Update 56 Preview 1: Dark Apostate Archetype

[Pandjed]

Ya, to me making Warpriest all about Fire makes sense since, for one, the tree is very much aesthetically fire-based (red, flames in its icons, etc) but also gave more Fire Spellpower than DD ever did. Leaning harder into that gives it a cool identity as the place to go for Cleric's Fiery might. I think the only thing it's missing is me adding 2% Fire Spellcrit up the central weapon line and it should all work out. That means that Fire clerics actually end up with more Spellcrit than before, and comperable Fire Spellpower.

You're definitely not wrong about the t5 SLA selection. I'm actually now leaning towards offering Order's Wrath versus Chaos Hammer to go along with the split Benediction choice. It would mean you'd need to plan your alignment out carefully but would mean that a Chaotic Good Cleric would actually want different DD choices than a Lawful Neutral one, which I find neato. Or, even cooler, maybe offer all 4 of those spells in both t4 and t5, so you'd end up with 2 picks from the pool of 4.

I feel like adding fire to warpriest is an interesting idea (especially as it also makes it more different from warsoul), but for it to work out, we need either fire based SLAs (as taking metamagics to actually be a fire caster while having no SLAs for leveling does feel bad), or buffs that emulate metamagics while using melee/ranged abilities from the tree.
For example, if you hit with radiant florish, your next (fire?) spell counts as being empowered (not stacking with actual feat). Or an enhancement, that grants a metamagic feat while having a weapon feat (like Improved Critical for empower and a greater fighting style/IPS for quicken), so that this combination of melee and ranged would work out better.

Which would mean to also take warpriest under bigger reconsideration, but we're at cleric atm anyway. :P

[nobodynobody1426]

Are all 4 of the Alignment spells becoming AOE like Holy Smite? That was the biggest reason it was so popular - obviously, an AOE nuke is far more desirable than a single-target one, especially when the damage die are the same.

Or at least Unholy Blight - it's a very interesting idea if you get a choice of one AOE spell with no alignment penalties (Smite or Blight) that corresponds to the SLA choices in DD, and then an additional single-target spell (Hammer or Wrath) for boss/champ/reaper burst damage, even if its not an SLA option

Will just say, also consider the opportunity cost of slotting those spells. They're all L4, which is also competing with Divine Power, FOM, and DW

All the alignment spells are AoE. Have you ever cast Order's Wrath, it's a giant square made of light.

[Lynnabel]

I feel like adding fire to warpriest is an interesting idea (especially as it also makes it more different from warsoul), but for it to work out, we need either fire based SLAs (as taking metamagics to actually be a fire caster while having no SLAs for leveling does feel bad), or buffs that emulate metamagics while using melee/ranged abilities from the tree.
For example, if you hit with radiant florish, your next (fire?) spell counts as being empowered (not stacking with actual feat). Or an enhancement, that grants a metamagic feat while having a weapon feat (like Improved Critical for empower and a greater fighting style/IPS for quicken), so that this combination of melee and ranged would work out better.

Which would mean to also take warpriest under bigger reconsideration, but we're at cleric atm anyway. :P

What makes me sad is that in order to make it "equal" in SLA selection to fire in current DD I just need to make one of the t5s in Warpriest multiselect with the Flamestrike SLA since that's all they got before! Which is easy to do - it'll probably end up multiselected with Divine Power - but does make me want to add more since the current spell selection for Fire clerics does seem pretty anemic. Maybe Scorch gets added as an option inside Radiant Flourish as well?

And ya, that's one of the biggest benefits of Archetypes for us - we can spend time doing this sort of retooling

[Lotoc]

I kind of feel revamping warpriest to be a fire nuker tree may be the wrong direction.
Giving DD a secondary thematic of supporting the casting domains (and not just fire which has been supported historically) and making domains besides Sun/Necro actually desirable would generally be an improvement, the domains right now are probably one of the big things in need of work for Clerics.

[nobodynobody1426]

Just for demonstration on how absurdly bad this idea is.

Seasons Herald

Child of Summer: You gain the ability Child of Summer: Activate to grant +5 Spellpower when casting Fire, Light, Sonic, Force, and Positive spells. This seasonal Spellpower is multiplied by one for every Core enhancement possessed in Season's Heralds (starting with this one), up to +30 when you have all six Enhancements.
Lasts until death or the player changes season. Fire Elemental form changes you to this season automatically.
Passive: +1 Universal Spellpower per AP spent in this tree.

Wax and Wane: +2% critical chance with spells associated with your current season.
Winter: Acid, Cold, Electric, Earth and Water
Summer: Fire, Light, Positive, Force and Sonic

Druid gets natural access to Flame Strike, Firestorm, Sunbeam and SunBurst along with all the healing spells. It does a better job at being a light caster then the proposed "Light Tree" while also being a strong fire caster. In total it gets +3 CL/MCL to all spells in it's season, elemental forms add +3 to Fire or Cold, the level 31 feat makes it +3 to everything.

