I'd also like to put in a plug for some sort of limited multi-classing. The skills portion could be covered by the general perks (i.e., +spell aiming for professions that can only 1x train), but access to non-native spell circles (up to a certain level like X10 or X08) would also be absolutely amazing and contribute to professional balance. The cost should be appropriately expensive, however.

Some paladin ideas!

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Crusader Unique Line

Requirements: Must be a Paladin, cannot have chosen ascensions in Honor tree or Slave to Darkness tree.

Elite Tier:

Harry the Foe: Anytime an enemy leaves the room you are in, you have a 20/40/60% chance to get a free melee attack against them. If this stuns them or puts them on the ground they are prevented from leaving the room. This works while you are in RT.

Punish the Unbeliever: 1615 and 1630 have an increased DF, as well as applying DoTs during a successful cast.

Legendary Tier:

Indignation of the Righteous/Wicked: Incarnate 1650 SMITE ability has a 50% chance NOT to use any divine energy. In addition, you may cast this ability as an AoE for double the divine energy cost of a single strike.

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Honor Unique Line

Requirements: Must be a Paladin, cannot have chosen ascensions in Crusader tree or Slave to Darkness tree.

Elite Tier:

Rejoice, Reinforcements!: When you enter a room, reduce the roundtime of any Player Characters in that room by X amount. In addition, anyone in your group who becomes stunned or webbed has a 20/40/60/80% chance every X seconds to break that stun or web.

Sacred Challenge: You may target a single creature. As long as that creature is targetted, it cannot leave nor target any other player or creature in the room. No other creature or player in the room may target you. Every attack you make against the creature Flares with deity specific flare.. You are also forbidden from leaving the room or targetting any other creature, or using AoE abilities/spells for as long as the Challenge'd creature is alive.

Legendary Tier:

Vow of Temperance: You may no longer receive nor use outside spells or buffs. However, you can no longer be stunned or put into RT from an outside source. At rank 2, your DF for attacks and spells increases by X% and at rank 3 you also are immune to web/silence/sleep.

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Slave to the Dark unique path

Requirements: Must be a paladin. Must not have chosen ascension perks in the Honor or Crusader trees.

Elite Tier:

Blood is Power: Sacrifice a percentage of health (reducing per rank) to gain a percentage of stamina and mana back (increasing per rank)

Touch of Corruption: Your guiding light flares from 1625 and 1604 may triple flare and become vacuum based instead of plasma based. With further investment, the flare strength increases.

Legendary Tier:

Shadow Infused: Gain 3 CER of crit and damage padding naturally that stacks with padding from other sources, per rank. In addition, when stunned, there is a %chance to automatically cast 1630 for free (no mana/roundtime)

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GM Naionna at 11:41 PM
Whick is so pretty. it's a shame he has to talk.

Shield Counter:
Rank 1 - Chance for a reactive shield bash with a successful block
Rank 2 - Chance for a reactive shield strike with a successful block


Shield Swiftness:
Rank 1 - Decrease current hard RT by 1 second with each successful block
Rank 2 - 2 seconds

What about a skill to allow the ability to learn new languages.

Some ideas:

For empaths, a legendary skill that enhances troll's blood (1125) to greatly increase its chances of breaking a stun. This could be a tiered ability where each tier increase the stun breaking chance and even the base interval the effect triggers.

For general pet spells such as familiars, spirits, demons et all, a legendary skill that gives them the ability to help out in combat. It can be something simple like a flare that have a chance to trigger when the master attacks. I just would like to see my wizard's fat cat belch a ball of fire or something once in a while, for flavor.

Awesome ideas! I really like all the enhancive ideas and the rest.

Spell Dilettante: I’d love to see some cross-class spell knowledge, especially for minor buffs. Perhaps Ascension points to learn certain spells, ones commonly found on imbeds and such: 103, 303, 503, 507, 508, 509, 511, 203, 204, 205/206, etc. Even if it took a number of points to learn, it would be fun to be able to self-spell all of these. Perhaps there could be a skill tree for “Spell Dilettante.”

For Paladins:

1601: Let it be a stackable duration on others. (Same for 103 and other common, short spells too).

1602: Increase the number of targets

1603: Increase the duration.

1604: Evoke/Channel it to be a Bless as well. I’ve always found it a bit odd, RP-wise, that Paladins can’t Bless.

1608: Make it an aura that is always turned on, like a bard song, for a renewing mana cost.

1618: Turn Crusade into an aura spell as well, similar to a bard song with a renewing mana cost.

1630: Increase the number of targets and let it be toggled to player-friendly.

