To make my idea a little more clear to those who didn't notice all my sporadic ridiculous edits - investing motes/sparks would bestow the buff/boon/stat+/utility syntax/whatever you 'pay' for until you 'uninvest' them at whatever pre-determined cost (if any) to put them elsewhere. This is why I related them to talent points. By weighting certain stat+ or abilities, and limiting the pool of sparks or motes or whatever, it makes it so a Demigod doesn't get EVERYTHING, and instead has to pick their 'loadout' so to speak. If you throw in some extra stuff, and then add in the essence shop, you should have a way to reduce essence pools, lessen Demigod power, etc. I would prefer to see stat mote costs weighted according to archetype, so Bards spend more sparks/motes to get +CHA than a Warrior, and a Warriors spend more for +STR than a Bard or Mage, etc. My concern is that some classes would get shafted by this ideology.

This would also open up city/commune-specific investable specials for flavor or whatever to make each Demigod a little more unique, though that would come later.

What this does is it makes a Demigod think about what they want, and give up certain toys to have a handful of others. Make Vernals gain extra sparks/motes and other 'loadout' options, do away with Ascendancy, and viola. Consider making motes/sparks purchasable, and each Demi starts with 0, if you want to limit their power 'spiking' upward, with an obvious cap on how many one can have regardless.


EDIT: "Call of Duty: Aetheric Warfare" - Oh god, to the person who said this, I hate you. You know who you are.

Yeah that would be like me complaining cause I lost lost demi from raiding (which almost happened the other night.. I got out on distorted orgbix with 500 health left and 240k essence). If you spend all your essence you have nobody to blame but yourself.

Btw for those confused, Rodngar's idea is basically Beastmastery beast trains but for demigods.

You can re-invest trains? Well :censor:.

Yep, wackodoru.

Yeah if you buy 10 cr wackodorus.

No credit cost needed to retrain these, and I'd say that, for imagination's sake.. You have 10 motes, and are.. a Warrior. +2 STR is worth 3 motes. You want that. You have 7 motes left. Let's say traverse is.. 5, you want that. Umm.. regen is 1, you have 1 floating. You've given up getting other stats. That is a very very rough example. You can then, say.. dump a small bit of essence to reclaim the motes..

.. holy crap it is.

EDIT: Reclaiming obviously loses you the invested benefits in lieu of picking new ones.
EDIT2: Man, now, when you put it like that it sounds like crap, Shuyin.

It's not only when you risk losing demigod; any time you get close to a essence shop purchase you are going to become a wuss, especially if you lose the ability to divine fire. People won't compete in events like wild nodes unless they have a good chance of winning. At least there will be fewer kick and run raids.

Rodngar's idea sounds wonderful from the perspective of someone aiming for demigod.

You really need to read more, most every issue you've brought up has been included in most the suggestions given,

Limit # of Ascendants - check
Remove OP combat skills or adjust them - check
etc

What more do you want? All I really hear is nerf ascendants, but keep me as powerful as I am (minus the divinefire thing you just said). People are agreeing with you and you just don't seem to realize it because they are offering alternative solutions that solve both your problems and problems they have. It's frustrating to take into consideration your issues, include them in a solution and have you ignore them.

There are other ways to achieve the same limitations.

Branching paths are one. An example might be. The Nature Seal offers demigods the ability to merge with the power of a particular natural environment, You can only choose one of the natural environments listed and this might confer bonuses itself, modify other bonuses or unlock further relevant purchases.

Raising costs are another, once you have purchased one ability the others might become more expensive possibly to the point that you are spending months bashing up the essence just for one new bonus.

Combination of the two? Multiple branching path options (one for each seal?) the price to get the initial bonus raising depending on how many paths you have combined. A cap could be introduced by saying that you cannot combine opposing domoths, which would limit the choices to five if each path only had one level each or further levels just evolved the base bonus they granted. Could also put powerful abilities in opposing seals so that you have to choose, do you want to get res (life) or prevent people from being resurrected (death)

Incorporating points, Maybe you could choose multiple paths but each divergent path costs you more. If you wanted to get the Desert and Tundra bonuses from Nature it would cost you the chance to use one of the other seals.

Just a thought really, but there is always the chance for something different even if in the end it achieves a similar result.

Another thought, and one that comes with flavour and builds off of Saran's idea

Let each Demigod choose to devote themselves to one of the nine seals. "Adherants to the Nine" or something.

Whichever seal their devote themselves to would be slightly less expensive to invest into, which could be done similarly to the way the ascendance skillset currently is, ie: MEDITATE ON NATURE would let you invest essence into the Nature Domoth.

Allow a demigod to invest into any seals they want, with the caveats that A ) they can't devote to another seal without forsaking the first and taking a penalty on the returned essence, B ) essence invested into a seal they are not devoted to has less of an impact, C ) Any divergent branches can only be taken in a devoted seal, and D ) You cannot invest into a seal and its opposite.

Let the current VA's who are about to get shafted keep either all or a large portion of their essence if they voluntarily step down from VA, which refunds a portion of the power spent on them and grants them an honour line related to their org and the event that's going to be spreading the amnesia dust.

