Afflictive Module: Clerical Afflictives.

[Burzuk]

All the clerical afflictives have been updated. I won't pour over every single detail, but here are some highlights:

Dependency
Dependency is a major new spellcasting concept that will mostly apply to clerical spells. Clerical afflictive spells are almost all affected by dependency. The exceptions are the cause/harm series of spells and the undead-targetting spells (dispel undead and turn undead). You can use dependency to tailor your cleric to your own personal playing style: if you want to be an "offensive" cleric, sacrifice hp for affbreaks and enjoy stronger damage on your aff spells. If you want to be a "defensive" cleric instead, equip yourself normally and enjoy your hp, but take a hit on your aff spells damage. Remember that certain clerical spells aren't affected by dependency at all (turn undead, cause/harm spells), so if you've equipped your cleric more defensively, focus on using those non-dependent aff spells in combat instead.

Merin at Timaran has some (pretty mediocre) affbreak eq for sale, but you'll want to find better ones via Winter runs or gambling if you're serious about using breaks full time. Of course, there's nothing stopping you from switching break equipment on/off depending on the situation. Think of it as a way to change your cleric's "specialization" on the fly, just by switching equipment.

Lethality protection
Those of you who have tried to cast the old harm spell on an almost-dead target only to land scratches and grazes will understand this already. Essentially, lethality protection used to be applied to certain clerical spells -- most importantly, wrath -- which gimped their damage against near-dead PC targets. This made it harder for clerics to simply stand back and kill off their victims using aff spam the way mages can. After I had left AR, most of the lethality protection on cleric spells were removed (harm was the only one remaining), so we've wound up with clerics playing like mages with aff spam, except clerics also had massive healing/protection spells to boot. To fix this problem, lethality protection has been restored to most clerical aff spells now, but in a modified form. It won't nearly prevent kills via aff spells as before, but instead will gradually decrease their damage as the target's hp falls. Clerics should rely upon aff spells to wear down and weaken an opponent, but the actual killing should be done with either mals or sheer chasing to finish off a wounded opponent. Note that the cause/harm series of spells (especially harm) is a major exception to this rule, but dispel/turn undead are exceptions as well.

Dispel undead
Before I updated it yesterday, the helpfile still read that dispel undead only affected undeads. It was that way back when dispel undead replaced dispel evil for healers during purge, and I'd even made a fairly successfully healer shortly thereafter despite that undead-only restriction. However, Stryth eventually relented to the people complaining about the lack of a direct damage spell for healers, and changed dispel undead into an exact copy of dispel evil (making the name rather misleading). The problem? Dispel undead and dispel evil have the exact same mana efficiency as wrath. That's right, healers have been using their version of wrath the whole time. It does less damage per cast, but also casts faster than wrath. Since the mana efficiency for wrath and dispel evil/undead are the same, compare their mana costs and casting lags, then do the math yourself to see why I said that "healers have been using their version of wrath the whole time."

The new change is a compromise solution now: instead of doing no damage against non-undeads like I had originally planned for dispel undead, it now does reduced damage to non-undeads instead. In its new form, dispel undead has somewhat better mana efficiency than harm when used without affbreaks; at the upper limits of the affbreak bonus, dispel undead has better mana efficiency than demonfire. Though dispel undead is no longer as strong as wrath, the comparisons I've provided should be familiar damage benchmarks for any cleric player. The upside is, dispel undead is even stronger vs undead targets than it was before (assuming you have enough affbreaks), which is great for leveling or vamp-hunting.

Also note that paladins didn't really have any reason before to use dispel evil instead of wrath, unless they really valued dispel evil's quicker casting over the free curse attempts from wrath. With this update, a major differentiator for paladins between dispel undead and wrath is that dispel undead deals lethal damage whereas wrath has lethality protection. Therefore, once you have your target down to awful, finish him off using dispel undead, not wrath.

Turn Undead
Turn undead is a now devastating multi-hit AOE spell, high in both per-round damage and mana efficiency when used against undead targets. The drawback is that it now forces the cleric to "commit" to the casting of the spell, since turning undead takes several rounds and lags the cleric in the meantime (preventing them from also healing their groupmates, etc). This eliminates the "turn-flee-turn" cheese (which is also unnecessary since turning can be done mid-combat now). Tanking healers are the best turners; non-tanking paladins are the worst ones.

Cause/Harm spells
As what are probably the most interesting set of changes here, the cause/harm series of spells has been turned into complete inverses of their healing counterparts. What this means is that they always do their full damage against a non-immune target, even if the target has -200 save vs aff, sanc, protection, magic resist, and mana shield. Yes, this mean you can pull an instant MANGLE out of your ass (*** DEMOLISH *** if boosted by cause continual) by using a harm spell, regardless of how much afflictive defenses your target has up. Yes, this is potentially stronger-than-hellstream damage we're talking about here (since there's no way that a hellstream is going to do that much damage vs -200 save vs aff, sanc, protection, magic resist, etc, and be cast in a single round on top of all that). Since the cause/harm spells neither depend upon affbreaks for damage nor have their damage reduced by lethality protection, they are very dangerous as finisher spells for shamans. The main drawback is that the stronger spells in this series (cause critical and harm) have cooldowns that prevent them from being used repeatedly as mindless spam spells, so where and when to best use them will require good timing and judgement. Still, when used judiciously, these spells are extremely deadly -- especially harm. (Harm, by the way, now scales by level just like all the other cause/harm spells, so no more lowbie harm cheese.)

Of particular note is cause continual: it's an extremely effective spell to use when casting multiple cause/harm spells. Casting a cause continual followed by a boosted cause serious will inflict more damage than two straight cause seriouses, and casting a cause continual before either a cause critical or harm will allow you to make the most out of each cooldown-restricted casting of those spells. If you want to use the cause/harm spells effectively, you'll want to use the cause continual spell early and often.

Flay health
A replacement for demonfire, flay health is a new disease-based aff spell for shamans. Not only does it have high dependency (requiring lots of affbreak for maximal damage), but it also works best on targets with lowered constitution. That is to say, ignorance resistance issues here, flay health will hit a 25 con dwarf as hard as it does a 15 con elf. However, a 15 con dwarf will take more damage from flay health than a 15 con elf, because a 15 con dwarf has significantly lowered constitution from its max. This means it's important to keep your constitution maxed when fighting against a shaman; converse, shamans can wreak havoc upon their victim by lowering a victim's con with plague beforehand. Also, I highly suggest that you save some trains for con to replace that which was lost from death, instead of spending all your trains on hp/mana/mv and refrain from wearing too much equipment with -con penalties when fighting a shaman, since those will also increase a shaman's flay health damage against you.

Speaking of damage, with high enough affbreak and just a few points of decreased victim con, flay health can inflict more damage than demonfire vs a good-aligned target. Even without affbreaks, flay health against a con-lowered target can inflict more damage than demonfire vs a neutral-aligned target. If you're unhappy with your flay health damage (and mark my words, you will be), wear more affbreaks and lower your opponent's con first. Remember, the damage potential is actually higher than that of demonfire... and that's not even counting the vuln vs avians.

No need for avians to be overly worried though. Healers will have a suitable solution, once we get to the Religion Module...

For more information about what else is in store for the Afflictive Module, see this post: Afflictive Module: Introduction.