Earthpriests

[solar]

Do we have to pay for being citizens of Graemor?!

YES!
As a Graemorian, you willingly allow others the chance of killing you when you are in the city. If you don't want to be killed, don't live there, eh?

And wouldn't more powerful Graemorian guilds just WORSEN the situation?! You would get killed faster then, and whine more. Oh, look! There was another e_priest training, and wow, that lich wields a mean sword - no wait! URGGGKKK (10 points for drama!).

And as a city of 'evil' races (majority dark elves, trolls, blah blah, foo and bar races) the 'roleplaying element' practically commands that this city is a better canditate for pvp-area.

[dunn]

There is a whole problem with pvp in Graemor. In Icesus terms it's not pvp, but pvp-wipe. This isn't your hack and slash mud where every guild is supposed to have a fair chance in a battle.
. Ie, a mage doesn't have as many hit points as a warrior but will do more damage to make up for it. But will still tank with that warrior toe to toe.

Graemor in the case for pvp, is a place where you take your chances if you're a caster since you can be easily stunned/wiped by melee. Although I haven't seen many templars and militia hanging out around graemor, waiting to catch players as they train. That would be pretty annoying. Let's hope we get hunting back.

I think the whole idea for a city pk zone is wrong because 1) all guilds are not included (don't have a fair chance of encounters, Graemor is pretty far from the rest of the world) 2) The pvp occurs mostly due to accidents. (People not wanting to get killed but accidentally catching some person at it which will inadvertantly become a nuisance to watch out for even if they only meant to play by the rules.)

And dancers are not that much of a pk factor anyway, since they take forever to stab and anyone with less than maximal dark vision will be tipped off to that huge globe of darkness in the room.

So all you're left with are unprepared players, that can be wiped after hours of trying to make that level. There's no fun in that.

You also don't catch formations in Graemor to allow that to be a part of the fun. There should be regular mob areas that are pk zones, not cities, in my opinion.

If Graemor was an area, I say thumbs up. Great concept.
As a pk guild/city area, uh, I can understand why people are becoming annoyed. My point is that a pk area can be made much better and much more pk-oriented if it was done outside a city. Not to mention fun for all.

YES!
As a Graemorian, you willingly allow others the chance of killing you when you are in the city. If you don't want to be killed, don't live there, eh?

Ok, I don't agree that if you choose Graemor as a hometown you give players permission to kill you. The RULES give players the ability to kill YOU. If I pick Graemor as a hometown, I give myself permission to run. If your hometown is Graemor you are a target for an abusable area. Period.

If you want to say that you agree to pk merely by being a citizen of Graemor then the guilds should be moved outside the city. (It's not a 2 for 1 deal with a catch, just because you want to try playing an earth priest or a shadow dancer. It shouldn't have to be.)

Then that would be fair to say.

And wouldn't more powerful Graemorian guilds just WORSEN the situation?! You would get killed faster then, and whine more. Oh, look! There was another e_priest training, and wow, that lich wields a mean sword - no wait! URGGGKKK (10 points for drama!).

Remove the guilds, then no one would complain. (They would still require/maintain citizenship.)

If Graemor is a pk zone, as I'm sure it always will, there's no point in having local guilds there, right?

Move the epriests outside the city - heck, give them a nearby outer temple. Make the dancer mansion a pk-safe haven. Problem solved.

Unless of course, the above quote is your idea of "O.K" with a dozen roses.

[shyress]

*WHINE*

[artic]

-Artic comments on Earth priests-

I finally tried them. Am now a lvl 35 Earth priest able to summon a lvl 40 Skeleton Warrior. And this is what i think of the guild:

It Blows!
Once upon a time there was a group of priests that worshipped earth. They were soo powerful, that the gods became envious and banished them. Many many years later they were recreated. Yet fearing the same mistake of becoming too powerful for the gods liking, they decided to SUCK!.
There used to be 2 spells 'fissure' and 'tremmor' - they were 2 spells for a good reason. 'Fissure' was powerful (hard to get so you had to have low % in spell and had to use rite of success for it to work) it created a fissure in the ground and burned everyone for a short beriod of time. 'Tremmor' was special use only spell. You could use it to knock down enemies. Boths spells had downsides- no 2 fissures could be cast in the same room (not for a quite long time, one fissure created a crack in the ground, that had to disappear first) and tremmor did not work on some monsters with higher reflexes. These 2 spells have now been gombined, giving a spell that only of rare occasions does the fissure part and quite often does the tremmor part - that is , gets resisted by creatures of high reflex.
Arming a minion - A minnion can be armed after it has reached lvl 3. Thats rather easy to do with a walking corpse or a zombie, but my skeleton warrior need 50+ K for one level. Obviously some people find this to be ok, but i dont make that much in one play time.
Minion drain - All minions drain mp from you. This means you can not idle with blessings and minions- this would drain df like a hoover. Also going below 50% MP is bad idea, cause regen will be negative unless you use meditation, so great is the drain already at low levels.
Minion regen - There is none. Afraid of the high exp rate of the earth priests they were made to be very slow. Extremely slow. I think that higher level epriests might not care for this much, but lower level ones need a way to replenish their minion.
Prayer - Its a forced to learn skill, that has no use. If you want to regen, you use meditation. Pray stops when HP is full, and does not seem to help with MP. skill help prayer says it help you pray in hard conditions - aha! maybe i can regen my minion with it while in battle. NO! cant pray for minion. So im supposed to learn a skill that has no use?!! Why? ok im a priest and priest has to know how to pray- yes ok Give me some prayers than!

So to sum it all up. This guild might be very interesting for high level players who aslo take the levels in the high-end subguild that is for sorcerers and epriest together. But keep in mind: You can become a earth priest with only a total exp of 1 Mil.

[zohlor]

Earth Priests do seem a bit hard to play at low levels or when you just reinced to the guild and have zero masteries, but . . .

Pray doesn't stop at full HP.

Minions do regen, but slowly. And there is no drain while you are at an earth altar, like the one south from Vaerlon.
You've got the skill 'vicissitude', can use it while you are regenning for your mp to heal your undead - or alternatively, go kill something and use the corpse from it to heal the undead a bit with the skill. The more similiar the corpse is to the race of the minion, the more it heals. And unless it was changed at some point, you could arm minions when they reach level 1. Not entirely sure about the lower level minions.

[artic]

I take back all bad things i sayd about pray! But still, why no pray for minions?

[felgand]

Mainly because epriests don't need it. The changes to minion healing were put into place because it was entirely too easy to heal a minion through spells before. Now at least they need a reagent (a constant supply of corpses) to heal effectively. After playing an epriest for some time, I can tell you with confidence that they do fine without being able to pray for a minion.

[lipides]

I say that earth priests will rule WHEN you get the 2 i'd say most important spells, Dhubr's care and Spirit nexus,without them. EP are useless.

[artic]

Don't Trie earth priests if you are below level 30. Or you will either have some spells, but no way to regen you minion, or no spells and a regennable minion.

[vinicius]

Realistically, having played a level 59 Earth-Priest for a number of months, if you can't invest 200+ million in worth into the guild alone, not counting experience used to train stats, I don't think 95% of players are going to find they can be successful enough to stick it out for very long. Anybody with less than those numbers, which unfortunately at this time is less than a top-100 player, should do so with the intent to have fun trying out something new and different and perhaps build up some masteries in case they want to try it after they have attained these totals. As Lipides stated above you really need at the least the Dhubr's care spell at a decent % to keep a minon healthy and regen times down.

As a side note - unless you can take all 70 or so guild levels, pick a race that regens sp better and you won't feel the pain of the minion drain as much.

Earth Priests do not suck -- but you probably will as one at this time if you are not a top-100 player.

[apog]

Being the only low level epriest that's currently been on for any length of time, and being the one who everyone asks questions by "tell" because every other epriest is lvl 65+, I'm going to take a crack at what Artic has said. I think it's important to get the facts straight and to clear up some misconceptions and to verify some rumours.