After the dust settles, those VAs an org chooses be considered "Devoted" to both one of the nine seals for being a demigod, and to the nexus manifestation from which they were raised, which essentially will act like another seal that only VAs can get.

Now, to limit the number of VAs, the justification can be that the devotions are being allowed because an infinitesimally small trickle of the Immanidivinus, no more than a thread, crosses the Void Gulf into each of the seals, and the nexii. Because the Seals were borne of the Immanidivinus, they can withstand the flow of it to the point that there's no practical limit to the number of devotees they can have, but for a nexus, which is mortal crafted, maintaining more than one or two devotees for any length of time would have a devastating effect expressed as a power drain, and if the nexus drops to 0 power, all VAs are cut off from the nexus skills.

Add in the RP-only essence shop for things like cults, and whatnot, have Avechna, or Nann, or Sparky, or Tully, or someone manage that shop.

Lastly, give the orgs some alternative to Vernal Ascendant that offers no combat benefits whatsoever, but can also be given to people they feel warrant a super-duper-mega-awesome RP position, power, and/or toy.

I think we're better off shooting for something as simple as possible.

True, just thought I'd get the idea out there while I'm coherent enough to think, but not coherent enough to tell myself it's a dumb idea.

Nerf Divinefire, or remove it. I've not used it once. It's a great kick-and-run tool, from what I've seen.

You can even remove Zap, for all I care. Never used it once.

I like the essence shop, of course. I hate the time-limited abilities, as someone who wouldn't have the time to spend earning essence all the time just to keep what I now enjoy. Buying flavor options sounds better to me, whether more RP-oriented or PK-oriented. Anything that allows me to customize and become more than just another demigod would be welcomed.

Now we're talking about taking away stuff from Demis too. Great.

(i.e. not great)

Back when I was on satellite I probably used it more than everyone else in the game put together; there were days I put two million essence away on it. And even I agree, zap can go. There were two situations in which it made sense: someone like me who could make demigod but be on satellite a lot of the time (and how likely is that to happen again?) and the coordinated remote-instagank-a-novice tactic that virtually no one likes, even when they were using it.

I'll be sad to lose divinefire, but I could survive that. (Particularly if someone were dangling the extra-tradeskill carrot.) I'd prefer to see one of the changes previously discussed that makes it impractical as a "get out of jail free" card in combat, but left it useful in hunting, or which toned it down, or both.

I like Shuyin's idea of letting us buy our powers and making that part of the essence shop, despite the fact that it doesn't prevent but just delay the powers; but then, I don't see the big problem that some people say they see with "demigods are overpowered". As with any "buff" you have to balance it to make it good enough to be worth the work it takes to get it, but not so good that it discourages everyone who doesn't have it. It started too overpowered and then it got nerfed and it was, I think, just right. In my opinion the reason it's being complained about again is not because it's too powerful, but because the work of getting it has been reduced. What I like about Shuyin's idea is that it creates a framework for the essence shop by which people can use the same mechanism to buy other things, including things that aren't necessarily combat-related but more utility (like transportation) or roleplay (like custom emotes). Making some of the more combat-oriented ones mutually exclusive is a fine way to keep this from expanding into making them more powerful than they are.

Speaking of which, let me reaffirm that the extra-tradeskills-for-essence thing can be limited to Mythical +50%, so no one can load up all the tradeskill combat bonuses, and thus, demigods won't get more combat-powerful, and that would be absolutely fine with me.

Since I keep being cited as an example of someone who might be ascended due to longstanding service, but won't be ascended due to not being a proven combatant, I don't know how much weight my voice can have if I talk about changing what ascendants can do, and what they cost, for fear that my comments will be dismissed as self-serving. But I have always thought it would be nice if it could be more about loyalty and service and dependability than it has been. The flat cost that gives demigods who earned it themselves a huge disadvantage is still the biggest problem there to me.

But nearly as big is the fact that ascendant gives you two things: Ascendance which is highly touted as being mostly about non-combat things, so everyone argues that ascension can be non-combat-monster-oriented; and being substantially better at domoths, which trumps everything and makes it be combat-monster-only. That's why Xenthos's idea to separate the two somehow is genius. It doesn't have to be done by changing names around, it can be part of the essence shop for instance. (E.g., you can buy primary affinity with one domoth, and secondary with another, and that's it. You get the bonuses currently gotten by ascendants in only the domoth you are primary on, and a lesser version of them on the secondary.) But separating them makes it possible to grant the commune's highest accolade on someone for reasons other than that they kick butt, and also dispenses with most of the objections that each VA makes the next VA easier to get.

I'm going to keep my fingers crossed and say a little prayer every morning and night that the idea of paragons really does get some careful consideration because I like it so much.

I actually like zap, not even for the pvp aspect, but it's fun to think up a cool zap and zap people. Heck when I did Gregori's the first thing I did is ran to Glomdoring and randomly zapped people and then got tells about how cool my zap looked. Not to mention all the zap-tag games we had in Serenwilde.

On Kalin, 2 of my kills are credited to zaps as well. Don't remove it.

is now replaced with



(sharp pointed sticks, against which there is no defense)