Hi,

So, recently Xenthos transed Ascendance, and I myself am at Myth now, and quite frankly, if you ever read lack of rants, we've been less than impressed with the skill as a whole, to say the least.

For 120,000,000 essence (29 mil to expert, 63 mil to fabled, etc, understanding that it's about 10 seconds a meditation for 30k essence a piece) , this is what we get:



Here's the breakdown for the essence costs from rank to rank, roughly, I lost a good portion of my notes when scrying pool broke down, since that's where I stored them.



We get an ability each rank until about about expert, then we get an ascendant cult ability every 50% until trans, alternating between cult and personal abilities from then on. So here's an analysis of each ability along with my own suggestions, I'm sure others will be chiming in soon enough as well.

Meditation - It's just how you learn ascendance, nothing really can be said about this, aside from it's a bit annoying that doing certain things like speak on channels cancels learning while "normal" learning doesn't. Nothing big though.

Suggestion: Just to save time, make us able to learn huge batches of essence all at once please.

Clairsentience - It's ascendant farscout, gives vague locations of every ascendant currently online starting from plane, then moving to specific room and area when you enter the same area as the ascendant. Oh, it always provides the specific room/area for ascendants in your own commune/city though, 300 essence.

Suggestion: I personally think it's a bit neat. If I had to ask something, why not add demigods too for an increased cost.

Fearaura - passive ability you turn on that periodically ticks and affects all enemies with fear, 200 essence to turn on, with 100 essence drained every 8 seconds it's left on from then on until turned off. Kind of neat when fighting people who don't have rubeus or wolf totem.

Suggestion: I'd ask for it to beat that too for an increased cost (double, maybe), might be asking a lot though.

Destruction - damage attack, 3.5-6 average balance, 200 per blast on adventurers, 25 per mob, does 1-1.2k at trans. Seems fine to me, but some concerns have been raised that the essence cost removes the bonus of the essence gained from killing the mob.

Affinity - gives 5 dmp to the ascendant's home turf (forest, wyrd, etc) as well as makes it tougher for enemy mages/druids to break home turf melds. Makes it tougher that it makes the eq regain from breaking the meld longer. It's pretty neat, can't really think of any suggestions for that.

Flight - Gives you the ability to fly. It's free faerie wings. Not so awesome for those who can already fly, like poor Xenthos. Oh well.

Veneration - Ability to make cults, as well gives the cult leader the ability to see where all cult members are as the first power. Basically, you need to belong in an active order and convince your god to give you a cult for a large essence cost to the both of you. If you somehow manage that, your cult will have its own essence pool the cult leader can use to use the various cult abilities. Cult members can add to the pool by offering at a shrine to the divine who gave the leader the cult in the first place. Inducting people into the cult costs personal essence, each IC month, personal essence is drained for every cult member as well. Leaving the order of course dissolves the cult.

Suggestion: Please remove the reliance on having an order, have it cost a lot of personal essence instead. It doesn't make much sense that an ascendant, a being above even demigods would need divine approval to start his own following. To compensate, also give the cult leader the ability to set up -one- shrine for himself (hey, make it customizable for RP) that cult members can offer to help add essence.

Benevolence - It's energylink for essence, 2:1 ratio, i.e. I transfer 10k, demigod gets 5k essence.
Suggestion: Eh, nothing big, maybe a 1.5:1 ratio instead to throw us a bone, given how minute amounts of essence doesn't really gain us anything.

Intervention - Cult ability, it's like champ rescue for cult members, only you don't actually switch places, the leader just poofs to member immediately. No one has a cult, no comment, but it seems neat.

Prospicience - Cult ability, it's a seeing stone, i.e. if I use the ability on Xenthos (who is in my cult as an example), I can see what he sees via LOOK, like the artie. Works from anywhere. No one has a cult, no comment, but it seems neat, bit pricy essence wise to learn this ability though.