1.) Seismic Shockwave. I'm at the same level in the appropriate guild as Artic was at, plus or minus a level. This is the epriest earth based area spell. You don't get this until about 10 levels into the "guild of earth". It raises at 8%/level. At 14 levels into "guild of earth", I have it at about 44%. That being said, any spell that you have a max of as 44% is going to suck. This compounded by the high fail rate of a 44% spell, the semi high cost compared to other non-area spells, the fact it obviously aggro's everyone in the room, the reflex save given to mobs, and that the mid level minions just can't take more than 2-3 below avg - avg mobs at a time make this a relatively non-used spell at this level. However, this follows the same pattern as I've seen with other area spells like bladed wind and the mage area spells like 'storm'.

2.) Arming a minion - Here Artic is completely wrong on the level requirements to arm a minion. All minions that can arm weapons and armour, do so at level 1. That being said, this is compounded by a couple of things. First off, your necromancy skill and your necromancy mastery reduce the amount of exp needed for this first level by a great deal. This is also compounded by party shares. Minions get exp based on their party shares just like everyone else in a party. If your shares are very uneven, it can take a long time to get that first level. This happens to me if I want to level a skeleton warrior as I have a %75/%25 party shares as compared to a wraith were I have a 60%/40% cut. You don't get weapons or armour back that you give to a minion, so don't make the mistake of giving them an ocean blue falchion or similar thinking that you'll get it back.

3.) Playing time commitment - Since the low leves epriest generally has crappy spells and at a generally low level, we are required to lean heavily on our minion for exp-rate. That being said, given a common exp-rate for me when I had a skeleton warrior, it took me 10-14 hours of almost constant play time to max out a skeleton warrior. However a maxed out minion is much much better than a 0 or 1st lvl minion. That being said, the time commitment to an epriest is very high. If you don't play more than 3-4 hours per day, you're going to get jipped because your minion isn't going to get to a high enough level to get a good exp-rate. If you leave your minion an earth altar, it will stay until boot. If you leave it anywhere else, it will disappear after about 30-45 minutes. This means if you can only play for an hour or two, then have to leave, you can store your minion at the altar, log off, then log back in later when you have more time.

4.) SP drain from minions. This is highly dependant upon 4 factors. The first is your max SP. If you have a high max SP, then of course the relative drain is going to be lower. Obviously like any spell caster class, a gnome or brownie is better than a troll or b'rogh. The second is your minion's type. Higher level minions have a higher SP drain. The third is your mastery "power over undead". This mastery *SIGNIFICANTLY* reduce your minion's SP drain. The fourth is probably the most important and most non-obvious factor, and that is having your minion at an earth altar. If your minion is at an earth altar (it doesn't matter which one or what kind), you will not have any SP drain. As was said previously, for low-level players it is best to choose a caster race with high wisdom/intelligence and a high spr rate. My favorite is the gnomes as you can get that spiffy gnome cloak for pretty cheap and they have high wis, high int, high spr, and a high exp-gain rate. Since thise drain is constantly in effect while not at an altar, it can significantly increase the cost of blessings. Unless you have a consistant source of DF or have very low blessings, then I would suggest against getting too many blessings.

5.) Minion Regen - Mid level minions have extremely low natural regen rates. We're talking less than 1% per tick. This is where the skill "Vicissitude" comes in. This allows you to basically heal your minion through the use of corpses. This comes to the sub-guild "path of necromancy" around level 9-10. It increases at about 5% per level. I think I have it at 40% right now. Here is the trick with "Vicissitude". You heal more using this skill *if* the corpse you are using is the same size *or* the same race as your minion. In other words, if your minion was summoned from a gigantic troll, then the corpse of a troll or the corpse of a gigantic mob will heal your minion more than if you use a corpse that is not a troll and not gigantic. What this means is that if you want higher regen rates, choose a corpse that is representative of what you generally kill. If you go to shanty a lot, then choose a medium size or orc corpse. If you do trolls a lot, then do a very large or gigantic corpse or a troll corpse. If you do this, you won't have to do what most epriest do a lot and that is use "Vicissitude" with no corpse. This can be done, but heals very little. Again, materies are the key to this. While I used to heal my skeleton warrior at 2-3% per use with no corpse, I can now heal my wraith at 4-6% per use with no corpse and with 12% in the relevant mastery. As a comparison, healing with the same type of corpse gives me 18%-28% hp back.

