v0.10 ...if we did v1.4 instead

Personally, I view an Earth Wand equivalent as similar to Clerics in D&D of old having Turn Undead. If the Earth Wand effectively only does damage, and only to Undead or Reverse Life Forced creatures, it effectively mimics that old power. Then you are not adding any healing and Earth Casters get a boost to Undead Slaying (or Hero Slaying if you are a dirty dirty Necromancer).
 
Having too many good spells to pick from isn't really an issue, and more or less supports the argument that Earth Casters have a better tree (which is ok! the classes all have their niches in 1.3. 0.10 on the other hand...)
Its not a case of too many good spells its a case of taking the purify the group expects you to have or the paralysis you'd like to have in case things get hairy. The advantage Celestial has is that no one is ever going to get yelled at for taking a magic storm over a prison or vice versa. Earth casters do get yelled at for throwing a death or a paralysis.
 
Personally, I view an Earth Wand equivalent as similar to Clerics in D&D of old having Turn Undead. If the Earth Wand effectively only does damage, and only to Undead or Reverse Life Forced creatures, it effectively mimics that old power. Then you are not adding any healing and Earth Casters get a boost to Undead Slaying (or Hero Slaying if you are a dirty dirty Necromancer).

But Turn Undead was ultimately a terrible resource for Clerics, as it resulted in either Undead being too easy for a party to deal with and thus unwanted by DMs, or a completely unused resource because Undead weren’t encountered. D&D then released feats that used Turn Undead to generate other cool effects, because they recognized Turn Undead by itself was pretty bad.

This is why Pathfinder ditched Turn Undead as an inherent ability and replaced it with Channel Energy, which was far more positively received by players of said class.
 
1) Having Wands isn’t a minor thing. The tone of your comment “the only thing they have over Earth is the ability to add damage” indicates it’s minor. It’s actually pretty major. It’s literally hundreds of damage per day that’s added when you get low-highbie status.

2) They also get exclusive access to Scrolls, which has the pre-req of Read Magic and X Celestial Level slot to use. Potions don’t have such a requirement, which means that an Earth caster is going to have less potions than the equivalent Celestial caster will have scrolls, all other things being equal.

I’ve seen Earth Casters left behind for mods because you only need so much healing, but you can -always- use more damage.
You make some interesting points. I can only speak from my experience for what I've seen from my chapter, which has many high proficiency fighters that are dealing out most of our damage in the fights i've been in and healers are always needed. In that type of environment I saw almost disappointment in some folks when a friend of mine revealed he was a Celestial Caster. People weren't mean about it and he definitely hasn't been excluded from anything to my knowledge, but healing is definitely of value for our environment and so I have the impression that earth casters are looked upon as the "smarter choice" if you're a caster.

I'm guessing that the Seattle chapter has an abundance of Earth Scholars if damage is really that much more demand from your perspective. Let me know if that's right or wrong so I can get a better understanding.

I never said that damage is a minor thing. As a fighter all i care about is damage :p. I was only trying to make the point that the main thing a Celestial caster has in terms of being to help the fight is damage. It's pure DPS/DPR in MMO/Tabletop terms. Earth casters get the utility of healing that is unique to them, if they could do a bunch of damage as well, why would there even need to be Celestials?

My view of things when it comes to game design for RPGs is that they're about making choices. It's like when I chose to be a fighter, I chose dealing more damage and getting armor over the possibility of healing myself/others or backstabbing or making potions. Now I could do those things by building into them, but that's the hard choice cause now I do less damage.
Those hard choices are what the character building aspect are all about and part of the fun of RPGs, in my opinion at least.

There is the other unspoken thing that Earth casters have over being that if you have a group that ignores you doing the big bad evil you can do things like hit things for 60 body at level 8, and you get those deaths as well.
I do sympathize with Earth casters feeling forced to save their slots for life though. I'd support having relics be able to store those perhaps with the current minute timer that they have for the purifies.
 
I haven't played Pathfinder. Is there a way to use the Channel Energy rules as a template for Relics in Alliance?

It has some merits, but I suspect the Owners would be against giving Earth casters access to the primary use, which was AOE bursts of positive energy.

I can't say I'd mind relics being a 'spend charges to convert healing spells to voice radius' thing, though it would be hard to balance.
 
It would be a "heal by voice" effect. So not really.

