I've been playing a healer since the game first opened up. And now, I'm getting an itch to switch from healing to either astrology or hexes (though hexes is extremely low on my list). What good skills would astrology give me and what would be the bonuses of switching to it?

And what would be the negatives of switching from healing to astrology?

Any advise would be greatly appreciated.

I love astrology, but it is definitely not for everyone. It's a great role-play skill, a great skill for buffs and potentially afflictions. It -is- complicated to set up and use. It requires a fair bit of scripting. The syntaxes are unwieldy, and with twelve astrological signs, even my aliases are pretty clumsy.

I know several people who have ended up abandoning it for hexes where they can form a reliable attack strategy. There is so much variation in astrology that it is difficult to do this. Some days astrology is great, to the point where it would be over-powered. The reason it's not is that some days it is next to useless.

Coming from healer, you'll like the spheres as they can be quite useful buffs both for you and your allies. It's the same issue though -- some days they're outstanding, some days merely decent, some days not really helpful at all. They can also be very taxing on your power. As far as killing with them, I completely fail at this and can offer no good advice. Talkan and Sarrasri seemed to manage well enough though, so I think it's just me!

Take a look at Xiel's site or the scrying pool for a skills list.

Talan pretty much has it spot on. Astrology can be an absolutely awesome addition to roleplay and can provide some good buffs, but to make it combat worthy it'll take a lot of work.

Astrology is not complex. That's just stated in the help file to make it sound mysterious. I always found it extremely easy to use. As for coding, all you need are basic echoes for the afflictions on any given day, and a single alias for each ray. Beyond that, if you can remember about six different words at any given time, then... well, you shouldn't have issues.

Plus it makes you into an awesome tank.

The hardest part, and only hard part, with astrology is knowing what spheres and such are better at the time of the fight. And that is as easy as setting up a second window, a couple of echos for the signs, and star gazing once the month starts.

I had a more complex script where f1-f6 would be assigned the powerful negative effects, and f7-f12 would be the positive effects.

The rest is just knowing what each effect does which is the challenge of all the others.

(Rays are easy and do not deserve mentioned as hard.)

I would never change from healing given choke's new change since you can effectively aurawarp them and plague them and just follow them around in choke and literally never let them heal. Healer provides incurable succumb (plague is a reishi cure, each time plague ticks off, it will allow you to cure but if the system opts to cure succumb with reishi, it will immediately hit the plague first and never heal succumb). Using healing you could effectively kill someone without choke *gasp* I envoyed it to stop it back when it was Mag vs Celest but the admins seem to think incurable is just fine. SD healer has it even better than regular SD (besides maybe presetting hexes in a room and just immediately choking on entry) and its the tertiary I would take if I ever hop.

And considering Wiccan Healers can give a neurosis aura and get rid of insomnia every few seconds (if memory serves), healer really isn't that bad anyway.

After reading everything everyone has posted, I think I'm going to stay with healing. Yes, I'm used to it and can heal on a dime. But after reading everything that you guys have written, I think its the best choice I have at this point. Thank you everyone.

Aww and I was going to advertise the AstrologyThingyMaboby

http://forums.lusternia.com/index.php?show...c=16789&hl=