Future Plans - Clerics

The cleric class has long languished - not because it was useless, but because until recently there wasn't a lot of reason to have a really high cleric level. Prior to the 2010 christmas expansion, there weren't a lot of cleric spells or skills above level 30; and many cleric spells didn't scale in power as you gained levels, like mage and necromancer spells do.

As a result, cleric has been a useful, powerful class - but not something you want to be your primary. Our future update to cleric aims to change that.

The biggest updates to the class aren't likely to be new spells and skills. Rather, we want to fix existing spells and skills that aren't up to snuff with the rest of the class.

Take for example the 'peace' spell. This could be a very powerful, useful spell - if only it worked differently. We're currently imagining room effects, duration effects, and a handful of other options to improve this.

Another spell that's long been on the todo list is charm. The current version of charm has basically been dented into the ground to prevent charm armies. With this update, we're planning to switch it to a control point system similar to necromancers. This should make charm a lot more useful while at the same time limiting "charmy" problems.

Other things that could use similar kinds of improvement are turn undead, the ward spells, curses, and the monitor skill.

All this said, we do plan to add more spells and skills. So far these hit most of the major groups - character buffs and enhancement, a possible brew skill, some new curses, new damage spells, and a new undead spell.

The schedule for this is some time in august, about a month after the thief updates of the previous post. After this, we still have a ton of things to work on, including elemental channeling for mages, god code, and a couple of new character classes.