Nexus Clash

Fallen feels like it's in a bit of a weird spot currently. The class's effectiveness is highly dependent on MP, both for respawns and for Fractured Vessel bonus damage. This makes it feel very awkward to spend MP on damage, especially as a caster - you're punished way more than other classes for using a standard resource.

Further, Fallen's built-in MP regeneration tools are a bit awkward to use. Dividend of Indolence is a huge gamble that often won't pay off, while Avaricious Oblation both requires a supply of gold/silver and regenerates MP slowly over time. Both of these skills are also very CP intensive to use effectively, as you'll likely want the Alchemy tree to transmute metals for Avaricious Oblation.

I believe changing up the T2 Fallen skills could significantly alleviate this awkwardness. Both Defiler and Pariah already have strong MP regeneration tools (Dark Heart, Soul Vampire, Stygian Fury) that would synergize well with Fallen's kit. However, all of these tools are missing from the Ex-Shepherd and Ex-Paladin skill lists. Those classes instead have several self-healing skils (Heal Self, Feast on Suffering) or skills made redundant by T3 skills (Exploit Weakness). This self-healing synergizes well with the Pariah kit, which has a greater focus on HP management with Stygian Fury, but not so much with Fallen, which has few ways to spend HP and very fast HP regeneration through Fractured Vessel besides.

tl;dr: In my opinion, giving Fallen a way to either directly gain MP (like Dark Heart or Soul Vampire) or a way to convert HP to MP (like Stygian Fury or Sorcerer's Might) would greatly improve the feel of the class and make it less awkward to play.

i've noted down somewhere that ex-shepherd should have dark heart/life vampire/soul vampire

i haven't looked into ex-paladin as much but noted that 'minor damage floor bits on player attacks' is sad and would've rather seen a shadow armor of all things as a counterpart to divine armor

but ye as it stands there's no sanity in going ex-shepherd with zero inherent mp generation out of defiler's skills

but there's a lot i could say about fallen in general, i've just focused on the most clear-cut issues in ex-shep

A correct analysis of the class design Plum! There will likely be some changes to how ex-shep/pally work because it's very glaring that the fallen is lacking the MP regen tools that it needs to balance it's spend, especially when analogues of those tools exist already in both classes.