Aegis - Oh man, I love this one. It's a personal ability where you aegis an ally (one person only), and all fatal damage they take is transferred to the ascendant. It means that say Xenthos (whom I've aegised) is at 300 health, and Desitrus swings at him for 2k, effectively killing him. However, since I've aegised him, Xenthos actually takes 0 damage and all 2k damage of that gets transferred to me. This only works on damage that -will- kill the victim, not just damage in general. It turns off automatically if the damage gets too much that the ascendant will die too. 10k essence to put on an ally.

DivineSupper - cult ability, doable once every ic month, the leader and all the cult members in the room will get h/m/e/end/will refreshed all at once and they all get psionic/normal shields. No cult, no comment, kind of neat though, I guess, though it's pretty much just demigod refresh me.

Portal - This one's neat, you can send portals to cult members and to your nexus instantly for 10k essence a pop, lasts about 3-5 minutes, doesn't work if you or your target is on a mono (excluding the nexus). It costs 100k essence though if you send portals while on enemy territory.

Suggestion: Can't we send portals to any person for an increased cost as well? 20k will be fine.

Presence - cult ability, doable once every ic month, the leader and all the cult members in the room will get increased charisma and what seems to be passive ego regen. The increased charisma seems to imply to give an amount similar to what a throne furniture gives. Eh, not so neat for 50% fabled. No cult, no other comment to improve upon until I actually use it though.

Consumption - This one's neat in theory, not so much in application. Basically, it's an ability where if you do it at a demi/ascendant who's bleeding, you will take some of their essence for yourself. From testing, on someone bleeding 200, Xenthos got 81 essence, and when I was bleeding 2k, Xenthos got 500 essence. Oh, and you also slowly get insane as you use the ability. Lackluster for the 0% myth ability.

Suggestion: Change it to a passive ability where if you yourself kill a demigod/ascendant, you get 50k essence from their reserves, no more, no less. Alternatively, I wouldn't mind taking 1% of demi's total amount either, though, so demis/ascendants with low essence don't get hurt too badly. Please note that right now, you don't get anything from killing either demis or ascendants.

Glory - cult ability, doable once every ic month, the leader and all the cult members in the room will get experience depending on how many members are present. It's the GM artie, but for cults. Not very good for the final cult ability, 50% myth, but then again, if other abilities similar to these are any indication, I'm pretty sure it's not that great. I'd rather just replace this with something else, to be honest.

Omniscience - trans ascendance, personal ability, 500 to turn on, 50 essence per minute it's left up. It lets the ascendant talk from aetherbubbles, send tells to others not on bubbles, and hear channels while on them. Nerf.

Suggestion: Replace with something worth 120 million essence. It's neat, but not trans ability neat, move it down somewhere below veneration, I guess.

That's all of Ascendance. Basically, after having bashed this much essence, it's a bit disappointing that most of the abilities (all 14 of them) we get are pretty lackluster, especially given the amount of essence we've spent to learn them. I mean, some of the abilities have such high costs (essence and time wise) and have such little practical use that it's pretty much a loss as far as the time spent/abilities gained ratio goes. I understand that some of you might think that for a "free" skill, we're complaining a lot, but we really just care not to waste our time and effort. I guess after a while, I can go post more ideas to flesh Ascendance out some more, as far as beefing up the number of abilities we get in addition to fixing and adjusting the abilities we currently have as well, in more detail. Right now though, I'm just posting my own thoughts on it.

tl;dr version: Ascendance kinda sucks, fix plz. Costs way too much time and essence to get lackluster tricks. Needs more abilities/fixes for current ones.

Comments, opinions, and suggestions welcome.

Order-less cults, please. Then I can at least have some small semblance of Shikari-worship.

Supporting this post. For a skill of mostly flavour abilities (read: everything cult-related due to essence drain and active order req, demigod essence-eating, etc.) it sure takes a lot of hunting to earn, plus the original 1,000,000 power or once/year event.

