More Witches...

Apparently, now that the 'main map' has gone into 3D mode, Babbi Yaga's Shack can climb trees. I wonder how much climbing skill it has.

So more thoughts on witches... This time, I will talk about blood foci. If any of the five people who are likely to read this don't know, witches need blood in order to make most of their spells work. It's a nifty sort of limitation on the otherwise Awesome Power that the witch possesses, and really, if you're not killing things and draining corpses of blood in a sort of Satanic ritual, what kind of witch are you? (I wait now for some wiccan/modern witch to stumble upon this blog, misconstrue things, and start up a shitstorm of comments...) Anyhow, past a certain point, blood is a pretty easy component with which to come up, and one of the first things you learn as a witch is to just drain pretty much every corpse you make or come across into the old blood pouch. And once you're skilled enough to start manufacturing shrunken heads, you're basically golden forever for most of your spells.

One of the big factors that comes into play with blood foci is the rarity of your blood types... It takes increasingly-exotic blood to pop out more powerful spells, and for a couple of spells, you basically must have one type of blood or another, like faerie blood to cast the crudelis curse.


One issue I do have with blood is that the rarity of blood types don't always follow how difficult they are to get, considering that elicat blood is considered 'exotic', and the things basically infest the Temple of Discordia... or that you can make eight 'exotic' shrunken heads (more if you have a brute or battlerager nearby) out of a single hydra... And of course, there's unicorn blood, which is supposedly a 'very rare' type (more common than 'exotic', in other words), despite the fact that no unicorn has been spotted on the MUD since the last time someone mistakenly tried to kill the Red Bull, leaving only a single source (that I know of) from which to get the stuff. Plus, unicorn blood is a necessary component for one of the Ordo's most powerful spells. A little more than 'very rare', I would say...

In general though, I do like the blood component. It makes the witches a bit different a guild than the other mage-type guilds out there, and gives them a bit of flair.

One thing that would be very nice (if not completely necessary) would be a way to determine what types (and maybe how much) of blood you had on-hand in your foci, since the only real way to do this now is to cast a spell and see whether or not it goes off and what kind of blood it ends up using (as far as I can tell, anyhow).

Witches, part 2 (Electric Boogaloo)

So with all of the supposed weaknesses of the witch guild (see previous post), I started my character with the goal of mitigating those weaknesses somewhat. This is an approach I have tried in the past by making two of my previous witches as fomori, which offset the inherent squishiness of a mage class with supernal durability access, natural armor, natural weaponry... Of course, fomori also don't have much charisma to start (a key attribute for witches), as well as a bunch of strength in a guild with essentially no specialty access in strength. I think the highest I ever got a fomori witch was somewhere around level 20.

I started off this time with the decision to make a new witch who was a little bit more of a finesse fighter, so I decided to go with a zenun. Zenunim, amongst other things, get flight spec access (for better dodging), bonus specs in stamina and recuperation, and access to regeneration. They also get ungodly levels of charisma, good dexterity, and good mental stats, so they seem a bit closer to ideal witch. Plus, they're demonic, which is a good bonus. I joined spearmaidens for the combat skill access (although I had considered wandslingers, as well), so at the very least, I would have a decent melee combatant with an aura that hastes me, finishes off morted opponents, and offered a bit of protection. Plus, I would have a character that was able to turn invisible and use some damage-dealing spells.

Using this build, I found myself advancing relatively well, although I really didn't take off until after I discovered just how much the guild's curses can make the difference in a fight. Now, I'm used to playing guilds whose primary powers focus on popping in and unleashing a world of hurt in the form of lightning bolts from eyeballs (ELF, RW, OZM, RM) or else unending amounts of slashity-stabbity (Kensai, Knights, Brutes, Rangers) -- after all, most of the guilds on the mud are built on the model of allowing one to perpetrate extreme amounts of damage upon an unsuspecting world in the quickest time possible. This is generally a good model, and I have no real problem with it. But it's also a model that the witches don't squarely fit into, since witches, more than anything else, seem to be debuffers. Witches get a lot of traction not by being able to out-damage the competition, but by being able to make their opponents just as squishy as a witch. It's really a different way of doing things from the way most guilds operate (although lots of guilds get debuffs, there are really none that seem to work them as well as witches do). Hex an NPC, and suddenly they're dodging less often, attacking less often, hitting less often... In short, they're turned into as poor combatants as the typical witch.

Now, while the debuffer role would seemingly be most effective in a group, where their powers would allow the other members of the group to inflict Satanic amounts of rape upon the unwashed masses, the very act of grouping with a witch appears to violate the basic ethos of the guild. After all, witches are supposed to maintain secrecy about their membership in the guild (to the point where they're listed as 'adventurer' in their whois profile, despite the fact that it really doesn't fool anyone, and makes everyone assume that any adventurer over the mid-teens in level is secretly a witch). So, grouping sort of kills the whole secrecy thing. After all, who's dumb enough not to suspect that the lady in the corner -- you know, the demonic-looking one surrounded by a shroud composed of the stolen souls of her victims -- who keeps whispering to herself for some reason, is in actuality a witch? And to a certain extent, the secrecy is completely justifiable -- after all, they're hunted by the church of Yehovah, which has a really nice cathedral and masses of homicidal knights, while all Samael's followers get is a grotty old shack in the middle of the woods. So, for the most part, I tried to build a witch who could go it alone, which means getting some combat ability apart from what the guild offered -- a 'pure' witch would be pretty cool in a mixed group, but unfortunately, that just doesn't seem to fit the whole idea behind them.

Anyhow, that's about where I am with my witch now... Sort of pondering whether or not I want to take her to hero level or beyond. What I really hope for is to get a few other people together to play witches, so I can get some groups going now and then.

Witches.

One of the things I like to do from time to time in the game is to attempt to play characters in guilds and associations that don't get played very often -- Porphyria originated as an attempt to make a viable character that remained an adventurer her whole career (an idea I revisited later on with a tuatha character I got to about level 32 and then deleted), I've gotten two brutes to hero-level... Obviously, I also enjoy playing the more popular guilds as well, but I have found that just about any guild can be playable (and enjoyable), no matter how much some people might talk about a certain guild 'being broken', 'sucking' or 'needing an update'.

So my latest real project character: A zenun Maleficus. My first impressions of the Ordo Maleficus guild were not at all kind. It is, amongst all else, a Den guild, which means it has help files that aren't quite as forthcoming as those for other guilds, it has hard level requirements for the use of a couple of the higher-level powers, some of the powers have rather serious cooldown requirements (if a ringwielder can pop off hundreds of area attacks an hour, why does my only real area attack have an hours-long cooldown?), and it hasn't had much dev-love for quite some time. I've run a few characters through the gauntlet of this guild, not really getting anywhere, and even got frustrated and deleted a level 30-something tuatha with a psychic healer talent who I brought over from the Elflords.

With this character, I've finally been able to find a play style that works for a witch... For the most part in the past, I was bummed that the witches, on their own, did not seem to offer a whole lot of bang for the buck -- Most of the damage-dealing powers cost a lot of SP, blood foci are hard to maintain, and witches are inherently pretty squishy (they get little decent combat specialty access).

(Will continue in next post)