I am not a fan of the suggested change to consumption. It is already enough that it is stealing essence from one person and giving it to the ascendant. Changing it so you tack on another 50k + 1% of the essence reserve of someone on top of the essence you would already gain from killing the person is a bit much, even if the Ascendant has to be the one to do it. I feel the way the skill is now, is fine.

Absolutely not. The skill is by no means fine as it is. If you're scared of demigods losing too much essence (and people think that is valid) then it will have to be something else, but it's awful as it stands. Completely unusable. Even if I sat there bleeding somehow for an hour and let Xenthos "farm" me for essence he'd drain like 70k after an hour.

Ascendant should be mostly flavour skills. I'm sorry, but you got demi without actually working for it(minus Shiri). You shouldn't be showered with special abilities. Aegis alone sounds incredibly annoying. Aegis demesne user. Oh look, now we are stuck fighting in a demesne. Being able to talk from aetherbubbles (hello domoths!). Cults sound cool, and I have no idea why you think it would be hard to find an admin to give you a cult. They did create the skill after all.

Some could use some tweaks, but I was opposed to Ascendants from the start. The skills they get shouldn't be anything but marginally useful.

The essence drain really doesn't matter. It's 50 essence per minute. That's 40+ minutes by killing one necrotroph-thingy. At the same time, it doesn't allow hearing things I shouldn't be able to hear anyways-- no access to other channels, it just lets me hear things on channels I already hear things on. So a novice can now speak to me if I'm on Astral and have the skill up, instead of having to use messages. I can also put it up if I'm hunting off-plane and there are people chatting on the Glomdoring aether without much planar, so I can keep up.

It is a neat skill. I'd say that Aegis is my favoured skill of the bunch, and then either Portal or Omniscience. I don't know, I think I was just hoping for a bit more from transing the thing.

I sent Estarra an email about creating a cult 1.5 RL months ago. No response.

It's apparently pretty tough.

It is not awful at all, considering you get it with only an expenditure cost of time in bashing.

Also, that is the point of the skill, to be a flavor skill. You feel you should get some major combat boost from something that can only be acquired by a few do to actual realm mechanics, and that those people gain the skill-set only through the aid of many of other people? It is not like you personally placed 1 million essence in the nexus for your ability to learn from a restricted skill-set, so that being the case I feel you also do not deserve a skill-set that gives you a significant boost in your personal combat power.

This argument is both wrong and irrelevant.

1. The popularity contest is harder than the bashing. Again, I know, I've done both. Xenthos and Malicia deserve it.
2. They have to bash the equivalent of like 92 to demi (or more, depending on where you place the essence numbers) anyway. They worked for the demigod, albeit after the fact.

The investment of 1,000,000 power does not match up with anything except aegis/portal.

Btw, I'm not sure how you think cults work, but they require an active order. It's not just a case of asking the admin for a cult, it's a case of asking an active god you're in the order of for a cult (and cultmembers have to be in that order.)

EDIT: Geb, it's awful no matter which way you look at it. "You get it with only bashing" is not a valid argument. "An ability is not awful if you get it with bashing, even if it would otherwise be considered awful" does not follow.

I think I was unclear on how to change consumption. We already get nothing from killing demigods/ascendants. My suggestion was to change that and just have us gain 50k essence OR 1% of their total amount when we do kill them, that's all, no more, no less.

I was also about 50% titan when I "got" demigod, I think you can excuse me too as far as not "working" for demigod. Also, this is my second lvl 100 character, heh. Also, cults need you (the cult leader) to be part of an order with an active divine to give them the cult. This pretty much hoses those who belong to an inactive order or do not have any order at all due to a variety of reasons. I'm all for Order RP, but tying cults to them seems such an odd relationship.

As far as omniscience goes, people have always gotten by aetherbubbles with messages, and I'm more than happy to continue using messages to communicate instead of this trans ability.

Just as a note, 200 bleeding (a "reasonable" amount to keep up on people, considering clot) gave me 81 essence per shot, on a 4s recovery. That's 15 shots per minute if they aren't fighting, or 1215 essence per minute. 72,900 essence per hour. As well as giving insanity. And that's if they sit there for a full hour bleeding.

I'm not sure I know any Demi who can't hunt twice that in an hour if they want to, personally...

However, the whole Soulless thing is definitely part of that skill, and it is flavour. It'd just be nice to have it tweaked a bit.

I'm fairly sure no Ascendant particularly cares if their combat power gets boosted significantly through Ascendance, what we care about is to make all that time and "effort" invested to be worth it.

My answers are bolded.

That post was directed at Celina, not you. Except the edit. Which you ignored.

I agree and disagree at the same time. It is something that we can receive based on the efforts of multiple people, including ourselves-- so it would be nice if we could actually use it to benefit those same people, without requiring everyone to go order-hopping every time a Divine goes inactive.

It is an investment you choose to make, which became possible for you with through the aid of other people. Gaining more power to help those people who placed you there is fine (I.E. Aegis and such), but more personal power than what an Avatar possesses is not needed. The consumption skill should be seen as what it is, flavor. Some addition that is nice, but really not needed. It should not be considered something that must be upgraded to give a significant boost to Ascendants, in my opinion.

Just because you don't like it doesn't make it irrelevent or wrong.

I do, however, realize the futility in arguing about it. Buff the buffed! You really aren't as bad off as you think you are.

edit: Geb made a point I forgot. Popularity is not hard. Not by a long shot.

Where did I say I feel you should be required to join an order to make a cult? My original post was about consumption. I also pointed out that cults were not even considered in my argument, and frankly I could care less if they require the Ascendant to be in a divine order or not.

Yeah, well argued, I guess I give in. "You're only saying that because you're disagreeing with me. Besides, arguing is pointless, because you disagree with me."

Without directly commenting on the topic at hand nor any of the suggestions, I'm mildly curious.

What were you expecting out of Ascendance? Just honest curiosity.

Then we could have at least been automatically transed in the skill instead of investing as you say, given the fact that the investment is not worth the gain as it is currently. I'm afraid I can't really see where an ability to gain xp (essence) at something where you previously could not counts as something that is a significant upgrade.

Incidentally, I'd be fine with a cult leader could not become an Avatar, if concerns about 'effect-stacking' are really there.

Edit:



Abilities appropriate to the time invested to gain them. Combat, utility, whatever, it doesn't really matter.

I generally agree though that continual abilities useful to my org would have been preferred instead of this mix between onetime cult effects and less-than-stellar personal abilities.

To be honest? The original vision of the cults sounded a lot more interesting.

For the most part, it really should just be stuff that helps out the organization primarily... and, well, there's a lot of cult stuff aimed in that direction, but it's pretty difficult to actually utilize it. Other things could use a few minor tweaks (I agree with some of the ideas above, not so much with some of the others).