Problem:
War shrines have excellent offensive effects for a relatively cheap cost, enough to overpower a superior force, makes raiding too difficult.

Potential Solutions (Updated: 10-21):

Raising a Shrine:
-No erecting a shrine in enemy territory
-Increase time it takes to raise a shrine in general
-Have shrine costs scale according to affinity, depending on where it's raised: enemy/neutral/allied territory.
-Limit shrines to prime and allied org territories

Shrine Mechanics:
-Limit shrine effect to within the shrine's influence only
-As above, only have it work area wide on places considered allied territory.
-Require a shrine room to be fully sanctified before powers may take effect.
-Limit shrines to 1 area power at a time, and activating another cancels previous for ease of flexibility.

Shrine Effects:
-Uniformly increase the essence cost of all shrine powers.
-Same as above, only used affinity to decide on such costs.
-Weaken distort
-Weaken invasion mobs.
-Move distort to shield shrines.
-Move gravity to shield shrines.
-Make gravity not affect climb up/down.
-Limit calling invasion to once a day
-Remove mob tracking from invasion shrines.

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Please make your suggestions and discuss.

I'm still of the opinion that the flavour of shrines right now is an excellent angle to how they're dealt with as compared to the boring Achaean worldburn. I agree though that they are too impacting as is, and thus a neat little middle ground can be addressed thusly:

• Limit any given shrine's effects to rooms actually under the influence of the shrine. This way, the flavour is retained but the mechanical impact is blunted some by restricting shrine effects from affecting a whole area from some remote location.
  
• Necessitate that a room is fully sanctified before another room can be sanctified to prevent the current mechanic of single-sancing a room and moving on to reach the full 15 room maximum to raise all shrine effects.
  

The problem is how quickly they can be put up during offenses, not how effective they are in defense, IMO. Some ideas:

• You can't erect a shrine anywhere you are enemied.
  
• Sanctifying a shrine is a very slow action. When it's happening, loyal mobs in the area who would complain if attacked, will complain.
  
• Shrine effects are reduced, or maximum area of influence reduced, or both, except when the shrine is in org territory of an org the god has affinity with.
  

Fast list:
- Require full sancing
- Make shrine distort considerably weaker. Its cost will never warrant its strength until we start charging a ton of essence for it.
- Lower the level of invasion mobs
- Alternatively move distort to shield shrine which will stop a trifecta of powers and require choice.
- Make gravity not effect moving down or climbing down.

I'm of the (probably unpopular) opinion that shrines should really just be killed once and for all. They should be restricted to prime, godrealms or organizational territory. Right now, we currently have a stupid situation where orders play a larger role in daily combat than they ever should.

But, if that can never happen, I agree that shrine distort needs to be weakened. It probably shouldn't exist at all, but whatever.

Wrath should fire at a consistent rate, and at a lower one than every 2-3 seconds?

Why would you want to remove them? There are already a lot of unused things in the game - why make more things obsolete.

I'd like to see something done to "tone them down" some, but still be practical and give a proper edge when used.

I would like to see distort moved to Shield shrine, and have increased cost.
I would also like to see warning messages when someone is setting up a shine in a place that they are enemied. Have the yelling mobs yell about it or something.

There are obsolete things and there are things that should become obsolete because they are otherwise detrimental to the game. Shrines being in every fight is one of these things.

Moving Distort onto a Shield shrine seems like a good idea. It might help fix the problem, and having real choices is always nice, instead of always going with War.

Distort is far from being the only problem with shrine use. I think suitably limiting the effects to actually sanctified rooms will cut their efficacy down comfortably.

I do not think that limiting the wrath/gravity or other effects to sanctified rooms is a good idea. Consider a domoth fight on an aetherbubble or another fight in neutral territories. Presumably the holding area will be melded and shrined, making it that much harder for any opposition to reach them. While it is true that this would be the case anyway, the current setup allows the challenging group to set up their own shrine, making the occupying force subject to the same effects as the challenging force, creating a more even playing field. I think this needs to stay intact.

I like the idea of diverting some of a war shrine's more potent powers into a shield shrine. Gravity is another good candidate, to my mind. The notion has been batted around for ages, and now is a good time.

I do support that a shrine and its required rooms should be required to be fully sanctified before shrine powers are activated - but as now, should be fully defiled before powers lapse.

