Feedback: B5 Advocate

[cat]

Hello all,
I'm planning to summarise my questions and personal feedback/observations on each class, starting with those I'm most familiar with. I appreciate that T3 is not yet finalised so this is going by what I have read so far.

ADVOCATE

Inviolate Form: “Others in the area will see a notification that the inviolate corpse of the saintly Advocate is present in the area.” Is this message only broadcast to Goods, or to everyone nearby?

Inviolate Form: Can non-Goods identify an Inviolate corpse in order to avoid damage from Desecrating it or to body-block the tile from Goods attempting to use it? If yes, does this require a skill such as Sense Magic or Sense Alignment?

Inviolate Form: Inviolate Form should block the fetching of a Relic corpse by Servitor of the Grave. It's inviolate; freaky ghosts shouldn’t be able to drag it through the planes. Additionally it makes no sense for Servitor to haul a corpse that cannot be raised.

Saintly Relics: Request ability to customise Relic descriptions, making Relics more identifiable and unique to each Advocate.

Saintly Relics: “If the site of the Relic is no longer infused to Good by 100 or more points, or if it is the site of a non-Good Stronghold, the Relic will be destroyed.” Suggest Advocates with Saintly Relics get a notification when their Relic tile falls below a certain threshold as a warning that their Relic is at risk - it doesn't make sense for them not to feel this occurring.

Blessings: Suggest some ability to tune which tables Pray for Others draws from as opposed to only Pray for All. Some suggestions below:

Blessing tuning option: Advocate can toggle all three tables on or off. Toggling Pray for Others to any preference besides Pray for All would remove the bonus % for a higher result that Pray for All provides. Issue with this solution: potential abuse of toggle for situational benefit e.g. toggling off defensive results when preparing for a raid. Do not suggest this solution unless there’s a very large cooldown or similar abuse prevention. Note a large AP/MP charge is not enough barrier when there are methods of funnelling AP and MP to the Advocate.

Blessing tuning option: Skill linked percentage increases for associated results. As with Pray for All, except Blessing table/results chances are linked to skills taken. Inspiration, Mighty and Resolute each giving a higher % chance of Offensive Prayers for Others while Sanctuary, Guardian and Stalwart each give a higher chance of Defensive Prayers for Others. Having a balance of the two would cancel out any % increases.

Blessing tuning option: Buying a whole tree locks out the oppositional tree. Buying all three skills in the Offensive buff tree (Inspiration, Mighty and Resolute) means ALL Pray for Others results will draw from either Offensive or Magic tables as the Advocate has made a dedicated choice to buffing its allies offensively. Buying all three in the Defensive buff tree (Sanctuary, Guardian and Stalwart) means ALL Pray for Others results being drawn from Defensive or Magic tables.

Blessings: Advocates should be able to discard or auto-reject unwanted stored blessings from their personal pool and/or Relics. As the AP and MP spent is not refunded when discarding a result this should probably be a no-cost action similar to dropping an item or a list of auto-declined items when searching. An Advocate with Inviolate Form should not be able to discard or otherwise alter their corpse's stored Blessings after death as they are fixed to the corpse.

Blessings: Does praying to an Advocate trigger passive infusion, or does the Advocate Praying for Others trigger the passive infusion? If praying from or into a Relic, does the passive infusion go towards the Advocate's current tile or the Relic tile?

Holy Transfer: At 60CP and gated by a 30CP prerequisite skill, this is currently very expensive compared to Conduit’s similar ability Secret Ingredient. Additionally while Holy Transfer has double duration it requires being active on the same tile as the receiving character and immediately begins ticking, whereas Secret Ingredient food can be dropped, passed, presumably even stored which adds huge utility.

Overall: While I haven't yet read through Archon, both Advocate and Lightspeaker seem top heavy - particularly Advocate. At the same time Shepherd T2 could benefit from more build choices. Suggest moving some skills from Shepherd T3 exits to T2. These skills should make both narrative and mechanical sense for all 3 Shepherd exits. Some possible picks: HoZ (Currently available to all Shepherd exits), Sin Eater (Advo), Blessing of Alonai (LS), Cosmic Affinity (Advo and Archon). However, moving Cosmic Affinity from T3 to T2 would require moving it to all MO T2s for balance reasons. Following on from this, suggest Glyph Mastery be moved from all MO Caster T3s to all MO Caster T2s. If every caster has access to it at T3 there's no reason for it not to be T2.

Thanks for reading!

[littleglassflowers]

Although I'm bad at strategising without actually playing, I wanted to comment that I really appreciate thoughtful posts like this. Thanks for writing it up.

[Kandarin]

Inviolate Form: “Others in the area will see a notification that the inviolate corpse of the saintly Advocate is present in the area.” Is this message only broadcast to Goods, or to everyone nearby?

All characters in the area will see this notification, independent of class, morality or skills.

Inviolate Form: Can non-Goods identify an Inviolate corpse in order to avoid damage from Desecrating it or to body-block the tile from Goods attempting to use it? If yes, does this require a skill such as Sense Magic or Sense Alignment?

The intent of the code is that an Inviolate corpse relic cannot be Desecrated manually; Desecrate code skips over it. The Desecration blowback only occurs if a character with Desecration kills an Advocate with Inviolate Form.

Inviolate Form: Inviolate Form should block the fetching of a Relic corpse by Servitor of the Grave. It's inviolate; freaky ghosts shouldn’t be able to drag it through the planes. Additionally it makes no sense for Servitor to haul a corpse that cannot be raised.

The Death Servitors are the ones who remove the Relic corpse after 24 hours, so it follows that they should be able to handle it safely. Death Servitors are neither good nor evil and simply are. The Elder Powers of Good do not interfere with them as long as they stay within the bounds of their appointed tasks.

