04-16-2004, 08:00 PM
One of the key causes of writer's block for me is the need to be a perfectionist about something that I am labeling a "report." Basically, I don't feel like I'm qualified to write something "official looking" unless I know everything about the subject. However, I have to move past that tendency, so here goes. Here are my first impressions of the priest in the new push:
I have a level 9 undead priestess now, and so far, she has played similarly to my human priestess in the previous push. The old standby skills like Holy Shield are still there and work as well as ever. I'm a lot more experienced with the game, so I was able to level and quest quite rapidly compared with my previous characters. As Bolty and I have noted before, there are some serious issues with competition for monsters in the early undead areas that need to be addressed, and I've found minor errors in the descriptions of three quests already. However, those things are for discussion in another thread. Let's focus on the priest class itself.
The first difference one notices is what Bolty mentioned in his mage report -- that mana regeneration is wickedly fast now. Whereas before, I had to stop and drink after every one or two battles, now I hardly drink at all. This will improve the popularity of priests and mages in parties as they will no longer slow down a party so much. Also, it does make the action much faster for the priest and as Bolty says, it makes the game feel like more of an action game. I don't know, yet, if the mana regeneration is so fast that it is a balance issue or not. It depends on whether the regeneration rate is tied to a percentage of one's current maximum level of mana (like in D2) or is fixed to an absolute regeneration per time. If it's the first, then this could be a balance issue, because mages and priests could then just focus their skill points in intelligence and stop investing in spirit at some point. If it's the second, though, then the game balance would be fine. One would have to invest in spirit in order to be able to regenerate mana fast enough to cast the more powerful high mana cost spells.
I noticed that increasing one's intelligence as a priest by 1 point adds 10 mana instead of the 20 in the last push. Also, an increase of one stamina point only boosted the priest's health by 7 points instead of the 14 points in the previous push. Of course, you get a lot of skill points in this push, so that reduction seems reasonable.
Now, on to spell changes:
Holy Shield felt like it came later than it did in the previous push. You get it at level 6 now, and I think you got it earlier in the previous push, but I'm not absolutely sure. Maybe I just missed it so much that it felt longer.
Holy Word: Fortitude, which buffs character(s) stamina, has been seemingly boosted. Rank 1 Fortitude now gives +3 stamina and Rank 2 Fortitude gives +8 stamina, instead of the previous +2 and +4 in the previous push, respectively. However, since stamina itself has been reduced in effectiveness, this equates to roughly the same health boost in the end. A similar change happened to the mage's Arcane Intellect, I noticed.
The new high level healing spell, Flash Heal, apparently isn't insta-cast but instead has a 1.5 second cast time instead of the 2.5 second cast time for Lesser Heal and 3.5 second cast time for Heal. So, it will be faster than those other healing spells but will not be insta-cast. Having Renew (a heal over time spell) be insta-cast is very nice.
And now for the biggest change in the priest and the one mages are gloating over the most: Sleep has been moved from the priest to the mage. On the whole, I like this change. Sleep is more of a mage-like spell and the mage needed a crowd control mechanism of some kind. Meanwhile, while the removal of Sleep does hurt the priest class, the priest does have some other AI-affecting spells in its arsenal that can be used instead. The gain for the mage class is huge. The loss for the priest class is only moderate. Let's talk about why.
First of all, until my priestess in the previous push turned lvl 20 and got Rank 2 Sleep (30 second duration), I rarely used Sleep. Why? Because the Rank 1 15 second duration just wasn't long enough, considering how long it took to cast it. If you were fighting two monsters at once and put one of them to sleep, taking hits the whole time while casting the spell, you could only get a few hits in before you had to cast sleep again. It was often better not to sleep one of the monsters and instead focus on killing one of the monsters and put it out of action permanently. I notice that the new mage Rank 1 Sleep spell lasts 20 seconds. This is a good change and will make the Rank 1 sleep spell much more useful.
So until my priestess reached level 20, I rarely used Sleep in battle. But what did I use it for? If I found myself in a hopeless battle with a dangerous monster, I would try to sleep it and then run away. Most of the time, the 15 second head start was enough time for me to get away, unless the monster had friends to help him. A priest can no longer do this, but he does still have a spell to help in this situation at level 14: Psychic Scream, which causes up to two monsters near the priest to run away in fear. The downsides to this spell are that it won't work on a distant missle-fire monster, that it can be resisted, and that it has a long "cooldown" duration which, means that if a monster resists the Psychic Scream, then you have to wait a long time before you can try again.
