Get rid of the buggy legacy protect system in favor of…

Avatar of Protection: advanced difficulty; 2 slots (?); warding/utility; signature; Sacrifice book; VoS prereq; initial cast costs mana and spirit

The Avatar of Protection spell forges a powerful avatar from the mettle of its caster’s soul. The avatar is neither sentient nor completely autonomous. It is merely an extension of the paladin’s will to protect any and all in need. So strong is a paladin’s link with his avatar that the avatar will often take the form of its caster when in full effect.

Self functionality:

The avatar lies dormant in a dim globe that hovers near its caster in serene anticipation. When its caster is in danger (immobilized, prone, kneeling, webbed, sitting), the avatar springs forth, inhabits the caster’s body and urges him to break the shackles that bind him. This effect is available only once every 30 seconds at max potency.

Others functionality:

While the spell is active, a paladin can gesture at someone to transfer the globe to a nearby adventurer or invoke it to have it return. The avatar, as an extension of the paladin, possesses all the paladin’s skills and experience and defends just as fiercely. The avatar springs from its globe to guard against any attacks made on the protectee. Attacks that pass through its defenses are absorbed by the avatar and felt by the paladin in the form of the vitality hit for the portion that gets passed the avatar’s defenses. The avatar’s skill scales based on mana from 60% of the paladin’s defenses up to 100% at potency cap.

The paladin must be in the same room as the protectee. If the two are separated, the globe returns to the paladin. Assess protect can be used in place of a gesture to automatically transfer the avatar to the most needy adventurer.

Avatar of Vengeance: metaspell; 2 slots; adds the following cast feature via cast toggle to Avatar of Protection

On self: Replaces normal functionality with spirit ward and regen bonus. (I considered a spirit attack reflect, but that just seems too niche.)

On others: The avatar now deflects attacks that make it through its defenses rather than absorbing them. What’s left from deflected attacks hurts the protectee rather than the caster. The vengeful avatar casts halt on attackers that make connecting attacks.

Pluses:
• You kill a legacy system in favor of a more modern, less niche spell, which has the benefit of being simpler than a full on protect revision and better than removing a desirable ability altogether
• It’s now a dispellable effect and weak to DFA so protectees are far from immune to damage in PvP
• It fits the paladin protector theme very well
• It feels like a natural evolution from VoS and gives us another worthy Sacrifice spell
• Lots of expansion potential through metaspells and such

Minuses:

• It’s a spell
• It’s dispellable and weak to DFA (it’s a minus, too)
• It’s a strong ward when cast on others so it may be subject to ward nerfs, although I’d hope not given it’s weaker than the current protect and fits the guild extremely well. It's primary purpose is to encourage group play and doesn't make paladins any less killable in a practical sense.

I would be honestly, and deeply saddened to see Protect removed in favor of a spell.

Dragonrealms is already far far too invested into magic, and could use MORE variety rather than just pushing everyone into being mages with different sprinkles.

Samsaren

>Dragonrealms is already far far too invested into magic, and could use MORE variety rather than just pushing everyone into being mages with different sprinkles.

Me, too, but I'll take magic dev as an alternative to no dev for more years. The only new paladin spell/ability dev I recall seeing over the last I-don't-know-how-many years is magic-related and GMs seem a lot more receptive to spell suggestions. I'd love to see the pendulum swing over to abilities, but I'm not confident it will in the foreseeable future, especially given how fragmented ability systems are across different guilds. It's hard to argue there's more ROI in writing a spell than writing a new ability, sadly.

Plus, our sacrifice spell book IS pretty weak. I mean, at the top of the Sacrifice mountain we have AG, and arguably the best spell in it is AA (MPP).