I'm starting to think that the essence required to train in Ascendance is a tad high. Since my last skillrank, and even skill, I have spent 6.9 million essence. I feel it could do with a toning down, unless skills come at a faster rate after Gifted.

So right now, can VAs be raised, then removed to give them demigod status? Yes it would be a costly thing to do, but that isn't the question. If orgs can just raise/remove/raise/remove (if they had the power to do it) what would stop them from making all the best fighters they had insta demis?

Again, depending on how many VAs they were allowed to have, they could just rotate VA's out (in theory) and give a whole org insta-demi status.

I am just wondering if this is how it is coded right now, if so.... then maybe that should change before we see an org take advantage of the situation. I guarantee if I was running Mag, and had enough power in the megalith to do so. What would be there to stop me from letting my org know that if an individual donated 1mil essence, (or 1 mil essence was donated by a group of people for 1 individual) that I will bring them up to insta demi by using the VA to accomplish this goal?

One million POWER, Ildaudid.

Perhaps I've been a bit out of touch lately, but I can't say that I've known anyone to ever give any amount that even remotely comes close to 1 million power to a single nexus.

If you were going to say that you would let them become VA then have it removed if they donated 1mil power.. Why would you remove it? They are more powerful as VAs. That seems like a waste of power to me.

Ildaudid, there's no limit to how many VAs an organization can raise.

And yes, a million power isn't exactly easy to get. That said, scepters/orbs/crowns should not add power - there's enough incentive to obtain them as is. It only allows organizations able to raise VAs obtain... more VAs.

Eh, there is not much incentive without the power. I know I wouldn't bother if not for the power.

I have to agree with Ilyarin about transing Ascendance, spending upwards of 6 million to get from master - gifted strikes me as a bit too much (I've poured in about 3 million myself at the same rank). It's a bit of a bummer putting all those essence into the skill and only getting -one- ability per rank. So unless more abilities start coming in more often at the higher levels...let's just say transing Ascendance will be a while :/

Also, the whole Cults being tied to an Order is a bit of a bummer as well, we of the inactive Orders are kind of hosed in that regard.

I don't know, from what I've seen of the skillset, the essence cost should be high. Some of the abilities therein are quite powerful and ascendants have an innate advantage over everyone else. Dying really has zero longterm effect on their potential as VA status can never be lost, though granted the downtime between deaths can be rather lengthy unless essence is used (I'm discounting the various death-escaping skills at the moment of course). The bonuses that are gained through ascendancy are 100% permanent, so it makes sense to take a while to come to fruition.

Oh I didn't try to imply that it should be brought crazy low values, just lowered in general. My bad if it seemed the former and not the latter.

From current estimations, it'll be upwards of 50+ million to trans, we think (Ilyarin actually did the math, he can probably say so).

I think Exeryte said he has about 80+ million? That's a lot of essence.

Then again, maybe the high abilities in Ascendance will just utterly blow our minds and make it so that the current essence costs are perfect for such uber skills (zomg thunderclap?!?!).

Hmm, if you bashed up a million essence a day. (Possible though difficult) That's just 50 days. If you took it at a pretty reasonable pace and did half that, it's like 100 days. If you go pretty darn slow you could do it in a year without much trouble. How fast do you think it should be able to be done? As I understand it, it's supposed to be kind of a long term incentive for Ascendants to keep active.

I think it would suck if VA's went to "full power" in under a RL month that would be really bad.

There needs to be something for the VA to keep working towards. I could just imagine in a few years from now, having really powerfull VAs who all the other VAs are jealous of and look up to.

100 million seems insane.

Over what period of time though?

Bother, wrong thread. But anyways, go go Ascendance.

Just a summarizing of ideas:
1) Vernal Ascendants are supposed to be for the organization. Cults are a neat concept, but are extremely limited (and force an Ascendant to Order-hop to an active Order). Vernals should have specific monolith that can be offered to within their organization, and all essence offered there is *split* between all Vernals the organization has (active and inactive).
* Alternative: A percentage of essence offered at any Divine's shrine located within the organization is split up between all Vernals of that organization.
2) Examine the power produced from Sceptres/Orbs/Crowns. It could very easily be lowered to something still desireable... but at the moment, it's a pretty major source of income which is based entirely on the number of Ascendants/Demigods you have. The more you have, the faster you can make more (so the more you make). It'll eventually get kind of depressing.
3) Examine the amount of essence it takes to learn Ascendance. Personally, I think it's fine as-is. There could be more skills in it, from what I hear, but what I think most of us would benefit from would be a way to check how much essence to the next learned skill (kind of like ASK BRENNAN KNIGHTHOOD). Knowing how close you're getting would give you a goal to reach, instead of the current, "We have no idea where the heck we are!" that Sojiro and Ilyarin are talking about.
4) Along the lines of point 1, give Vernal Ascendants some things that are more organization-related. There've been ideas such as being able to perform minor rituals, etc. I think it'd be neat to have things we can directly do for our organization, but I'm not really sure if it's necessary. It could be the ability to raise a cult that's divested from Divine Orders, perhaps.
5) What have I missed?

Why are you missing the point? The point was, if the org had enough power to do it, they could insta demi people. Let the 1 mil power part go.



Yeah I wasn't sure if they could have as many as they wanted. Which had me wondering about the whole get VA then drop to demi thing.




Yea same as above.

Except the one million power is kind of central to this whole thing.. It takes a LONG TIME to get 1 million power.

If an org had a million credits, they could instantly trans everyone that came out of the Portal, arti them out, and send them on a rampage.

That's about as feasible as an org having millions of power to keep raising people at any kind of fast pace.

Exactly what sorts of abilities are in the ascendant skillset? Are we talking about more RP-oriented things, more combat-oriented things, more divine privileges kind of things?

Also...heh, Celest has a little clause at the end of the whole ascendant proposal system saying if anybody donated 1 mil power, the SC would automatically consider them ('consider', not necessarily approve) for Ascendancy. I grinned a bit at that. It seemed to be incredibly tedious for me to get just 200 power...after all, think of the different ways an individual can get power in Celest:
-light essence
-empower angels
-supplicants quest
-scholars/bards
-starlinking astral nodes (celestines only)
-...? Can you do an aetherspace journey by yourself and get power?

In other words, it's extremely difficult and would take you many times longer than getting demi, I think...

Doing all of that stuff, you'd hit demi long before you got a million power. I think I'll hit 80 before even coming close to 10k power.