When I look over commune skills and communes in general, I have to admit they do not seem all that appealing compared to city skills and cities in general. Added to this, I think they need more variety in them to distinct them from the cities. Ideas I had were these for those interested:

Commune Warrior guilds
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Remove the current master specilization for their knighthood skill, or even all of knighthood. Replace it with something that declares them more as outdoorsmen and rangers. Ideas for specilizations are:

Spear (added with this would be skills involving beating tribal drums)
Bowmanship
Glaive (tri-bladed weapons they can launch at enemies or strike them with it in certain ways)

Wiccan guilds:
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currently the wiccans share the same basic skills with Druids (Nature and Totems), which I feel somewhat loses a bit of flavour. Keep totems but replace Nature with a new skill more devoted to mystical spiritual powers. At this time also, Moondancers and Shadowdancers share almost the exactly same skills, the only difference being Night or Moon and 3 fae creatures. I think removing Wiccan and creating a new skill for each would more profound the differences between them. The two new skills (Moonwicca and Nightwicca) would have in them different fae they can summon with few shared inbetween (wisp, dryad), also in the skill there would be more abilities to utilize rather then simply summoning fae creatures (I am still thinking that part over). The Nightwicca can summon the "corrupted" fae that Mantekaan had created, and the Moonwicca can summon purer forms of fae creatures.

So in conclusion:

Spiritualism (have skills such as purifying the spirit and afflicting certain spiritual afflictions)
/then to Master in either/
Moonwicca-----------Nightwicca


Druid guilds
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Not sure if I should even touch this subject from the amount of times it has been brought up. Currently Druids are rather...unappealing, and it seems the only ones that would go druids are those that either enjoy the RP of it or simply do it as sacrifice since their communes need more druids. I am not going to go into detail here since it has been done many times before, but perhaps splitting up Druidry into Naturalism and Wyrdry could be a good chance to push different abilities in to assist them in becoming somewhat more formidable when utilized with their other skills, such as their totem specialty.

Communes in general:
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Communes in general seem to be overshadowed by the cities, and seem to lack much against them. I think introducing new aspects to communes only to assist them to be more profound in their own way may help to make them more appealing also.

Well those are some of my ideas, hope you enjoy them.

Warriors:
Eh, adding more specs onto the existing 4 isn't going to fly, I suspect. Unless there was some shuffling of how it works (like both cities/communes getting two sword styles and an alternate appropriate style), we're going to have to envoy to fix what we've got there. It's been pointed out that city warriors being able to take hunting is kind of weird (seeing how it's all the outdoorsy stuff) but good luck taking traps from city warriors (tackletackletacklepitpitpit).


Wiccans:
It would be nice to reverse the trend in Wicca, so that instead of most of the fae being the same, with a few shared, the skillsets are mostly different with a few similarities. For the same reason as above, I really doubt that it will ever happen. Spiritualism, in all the different incarnations suggested, seems more like a mastery level skill itself.


Druids:
Eh, the main thing with druids is that changes can't reeeeally be made without either making the druid guild in question broken, the opposing guild broken, or wiccans and knights who share our secondary skill broken. It's been suggested to split the druidry skillset into two identical skillsets and work slowly through the envoy process from there, but the admins told us that was not likely to ever happen.


Communes have some really nice stuff, but in general it does feel like we got the somewhat short end of the stick, at least in combat. We're trying to get some aesthetic changes through to give the feel of some uniqueness where we have double skills, and are hoping those go through!

I few very old (and very incomplete) ideas for new skillsets are Groves and Spiritualism. I had some ideas for Groves, but the only way I could see it would be as a replacement for Crow/Stag, which would mess with warriors.

Actually at the time my idea was to remove the current knighthood specilizations from serenguard and ebonguard and replace them with the ones I suggested. Added to this, perhaps the idea to remove knighthood for them and replacing with another fighting type skill (brawling?) which later they can specialize in it (Bowmanship, Glaive, Spear).

I think this would add more the idea of living in the wild, I also dont get how those living in forests wear armour and wield forged swords really >.>, but that is just me.

My primary issue with the communes is not so much that whether or not they are distinct from the cities but that they are not all that distinct from each other.

One thing worth consideration in any discussion regarding the communes is how what is or is desired will function should Ackleberry and Jojobo be added to the game.



One suggestion here is perhaps all the warriors could have their weapon choices reviewed with the new additions. If they were to keep knighthood that is, otherwise you are creating a new archetype.



Coming back to the above, what we would eventually want is Sun and River as well.

Suggestions that immediately come to mind are ritualistic, concepts such as going deeper into the mysteries and secrets of Mother Moon and Night. I know this might not be well received by the Warriors but what makes one a wiccan ic seems to be the ability to summon fae and that's all, expansion beyond that could prove interesting.

Also the helps relating to wicca talk about summoning them in times of need, but really it seems more likely for them to just walk around with a full entourage constantly. Perhaps there could be some development of abilities that follow the time of need and the connection to the ethereal realm. Perhaps channelling spirits present in natural locations (this would extend to most natural location types) as an attack could be an option?



Whether or not this would be enough depends on what would be done.



Overall it's hard to not feel like the communes are backwards. Lusternia on a design level is very structured and the Wiccan and Druid guilds go against that structure, the most basic being that primary base skill determines archetype. For every other archetype in game the primary base skill is unique to that archetype and, excluding warriors, the specialisation is unique to their guild. This is becoming more noticable as more and more guilds are being added to the game.