Angel of Vengeance

Scourge: Whenever you cast a Fire, Force, Light, or Physical damage spell, you gain +3 to your Fire, Force, Light, or Physical Spell Power for 6 seconds. This stacks up to 3/6/10 times. In addition, when you take damage you have a 20%/50%/100% chance to gain one stack of Scourge.

Smiting: Your Fire, Force, Light, and Physical damage spells have an additional 2% chance to critically hit.

Just Reward: When you critically hit with a Fire, Force, Light, or Physical damage spell, you gain 3/6/10 Sacred temporary spell points. Passive: Your deity's favored weapon is considered a Spellcasting Implement in your hands.

Intense Faith: Your Fire, Force, Light, and Physical damage spells are cast at +1/+2/+3 caster level.

Zealous Faith: The maximum caster level of your Fire, Force, Light, and Physical damage spells are increased by 1/2/3.

FvS, even without it's cores, gets bonus's to both Fire and Light spells along with +3 CL/MCL.


Then go look at Bard with it's new bonus's to +Sonic and +Electric.

[droid327]

What makes me sad is that in order to make it "equal" in SLA selection to fire in current DD I just need to make one of the t5s in Warpriest multiselect with the Flamestrike SLA since that's all they got before! Which is easy to do - it'll probably end up multiselected with Divine Power - but does make me want to add more since the current spell selection for Fire clerics does seem pretty anemic. Maybe Scorch gets added as an option inside Radiant Flourish as well?

Multiselector with Ameliorating Strike: Conflagrating Strike - When you Smite a foe, your target and nearby enemies are struck with Fire damage equal to 1/2 your weapon's Enhancement bonus, per Cleric level, scaling with Fire Spellpower or 200% Melee Power, whichever is greater. If your weapon is Favored, this increases to 3/4 your weapon's Enhancement bonus

Its not a spell per se, but it gives more Fire flavor to the tree, while keeping with a martial focus and rewarding Favored weapons

Scorch SLA would seem to pigeonhole it in with Tiefling too much, just because that's their Immune breaker...why not stay classic with Fireball, especially since DD is getting Holy Smite back?

[nobodynobody1426]

What makes me sad is that in order to make it "equal" in SLA selection to fire in current DD I just need to make one of the t5s in Warpriest multiselect with the Flamestrike SLA since that's all they got before! Which is easy to do - it'll probably end up multiselected with Divine Power - but does make me want to add more since the current spell selection for Fire clerics does seem pretty anemic. Maybe Scorch gets added as an option inside Radiant Flourish as well?

And ya, that's one of the biggest benefits of Archetypes for us - we can spend time doing this sort of retooling

You would need to massively redesign Warpriest to do fire, and honestly at this point you might just want to look at the divine spell list.

Here are the divine spells and relative damage (post update). Excluding Nimbus cause it's only for a few levels.


Searing Light, 1D6+6, 9.5 per CL, MCL10, @12 would be 114 base damage Light
SunBolt, 1D6+3, 6.5 per CL, MCL15, @17 would be 110 base damage Light

Holy Smite/alignment, 1D6+4, 7.5 per CL, MCL10, @12 would be 90 damage Good/Chaos/Law/Evil (was 11.5 per CL and 138 before)
FlameStrike, 2[1D6+2], 11 per CL, MCL15, @17 would be 187 Fire/Bane
Cometfall, 1D6+3, 6.5 per CL, MCL20, @22 would be 143 Blunt
Sunbeam, 1D6+7, 11.5 per CL, MCL20, @22 253 light (this technically has no MCL, but after U52 20 is the effective MCL as we only have 20 heroic levels)
Firestorm, 1D6+8, 11.5 per CL, MCL20, @22 would be 253 fire
Sunburst, 1D6+4, 7.5 per CL, MCL20, @22 would be 165 light (same as Sunbeam, after U52 20 is the effective MCL)
Divine Wrath, 1D6+9, 12.5 per CL, MCL20, @22 would be 275 light, 20s cool down.

Then we have Celestial Bombardment which is a humongous pile of damage dice, but has a long cool down. It's also Fire. Most of the rest are 6s or less for CD.

In epics there are no light elemental strikes or abilities. Best is Holy Fireball but .. that is also Fire.

This list should illustration the point we've been making here. "Light" damage support in Cleric/Favored Soul is mostly limited to low level spells. We could give Cleric +1,000 light spell power and +50% light spell crit, but there would be nothing to leverage it with.

