cinder tiles.) Second Chance: No longer considered a Healing Skill. Recontextualized as dulling pain and mystically infusing a target with the will to fight on. As such, no longer considered Mercana in-story. ("But why though?" Well, ressurrection is a rare effect, with a niche application that seems too iconic to take away from the clerical playstyle. But the bigger reason is that effects roughly equivalent in power and niche of use for the other divines are challenging to come up with. Given the way defeat is usually contextualized, it seemed like the more obvious solution to the continued presence of healing magic on non-Mercalan palettes. ) Invoke (Attunement, Mass Compatible, 4 turn Cooldown, Replaces Graft): Invokes holy energy to provide one's allies a very powerful defensive effect. The duration of an Invoke effect cannot exceed 5% of your scaled faith, but it will always be a minimum of one turn. Mercala specifically - Graft: Restores a target ally's HP. Values unchanged Light - Shield of Faith: Grants the Shield of Faith status for one turn, which grants 15% additional resistance to all damage types. Darkness - Shroud: Grants the the Shroud status for one turn, which causes any attack against an affected target to be treated as if the attacker was blinded. Fire - Nova: Grants the Nova status for one turn, which causes magical fire damage equal to your fire ATK to any enemy that begins their turn within two tiles of the target. Water - Empty Veil: Grants the Empty Veil status for one turn, which allows the target to ignore the movement penalty of flooded water, and gain immunity to water and fire damage for the duration. Earth - Stoneskin: Grants the Stoneskin status for one turn, or until it is destroyed which absorbs an amount of damage equal to twice the curate's earth attack. The stoneskin is destroyed early once it absorbs sufficient damage. Wind - Warding Wind: Grants the Warding Wind status for one turn, which causes the target to gain an additional 30 evasion from any attack originating from more than 1 tile away. Lightning - Thunderclap: Grants the thunderclap status for one turn, which causes unresistable sound damage to an attacker equal to the curate's lightning attack when the recipient of the buff evades or triggers a glancing blow against an attack. ( The enchantment talent, and to a lesser extent pacifist boon, would dramatically overtune most of these powerful buffs by extending their duration far beyond the cooldown. Hence the stipulation about scaled faith. With a quite considerable 60 scaled faith, the duration of  these buffs could be extended up to 3 turns. Beyond that is, as far as I know, impossible. ) Antithesis: The damage bonus now extends to followers of gods that grant darkness as a divine element. When used by followers of a god that grants darkness as a divine element, the damage bonus instead extends to followers of gods that grant light as a divine element. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- PRIEST Modified Skills Holy Spark: Scaling is changed to 100% SWA 120% Lightning Attack if Lightning is your divine element, but the two instances of lightning damage are still dealt separately. Other divine elements remain 70% the user's Divine Element, and 70% Lightning. Needle: Scaling increased to 50% Light attack per hit, no longer heals. The needle explosion is triggered by the same damage type dealt by needle. Divine Shower - (Attunement): Now inflicts a different status effect depending on the divine element. Light/Darkness - Blindness Fire - Burn Water/Earth - Clumsy Wind - Lingering Wounds LV Rank*10 Lightning - Interference Divine Judgement - (Attunement): Now affects spells of the spellcasting domain associated with the user's divine element. Only works for spells from Curate and it's promotions. (Divine Judgement doesn't always work, but when it does, it's a game ender. Offensive Mercalan Domain magic isn't too easy to come by if you're not already a curate. But the same can't be said for most other elements. Hence the stipulation about curate spells only.) Divine Presence (Attunement, Replaces Mercalan Mist): This Skill requires a Rank D Invocation. Washes the entire battlefield in the presence of your god, creating a wide variety of effects. Divine Presence overwrites any 'Mist' skill, and is itself overwritten by such skills, and other divine presences. Mercala Specifically - Mercalan Mist: Effects are the same as before, but instead of gaining a 5% lightning weakness per rank, enemies instead