Another potentially useful spell is the new spell, Fade, which for 10 seconds reduces the priest's threat level. People may be underestimating this skill's usefulness. When solo, Fade is basically useless, but thinking back to the times I was in large parties with my earlier priestess, I can see where it could be quite useful. Here's why: Holy Shield engenders a small about of threat. That may sound innocuous, but think about the consequences. Let's say I'm in a five-player party trying to run the deadmines and get to Van Cleef. The standard operation is to have a designated "puller" hit or taunt a small number of monsters (preferably one but sometimes it's inevitable to get four or five at once) and bring them back to the party. This puller needs to be protected and a priest's Holy Shield is a great way to do that. Now, let's say that the puller woke up four monsters (say two engineers with their robots). The four monsters charge at the puller and the puller runs back to or maybe even past the party (for example, if the puller is a mage). The puller takes some hits on the shield that I hopefully had up on the puller already (not always possible as pullers sometimes get too eager) and I then throw up a shield on the puller again. Whoops! Suddenly I'm a "threat" to the monsters bearing down on the puller.
Sure the original monster who was hit by the mage's spell or warrior's taunt will continue to bear down on the puller, but the other three monsters turn and go right for me. If some of them are missle-fire attackers, this makes the situation worse. Then, in order to protect the fragile priest, other members of the party take it upon themselves to aggro the monsters attacking me -- spreading out the damage among several monsters rather than having the party focus on killing the same monsters one at a time. This all might sound convoluted and complicated to you if you've never seen it, but believe me, this happened many many times when I was in such parties doing a major quest.
What would I do then? Well, usually, I would sleep one of the monsters bearing down on me, and if I was in a good group with a rogue, that rogue would sap one of the monsters and we could then concentrate our fire on the non-sleeping monsters. But what if I could prevent this situation from happening in the first place? If I had Fade on, presumably the other monsters wouldn't have detected the "threat" caused by my casting Holy Shield. The monsters would continue to charge the shielded puller and the rest of the party could focus on individual monsters and kill them off one at a time. Fade may be considered a weak or junk spell by those who are only interested in solo situations, but I think it'll be a standard part of any well-skilled priest's arsenal when he or she is in a large party.
Finally, I need to give mages some warning regarding their new toy. I notice that my undead priest has some passive skills. One is underwater breathing, which we already knew about. But the other is more important: Immunity to Sleep, Charm, or Fear. Presumably, regular undead monsters have this same immunity, so mages will not be able to sleep undead monsters they come across. However, priests have a new level 20 spell, Shackle Undead, that I presume will be able to trap or contain undead monsters. So if a party wants to be able to trap every type of monster, it had better have both a mage and a priest along. The relative strengths of Sleep vs Shackle Undead depends on what percentage of monsters are undead and how often they show up in important quests.
I have a level 9 undead priestess now, and so far, she has played similarly to my human priestess in the previous push. The old standby skills like Holy Shield are still there and work as well as ever. I'm a lot more experienced with the game, so I was able to level and quest quite rapidly compared with my previous characters. As Bolty and I have noted before, there are some serious issues with competition for monsters in the early undead areas that need to be addressed, and I've found minor errors in the descriptions of three quests already. However, those things are for discussion in another thread. Let's focus on the priest class itself.
The first difference one notices is what Bolty mentioned in his mage report -- that mana regeneration is wickedly fast now. Whereas before, I had to stop and drink after every one or two battles, now I hardly drink at all. This will improve the popularity of priests and mages in parties as they will no longer slow down a party so much. Also, it does make the action much faster for the priest and as Bolty says, it makes the game feel like more of an action game. I don't know, yet, if the mana regeneration is so fast that it is a balance issue or not. It depends on whether the regeneration rate is tied to a percentage of one's current maximum level of mana (like in D2) or is fixed to an absolute regeneration per time. If it's the first, then this could be a balance issue, because mages and priests could then just focus their skill points in intelligence and stop investing in spirit at some point. If it's the second, though, then the game balance would be fine. One would have to invest in spirit in order to be able to regenerate mana fast enough to cast the more powerful high mana cost spells.
I noticed that increasing one's intelligence as a priest by 1 point adds 10 mana instead of the 20 in the last push. Also, an increase of one stamina point only boosted the priest's health by 7 points instead of the 14 points in the previous push. Of course, you get a lot of skill points in this push, so that reduction seems reasonable.
Now, on to spell changes:
Holy Shield felt like it came later than it did in the previous push. You get it at level 6 now, and I think you got it earlier in the previous push, but I'm not absolutely sure. Maybe I just missed it so much that it felt longer.
Holy Word: Fortitude, which buffs character(s) stamina, has been seemingly boosted. Rank 1 Fortitude now gives +3 stamina and Rank 2 Fortitude gives +8 stamina, instead of the previous +2 and +4 in the previous push, respectively. However, since stamina itself has been reduced in effectiveness, this equates to roughly the same health boost in the end. A similar change happened to the mage's Arcane Intellect, I noticed.