[Lotoc]

Some minor feedback

Spellpower cores:
DD dark path is losing the alignment spellpower it currently provides "Gaining Light or Negative Energy spellpower from Divine Disciple also adds to your alignment spellpowers." which is kind of really unfortunate as DD dark is a lot more reliant on falling back on alignment spells to deal with immunities than a light focused caster.
If DD dark is meant to lean into unholy blight when stuff is immune to negative it absolutely should receive Evil spellpower at a minimum.

Domains:
Casting domains are a bit undersupported and they're always something you take to support your build rather than a build choice in of themselves, the elemental domains could stand to offer some better spells and some higher level spells, perhaps at level 18 get some 9th level domain appropriate spells added to spellbook, Acid Well for Earth, Rend the Soul for Death etc.

Dark Apostate and Curses:
DA isn't quite as focused on negative casting as it is on debuffing and survival and honestly that's fine I guess, but it could stand to have a curse that's often used against players to deal with the fact we're frequently death warded and thus immune to negative energy damage.
Offering DA clerics Death Mark Curse which many undead cleric type enemies use against us would help this class deal with enemies which use Death Ward, perhaps allow it to strip immunity to negative from non undead enemies like golems also but the debuff itself has to actually be cast.

[Baahb3]

And ya, that's one of the biggest benefits of Archetypes for us - we can spend time doing this sort of retooling

To be blunt...

What a load of hogwash. You could retool enhancement trees without introducing these archtype trees anytime you wanted. There is/was/never will be, anything stopping you from working on the existing trees.

[GoldyGopher]

Ya, to me making Warpriest all about Fire makes sense since, for one, the tree is very much aesthetically fire-based (red, flames in its icons, etc) but also gave more Fire Spellpower than DD ever did. Leaning harder into that gives it a cool identity as the place to go for Cleric's Fiery might. I think the only thing it's missing is me adding 2% Fire Spellcrit up the central weapon line and it should all work out. That means that Fire clerics actually end up with more Spellcrit than before, and comperable Fire Spellpower.

You're definitely not wrong about the t5 SLA selection. I'm actually now leaning towards offering Order's Wrath versus Chaos Hammer to go along with the split Benediction choice. It would mean you'd need to plan your alignment out carefully but would mean that a Chaotic Good Cleric would actually want different DD choices than a Lawful Neutral one, which I find neato. Or, even cooler, maybe offer all 4 of those spells in both t4 and t5, so you'd end up with 2 picks from the pool of 4.

Before you put the cart before the horse, too late I know, let's talk about your vision of the War Priest.

War Priest should not be a caster, it shouldn't be throwing ranged spells around. It's about melee.

I have no problem if you want to give war priest melee like abilities.
Imbue you Weapon with Holy Fire (1d6 Fire) -> increase Weapon Imbue ...
Holy Ground - Enemies take 1d6 fire damage per 5 seconds while standing on holy ground (up to 200% Fire Spell Power) -> self, allies heal 1d6 damage per 5 seconds while standing on holy ground.
Holy Strike - Call down Fire from heavens on Self, damaging all enemies within a small range of you doing 1d6 per Cleric Level (Fire Spell Power)

It when you are attempting to turn a melee tree into a caster tree that bothers me.

[Baahb3]

It when you are attempting to turn a melee tree into a caster tree that bothers me.

I think this is all that needs to be said on the warpriest topic.

[Lynnabel]

To be blunt...

What a load of hogwash. You could retool enhancement trees without introducing these archtype trees anytime you wanted. There is/was/never will be, anything stopping you from working on the existing trees.

I don't understand what you want me to say to that :P Because, yes, it's indeed true, we can revamp stuff whenever we want. What Archetypes help us do is focus those revamps. That's part of why it's such a cool feature.

[Lynnabel]

Before you put the cart before the horse, too late I know, let's talk about your vision of the War Priest.

War Priest should not be a caster, it shouldn't be throwing ranged spells around. It's about melee.

I have no problem if you want to give war priest melee like abilities.
Imbue you Weapon with Holy Fire (1d6 Fire) -> increase Weapon Imbue ...
Holy Ground - Enemies take 1d6 fire damage per 5 seconds while standing on holy ground (up to 200% Fire Spell Power) -> self, allies heal 1d6 damage per 5 seconds while standing on holy ground.
Holy Strike - Call down Fire from heavens on Self, damaging all enemies within a small range of you doing 1d6 per Cleric Level (Fire Spell Power)

It when you are attempting to turn a melee tree into a caster tree that bothers me.

Warpriest has two parts - the war and the priest. That's why it's called Warpriest :P

[Kielbasa]

To be blunt...

What a load of hogwash. You could retool enhancement trees without introducing these archtype trees anytime you wanted. There is/was/never will be, anything stopping you from working on the existing trees.

