Virilneus’ GS4 Idea Book

I don’t know why I post this, no one cares. But I was thinking more on this last night.

Our profession sucks, it needs work, it needs work in a bad way. We pay the highest cost for the lowest abilities. Unlike wizards with 2 unique circles, and empaths/clerics with 1 and a half, we’ve got 1 circle ourself, and then two circles that are the village bicycles of Elanthia. Some of the spells in one of our circles were designed to benefit rogues the most for crying out loud.

So our professional circle really needs to kick butt, end of story. For balance, factually based on training costs, the 700s deserve to be the most powerful circle in the game.

I could write 5000 words justifying this, explaining in minute detail, but I’ve done that all before, so I won’t bother again. Our penalties, slights, and higher costs are all factual, they must be dealt with. (by the way, both curse and disease were listed among the official 2005 development goals, seriously)

One of the few avenues for dealing with this issues is with curse, because as presented it is a very flexible spell, that could be made more flexible. I would request that any GM that decides to (finally) work on our profession, start with curse, as it’ll be easier work overall, as well as set the table for the rest of the circle, and provide us with more benefits quicker.

STEP 1

Make curse verb based.

Instead of…

stance neu
prep 715
cast at seer
stance def

You would merely type

CURSE seer clumsy

or

Curse diamond itchy

Like how beseech & regenerate work.

STEP 2.

Roll disease & nightmare into curse. These are not worthy of spell slots. Nightmare is no better than a curse, it is a curse. It has almost no practical function. Disease is not 16x better than bloodburst, that is for sure. We’ve spent years thinking of ways to make it better, but they rarely make that much sense. Easier to just design a fresh-concept attack spell (or utility spell) for the 16 slot, and put the disease concept into curse.

STEP 3.

Curse Buffs. As stated above, we’ve got the fewest spells that are “ours” than any other pure, we need to make up for that with multifunction spell slots. (since we won’t be given minor mental).

The concept is, if you self cast a curse you get the opposite of the negative effect. If you fumble while self casting the curse, you get the negative effect still, and of course you can wear only one flavor at a time.

CLUMSY CURSE - Either protection from knockdown manuevers or just protection from manuevers in general, aka either phantom dodge ranks or something else (like what 313, 1109, 911, all provide), or a CMAN bonus like from a moonstone cube.
ITCHY CURSE - what do you really lose? Dexterity, so how about a dexterity bonus?, like +15 to dex bonus.  Or protection from being disarmed, or protection from distraction attacks. Or a DS bonus. or all of the above.
FORWARD CURSE - the AS penalty curse obviously translates to an AS bonus. As the only pure without a native AS bonus spell, we need this.
GUARDED CURSE - TD penalty obviously translates to TD bonus
NIGHTMARE - resistance to fear based attacks, like what you get with 211 or 215, like what we were supposed to get with Will Enhancement (RSN!), or like those new alchemy drops.
DISEASE - what’re you losing? Health? vitality? Maybe a boost to CON, or a boost to health return. Or resistance to disease, or all of the above.
 
We currently have two damaging curses, Advanced and Defensive, Advanced also includes an AS penalty. Do we need both? I don’t think so.

Opposite could be phantom damage padding or crit padding like what sunfist has. A stone-skin like effect. An empath like ability to cast while wounded. Something along those lines.
Having curse be this flexible somewhat makes up for our lack of a second unique spell circle, and of course our ridiculously high training costs (WHICH STILL NEED TO BE ADDRESSED EITHER WITH MANGLER CHANGES OR LOWER LORE REQUIREMENTS).

We also free up 713 and 716 for more development, and 707 could easily be moved to either slot thus allowing us to be able to think of a concept attack spell that costs 7, 13, or 16 mana, nice range there.