It seems likely to help with a sense of identity, even if it is only cosmetic, differentiating skills allows for them to reinforce certain parts of the guild rp even if mechanically everyone in game has the same ability. The things that your guild can do that no one else can are the entire primary skill spec, if you ignore the guilds mentioned here.

I don't feel like it's worth tweaking warriors in the Communes. The general reason is that they are 'imports' anyways, Arcanis. They are not part of the existing culture but became part of them to keep up with a "changing world". The Ebonguard in particular were created because "everyone else had them and so Glomdoring needed warriors too". Trying to come up with multiple new skillsets, a new variation of armour, etc (though I suppose you could use tattoos for tribal warriors as well), just seems too complicated.

Wiccans and Druids (especially Druids) could use some major flavour overhaul though. They're all pretty stagnant and do feel like they've been left pretty far behind in regards to their counterparts in the cities.

Calling those glaives is an abomination. Glaives are polearms.

The commune skill design was interesting and different when we had two cities and Serenwilde, but at this point, yeah, it feels archaic and broken.

EDIT: Giving commune warriors Tattoo armour would be pretty awesome.

Communes did have great skills, we just like to turn them into dingbat artifacts.

Also, a big fat NO to weapon specs specific to orgs for warriors. That flexibility is one of the things that makes warriors different. I like it just fine that way. Put more emphasis on putting flavour in the tert specs if that's what you want.

And give them actual tert specs instead of everyone else's secondaries.

Something I forgot to mention before. The teritaries.

Dreamweaving and Runes has for some time already sort of been forgotten, Mages got TP and TK which gave them the oomph they needed. Ecology itself, which was suppose to connect Druids (and bards I guess) more to a Nature theme, fell very short from what was expected. Ecology itself does not give much to assist in druid combat also, and I believe if worked differently (or overhauled completely) it can perhaps give communes and druids more flavor.

Any suggestion that consists of 'Code 6-10 new skillsets' is wholly unrealistic.

I'm going to have to disagree on your assessment of ecology too. It has -great- flavour, far more commune flavour to it then psionics has for cities, which... doesn't really have any flavour at all apart from the history behind the skill.

The issue is with the comparison to psionics power-wise, since it was released under the premise of being "psionics for communes".

Well what it felt like was...

Druids wanted to make x change to y skill but it would make Mages op or up. I remember talk of things like, druids nerfing themselves with the hope that they could get some changes through to one of their shared skills. I think before bards came out, people were trying to do more with ecology but kept getting turned down.

The problem now is that any change to ecology needs to be balanced against bards, so druids are back to where they started.



Realistically... the complaints aren't going away as far as wiccans and druids are concerned, they should have been differentiated from day one, as has been mentioned not only in this thread but in the past, it worked when it was only Serenwilde, but it just doesn't when you consider the possibility of four communes in the game. Changing wicca and druidry now has the benefit of only affecting four guilds as well as setting up the possibility that ackleberry and jojobos guilds will be as unique as the new guilds were.

Hmm. Yeah. I think that Wiccans and Druids in general would be happy if instead of creating new skillsets, their shared skillsets were just copypasted into two separate skillsets so that envoys can deal with them separately. So, druidry would be a Hartdruidry and Crowdruidry, which at first would just be exact clones of the existing Druidy set, but be able to diverge over the natural time schedule of envoy reports.

I think I've mentioned this before, but it's already possible to add a new skill to a shared skill set without it appearing in the opposite's skill set. Druidry is already like this, and so is Phantasms (albeit less so).

As for the proposed change actually being approved, that's up to the admin. Damn BloodBane rejection.

riiight, but there is less of a chance to get something like that thrown in as it is now (because you'd need a new skill for the opposing guild at the same time to follow the pattern), but with separate skillsets, there can be more divergence because it's less of a terribly partisan change to a shared skill.

I really am not holding my breath on Ackleberry and Jojobo -ever- coming out, the most I have seen in IRE games is a max 6 orgs that the playerbases can handle. Looking at Lusternia alone, already the numbers are rather slim and unless we suddenly got a large influx of players in, the chances of 2 more orgs ever being added are slim to none. I find this a shame though, as I personally adore Jojobo and the aspect of a Forest/Jungle of the Sun.

(I wonder if the admin flipped a coin to wonder if Gaudiguch/Hallifax or Jojobo/Acklebery should come out, though the concept of all 4 elements accessable seems like a winning point there >.>)

Entirely untrue.

(And like I said - any suggestion that consists of 6-10 new skillsets will never make it pass muster. I'd bet my proverbial lunch money on it!)

Also, not only are more skills more time consuming, but the more skills you add, the more imbalanced combat becomes. It's impossible to balance as it is.

Yeah I don't understand the fascination with proposing entire new skillsets instead of fixing what we already have.

That out of the way. I do like the idea of letting warriors have viable options of armor without wearing plate. From a RP-standpoint I would love my Serenguard to be able to forgo plate and have a more tribal/tattoos/warpaint protection. From a mechanics standpoint, I don't see it happening or as being worth the coding resources.

Some more differentiation between city/commune trackers could be done through envoys though. Tree-specific traps (as in tree elevation) for commune trackers! Or let us attach all those shrunken heads to our armor for some minor buffs. I actually just thought of that and love the idea. Trophy/shrunken heads from trackers could be used to provide small buffs or even attacks (display head for a room fear ala crow totem for instance).

Edit: I seriously doubt any more is going to be done in differentiating city/commune trackers. But, I still like the idea of using heads as ingredients for buffs or attacks.