1635: Extending the range on Beseech while dead to be more cross-realm.

1640: I love the idea of improving 1640 effects, number of uses, updating it to a better Resurrection tier, and being able to use chrisms

1650: Make Incarnate Armor trigger automatically at 30% health and improve the effects and number of uses.

For most Paladin spells, more ways to increase their AS/DS, bonuses, or such.

Buff Others: Being able to buff others with self-cast spells like 1606 or 1610 would be great.


Mounts:

Make a Mount line of things for Ascension and give them the ability to fight like Ranger companions do now. Also, a skill tree that adds AS/DS, causes them to guard you while prone, etc, while fighting with your mount. Perhaps Wizard familiars could also fight.

Ambush Reach: As a Dwarf, I’d also love a better way to reach heads for ambushing taller targets. The CMAN for it isn’t available to Paladins. Perhaps something could be added there! Innate weapons’ reach or Acrobat’s Leap for All.

Holy Power: In terms of class-specific crafting, perhaps let Paladins/Clerics add Sanctification to items, with a ritual/charged Holy power like Enchanting Essence. It would also be cool to create a “Holy Power” pool that could be used for other things, including SMRv2 attacks like 1650’s Smite. Or this could be used by everyone as a poop of energy to unlock and then use to self-bless items and cast prayer-based buffs.


~Fulmen Soulhammer

Naturally, in the spring, a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of how best to min/max or abuse new systems.

Then, of course, there's old goats like me. We just contemplatively chew a cud. :)

.

So, some thoughts:
- I loved the Sheruvian Monastery to death, with my Bard. Human-sized critters (so "pathetic HPs, compared to the 36th-ish level titans & frost giants") in no armor (so "pathetic defenses, and easy to ward with spells") who cast no spells (so "comparatively easy to survive, unless a 63rd level Harbinger came in") but had mana (so "easy to refill mana to fuel Disruption to kill them"). Sadly, "hunting them" means "you eventually age out of them." Similarly, Krakii was rolled up pretty much specifically to go into kral warfarers and shred them with a claidhmore, and it was a sad day when I aged out of there.
* With the EXP/ATP setting... can you do 0% experience/100% on the other side, and just "stay in your Happy Hunting Ground forever"?

- Is this the kind of system where you might see specialized styles of Unarmed Combat get dreamed up? Go study under the Grand High Whatsis and learn Crane Style, or Tiger's Paw, Monkey's Fist, whatever?

- Is this the kind of system where a dedicated Bard could for example learn how to use the flares from a sonic "weapon" to instead be on one of the OTHER kinds of Sonic Equipment? (Shield, like for Bashing; or Armor, like for Bearhug; or Dancing Weapon, like for having flares on your cool dancing made-out-of-air weapon?)

I seriously love this concept. I'm also really enjoying reading a lot of the suggestions.

Before I write up anything comprehensive, though, one thing that I think would be an amazing way to introduce expanded spell capabilities with this system would be to allow any class to train (at a very hefty cost) in all Minor spell circles. I think this might be a fairly straightforward way of expanding into the concept of multiclassing without taking away any truly defining profession-specific spell circles.

- Overlord EK

>You now regard Eorgina with a warm demeanor.

Feint of Heart - Bonus to using feint, creatures (Ithzir) cannot fade out from the attempt.

Long Arms of the Law - Extends your reach so you can hit flying creatures.

Dispel Dodger - Immune to dispel attempts.

Grasp from not-quite-the-Grave - Able to handle cursed objects without getting stuck!

I'm a huge fan of the common ascension skills suggested. One of the reasons I enjoy GSIV so much is its relative flexibility and ability to customize my character with specific tweaks. I'm much less of a fan of locked trees and class-specific skills. Investing limited dev time into new features that can only be used by a specific segment of the game population seems to be a less efficient approach than providing something functional across the board.

From a standpoint of practicality, when you lock things down to a specific class, you're getting into "guild-style" features and the related development (a system that after 30 years, still isn't even close to being complete across the board). I think it's fair to say, form a customer perspective, that an overly-complex system runs the risk of the same fate. Implementing a point-based system is pretty straight forward and benefits everyone.

Here are some of my quick ideas for rogues, basic as they may be. I’m not gonna get into tiers or anything fancy because I’m lazy, and I apologize if any of these seem like repeats.

True Crit: An ambush (from hiding) or waylay that costs X amount of stamina that removes all critical and damage randomization.

Pure Kill: An ambush (from hiding) or waylay, with an anti-magic or ensorcelled weapon, that costs X amount of stamina and ignores all DS generated by spells. (Similar to the old attack grimswarm were able to do when they were released).