gain a 2% Light weakness per rank. The HP regeneration is increased to 50% of your light attack, up from 25%. Light - Purifying Mist: A golden mist descends upon the battlefield. Increases all allies evade based on rank ( 10 per rank, 50 at rank 5), and causes negative status effects of ALL combatants to have their duration reduced by 2 per round, instead of 1. Enemies gain 2% Light weakness per rank. Huggessoa Specifically - Huggessoan Mist: A black mist descends upon the battlefield. Grants allied undead and vampires bonus HP regeneration equal to 75% of your dark attack, which is considered vampiric healing. Increases all allies' evade by 10 per rank, enemies gain 2% Dark weakness per rank. Fasting vampires do not receive the HP regeneration. Darkness - Entropic Mist: A violet mist descends upon the battlefield. Causes the LV of negative statuses inflicted by ALL combatants to be increased by a percentage equal to half of your scaled faith. Increases all allies' evade by 10 per rank, enemies gain 2% Dark weakness per rank. Fire - Fugitive Fuel: Flammable gasses fill the air, when an enemy casts a nefarian domain spell, or uses a blazing elemental impact, they also deal fire damage to themselves equal to your scaled faith. When you or your allies cast a nefarian domain spell, or use a blazing elemental impact, it causes an additional explosion that deals fire damage equal to your scaled faith to enemies in 1 range of a tile affected by the fire damage, only once per attack. Increases all allies' evade by 10 per rank, enemies gain 2% Fire weakness per rank. Water - Detoxifying Mist: A cleansing mist fills the air, any status effect that causes damage over time (Poison, Burn, Lingering Wounds) affecting your allies deal only 35% of their normal damage. Additionally, they gain status resistance equal to your scaled faith against such effects. Increases all allies' evade by 10 per rank, enemies gain 2% water weakness per rank. Earth - Latent Tremor: The ground intermittently shakes and shudders. When an enemy moves or uses a movement skill, they have a 5% chance per rank to be knocked down. Emplacements (Such as Runes or Wraithguards), Robots (Not mechanations), and Structures (Such as white prison walls) take earth magic damage equal to 50% of your scaled faith per rank at the start of every turn. Enemies gain 2% earth weakness per rank. Wind - Trickster Gale: A knowing wind surges through the battlefield. Your allies gain a movement bonus equal to 5% of your scaled faith, your enemies gain an equal movement penalty. Increases all allies' base evasion by 5 per rank. The accuracy of ranged attacks for your enemies decreases by 5% per rank. Enemies gain 2% wind weakness per rank. Lightning - Dead Air: The air around you sparks and fills with dark clouds. Allied robots gain an additional momentum per turn, and water damage dealt by you or your allies has a chance to inflict interference for 2 turns equal to half of your scaled faith. If a target already has interference, it consumes interference and inflicts stunned. Increases all allies' evade by 10 per rank, enemies gain 2% lightning weakness per rank. Godly Servants (Attunement, Replaces Shine Knights): This skill requires a rank C invocation. Summons aspects of your deity's will, which serve them long into their death. The servant's LV and abilties are determined by the rank of this skill, and the caster's divine attunement. Light - Shine Knights: Shine Knight level progression now goes 30/40/50/60/70 to give them a slight increase in power, otherwise unchanged abilities. All other Godly Servants cap out at level 70 to match. Darkness - Dark Knights: Uses a greatspear. Rank 1, learns Revenge (Gains +1 SWA whenever it takes damage, once per attack), Rank 2, Lowers stats for nearby enemies. Rank 3, reduce the hit of nearby enemies, Rank 4, basic attacks gain more damage and range. Fire - Hellknights: Uses a greataxe. Rank 1, learns Revenge, Rank 2, deals fire damage if they start a turn within 3 spaces of an enemy. Rank 3, reduces the hit of nearby enemies, rank 4, basic attacks gain more damage and range. Water - Echo Knights: Uses a spear and shield. Rank 1, learns Protect. Rank 2, learns Gentle Torrent. Rank 3, increases the magic armor of nearby allies by rank*2, Rank 4, basic attacks gain more damage and range. Earth - Green Knights: Uses an axe and shield. Rank 1, learns Protect. Rank 2, learns tremorsense aura, increasing the accuracy of nearby allies. Rank 3, increases the physical armor of