Official: (1650) - Divine Incarnation Pre-Release Information

Quote from GM Cyraex:

Hello Paladins of Elanthia!

As GM Estild shared with some of you at Simucon, I have been working on the development of 1650, Divine Incarnation. Now that the project has entered the final stages of Quality Control, I felt it appropriate to share some high level details with you all about the spell. I am not sure when the spell will be released as this time of year is quite busy for most of the staff with the upcoming Christmas holiday, but I assure you it won't be to much longer. Thank you for your patience!

I will not be sharing any specific numbers at this time, but I will share most of the general mechanics with you. Some of the mechanics in this design were taken from or inspired by player ideas that were posted on the forums, so thank you very much to those of you who participated!

Without further delay, here are the details:

1650 - Divine Incarnation: The paladin becomes the divine incarnation of their deity. While incarnated the paladin is granted a divine energy pool that may be used to call upon the powers of their deity using the INCARNATE verb. The size of the divine energy pool will increase based upon your training in Spiritual Mana Control. This spell will have a 5 minute duration or until all divine energy is used. There is also a corresponding 10 minute cooldown that starts when the spell is cast.

The INCARNATE verb will give the paladin access to four unique abilities. Those abilities are ZEAL, ARMOR, SMITE and ONSLAUGHT. Here is a brief overview of what each ability will do.

ZEAL - A divine aura will enable the paladin to trigger deity specific flares on each successful attack for a certain duration of time. Training in Spiritual Lore Summoning will increase the time duration.

ARMOR - A holy armor will surround the paladin granting them a resistance to all forms of attack for a short duration. This ability will be usable during emergency situations, but only a certain number of times per day. Training in Spiritual Lore Blessing will increase the amount of resistance and the number of emergency uses per day.

SMITE - The paladin attempts to smite a target with an influx of divine energy. This is an SMR2 based offensive ability. Training in Spiritual Lore Religion will increase the amount of damage dealt by this attack.

ONSLAUGHT - The paladin is consumed with the power of their deity and carries out a vicious onslaught. This attack is very similar to an MSTRIKE, however it will incur far less roundtime, attack every valid target in the room and ignore a portion of the target's stance. Training in Spiritual Lore Religion will increase the amount of the target's stance that is ignored.

There will also be brand new deity specific messaging for almost every aspect of this spell. A big thank you to GM Xayle, GM Thandiwe and GM Sindin for their creative assistance in designing the deity specific messaging for this spell.

Please feel free to ask questions about the information I've shared, but keep in mind that I will not answer any questions about specific numbers for any of these abilities. Those details will be shared with you all on the day that 1650 is released.

I've worked really hard to make Divine Incarnation a reality and its my hope that you all will enjoy it for years to come!

GameMaster Cyraex

Well this sounds amazing

Quote from GM Estild:

Just to address this: there are a number of professions, including paladins, that could use more utility outside of combat. We're not against that idea, but we have yet to find one that is worthwhile, balanced, and appropriately themed. However, even if we did have such an idea, it would unlikely be in the 1650 spell slot since level 50 profession spell slots represent the pinnacle of power for a profession. Utility does not fit that role for paladins.

Regarding 1650 itself, yes, paladins already excel at combat, but these new limited use abilities can mitigate some existing weaknesses for paladins in combat. While everyday hunting may not be an issue, this is still something new to use and in unique situations (invasions, etc), there is definite potential. e.g. a horde of creatures in defensive stance and your attack strength isn't high enough, with Onslaught, you can cut through their defense and attack them all. Or if one particular creature is too tough, you now have a maneuver based attack, Smite, to disable or kill them.

GameMaster Estild

Quote from GM Estild:

I guess we'll see how it shakes out. Finding out its a skill that is mostly aimed at fitting a niche role in a late night (eastern time zone) situation for invasions is very disheartening though. I'm sure the mechanics and flavor text will be top notch even if the usefulness is not there for people who hardly ever see invasions.

It's not mostly aimed at that. That was just one particular use case for the handful of paladins that claim they can already attack and kill anything in defensive stance with one attack. For a significant majority of paladins, that's not the case, and the spell has benefit for them in almost every scenario because of that.

GameMaster Estild

Quote from GM Cyraex:

Some non-numbers questions: Can you use more than one ability at a time, assuming you have enough points in your pool? Specifically, with enough points, can you get zeal flares on your super mstrike? Are zeal flares instead of, or in addition to, crusade flares? I like flares! Does incarnation change your appearance? Is it too late to change the verb to GODMODE?

You can use the abilities at the same time, but the use of the ability does incur roundtime. So you could use ZEAL, wait through that roundtime, and then use ONSLAUGHT and the abilities would stack so to speak. Yes Crusade flares can be used in combination with Zeal, as can any other paladin type flares. The Zeal flares do not trigger with cmans or shield maneuvers, only with attacks. While I wish I had the time to physically change your appearance, this was out of scope for this project. As you'll see later on when the spell is released an enormous amount of work went into developing 1650 and unfortunately, I had to pick and choose what to develop in order to get this done for you all.

Even if it's done as "incarnation smite", it's still inconvenient, because "inc" or even "inca smite" both want to have you try to "incant smite". (Because "incant" comes before "incarn", in the browser.) Maybe "divin smite" (divine incarnation ) will work....

The development of the spell is essentially complete barring any corrections that come out of Quality Assurance, so it is to late to change the verb that is used to activate the abilities. The syntax will be INCARNATE . As another player mentioned, if you don't like this you can always build a macro or alias to make things easier for yourself.

Looks like a lot of fun and the part that I was most pleased to see was the cooldown. Except for the single x/day portion this spell could be usable once every hunt. While I might not use it every hunt it is something that at least I'd use often enough to remember to use it at a fitting moment.

I understand the dislike for x/day usages, however when you see the actual numbers for the ARMOR ability, you will better understand why the spell needed to be designed this way. In order to give you all "god like" abilities, there had to be a trade off and x/day usages is how that was accomplished for the emergency uses of ARMOR. As we've shared with you all before, all the development we do is reviewed, criticized, and debated upon by the entire development team and we do our best to take everyone's concerns into account. At the end of the day though, we have to do our best to preserve game balance while still providing you all with amazing new abilities. That's why we use the x/day usages sometimes.

GameMaster Cyraex

Quote from GM Cyraex:

It will use the INCARNATE verb. Its also important to note that the idea of "emergency" is a little different than the traditional with this ability, I will explain that more when the spell is released.

It does not change the appearance of your equipped armor, you can think of it as a buff, but I'd say its a lot better than padding.