Shadow Mass: The ability to use focused and open mstrikes in conjunction with Silent Strike.

Mimic: If 2 or more creatures are in a room, you can move purposefully from shadow to shadow to manipulate one or more of your opponents into attacking one another.

Footloose: Upon achieving Evasiveness (via Light Armor Mastery), for 30 seconds you receive a % chance to redirect an incoming attack towards another creature in the room. (Similar to Duck and Weave, but good).

Zero Chill: Remove all current cool downs… with a cool down, of course.

Zero Chill Mastery: Cool downs are square problems, and you’re no L Seven weenie. No more cool downs for you!

Gouge: Deliver an attack from hiding that disables and causes rapid bleeding, can be used in conjunction with silent strike. (I see this one working like low steel psychic flares, but with blood loss).

Cabin of Gliding Knives: Basically mfire but with hurling. This would probably require a whole new game object that works like a quiver but can be filled with disposable throwing knives, kunai, etc.

Pyramid Plot: You’re a proud business owner able to make thousands of silver from home selling essential poisons. You can make your own poisons that can be applied to weapons to cause all sorts of varying effects including: hp loss, stuns, dispels, sleep, or a new berserk affect that causes the afflicted start blindly attacking everything in the room.

Proper Implementation: Gain the ability to steal from creatures to receive extra coins, magic crystals, small statues, etc that wouldn’t have been found via Loot.

Plunder: If you attempt an ambush, waylay, or subdue with an open hand, you attempt to automatically pickpocket your victim. Works in conjunction with Silent Strike.

Key to the Heart: You can use lockpicks as weapons (functioning as terrible, puncture only daggers). Hurled lockpicks on the other hand receive non-randomized crit weighting determined by their value with a % chance of breaking upon use. (eg. A hurled vaalin lockpick would have claidhmore critical weighting, but with a high chance of snapping. It would remain repairable via Lockmastery, but suffer the same modifier loss as a regular break).

.jaired
>LIKE A BOSS
Please rephrase that command.

I'd suggest splitting these into ideas that specialize and ideas that generalize. There are many opportunities to create a polymath sort of character, a sorcerer who is great with weapons, or a warrior who is good with spells. A halfling who can carry a truck. Paladins who are more cleric, or bards who are more rogue. Maybe some of these aren't too OP, and maybe this is the hardest thing to accomplish with points. There are also many opportunities to create a specialist. Divergence, or convergence, on the archetype of profession OR race OR whatever will be a consideration that I see players appreciating over time.

If there are mutually-exclusive trees, then there should be more of them, sometimes with skills that overlap. Or, as an alternative, inclusive trees, but costs increase as you progress in all of them.

There are some great ideas here, but let's not create too many band-aids with this. Some things that aren't working well should be addressed for everyone, not just post-cap dev.

Tertiary training - allows a class that can only 1x in a tertiary skill to 2x in it. Must specify the skill at time of picking this ability. This ability can be picked multiple times.

<<The Ascension system will be Post-Cap Development, but it will not be restricted to level 100 characters. A lot of the exact details are still being worked out, such as the mechanism to earn points, so any or all of this could change. However, the current plan is for you to earn experience through your normal hunting grounds. That experience can then be diverted into a special pool for Ascension Training Points (ATPs) that that are then spent to unlock a number of passive and active abilities. It will function very similar to the Combat Maneuver List (CML) system.>>

Under the current plan would existing experience be available to be diverted into that special pool for Ascension Training Points (ATPs)?

Wolfloner's player

Steve

Thinking along the lines of point/rank increase options.

** Maybe secondary skill systems like artisan skills could be included. As a master forger, I would love to have the ability to expend post-cap training to further my non-combat related skill-set, like fletching, beyond the current system limitations.

** The ability to increase my play instrument skills beyond non-bard caps. While my giantkin fighter's music will never be magical, it would be great for him to be able to master playing his Issimir bagpipes.

** Also, while the "translator" items are pretty nifty, it would be cool to have a platform to invest experience into learning additional languages, perhaps even cultural languages.

** Organizational skills (i.e. +1 global extra locker slots)


Pondering other non-combat related possibilities...

** Special verb (or verb stylization) unlocks. These could be based on the number of stacked common skills a character has (i.e. 10 ranks of Strength Training unlocks a new stylized verb, 20 ranks unlocks another). These wouldn't have to be overly complicated, but would be a fun way to express a character's investment into the ascension system while in-character.