Channel Energy, in practice, would be the equivalent of giving Earth Casters the ability to throw Healing packets, that would become more effective with build spent in Earth Magic. Channel Positive Energy can be used to either heal allies or harm Undead (and Channel Negative Energy is the reverse). True, in PF, Channel is an AoE, but if you wanted an Alliance version? You give Earth Casters Healing Wands. That’s the equivalent.
 
Channel Energy, in practice, would be the equivalent of giving Earth Casters the ability to throw Healing packets, that would become more effective with build spent in Earth Magic. Channel Positive Energy can be used to either heal allies or harm Undead (and Channel Negative Energy is the reverse). True, in PF, Channel is an AoE, but if you wanted an Alliance version? You give Earth Casters Healing Wands. That’s the equivalent.
So an earth storm that you can stop where the damage scales with your xp? I prefer the "d&d rebuke undead" style relic, (crowd control option) versus the "pathfinder channel energy" style.
 
While we're talking about D&D's solutions to cleric problems, cheap class independent healing.

Wands of cure light wounds / other level 1 healing spells pretty much removed the need for out of combat healing.

My issue with free in combat healing is that alliance lets you tank @ 1 hp really effectively. Having a class be able to keep everyone alive just by existing makes combat very low risk.
 
That's basically what Earth Casters are designed for right now, and the .10 setup makes that even more clear with healing at every level. They can backpack a fighter from now until next Tuesday, since it doesn't matter how hard the fighter gets hit so long as 1 point of healing keeps them up. A 4-column healer has 36 pickups right there for 75 build if they bottle rocket. With a pyramid it's even sillier, 45 cures for 70 build by the time they hit their first 9th level spell.
 
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That's basically what Earth Casters are designed for right now, and the .10 setup makes that even more clear with healing at every level. They can backpack a fighter from now until next Tuesday, since it doesn't matter how hard the fighter gets hit so long as 1 point of healing keeps them up. A 4-column healer has 36 pickups right there for 75 build if they bottle rocket. With a pyramid it's even sillier, 45 cures for 70 build by the time they hit their first 9th level spell.


I guess it's more of earth casters have to make a choice to gain access to healing right now. It seems kind of silly to just hand something that valuable away as a free passive on top of all the other cool stuff a casting tree gives you.

Either make cheap healing available to everybody so the game can be balanced around it, or keep healing exotic and leave scaling as is.
 
I guess it's more of earth casters have to make a choice to gain access to healing right now. It seems kind of silly to just hand something that valuable away as a free passive on top of all the other cool stuff a casting tree gives you.

Either make cheap healing available to everybody so the game can be balanced around it, or keep healing exotic and leave scaling as is.

Cool. Can Earth Casters have cheap, unlimited damage, then?
 
So with all this talk of D&D, you notice how clerics arnt forced into a healer only role? They have plenty of powerful offensive spells. They where plate and carry weapons they can get involved in melee with the right buffs?

Alliance earth casters are more like wow priests. Cloth wearing, cant really do anything other then healing. If you like that style of sit back and watch others to everything while you get to be a class that just helps others, that is great.

But why cant earth casters be like dnd clerics, Able to heal but able to fight as well, Atleast give us some kinda love when it comes to fighting undead so we are a specialized but useful in that narrow space. That magic storm does to everything what earth storm does to undead is kinda BS.
 
Cool. Can Earth Casters have cheap, unlimited damage, then?

Personally, from my perspective, and I know it will never fly, but I would prefer if "Cause Wounds" spells were simply not considered Necromancy. Make Necromancy only be spells that create and control the Undead. Then Earth Casters would have some offense to throw around.

Find some way to allow each class to either heal in general or at least heal themselves - so long as it is less effective and more limited than an Earth Caster can heal - and then healing and damage are no longer "unique". Earth Casters still heal better, and Celestialists still have more damage at their disposal through High Magic and Wands (I'm not talking about Relics here, because there's been a lot of back and forth about them.). It has always annoyed me that in most other systems, "healers" have some form of damaging offensive abilities, but in Alliance they do not.
 
Alliance earth casters are more like wow priests. Cloth wearing, cant really do anything other then healing. If you like that style of sit back and watch others to everything while you get to be a class that just helps others, that is great.

I mean, even Holy Priests have access to damaging offensive spells. They aren't as good, per say, as a Shadow Priest, but at least they could still do something.
 
I mean, even Holy Priests have access to damaging offensive spells. They aren't as good, per say, as a Shadow Priest, but at least they could still do something.
I'm a big fan of bindomancy and curses. Destruction + healing can be pretty crazy against undead.
 
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