nearby allies by rank*2, Rank 4, basic attacks gain more damage and range. Wind - Gyre Knights: Uses two spears. Rank 1, learns Twin dance. Rank 2, gains gyre aura, increasing the evasion of nearby allies. Rank 3, reduces the hit of nearby enemies, rank 4, basic attacks gain more damage, range, and inflict or empower lingering wounds. Lightning - Thunderknights: Uses a greatsword. Rank 1, gains +1 movement. Rank 2, learns Sidecut. Rank 3, movement becomes teleport. Rank 4, basic attacks gain more damage and range. Huggessoa specifically - Army of the Damned: Enslave the souls of the dead to serve your bidding. At Rank 1, summons two weak zombies with a grabbing attack. At rank 2, summon three additional zombies. At Rank 3, you additionally summon two skeletal archers. At Rank 4, you additionally summon a skeletal magi, who knows basic mage spells. At Rank 5, your skeletal magi becomes a skeletal evoker instead, who knows several invocations in addition to their normal spells. ("That's a lot of minions!" Yes, though for a three turn invocation, you'd better be getting something pretty great out of it. The Huggessoan undead would additionally be quite a bit individually weaker than the divine knights to make up for it. If the concept of player necromancy is making you sweat, I talk more about it during the afterword. ) Heavenly Mark (Attunement, 7 turn cooldown, replaces Malmelo): A powerful divine mark that affects all of your allies, regardless of their position on the battlefield. The duration of an effect from heavenly mark cannot exceed 5% of your scaled faith, but it will always be a minimum of one turn. ⦁ Mercala specifically - Malmelo: No changes. ⦁ Light - Crusader's Mantle: Grants Crusader's Mantle status for one turn, which allows the targets to ignore up to (20% of scaled faith)% of damage resistance from their attacks and spells. Furthermore, their weapons are treated as being enchanted with the Exorcism enchantment on top of their normal enchantments. ⦁ Huggessoa specifically - Soul Shear: Shave a portion of your allies' life force away to use as nets for the enslavement the souls of the dead into your service. Deals akashic damage to your allies equal to 10% of their maximum health, and summons a skeletal warrior, archer, or magus in a space adjacent to them, depending on their main class. This spell can only target player characters. If the damage brings an ally to zero hit points, the resulting undead has their statistics increased by 20% (For the curious, this would be based on the base class of the target's main class. Soldiers, Martial Artists, and Duelists create warriors. Archers, Rogues and Bards create archers, Summoners, Mages, and Curates create magi.) ⦁ Darkness - Black Sabbatical: Grants Black Sabbatical status for one turn, which grants the targets (50% of scaled faith)% damage reflection against all elements. ⦁ Fire - Ignition Point: Grants Ignition Point status for one turn, granting the targets additional scaled weapon attack equal to 20% of your scaled faith every time they take damage for the duration, once per attack. ⦁ Water - Fluid Form: Grants Fluid Form status for one turn, granting the targets (40% of scaled faith)% resistance to slashing, bludgeoning, and piercing damage, as well as increasing the range of their weapon attacks by 2, using their more malleable limbs. ⦁ Earth - Wild Blessing: Grants Wild Blessing status for one turn, which causes random flowers to sprout beneath the target's feet whenever they move. A flower spawns this way for every tile moved, up to a maximum equal to 20% of your scaled faith per movement. Tiles that already contain flowers instead have their flower upgraded, increasing their power and range. Flowers spawned this way only affect your allies, and do not wilt at the end of the spell's duration. ⦁ Wind - Eye of the Storm: Cause a mighty wind funnel to descend upon your allies, knocking back all enemies within (10% of scaled faith) range of each of them, and knocking them down. It can also push certain field objects (such as rocks), which may cause a bonus effect if an enemy is hit by such an object. ⦁ Lightning - Energy Surge: Surge electrical energy through your allies, causing a flash of lightning to erupt from each of them, dealing damage to each enemy within 1 range of them equal to (100% SWA+120% Lightning Attack), and restoring their Focus Points by (25% of your scaled faith)% of their maximum. Devocation (Attunement): Changes from 'Mercalan Domain Spell' to whatever domain is associated with your divine element. Mercalan Tenets: Renamed to Clerical Prudence, effect unchanged. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Thoughts & Reflections What sort of things could we do with this? A few thoughts I had... ⦁ An Old Beast Shaman. Calling to their various deities for strength as the situation demands, which reflects the way systems of pantheonic worship in the real world were often used. (If you were unawares, you don't lose god loyalty when praying between different old beasts.) ⦁ Crusaders. The non-Mercalan light gods grant alternative options for traditional paladin types to fight without being a healer, letting them unleash their full power without needing to worry about breaking the tenants, at the sacrifice of access to the setting's incredibly powerful healing magic. ⦁ Druids. Or at least 'druidic-esque spellcasters' given the lore implications of the druids in-setting. Earth gods in particular have options that are meant to feel naturalistic. ⦁ Necromancers. Letting old Huggy strut his stuff in the player's hands is a questionable pandora's box to be considering opening, see my thoughts on it further on in the post. But I ended up having loads of very cool ideas about one of the fantasy genre's coolest mainstay villain archetypes. Necromancers are just cool. Is this balanced? Probably not. I can already see certain abilities that feel stronger or weaker than their equivalents in the same bracket, or the core curate/priest spell they're meant to be alternatives to. I have also given very little thought for how these abilities might become broken or redundant in conjunction with the game's other classes. If there's anything I intend to be taken away from this thought experiment, it is that I feel that there exists an angle to make priests of other gods very much a thing without needing to give them all their own classes. While I made an attempt to put things in the same hemisphere as the concept of 'balance', the intention of it all is mostly that writing strong things is fun, and helps to stoke inspiration for cool characters, not so much that I think it should be implemented as-is. I was super on the fence about including the Huggessoan necromancer angle for their priest abilities at all. There are a lot of problems with the idea conceptually, most glaringly to me at least is the 'Void Assassin effect' of giving players a bunch of really cool abilities that they would never actually be able to use without getting lynched by their fellow players due to the lore implications. The Huggessoan priest would get this effect worse than any other, and the resulting inspiration to take the class in very lore breaking directions would be both a source of major trouble, and pretty understandable. Ultimately I included it because it was fun for the thought experiment, and the ideas for how necromancy abilities could work in SL2 just kept on flowing. If I were put in charge of the game, I almost certainly wouldn't actually implement the Huggessoa prayer that way, and they would probably just use the other Darkness effects. The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that the Huggessoan priest is the only one who really doesn't need to build faith at all, though, which I found flavorful. Behind the scenes, I considered making 'War' a divine element, for gods like Ryart and the collective Old Beasts. It would have focused mostly around magical slashing/piercing/blunt damage and other weapon related effects and buffs, ideal for basic attackers. But the ideas didn't exactly flow, so I wrapped them back up into the traditional elements. It's something I'd like to revisit some day, or see suggestions about. RE: Curate/Priest Overhaul: Freedom of Religion - Lolzytripd - 05-29-2022 Can I staple on a lantern bearer synergy idea, where the active lantern type changes the element of priest and curate spells also... RE: Curate/Priest Overhaul: Freedom of Religion - Snake - 05-31-2022 While I do commend packing up everything on a more sensitive and whole rework for the definition of "Priest" since the term englobes a lot of possibilities depending on the samesake's religion, I wonder how many of those archetypes are really warranting to just not result in new classes, such as... Curate -> Shaman (Spiritual/Nature approach to Curate) Curate -> Heretic (Edgy and evil approach to Curate) Curate -> Crusader (A heavy-armored, shield-bearing, soldier-esque approach to Curate) Curate -> Medic (An alchemic, non-Mercana approach to Curate)