6.) Prayer - Prayer is a skill for the player. As with all prayer, it drains DF to increase regen rate. DF drain is based on what phase it is. If it's your worshipped phase, DF drain is small and regen tick rate is high. If it's not your worshipped phase, DF drain is higher and regen tick rate is not as fast. This makes it good for us if you use it during earth phase and you've got some extra DF. Our main oppenent as a low level epriest is running out of SP and not being able to regen it back fast enough. With prayer, we can increase our exp-rate because we can use our spells more often. Prayer stops after a certain amount of time praying or when you have max hp and max sp and max ep. You can only pray for those who worship the same element as you do or that you have "preach"ed to. We don't have the skill preaching and the minions are brain dead and don't have any thoughts at, thus are unable to worship anything. Those two things being true, there is no way to pray for undead as Artic said. While it would be nice as a low-level player to be able to pray, I do agree with Felgand that it would make higher level players too powerful.

7.) Minimum totals to join. I personally joined over from originally being an air priest. Since the guild is very wisdom based, I was able to use most of my exp from the start. At the time I had 19M. I found it very hard, but I was determined to work it out. After realizing that a better minion was better than better spells, I reinc'd and spent a lot more exp in the necromancy sub-guild than I spent in the earth sub-guild. I then used the better minion to help get a high exp-rate to regain the levels in the earth sub-guild. I now have about 35M and I feel much more comfortable with the guild. I would not suggest this guild to anyone with below 5M in Wisdom, below 3M in intelligence or below 3M in Con. Those are the much needed stats. I find that it was an absolutely perfect match for a healer who was tired of not soloing. The "guild" exp was almost a perfect match. If you are coming from a melee guild, you're probably not going to be able to use a lot of your guild exp and thusly you'll probably be weaker than someone with the same totals. I suggest a minimum level of 44. Here is my breakdown. 15 lvls in the priests of earth. 14 levels in path of earth. 14 levels in path of necromancy. 1 level in chronomancers. Minimum of 80% into necromancy skill. What this does is give you a decent minion that can be equipped with weapons, 2 necessary buff spells at around 40%, and the ability to enter the stable rifts at vaerlon and graemor so you don't have to kill yourself getting home. If you can't commit to those levels and skills, then I'd personally say it's going to be a waste of time unless you really really want to be an earth priest and don't care about exp-rates and frustration levels.

Conclusions.
1.) If you are a mid 40+ healer and that's all you've done and you want to do some solo'ing without taking a lot of damage personally, then this is something that you can try without losing access to a good chunk of your exp, and without having to trade all your eq.

2.) If you're a melee and most of your exp is in dex/con/str and you're barely on the edge of the suggestions I made above, then you're probably going to be happier doing another melee type class.

3.) If you don't have 4-6 hours per boot (either in one chunk or in smaller 1-2 hour chunks) then your minion probably isn't going to get to a level where he's useful.

4.) 80% or 100%+ necromancy skill is the key. If you can't make that, then you're not going to be happy with your minion.

5.) If you can't handle dealing with your lvl 3+ minion dieing because of any of the following or similar: a highbie cast "rain of judgement" right when you walk out of a room, reboot comes, you walk into a extremely strong aggro casting mage that you never seen before, a treant stomps your minion in 2 blows, etc..., then don't try it. It's just a fact that the minion you've spent 5-6 hours leveling and you've just now gotten to a decent level is going to die.

6.) Don't arm minions with crap eq. You can't give them new armour or weapons. Try to scrounge good stuff and instead of selling it, give it to them. Alternately, you can do what I did and buy poor quality steel eq (from shops with good rep, not the smith) and ratling rapiers, give them to a minion that you just created an hour after boot and play them very carefully for the next 25 hours until the next boot. It might cost you 200-300k, but a well equipped minion will get you much more exp and more money.

7.) This is not a newbie - low midbie guild. This was stated by Belannaer when he first opened the guild on Nov 09, 2004. His statement was "Priests of Earth are open for members now. Rejoice. The guild is located in Graemor and you are required to have it as a hometown. Minimum requirement to choose a hometown is 1M exp but I'd suggest you to have at least 20M totals before reincing into the guild." You're going to have problems if you don't have the levels/exp. That's a fact. Save yourself some trouble.


