Oakspire is nearing completion, and after it's released I'm going to focus my attention on getting drow clerics in the game - that is, clerics of Arachnus.

Post any suggestions you have here, whether it be titles, abilities or penalties, or spells.

The help gods file gives you a little bit of information about Arachnus.

I might be focusing too much on spiders, but:


Titles

Spinner
Weaver
Brood Mother
Black Widow


Abilities/Penalties

Increased passive poison resistance or even immunity.

Neutralize - timered ability to counter poison completely within self only (leaves room for curepoison and slow poison since they can be casted on others). This is assuming immunity is not granted.

Burrow - active ability during non-combat/non-grouped with delay, only in forests/underground areas/porous earth, functions like mist, to render player undetectable by normal means. Dispels on movement or combat, like hide. Provides regeneration capabilities (read: tick faster or tick for more HP/MP like in a clinic, or both).


Spells

Sap - offensive, instant, restricted by daily limits, large MP cost. Only effective against living (as opposed to undead) mobs and players. Causes a percentage reduction in both HP and MP of target, rounding up. Success determined by level and aura, cannot be performed while good/blue. Also checks against saves to determine full effect or half effect. Percentage reduction increases with level.

Some ideas:

Abilities
Summon - Summons a pet spider. Spiders can poison their victims.

Paralyze - The cleric poisons their victim, paralyzing them for a short period of time. The victim cant move, or fight. Make it work like a 20-60 second stun (depending on level, add 2 seconds per level).
Put it on a 2 minute timer.
make it available as of lvl 10.

Pray, Teach

Spells
Web - Same idea as entangle...
Darkness - Creates a magical darkness that cannot be seen through.

Oh forgot to add:

Make them like Aramon clerics with regards to alignment and healing.

I'm not sure if this is possible with the current code, but I like the idea of Arachnus clerics summoning several weaker spiders rather than one spider pet. The idea of spiders swarming all over you sounds appetizing, doesn't it? I think that Arachnus cleric healing should be average, whatever that means (not as good as Ceris and not as bad as Gradius).

more to come, as i think...

Or you just make the pet name reflect a swarm of spiders.

I think their pets should be the big focus on the Arachnus cleric. Maybe even 2+ pets, like a swarm of spiders. Their main ability would be stunning and biting, maybe hasted. I'd love to just see a cleric with across-the-board healing, maybe one other ability, and some really unique spider pets. Entangle, blind.

Maybe something similar to barkskin. Kevlar is made out of spider weave.

Random poison effect upon the spider biting?

Bump, some thoughts that I'll flesh out here.


Pheremones (although they are only supposed to work for the same species):

A timer based ability, like sing for bards, that can be used for various purposes. New uses can be gained by level, or maybe learned by studying quest items.




Examples -

Aggregation, a pheremone that causes an instant mob spawn in the room.



Alarm, a pheremone that causes mobs in the room to flee. This is different from howl because it works on both mobs in combat, and mobs not in combat with you. This will always succeed, BUT, only in the situation where the mob is capable of fleeing (I guess base this aspect of it off of howl; I'm assuming that such things are coded, ie, if Usagi howls at shadow demons, it won't send 5 of them fleeing out into the rest of the lighthouse?). Mobs that were not in combat will gain aggro to you, so be careful how it is used.



Trail, a pheremone that allows you to instantly backtrack/travel (think endurance, or sneaking while misted) along a specific route that was initially plotted. Say, I start from the HP clinic, and type release trail. I then walk to Rollo. I kill Rollo, and type backtrack trail. This will instantly return me to my room of origin, where I released the trail. This one's a bit tricky, and I don't know if it is possible to even code, but the most important part would be deciding how many rooms to limit the trail to. Should the initial trail end, yet you continue walking, you would have to return that that last room in order to activate it, and return to the beginning of the trail. I haven't thought about how long the trail would remain active, maybe until the timer for the next pheremone release hits 00:00.


Appeasement, a pheremone that removes aggressiveness from the mobs in the room that are currently attacking you (sort of like when you die to a mob, but without the death part). They will also no longer aggro you, if they had the tendency to do so previously.






Sense (think spidey sense):

A passive ability that outputs a message in certain situations -

If a mob/player sneaks into the room.
If an invisible mob/player sneaks into the room (regardless if d-i is on).
If a mist sneaks into the room (regardless if t-s is on).

Okay, I've been thinking of ideas.

One is: give Arachnus clerics a powerful infrequent attack....HARM!

DKs have it, and it seems like something Arachnus would do.