Saintly Relics: “If the site of the Relic is no longer infused to Good by 100 or more points, or if it is the site of a non-Good Stronghold, the Relic will be destroyed.” Suggest Advocates with Saintly Relics get a notification when their Relic tile falls below a certain threshold as a warning that their Relic is at risk - it doesn't make sense for them not to feel this occurring.

This might get spammy for the Advocate if the tile hovers around that level of infusion for any length of time. It may be better for the Advocate to be able to view the infusion level of their Relic site(s) at all times, so the angels themselves can judge if it's in peril or not.

Saintly Relics: Request ability to customise Relic descriptions, making Relics more identifiable and unique to each Advocate.

I really like this.

Blessings: Does praying to an Advocate trigger passive infusion, or does the Advocate Praying for Others trigger the passive infusion? If praying from or into a Relic, does the passive infusion go towards the Advocate's current tile or the Relic tile?

It goes to the location where XP is being earned, which is the Advocate's current tile. In theory this means that you can have the faithful in one location subsidizing your holy crusade elsewhere.

[Kandarin]

Blessings: Advocates should be able to discard or auto-reject unwanted stored blessings from their personal pool and/or Relics. As the AP and MP spent is not refunded when discarding a result this should probably be a no-cost action similar to dropping an item or a list of auto-declined items when searching. An Advocate with Inviolate Form should not be able to discard or otherwise alter their corpse's stored Blessings after death as they are fixed to the corpse.

This has been implemented devside as follows:
- An Advocate may discard a blessing at will for zero AP
- This will not unhide the Advocate nor run a status tick
- This will not refund the AP and MP spent on praying up the blessing to begin with
- The Advocate may choose from a dropdown list of blessings to discard and may thereby prune and reroll blessings to get a desired type and magnitude if the Angel so desires
- This does not work on Blessings already consigned to a Standard Relic or Corpse Relic
- Untangling how Standard Relics work from how Corpse Relics work to make discards work on the former but not the latter would be orders of magnitude more difficult than building this function, so I didn't do it

It'll be added in the next patch.

[Kandarin]

Saintly Relics: “If the site of the Relic is no longer infused to Good by 100 or more points, or if it is the site of a non-Good Stronghold, the Relic will be destroyed.” Suggest Advocates with Saintly Relics get a notification when their Relic tile falls below a certain threshold as a warning that their Relic is at risk - it doesn't make sense for them not to feel this occurring.

This might get spammy for the Advocate if the tile hovers around that level of infusion for any length of time. It may be better for the Advocate to be able to view the infusion level of their Relic site(s) at all times, so the angels themselves can judge if it's in peril or not.

This has been implemented devside. If the Advocate has the Psychometry skill, they may view the infusion level of the tile a Relic is on from the Unbind Relic and Fill Relic dropdown lists that shows how many blessings are in a relic. This only applies if the land is infused to Good - if you have Psychometry and see nothing in this space your relic is in mortal peril.

[cat]

Cat gives double thumbs up* for clarifications and feature additions, thank you!









*Cat is one of those Hemingway cats so it's more like four and a half thumbs up.

[Kandarin]

Blessing tuning option: Skill linked percentage increases for associated results. As with Pray for All, except Blessing table/results chances are linked to skills taken. Inspiration, Mighty and Resolute each giving a higher % chance of Offensive Prayers for Others while Sanctuary, Guardian and Stalwart each give a higher chance of Defensive Prayers for Others. Having a balance of the two would cancel out any % increases.

Blessing tuning option: Buying a whole tree locks out the oppositional tree. Buying all three skills in the Offensive buff tree (Inspiration, Mighty and Resolute) means ALL Pray for Others results will draw from either Offensive or Magic tables as the Advocate has made a dedicated choice to buffing its allies offensively. Buying all three in the Defensive buff tree (Sanctuary, Guardian and Stalwart) means ALL Pray for Others results being drawn from Defensive or Magic tables.

For a pending patch this has been implemented, largely as you suggested.

Under the hood, making a blessing rolls a nine-sided die:
- Three outcomes are always Magic.
- Three outcomes are Defensive. Buying any of the following takes one roll from Defensive and gives it to Offensive: Blessing of Inspiration, Blessing of the Mighty, Blessing of the Resolute.
- Three outcomes are Offensive. Buying any of the following takes one roll from Offensive and gives it to Defensive: Blessing of the Sanctuary, Blessing of the Guardian, Blessing of the Stalwart.
- The above means that buying all of one tree locks out the oppositional tree if you have bought no skills from the oppositional tree.

[SaltedSalmon]

Under the hood, making a blessing rolls a nine-sided die:
- Three outcomes are always Magic.
- Three outcomes are Defensive. Buying any of the following takes one roll from Defensive and gives it to Offensive: Blessing of Inspiration, Blessing of the Mighty, Blessing of the Resolute.
- Three outcomes are Offensive. Buying any of the following takes one roll from Offensive and gives it to Defensive: Blessing of the Sanctuary, Blessing of the Guardian, Blessing of the Stalwart.
- The above means that buying all of one tree locks out the oppositional tree if you have bought no skills from the oppositional tree.

Hm. Wouldn't you say that if you have max Guardianship tree, offensive prayers are more useful, and vice versa?

[Kandarin]

In terms of having more versatility from a bonus, yes, but if you wanted to be a source of versatility you wouldn't have stacked your CP expenditures so lopsidedly. There will be Advocates you appeal to for combat power and Advocates you appeal to for safety, and the design allows specializing - or remaining a generalist if one so desires.