Keep in mind that this is from the view of a level 44, 35M total, player. Players around my level and below are the ones that I'm trying to inform. If you've got 100M+ totals or are strictly speaking beating my ass in levels, while some of this may apply to you, it's very obvious that high level epriest is distinctly different than low level epriest.

[artic]

Thank You!

Finally some decent talk on this forum. Shows that a master at hes craft is talking. Thank you.

The solution for me is to reinc and redistribute my levels.

[artic]

Without making a new thread, i'll post my whining here.

This has been mentioned by others before, but ill do so again in hopes it will reach the nessesary ears.

Monitoring minion health is a pain in the rear end.
'party status' gives quality info and makes sense, when the party is large and you are the leader, is it ,however, way too spammy for using in a single earth_priest-minion party.
'shape' and 'look' give no exact info and are thus close to useless. However, if they gave as exact info as 'party shape' they could be used in small 'alias' scripts making the minion monitoring a lot less annoying.

So my suggestions:
* one way is to bring pack 'set' for minions and have a possibility to 'set mon party' for minion. This would be close to the dream situation. It would make leading a minion party as easy as leading any party in your previous guild- would make guild more acceptable for new members.
** Make 'shame my_minion' show better info. No fancy gauges or nothing, even something similar to 'hp -sr' output would be cool. So if someone else looks or shapes you minion they see the normal vauge output, but if its you (and you have a spiritual link to you minion) you see %'s. This would make things less spammy, but would still not be the dream-solution.

Second thind id like to mention is Minion-movement. In the old days you could give a minnion an order to 'enter hole' or 'climb tree'. This was obviously removed due to commands like 'get mithril' etc, but its limits the possibilities for playing as a earth priest. It seems i can not enter a room with a special command entrance and a instant aggro monster inside.

[apog]

As for minion movement, each guild has it's own playing style. As a ranger you learn that running shanty isn't as effective as running an outdoors/outworld area. As a solo mage you learn to the rite/hit/run/rinse/repeat wash cycle. For epriests, you have to learn the in's and out's of minions. We have a spell to summon our minion to our place. It doesn't even really cost us anything to cast if we fail. If you have an aggro mob that's in a room, then you can do a couple things. If there is a room on the other side of the mob, then flee past the mob, summon minion, then go back and fight the mob. You can also chain your movement spell with your summon, i.e. "enter crack;cast summon minion". On my list, it doesn't take any longer than a casting of touch of the nether. If you need to, rite of success before going in so you have a better chance of it working. If you can't run past or you can't take 5-10 hits from the mob, then you're probably going to have a hard time killing him with your skeleton warrior anyways. Even at my level, and definately higher levels, and it has been said that this guild isn't for low level players and that you will have problems, it's not a problem to use one of the two methods above. The third is obviously don't fight aggro mobs that are right next to a special entrance if you can't do one of the two above.

You don't hear rangers saying "I should be able to get my outside bonus inside" or shadowdancers say "I should be able to backstab in daylight". Summoning minions is our curse and our blessing just like backstab and OW bonuses are to shadowdancers and rangers respectively.

Try learning how to play epriest as compared to trying to get epriest to play how you want them to be or how you are used to other guilds being. Keeping your minion safe and protecting them are a couple of key things that keep this guild interesting and from being overpowered.

[apog]

I agree that a "mon party" for minions, or similar, would be extremely nice. They do already report spells through a "party" announce just like other spells, just not the hp/ep/sp stuff.

However, I've been on for a little while, I know it's been requested before and the wizzes have been silent on whether it's being worked on, it's never going to be worked on, or if it's a future project.

In the mean time, there are some things that epriests can do to cut down on the spaminess of "party status". These also work equally well for healers since they too have "party status" spaminess problems.

1.) Battle help verbosity.
2.) Use client triggers to remove some lines of party status during combat.
3.) Use "party status-row". Try using triggers to remove all the white space.

What those don't help with are when you want to party and you won't be leading. Albeit, this is rare. Most leaders aren't set up to monitor "party status" and generally epriests are left doing a "psay RUN!". It's just another barrier to partying. Whether that barrier is intentional, or not, is hard to say.