Shattered Kingdoms

Priests are a hard road, no doubt about it.

Here are my suggestions to making priest players actually enjoy their first 20 levels.

1. Make more range weapons available, both store bought junk, and unique NPC attainable finds. I understand there is a new stone pole mace available (that most priests cannot wear due to low strength and the weight of the weapon) but why the heck does a staff not have a reach capacity?

2. Make Flamestrike do 15% more damage, make it more likely to land, and make it available earlier. Currently, with the exception of starting combat and doing some damage to the back rows, flamestrike is near impotent. I remember my sorc could down some pretty big enemies with Magic Missile through a murder hole in various Cabal fights, but a priest can cast flame strike all day long and not kill anything. That is, other than undead.

3. Make heal based spells produce more XP for priests. From spammed 'cure light', to 'Heal'. Heck, all of the "cure" based spells. Make it worth the player's time to do priestly activities. I would even argue that 'cure critical' is usless at the time it takes to cast- perhaps reassess the various "cure" spells leading up to the Heal spell?

Hrm... Personally, spell spam took me a loooong way.

Cure light anyone?

All in all, I think that priests should get an amateur/novice damage spell, one that does a fair amount of damage with a very small increase in damage as the caster gets higher in levels, because Priests still should have some sort of difficulty to them, they are meant to be a rather difficult class.

These proposals to give priests a low-level combat spell forget that they're not magicians. Strength is one of the stats NPC clerics train for a reason.

Giving them a weapon damage buff seems more to the point. Frenzy is nice, but you can't use that for very many levels before it starts interfering with necessary protection and healing spells.

Considering that every priest I've ever played learns second attack early to help with levelling, I'd recommend just making it an Apprentice skill and be done with it.

Shamans could get a similar boost, so they remain the more physical of the pair. Their levelling is as slow as molasses too, until they get their damage spells.

Eh, I have repelled attacks with flamestrikes. I know I have killed other priests with it in cabal wars too, and killing the other groups priest can certainly put them in big trouble.

Simplest solution yet with merit.

I'm gonna go ahead and agree that priests need to get second attack earlier. Like, before it's made all but useless for leveling by the acquisition of damage spells with merit like SoF. Flamestrike has some merit for leveling, but not anything spectacular, so leveling a priest basically demands that you treat them like a melee character for well over half of their levels...but priests suck as melee characters, especially since they get one attack until expert or veteran (I forget which off the top of my head). Giving them second attack at Apprentice or Initiate would be a good fix.


And shaman level just fine. They don't need a boost.