Perspective, for those less familiar with it:

Xenthos spent about two months bashing - multiple hours of bashing a day, with ascendent stats as a shadowlord with insanely fast rapiers - to get to...omniscience.

Did you have to post this?

WHat I think the adminstration was to say that you pushed a lot of buttons for mostly flavor abilities, besides, you already get +2 stats to skills and some regeneration. Avatar get sweet powers, do you want an easy button too for killing a lot of NPCs?

Some suggestions.

Portal--As above, but make it break a monolith by spending more essence. These are Vernal Ascendants, not mortals. If they really want to protect against an ascendant, drop like 6-10 monolith sigils so it's too cost prohibitive. It's not like there are hundreds of ascendants, and it will encourage people to create one ultra-safe room for really important stuff.

Omniscience--hmm. What can we add that fits the term.

* Hack into any clan/order/guild/community channel. Costs essence to do. You can't speak on it, but you can hear everything that happens. Costs essence per time.

* Hear a trigger word and the entire statement if the trigger word is stated. For instance, I decide to "listen Tully", anytime the word Tully is said I hear the entire sentence that occurred, no matter who said it and where (in person, clans, tells, etc). Might be good for spying. Can use it for your own name, person, a concept, etc. Costs essence. For instance:

Well hey, if they weren't meant to be all that useful, why weren't we just transed the moment we got it? It'd have saved us a lot of time at least, plus we get to say that the skill literally was free with every purchase of ascendant.

People are already trying to underplay how much work this took. There's a few nice skills...

No one wants things that make Ascendants game-winners and knockout punches. But cults, and several other skills, have the potential to be amazing and not...small.

Something that wasn't based on killing a lot of NPCs would be fine too, you know. But "killing a lot of NPCs" (a hell of a lot) is what we got. And other than aegis and MAYBE portal they just aren't worth it. Right now I'm probably going to stop at portal, though I'll have a few more weeks of "killing NPCs" to go before I get there since I'm not bashing as insanely as Xenthos.

I would love orderless cults, even if the powers stayed notably lower than order powers and they excluded membership in a real order.

My guess:

To give you something to do.

To Shiri:

The Trans skill while neat, is pretty overpowered. Can you hear everybody? Like, every novice who doesn't have any planar?

120-240 hours or so? Don't suppose you have the actual days played recorded Xenthos?

I don't know, I agree that many of the powers are not all that impressive, and now that they are known I doubt many will push to trans it...

But still I guess I see the time it takes to become an ascendant (either through long term org RP, or through the once a year event) to be a much larger time investment than to actually trans it.

This of course does not get into the problem with someone who wins over their orgs support but is not a basher, but thats an entirely different problem.

...

Even assuming you can...can you please define "overpowered"? That doesn't fall under any definition of it I've heard anyone use.

EDIT: Smiley ninja'd by Hazar.

Did you seriously just call Omniscience overpowered? Was that a typo?

If they're speaking on a channel that I'm also in (so I can hear them on clans, tells directed to me, Glomdoring aether, and such). It's basically like enabling Collegium in all areas. It's definitely interesting, and I like it as an ability.

As to how long it took-- I don't have the numbers, but I'm guessing an average of 6 hours a day for 62 days.

The trans is just an upped version of Broadcast, you can talk/hear on all of your channels, send tells to anyone, not sure if they can talk back to you though.

They can!

PS: The essence invested in Ascendance should probably count towards ranking, simply because it's not like it's been "used up" in the traditional sense of the word (on things like divine fire, phoenix, etc)... and it's such a huge amount. That's 120,000,000 essence hunted up right there. Currently, all ascendants are ranked down at the bottom, simply because it's always being used on learning Ascendance. If it counts towards ranking, we'll be able to see how we're doing in comparison to Demigods as well as other Ascendants.

I forgot about essence drain. Thought it was just up, permanently.