Piety Vs. Skill

[aldath c'om]

give them a chance to earn the equivilant of 45 or 50p by being active, let hp either have 50 or 60 of the bat.

why should hp have more? he aint chosen by the god himself but by a vote inside the religion

[GM Oden]

Ok so in an effort to tone down some of my previous posts.

I honestly have not thought about making the skill able to be gained more than just by macroing. If however something were to be done like this, it would be part of a bigger project which I am fine with taking on board but it would not be rolled out just for religions. So, lets take this stance, first, the new skill would not be able to be gained through good works or other means, there is a method to my madness here so please hear me out.

Divinity as I have called it in this thread and elsewhere, the thought is this is your primary skill for a religion, this would raise like magery does with mages or meditation appears to for religion classes currently. Meditation would become a religion class' Evaluating Intelligence, so with that in mind, an initial system would be to take secondary skills and make those gain by doing their primary skill companions.

All secondary skills would gain a 1/3 as fast as their primary skill counter parts. so the following would occur.

Meditation:
Casting rites would primarily raise Divinity but also award a third of the points Divinity receives to Meditation as well.
Meditation would also alternatively gain by the passive mana regeneration, I have launched a servuo shard a few times and have seen the benefit of having passive meditation gains from passive mana regeneration.

Evaluating Intelligence:
Evaluating Intelligence would gain passively when casting magery spells so that you can train magery first and this would ultimately cut down macroing of evaluating intelligence at the conclusion of your magery training, less time in maxing it.

Item ID:
Tinkering and Inscription would gain gain Item ID passively when training.

Anatomy:
When Healing Anatomy would gain passively while going through healing training.

Animal Lore:
Veterinary would raise Animal Lore passively by training Vet

Arms Lore:
Blacksmithy, Tailoring, Bowcrafting would raise Arms Lore passively when training these skills.

There is likely other ones but with this system in place yes while not ideal for the old players who have maxed meditation, it would not benefit them much, however, as I stated in a previous post here, I had planned to push players currently in a religion to 65 in Divinity out of the gate.

Now what does this mean?
It is difficult to put a "60% in divinity means essentially 30 piety" because part of the entire rewrite of the religion process is to also balance out the effects, damage and healing of rites. I know this sounds like a huge nerf in terms of the word "balance" but this is not my intention, my intention is to close the gap between rites and other casting systems so that on some level at least the magic packages would be brought closer to harmony, but ultimately this would also help balance the shard as a whole.

I am not saying this will be easy and I am not saying that this would be fool proof, there will be testing involved but the end result with improved casting, improved casting and an actual way albeit initially a macroable skill which would also raise meditation passively, what you would be getting is a solid system that expands the amount of options you have both in terms of reaching for the full potential of your character but also your mobility on the battlefield as I have plans on rewriting the casting system so that if you are casting you would be able to move skill /20 squares, so up to 5 squares before the spell is canceled, this gives players a little more fluidity when casting the long spells and rites.

I will apologize as I have since re-read some of my posts and these last couple days have been a bit eye opening I suppose you can say. I generally have an idea and I have been used to just doing it, this poll I was not actually expecting to get as much push back as I have and it was shocking and troubling to me at the same time as I figured I would be delivering a system that is leaps and bounds over what you have now or to be fair what was proposed in the previous, piece mealed information in a new religion system.

In terms of gaining in the primary skills without macroing, I would like to start out with a secondary skill passively gaining by using primary skills initially and once a more full thought out system is hashed out for being able to raise primary skills by doing xyz we can add that. I am already thinking of ways to raise primary skills without having to macro them but it is a bit of a ways off and it needs to be a system that is not something a player can just do in one day to max their skill. Systems to alleviate macroing should not replace macroing altogether but should instead be a helping hand to cut down on time considerably in my view. So I am thinking of other ways in moving skills forward without macroing but initially this might be something that will be down the road as it will need to be relatively all encompassing in terms of raising skills for all classes beyond just religion ones in my view.

[Thoran]

+1 for passive gains to supportive skills.

[Quintoz]

give them a chance to earn the equivilant of 45 or 50p by being active, let hp either have 50 or 60 of the bat.

why should hp have more? he aint chosen by the god himself but by a vote inside the religion

Mostly because in an active religion that does organized stuff, the HP pulls the heavier load everytime, so to make the time and effort worth it they get abit more power.

[Shalinn]

After you get rid of piety and tie the system to skill, theres not that much "need" for the HP with high piety, making people more equal.

