Okay, traders have 22 spells, but about 50% of those seem to be useless, overly penalized, or geared towards organized PvP rather than everyday gameplay. Traders do well with versatility, but they need a little more in this area to better serve them in PvE. Their strongest skills seem to be counter-balanced in a way that gears them towards PvP rather than PvE, and DR is nothing if not almost entirely PvE. It just doesn't seem to fit this game.
One way of handling this is to make starlight more fluid. They would have abilities to quickly generate it in combat, balancing their ability to quickly expend it today. They could also use it as a currency. Imagine traders "selling" their starlight power to extra planar entities in exchange for lengthy (ritual) style buffs similar to elemental transformations. This would let them gain a significant amount of power in a specific area to meet their individualized needs (PvE) without putting so many penalties on it that they'd never use it outside of a very specific, orchestrated PvP event.
It would go something like this....
1. Lunar Transformations:
- Ritual Spell. Call it renegotiation or fine print or escape clause or whatever.
- While on, you now have access to the barter verb. For a % cost of your max starlight, reduced with trading, you can type "barter tessera" or "barter negotiate" (cost is paid with the usage of the verb).
- You're now presented with up to 5 options, 1 at 0 trading, 5 at 1750 trading.
- You can ORDER # from tessera or negotiate (a handful of options, randomized, so #1 on your first order may be #3 on your second order or not even in the list).
- Each of these options corresponds to a buff currently found in enrichment, replacing the starcrash buff (see below) with a crafting, mana regen, stat buff, or whatever. There may even be a few others in this list to shake things up.
- They're mutually exclusive. You can only have one on at a time, but you can tailor the buff to your situation. Maybe put a CD on negotiation, of say 40 minutes. Maybe a "breach of contract" [read: death in traditional lunar fashion] if you try to get more than one.
- This would teach a significant amount of trading (enough to keep the skill locked if you had the starlight to feed it).
- To add additional variety, you could even randomize the cost each time, max cost reduced by trading skill.
OR rather than doing all of this, just let enrichment be cast on a spell at 5x the duration for the benefit of only buffing that one spell.
Fix Broken Spells:
- Enrichment - It uses too much starlight. One 70 power cast at ~530 PM takes me from 6/8 max starlight to 4/8 for an 8 minute buff of multiple features I won't all use at once. I understand the intent was to have a burst of power, but you're spending a minimum of 10-20 seconds, 15%-20% of your secondary resource, and a good chunk of mana to put it up. In instant need situations, you're dead before you get it out or you didn't need it. The AVTA bonus doesn't even make up for the cost of the spell. Starcrash and regalia I discuss below. ARS prep doesn't make up for the prep and mana recovery time of enrichment, as you're still using a tert skill which takes a few minutes to pulse a mob down. In organized PvP, I can see it having a use (TRC specifically), but you're still doing 2-5 minutes of prep for 5-10 minutes of activity followed by an hour of downtime to recover reserves, assuming you had them available to put it up in the first place. When you do get it up, you're still double-dipping starlight to get the affected spells out. Instead, give it a new effect entirely. Maybe make it a ritual, give it a CD, and make it restore starlight. Maybe transform your soul (spirit) into pure starlight energy as a way of rewarding high charisma, or just "gather" the ambient starlight in the room to you like a magnet. (goes to the fluidity I mentioned above)
- Starcrash - Like enrichment, 2 mobs just isn't a huge benefit. The times you'd want 3-5 mobs hit (such as invasions or events or AOE farming) are usually a lot longer than the 2-10 minutes you'll get from Enrichment, often indoors, and in optimal situations you're still not as effective as the real AOE'r hitting 5-15 mobs every 20 seconds (HH/CHL + FR on the top end). Ideally, this would just have a metaspell similar to heavenly fires which permanently unlocks the new functionality (3rd target) at the cost of another slot. It's still 60% as effective, using a tertiary skill, and costing secondary resources. It's still inferior to the rest of the AOE guilds (clerics, paladins, warrior mages, bards, and arguably moon mages), but at least it's now viable in some AOE situations.