Money! They can sell the multiple new archetypes to us and justify reworking old classes/enhancements at the same time at hopefully less development cost than making a new class. If the new enhancement trees and revamped ones are done well the base class gets some quality of life improvements and offers us more interesting ways to play the game while giving ssg more revenue. This is their way to be like look class enhancement revamps are not just overhead and a sunk cost but actually sales!! in the accounting ledger. My hope is this leads to a much faster turnaround on old antiquated classes getting some polish rather than wallowing in the depths of despair. If archetypes sell well we end up getting the equivalent of a full class pass every couple years which is a significant improvement on what ssg has done in the past. This should be a win win for players and the company. Might also be a good selling point for vip subs.

[Baahb3]

I don't understand what you want me to say to that :P Because, yes, it's indeed true, we can revamp stuff whenever we want. What Archetypes help us do is focus those revamps. That's part of why it's such a cool feature.

Why does it take something new to focus on revamping existing trees? Is there not enough want or support from management to fix existing underperforming or outright broken trees without something new to pile on?

If this is the new mantra, than can we expect no fixes to existing broken quests in the Vale for example unless you are introducing new quests in the Vale?
--Not saying there are any, just an example

Or you will not be fixing broken or underperforming feats unless you are going to introduce new feats?

It just does not make sense that you need something new to actually work on something old.

[Gregen]

I think it's an interesting idea to add more fire spellpower to Warpriests. However, it's as others have said. As casters, we don't want to invest in a melee tree.

As primarily a healer, the removal of the universal line from DD is taking away 36 positive spellpower and 2% positive crit. This, to me, is a big blow. Radiant Servant is a great tree if you want to focus healing. I found DD to be a great secondary tree to continue focus healing as well as make offensive spellcasting viable. A healer doesn't need to be a nuker, but having the spellpower to kill mobs effectively is important.

I think it makes sense for DD to be a the general divine spellcaster's tree that offers to let some focus harder on light, fire, ect.. Please consider keeping the universal line in Divine Disciple.

[Baahb3]

Money! They can sell the multiple new archetypes to us and justify reworking old classes/enhancements at the same time at hopefully less development cost than making a new class. If the new enhancement trees and revamped ones are done well the base class gets some quality of life improvements and offers us more interesting ways to play the game while giving ssg more revenue. This is their way to be like look class enhancement revamps are not just overhead and a sunk cost but actually sales!! in the accounting ledger. My hope is this leads to a much faster turnaround on old antiquated classes getting some polish rather than wallowing in the depths of despair. If archetypes sell well we end up getting the equivalent of a full class pass every couple years which is a significant improvement on what ssg has done in the past. This should be a win win for players and the company. Might also be a good selling point for vip subs.

I understand that, I do. I know SSG needs to make money to keep the lights on but what a poor message to sell to your players. "We are not going to work on old stuff to bring it up to current game standards unless we can sell you something new to go along with it." I don't want to put words in their or your mouth but that seems to be what you are saying Kielbasa.

[nobodynobody1426]

Warpriest has two parts - the war and the priest. That's why it's called Warpriest :P

The priest part isn't a nuker but a defensive support role. Existing Warpriest implementation is actually pretty close it's origin.

https://dnd.arkalseif.info/classes/warpriest/index.html

Your vision of Divine Disciple being some sort of Light vs Dark vs Whatever-I-Feel-Today-Don't-Judge-Me tree isn't supported by existing design. Lots more spell work would need to be done to and existing domains modified or several other tree's introduced to do this. Which is why we recommended waiting until a time when your not trying to create a Dark Priest archtype.

[Impaqt]

To be blunt...

What a load of hogwash. You could retool enhancement trees without introducing these archtype trees anytime you wanted. There is/was/never will be, anything stopping you from working on the existing trees.

I'm sure he means scheduling wise. They can't just start retooling trees whenever they feel like it.

[Lynnabel]

Why does it take something new to focus on revamping existing trees? Is there not enough want or support from management to fix existing underperforming or outright broken trees without something new to pile on?

If this is the new mantra, than can we expect no fixes to existing broken quests in the Vale for example unless you are introducing new quests in the Vale?
--Not saying there are any, just an example

Or you will not be fixing broken or underperforming feats unless you are going to introduce new feats?

It just does not make sense that you need something new to actually work on something old.

I understand that, I do. I know SSG needs to make money to keep the lights on but what a poor message to sell to your players. "We are not going to work on old stuff to bring it up to current game standards unless we can sell you something new to go along with it." I don't want to put words in their or your mouth but that seems to be what you are saying Kielbasa.

This is the exact opposite of both our previous work cadence and our future plans. I genuinely don't understand why you would come to that conclusion given that for years now we've revamped things for free simply because we thought our work would bring joy to the players, and most recently this year made a gigantic selection of our races and classes free as well. If you're looking for reassurance, then no, we're not planning of doing any of what you've posted.