** Special feature modification options. Same concept as the unlockable verbs concept above, but instead unlocking special limited pre-set feature alteration ideas. This is where the visuals of the ascension system could really become visible; especially with the lore training (i.e. gain +25 ranks in Ascended Elemental Lore - Fire and unlock the option to hat "fiery blazing eyes", etc.

DUNGEONCRAWLERS

Would the ascension system have some sort of reassignment and "fixskills" style functionality that would allow a player to backtrack their character's ascension training if/when new options become available?

Yes. Jokingly referred to as the DESCEND verb. ;)

Wolfloner's player

Under the current plan would existing experience be available to be diverted into that special pool for Ascension Training Points (ATPs)?

It would not. The goal is that everyone starts off at the exact same point. Up to a certain point, those characters with a lot of post-cap skills are usually more efficient at earning experience/combat, so still retain an advantage due to their total experience earned.

Krakii

DungeonCrawlers' comment about the 'common' skills reminded me: are the costs for these going to be flat across professions ("middling-high" for all, as opposed to dirt cheap for some/expensive for others)? Are the numbers of them going to be limited (like Enhancives, not more than <some value> period)?

Because I could see a situation where it may turn out to be cheaper to get 23 ranks of EL:Water through this system rather than using Training Points, and pick up 10 ranks through Enhancives, to get level3 "The Watering" from Mana Focus/418, for example.

Or a Sorcerer who knows Targeting/425 wanting to get ranks of 2Hand weapon this way, rather than coughing up the training points.

Costs are still to be determined, but more than likely will be static across all professions. However, it's unlikely that the Ascension system will be a cheaper method to earn skill ranks. You are not going to advance quickly through this system and the more you invest into a particular skill, the more expensive it gets. Just to toss out hypothetical numbers, it takes 50k experience to earn 1 ATP and the first rank of a +skill unlock is 1 ATP. The second unlock is 2 ATPs, then 3...the 10th unlock is 10 ATPs. That's 2.75m experience to earn +10 ranks. Those won't be the actual numbers (as that's way too much exp for +10 ranks), but I'm using them to illustrate the point. The Ascension system is mainly intended to advance your character past the current game's limits, not to shortcut it. It's more for the characters who are already at their profession's skill cap, but want to continue to train more.

GameMaster Estild

LORE MASTER (one for each Lore in the game)
- Training in Lore Mastery precludes training in any other Lore Mastery (or possibly limited to one for each: Elemental, Spiritual, Mental)
- Each rank in LORE MASTER allows for SEED summation based Lore benefits to be 1 greater than current Skill based training supports.

e.g. A wizard has 46 Ranks in Air Lore training which provides a Floating Disk (511) benefit of a disk with a capacity of 12. Training in two rank in LORE MASTER - AIR would provide a disk with a capacity of 14.
Similarly, the same wizard would have the Sleep spell (501) "groggy" effect increased from 9% (required 45 Ranks in Air Lore training) to 11%.


DESCEND MASTER
- Each rank in DESCEND MASTER reduces the time to unlearn Ascension Points by 10% (up to a maximum of 50%)
- Learning 5 ranks in DESCEND MASTER grants the pre-title of "Descendant"



-- Robert

>channel my maul
You channel at a hefty mithril maul.
You make an astoundingly inept attempt! Success!

I actually agree with Krakii, the whole Ascension system (with it's already-branched threads) should probably be combined into a seperate folder now.

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As for some ideas:

Hybrid Alignment: If you are of a profession that is under a single sphere of influence, you may choose a second sphere, becoming a hybrid. Professions which are already considered hybrids (empaths, sorcerors, bards, rogues, warriors, monks) may not learn this ascension trait.

Hybrid Mastery: If you are considered a hybrid (either innately, or through having the Hybrid Alignment trait), you can now learn the Minor spell circle of your secondary sphere of influence. Sorcerors may not learn this ascension trait.

Master Spiritualist: If you are considered under the Spiritual sphere of influence (either innately, or through having the Hybrid Alignment trait), you can now learn the Major Spirit spell circle.

Master Elementalist: If you are considered under the Elemental sphere of influence (either innately, or through having the Hybrid Alignment trait), you can now learn the Major Elemental spell circle.

Master Mentalist: If you are considered under the Mental sphere of influence (either innately, or through having the Hybrid Alignment trait), you can now learn the Major Mental spell circle.
>(Editor's note: until the Major Mental circle is implemented, perhaps this could give access to the Minor Mental spell circle instead.)

~Cylnthia Kythnis Ardenai
~Paragon of Kuon
~Rose Guardian, House Sylvanfair

I've moved all the previous threads to this new topic.

GameMaster Estild