The new high level healing spell, Flash Heal, apparently isn't insta-cast but instead has a 1.5 second cast time instead of the 2.5 second cast time for Lesser Heal and 3.5 second cast time for Heal. So, it will be faster than those other healing spells but will not be insta-cast. Having Renew (a heal over time spell) be insta-cast is very nice.
And now for the biggest change in the priest and the one mages are gloating over the most: Sleep has been moved from the priest to the mage. On the whole, I like this change. Sleep is more of a mage-like spell and the mage needed a crowd control mechanism of some kind. Meanwhile, while the removal of Sleep does hurt the priest class, the priest does have some other AI-affecting spells in its arsenal that can be used instead. The gain for the mage class is huge. The loss for the priest class is only moderate. Let's talk about why.
First of all, until my priestess in the previous push turned lvl 20 and got Rank 2 Sleep (30 second duration), I rarely used Sleep. Why? Because the Rank 1 15 second duration just wasn't long enough, considering how long it took to cast it. If you were fighting two monsters at once and put one of them to sleep, taking hits the whole time while casting the spell, you could only get a few hits in before you had to cast sleep again. It was often better not to sleep one of the monsters and instead focus on killing one of the monsters and put it out of action permanently. I notice that the new mage Rank 1 Sleep spell lasts 20 seconds. This is a good change and will make the Rank 1 sleep spell much more useful.
So until my priestess reached level 20, I rarely used Sleep in battle. But what did I use it for? If I found myself in a hopeless battle with a dangerous monster, I would try to sleep it and then run away. Most of the time, the 15 second head start was enough time for me to get away, unless the monster had friends to help him. A priest can no longer do this, but he does still have a spell to help in this situation at level 14: Psychic Scream, which causes up to two monsters near the priest to run away in fear. The downsides to this spell are that it won't work on a distant missle-fire monster, that it can be resisted, and that it has a long "cooldown" duration which, means that if a monster resists the Psychic Scream, then you have to wait a long time before you can try again.
Another potentially useful spell is the new spell, Fade, which for 10 seconds reduces the priest's threat level. People may be underestimating this skill's usefulness. When solo, Fade is basically useless, but thinking back to the times I was in large parties with my earlier priestess, I can see where it could be quite useful. Here's why: Holy Shield engenders a small about of threat. That may sound innocuous, but think about the consequences. Let's say I'm in a five-player party trying to run the deadmines and get to Van Cleef. The standard operation is to have a designated "puller" hit or taunt a small number of monsters (preferably one but sometimes it's inevitable to get four or five at once) and bring them back to the party. This puller needs to be protected and a priest's Holy Shield is a great way to do that. Now, let's say that the puller woke up four monsters (say two engineers with their robots). The four monsters charge at the puller and the puller runs back to or maybe even past the party (for example, if the puller is a mage). The puller takes some hits on the shield that I hopefully had up on the puller already (not always possible as pullers sometimes get too eager) and I then throw up a shield on the puller again. Whoops! Suddenly I'm a "threat" to the monsters bearing down on the puller.
Sure the original monster who was hit by the mage's spell or warrior's taunt will continue to bear down on the puller, but the other three monsters turn and go right for me. If some of them are missle-fire attackers, this makes the situation worse. Then, in order to protect the fragile priest, other members of the party take it upon themselves to aggro the monsters attacking me -- spreading out the damage among several monsters rather than having the party focus on killing the same monsters one at a time. This all might sound convoluted and complicated to you if you've never seen it, but believe me, this happened many many times when I was in such parties doing a major quest.
What would I do then? Well, usually, I would sleep one of the monsters bearing down on me, and if I was in a good group with a rogue, that rogue would sap one of the monsters and we could then concentrate our fire on the non-sleeping monsters. But what if I could prevent this situation from happening in the first place? If I had Fade on, presumably the other monsters wouldn't have detected the "threat" caused by my casting Holy Shield. The monsters would continue to charge the shielded puller and the rest of the party could focus on individual monsters and kill them off one at a time. Fade may be considered a weak or junk spell by those who are only interested in solo situations, but I think it'll be a standard part of any well-skilled priest's arsenal when he or she is in a large party.
Finally, I need to give mages some warning regarding their new toy. I notice that my undead priest has some passive skills. One is underwater breathing, which we already knew about. But the other is more important: Immunity to Sleep, Charm, or Fear. Presumably, regular undead monsters have this same immunity, so mages will not be able to sleep undead monsters they come across. However, priests have a new level 20 spell, Shackle Undead, that I presume will be able to trap or contain undead monsters. So if a party wants to be able to trap every type of monster, it had better have both a mage and a priest along. The relative strengths of Sleep vs Shackle Undead depends on what percentage of monsters are undead and how often they show up in important quests.