- AVTA - Free mana is free mana. This really is a good spell by itself, but enrichment 3x isn't really worth it. Enrichment only lasts 10 minutes with 100 mana. I find this spell fuels a camb with about 20 mana / 3 minutes while enrichment is active and 7/3 min when it's not. Non-enriched. Fine. Great. Enriched, it's barely enough to cover the costs, and it still requires a sky. Can this cast a short-duration "seal cambrinth" on the item it charges and/or charge all cambrinth you're wearing at the same time and/or also overflow cambrinth mana directly into your attunement or always charge with enrichment active even if indoors (see transformation suggestion above). Maybe something really crazy like making camb and attunement one big pool. It fills attunement and overflows into cambrinth like today. When you harness, you pull from camb.
- Elision - Make this an "Aegis". It's a solid spell. One of the best in the toolkit, but I'd like the option to turn it on/off without releasing the spell. Basically, I'd rather it be treated as an emergency button akin to scream defiance, but different in that it would be a toggle while the spell is up, or maybe a toggle kicking it in automatically when stunned or low health. You would need a minimum amount of starlight to invoke it. Barring that, it would be nice for this effect to extend to boxes similar to Khri safe.
- Regalia - Needs to be revamped. The flavor text is perfect, but the effect is worthless. Incidentals for a few hundred plats will outpace what you can do with the spell even if you invest 3 slots and several techs, you don't have to worry about it fading at a bad time, and you don't have to spend primary or secondary resource to keep the armor up. Regalia doesn't need to be repaired, but 4 repair techs for 4 hours of damage immunity is more effective than a half-dozen armorsmithing techs to get lesser quality gear. Other guild creation spells are immeasurably better. They either give you the base feature for free (summon weapons), fewer slots for specific benefits (elemental weapons, tks ammo) giving you some new functionality you can't otherwise get (mana battery, SOL & AEG worn sizes), or providing other buffs (SOL). I'd rather this worked like shield of light. If you have no armor, it does what it does. Either way, it gives you some other buff. Hindrance reduction (similar to dampen) or armor reinforcement (similar to DA) would be great.
- Bespoke Regalia - See regalia.
- Stellar Collector - I can't count how many teserra I've lost with this spell. It also seems to be inert more often than not, but that may have more to do with winter than the spell. Either way, it doesn't feel like it's
worth casting even when starlight starved. I know there are plans to remove the tessera requirement. I look forward to the change, but I'd also like this to always be regenning starlight no matter where it is. It can be slow and increasingly inefficient, but something would be helpful for those caverns and undead hunting areas along the route. I'd also like to see it work more like OM than how it does today. Rather than tucking it away, you wear it and it slowly fills with starlight.
- Crystal Dart - Considering the secondary resource requirement, even with the cloud mechanic for min cast (doesn't help against undead), can this spell get some sort of secondary effect which makes it worth casting over strange arrow? Maybe give it a bless effect so it can hit undead with a min cast or some other lingering effect?
New Spells: Just... more. Rangers have 29. Paladins have 27. Thieves and barbarians twice this. Primes have almost as many in a single tree. Every guild in the game has more spells and more abilities than a trader.
Multiple ideas have been thrown out, but I'll throw out a few more (or retread old ground)...
- Transformations or other powerful "choose one" spells (see the top)
- Cyclic, illusion, multi-strike TM. Armor piercing. Weird hybrid of ChS and Rimefang, but it takes their spirit and converts to starlight. The idea is to make starlight more of a fluid resource. You have the current slower means of regen, but this lets you have more control regardless of where you are. Thematically, you'd summon non-euclidean geometric shapes around yourself.
- More metaspells. Maybe one that opens up a 3rd scroll slot. One above for starcrash. Maybe one for MOM that let's you redirect spells onto their caster.
- More buffs. Concentration shield to assist with speculates, strength, stamina, locks, thievery, tactics, TM, debilitation, defending, ranged weapons, attunement, arcana, enchanting, tactics, and wisdom.
- More debilitators. Fear-based knockdown or DF penalty, maybe cyclic affecting everything at melee with you, and a fear (shock?) based immobilize.
- "Cheat abilities" - Let traders buy bonus feats and spell slots (for plat) as a guild perk, maybe a lore prime perk? Buy permanent increases to attunement pool, again for plats. And the like.
- and many more.