[aldath c'om]

give them a chance to earn the equivilant of 45 or 50p by being active, let hp either have 50 or 60 of the bat.

why should hp have more? he aint chosen by the god himself but by a vote inside the religion

Mostly because in an active religion that does organized stuff, the HP pulls the heavier load everytime, so to make the time and effort worth it they get abit more power.

hp is just plain stupid if he carries all the load himself. imo right way would be splitting the load between religion. you can allways have religious leader and whatever other nice titles but u shouldnt have more power for player voted hp

[Gurrnutt Venomblade]

give them a chance to earn the equivilant of 45 or 50p by being active, let hp either have 50 or 60 of the bat.

why should hp have more? he aint chosen by the god himself but by a vote inside the religion

Mostly because in an active religion that does organized stuff, the HP pulls the heavier load every time, so to make the time and effort worth it they get abit more power.

I believe what he means is, the hp has to do oversight of the religion (setting up tome meetings, war and ally of guilds and opposing religions, indoc Etc) and yeah having the piety in pvp is nice. Most religions have priests who run the "church" no they're not chosen by god but they do bare a brunt of the headaches. With this is skill based piety in mind their is no incentive to be a hp other then just the tittle.

[Glarundis]

I believe what he means is, the hp has to do oversight of the religion (setting up tome meetings, war and ally of guilds and opposing religions, indoc Etc) and yeah having the piety in pvp is nice. Most religions have priests who run the "church" no they're not chosen by god but they do bare a brunt of the headaches. With this is skill based piety in mind their is no incentive to be a hp other then just the tittle.

Perhaps, but then we will either see the entire religion working, or the religion loses collective power and loses in the end..That's how things are..

[Darian Darkmind]

If the main purpose of changing the system is to reduce the need of GM intervention, then I agree with Quintoz with a small change.

Piety over skill, piety power should be changed.

10 piety should be the same as 40 is currently and what you start at
20 piety should be the same as 50, earnable with effort
30 piety should be the same as 60, hp only.

To keep it simple, don't change the piety levels (that requires scripting). Give 40 as a starting piety, automatic 50 for priests after X month (to prevent constant religion hopping) and 60 for HP.

No need to make it too hard if there's no real benefit other than people get to macro Divinity. We've plenty of skills to macro already, and if the outcome is the same adding one more just for that purpose is pointless.


That said, one thing I could like about Divinity is, if added:
- Each time you kill an enemy religion member, you gain 1 Divinity
- Each time you die by an enemy religion member, you lose 1 Divinity
- Leaving a religion reduces your Divinity by X
- Corrupting enemy altar gives you 5 Divinity
- Your altar being corrupted reduces Divinity by all member by 5 points. Cleansing the altar returns 3 points.
- Some random tasks can give you divinity

Soft-caps for Divinity
- Priest 100
- Monk 85
- Knight and Ranger 65

No hard-cap on Divinity, but any point above class "max" won't make you stronger. Instead the extra points only work as a buffer for dying/leaving a religion. So you can be a knight with 300 Divinity allowing you to die many times without suffering any power-loss in game. This also works as a way to compete against other players about who has the highest Divinity.


But then again, all this seems like a lot of extra work for very little to no real benefit. The same can be achieved with piety removing the GM intervention by adding the above stuff and I have a feeling it'd be simpler, easier and faster to script:

- Everyone starts with 30 piety when entering a religion the first time (religion hopping doesn't reset it)
- HP's piety cap is increased by +10
- You gain piety by killing enemy religion members, corrupting altars etc. above things.
- You lose piety by dying, being corrupted, leaving your religion.

Your piety has a soft-cap, but you can go beyond giving you a buffer.
- Knights and rangers soft-cap at 40
- Priests and monks at 50
- HP +10 (Knights and Rangers with HP tittle could thus reach 50 piety)

[GM Oden]

You missed the point DD.

the entire religion system will already get an entire rewrite from scratch. I've begun this process already and put it on the back burner once again.

This isn't past staff who just dip their fingers in to plug holes, things need to be rewritten to simplify them and give players and staff more flexibility to interact with the workings so a ton of scripting is a moot point and in fact skill gain vs piety ultimately gives me less work to do scripting wise.

In terms of who it benefits it ultimately would benefit players and staff alike but I'm not really committed to rewriting a religion system unless I can drop piety for a skill. I know many may consider this whining cause as I heard from someone who heard it from someone "he's not getting his way", I do this for free, I dropped my own shard to help out around here so I should have a right to say what endeavours I want to undertake or not and I've scrapped bigger pol projects than the religion stuff ice started so I'm not concerned about that.