Skills: (Dark Priesthood) Call Vassals time periods are weird

[AuXAuV]

The ability to spend more dark power for longer duration of call vassals is... weird.

It's in the niche of too short to be useful for non-meta players, and too long to waste on meta players.
It's also scales cost poorly.
To elaborate, it appears that meta-connected players will always ping their vassals and call for 1 minute, cramming everyone into a rush on the teleport button.
There's little benefit to longer durations as explained by the wiki presently, and longer durations have prohibitively steep costs.

One suggestion to make it a much more versatile skill is by allowing feral/non-meta players to take advantage of the teleport.

For instance, 5 dark power to summon vassals for 10 minutes, and then an additional dark power (6 total) for an hour of summoning, and an additional 4 dark power (10 total) for 24 hours of summoning.

[Fellis]

yeah agree that this needs a higher base cost (what that should be i'm not exactly sure) and the duration is relatively cheap. A lot of the short duration things in the game need to be changed, it's just not friendly towards a variety of players, including those on mobile only which is not insignificant

[Kandarin]

Promote. I'd agree that this would be better to have short/medium/long durations instead of fixing it to a straight scale of minutes. Dark Priesthood is supposed to be the meta-heavy DO build, but "people who will respond in sixty seconds if you ping them on Discord" is a bit too meta-heavy.

[Kandarin]

Putting this back out there for some commentary, but it's clear to me that this is priced wrong, because the controlling factor of the value of this ability isn't the time it's active - it's the number of summonings you do. Currently, summoning the most powerful raid team in the Nexus and summoning one person have the same cost - 5 DP - if you can get both to respond in sixty seconds. Conversely, you can spend 50 DP and get nothing if the person you were trying to summon had to go log off and didn't look at their phone for fifteen minutes. This unfairly favors not just meta-active people, but people who revolve their schedules around the game. This should not happen.

This should work like how Stygian Presence (which to be fair also needs another look) ticks down duration every time the DO benefits from it. The durations should be more generous, but every time someone actually answers the summons it should tick down the duration time. This gets you more response time but you have to pay more DP if you want more summonees.

So throwing some tentative numbers out there, let's say answering the summons chops 5 minutes off the summoning time. Then we give it three options with non-stacking durations:
Minor Ritual - 5 DP, 10 minutes, maximum of two summonees
Major Ritual - 15 DP, 25 minutes, maximum of five summonees
Greater Ritual - 30 DP, 50 minutes, maximum of ten summonees

[Klapaucius]

Keeping the cost to summon a single vassal low is in keeping with one of the key appeals of the skill - having a lackey on hand. I appreciate relaxing the 1 minute timer, because that's a bit intense, sneeze at the wrong time and you'll miss it.

However, I still don't feel like I'd be tempted to spend the 30 dark power in any situation where I didn't have bunch of people already lined up, ready to go. I'm not going to prospectively just toss it on after a raid and hope people log in during the next hour so they can teleport home, I'm going to meta-arrange for them to be ready before hand.

If the window was... maybe 4 hours instead of 1 I'd consider just popping it on, not sure where that sits with the intended use of the skill.

[Dissident]

Maybe the duration should just be long enough and tie the DP cost for every Vassal that heeds the call? Like 5 DP for every vassal that pressed the button.

[Goliath]

I would rather the skill have fixed time and a finite number of uses. Would make the skill more usable for smaller, less coordinated factions (giving them more time to gather, without ticking down an already short-ish time window).

[AuXAuV]

Maybe the duration should just be long enough and tie the DP cost for every Vassal that heeds the call? Like 5 DP for every vassal that pressed the button.

Expanding upon this because it is the best option.

Have a fixed cost to summoning of different durations.
e.g. 5 DP for 10 minutes, 10 DP for 4 hours, 20 DP for 24 hours.
Then have a 5 DP (or so) cost per person that teleports.

Having long duration teleports is important if you want to casual-ify the game.
Even 4 hours relies on being in similar timezones/patterns of life.
24 hours at least gives everyone the opportunity for travel.


Reusing the duration decrementing mechanic from stygian presence will lead to a lot of player frustration over lost "efficiency" with teleports running out and characters missing the bus, so to speak.
We don't need to reuse a new mechanic just because it exists.

I would rather the skill have fixed time and a finite number of uses. Would make the skill more usable for smaller, less coordinated factions (giving them more time to gather, without ticking down an already short-ish time window).

There's a hard cap of number of uses: up to the maximum of vassals, so 10 or 15 at most.
Wormhole on the other hand has no cap to number of teleports.
(A lot of older design elements have infinite scaling, for instance arcane well and other area effects. Luckily/sadly the game has not seen a large playerbase to exploit that.)

[Kandarin]

Per above, promote.

[Kandarin]

The spirit of this suggestion was addressed by a change in the last patch.