Shattered Kingdoms

Every now and again I think of something that would be cool for a class and I keeps a note of them. Here they are:

Shamans - Spirit Projection: The ability to leave their body and roam about like a spirit can when you manifest. Essentially the same as you can do when you die, just you can return to your body. The body would be stunned like with voodoo while and after you return to the body.

Warlock - Gust: Summons a gust of wind that grounds flying targets. Maybe the same effect as being bucked off a mount when grounded.

Bards - Songs of Competence: similar to songs of magic in that it would improve the level of skills of those in the group beyond the regular max. Dance could lower skills of those outside the group.

Scout - Hide: Simply allow them to hide and ambush from hide. but not against targets that can detect.

Paladin - Lay on hands: The ability to remove fatigue.

Hellion - Endue Weapon: Cast on weapon. Allows for another spell to be placed on a blade that is not normally allowed. Such as causes, blindness, deafness, chill touch, hellfire.

Hellions/Paladins - Divine Protection: Gives a bonus to all saves based on charisma and/or level to the caster.
- Sacred spell: Allow them to use the sacred spell. But only with those Hellion/Paladin religions.

I think of all the ideas listed above, Scouts, bards, shamans, and the sacred spells would be the easiest to implement because they are all mechanic wise in the game.

Spirit Projection sounds like Astral Projection and seems really fun. While shamans are already pretty great, this would be very interesting. The body would be left completely vulnerable as a vessel and as stated when one returned to their body there would be a huge lag like after using voodoo. Target could even suffer spirit disorientation just like after being resurrected, makes sense.

Gust: I feel like this could be another damage spell and not just utility. I say that because the lack of elemental variety in attack spells displeases me.
c 'gust' target
Gust would function like cone of cold and could hit an entire formation doing a "slashing" type of damage. The air cutting people to ribbons. The reflex save could serve to remove a mini-stun. If the save is failed the target takes full damage and is mini-bashed - same as F Minor bash duration for the record.

Songs of Competence: My favorite out of these. There is songs of magic that raises the level of spells and lowers magic resistance in the room. Why not a song that increases skills too? This one seems really neat. That and it would remove what is practically a prerequisite cabal for scouts as an absolute must.

Scout: hide: I don't really see any problem with this. No one ever ambushes and most the time scout fights don't even take place outside. Allowing a scout to ambush from hiding would let them use a skill covered in cobwebs in areas other than the outdoors.

Paladin - Lay on hands: Paladins are pretty solid as is, even though they're more support. I really like this idea. It sucks to have to wait forever in an Inn just to have fatigue to wear off from GS/HS and other spells that give fatigue. Removing fatigue is very powerful though so I'd say it'd have to remove a solid chunk of ME and PE from the paladin. In much the same way a certain cabal skill drains one's PE in exchange for ME, this will just drain both.

Hellion: Endue Weapon: I hear hellions constantly argued over about whether or not they are any good etc etc. Most the time it is extremely skilled players championing their cause, whilst avg joes find them lacking. I think this would be an excellent addition, giving them more versatility in applying maledictions and debuffs to targets.

Divine Protection: With the ever increasing difficulty in finding saves this would be incredibly powerful if it was anything like the D&D version. As for the sacred spell I still think that any class that REQUIRES a deity for their abilities should get access to said deity's sacred spell. Considering a class is completely dependent for access to spells, why not? Especially considering in the respective H/P religions the Paladin and Hellion both out rank the Priest in regards to the faith. Yet the priest gets the spell and they don't? This subject has been discussed on multiple occasions without any real closure.

I've always wanted to see an astral projection spell for shamans. That would be awesome.

Every class already has astral projection, it just requires a friendly priest and incurs spirit disorientation!

Warlocks: If anything, I think warlocks would find more utility in being able to strip buffs (dispel) or bypass spell damage reduction to some capacity. As it stands now, Gust would be alright but wouldn't really do all that much except for the cheap one shot kills of gusting someone over flying areas. With control weather, you can force people to ground simply by creating gales anyways, so I don't see the point of Gust as that part is kind of already taken care of.

What I'd like to see is more spell versatility. They have Magma which is a one trick pony. Make Earthquake more damaging since it's so easily bypassed by flight. If that was done, it'd give control weather more utility than forcing people to the ground for tracking purposes. The prone affect of it could stand to either last longer or it's damage buffed. Maybe a master skill like Tremor or Magnitude that causes the damage of earthquake to raise exponentially or something.

Scouts: Camo on the beach. Camo everywhere except in cities. I don't think they need hide so much as just more versatility for camouflaging. Hiding is more of the rogue's trap and ambush would be nothing but a lesser, ranged version of backstab if you could do it from hiding. This tends to intrude on the rogue's turf a bit too much.

Bard: I like the idea for the bards. Might actually be able to reduce the output of melee a bit if you can affect their skillset like that. Might give bards a fighting chance in melee combat...Possibly. Also, shield block. Bards need shields, even if it is as simple as a buckler.

The Hellion thing reminds me of a red mage from final fantasy. Enchant weapons with hellfire so on and so forth. Seems kinda neat.

Spirit projection is pretty cool. I like the sound of it as well. Replace voodoo with that plzkthx.

Keep in mind I haven't played in a while so my thoughts are based off of some older runs of when I played Mephistir and Grenth and Syrina.

Technically gust as a cone of cold equivalent in terms of group hitting would bypass MR, due to it being a 'slashing' type damage. However this is an issue that has bugged me for a long time about warlocks. Technically warlocks pull their powers directly from the elemental consciousness. None of the things they are summoning are magic, they're just relocating and manipulating the elements. A fireball isn't magical, the power to summon it IS, but the fireball in and of itself is not magic and therefore shouldn't be subject to MR. Same goes for pretty much all of their spells. No warlock attack spell should be subject to magical resistance (hell maybe not even MP by this logic).

Another Ability I would like to see in the game is Blink. Basically going in and out of Ethereal in combat. But I couldn't figure out which class it would be suited aside Sorc's, and they don't need anymore buffs for the time being. Best option thought had was creating a Spell Blade class that is essentially a Paladin/hellion but for Arcane and not religion tied. But creating a class isn't something that is going to happen. Just considering that it doesn't appear to have ever happened since the beginning.

Bards were added several years into the game. Minotaurs too.

I designed the Magus class. Zavijah said he really liked it, but big D said it wasn't on the roadmap for the time being =/

LoL I'm not surprised. I know that bards took LONGER than 5 years to get implemented. Probably closer to 10 years. The comparative ripple effects that come from implementation of a new class are pretty heavy.

Telepaths/Psionicist and Alchemist are the classes that I'd be most interested to see developed.

Implementation of a playable aquatic race would be really cool too. I don't love aquatic elves; I don't know how a merman/mermaid could be playable without the polymorph spell; but a sahuagin or a lizard man (saurian) playable race would make me very happy.