I'm opposed to removing the possibility of raising shrines in enemy territory. Instead, I would suggest that we utilize the much-hated affinity in a way that might actually make people glad it exists, by scaling the costs to raise and activate shrines in locations depending whether or not they are aligned, neutral, or opposed. Perhaps if you are trying to sanctify a shrine in a territory your god is not directly aligned with, the value of whatever you're offering is decreased, by the standard 45 or 50%, whatever it is. It would still be possible - but it would take much longer to set up and cost much more.

Regarding the suggestion that denizens cry out if shrines are being sanctified in front of them - I do not think this would be necessary if the process were meant to take longer. As with melding enemy territories, or setting up whatever other preliminaries before a large-scale raid, the defenders are responsible for patrolling their own territories. It's not terribly difficult to check in to your cosmic/elemental/ethereal plane with a scent/scan as you bubblix by. If you want this kind of notification of activity on a plane, the players should be responsible for watching it.

I'm in favor of raising costs overall. Esteem is much more available than it used to be, and shrines are seen as ephemeral tools, when they shouldn't be. Making them more expensive, and more substantial, making them take longer to raise, etc., would probably be useful in countering their current role as disposable weapons.

Talan:

I'm opposed to removing the possibility of raising shrines in enemy territory. Instead, I would suggest that we utilize the much-hated affinity in a way that might actually make people glad it exists, by scaling the costs to raise and activate shrines in locations depending whether or not they are aligned, neutral, or opposed.

I actually quite like this idea.

A question about the distribution of war shrine powers to a shield shrine though - if both gravity and distort were moved to a shield shrine, wouldn't people just end up raising shield shrines now as opposed to war shrines? I mean, Invasion mobs are nice and all, but I find people raise shrines more often for gravity/distort than Invasion since a single fully defiled room dispells all Invasion mobs immediately whereas it'd take more than what..6 or 8 to knock out gravity?

Vadi:

Why would you want to remove them? There are already a lot of unused things in the game - why make more things obsolete.

I'd like to see something done to "tone them down" some, but still be practical and give a proper edge when used.

Sometimes it's best to just cut off the foot before you have to cut off the leg. Clinging onto something simply because a lot of work went into it is irrational, especially when oftentimes clinging on just makes it worse. Kinda like how some corporations are guilty of spending 300+ million dollars to prevent the lost of 16 million.

Malarious:

Fast list:
- Require full sancing
- Make shrine distort considerably weaker. Its cost will never warrant its strength until we start charging a ton of essence for it.
- Lower the level of invasion mobs
- Alternatively move distort to shield shrine which will stop a trifecta of powers and require choice.
- Make gravity not effect moving down or climbing down.

Agree, especially moving distort to the shield shrine.

I support making some sort of warning when shrines are being raised, at least on certain places (like Cosmic and Moon/Night, the latter two aren't visited much, and are hard enough to defend as is... impossible and utterly pointless, that is) .

Warnings wouldn't do much to address the situation at hand, though I suppose it doesn't hurt either. I still like Talan's bit about raising shrine raise/use costs when brought into the consideration of affinity territory.

Another idea would be require full sanctification (or at least have 16 rooms of influence) to use any powers at all. This means if you can get rid of one room of influence, all powers go down and they need to put them all up again, not only wasting essence but time (as it's a fairly long balance) as well.

In short:

Talan:

I'm opposed to removing the possibility of raising shrines in enemy territory. Instead, I would suggest that we utilize the much-hated affinity in a way that might actually make people glad it exists, by scaling the costs to raise and activate shrines in locations depending whether or not they are aligned, neutral, or opposed.

This.

This thread is rapidly becoming one of the ones we seem to be reaching consensus on, good job! Though I see we still have thinks to talk about when it comes to shrines being area of effect or sanced room effect only.

I'll edit in the suggestions in the first page soon.

One thing I haven't heard mentioned here, but I have noticed in the game, is the sanctifying of rooms across area boundaries. Now, I don't know the mechanics of this exactly, but I have always assumed this was done not only for the protection of the shrines (keep a room or two in your org territory, so you can defend it with statues/totems/guards) but that the shrine powers worked across all areas with sanctified rooms.

Whether that is the case or not, I believe it makes sense to keep the shrines and their sanctified rooms limited to a single area, avoiding issues with Astral spheres, Avenger, and other odd things.

I'm fairly sure that shrine effects are only in the area of the shrine itself, not sanctified rooms - but I agree that could be a good change.

Also, I'll note that I don't think having affinity styled essence cost changes on raising shrines will really affect their offensive use in enemy territory. Though the idea of significantly increasing the time it takes to raise the shrine might, or just raise the time across the board - will have the same impact really.