Class improvements: details on Osamodas and Sacriers

The new Osamodas

The goal of these changes is to get Osamodas actively participating in battle alongside their Summons, rather than having to depend on them or even suffer as a result of their actions.

Unlike their counterparts on the official server, the Osamodas that you'll be playing with on the beta server are not simple mages who hide behind an impenetrable swarm of Summons, or sacrifice them shamelessly to beat up on their opponents. Whether they prefer to dive right into the fight or just support their team, the new Osamodas venture closer to the action because that's where they get their summoning magic.

Thanks to their versatile new summoning spells (of which there are 6), Osamodas now have access to their full bestiary during battles. Each of these spell can be used to summon all 13 Osamodas Summons, one at a time. But how do you summon the right one? By using summoning charges.
 

Summoning Charges

You acquire summoning charges by using the 24 elemental spells for the class (3 spells + 3 variants in four elements). When used under the right conditions, these spells let you accumulate 1 to 4 charges in one of the following four families:

• "Tofu" for Air spells
• "Gobball" for Earth spells
• "Toad" for Water spells
• "Wyrmling" for Fire spells

For example, suppose that after starting the fight in the state "Summoning Charge 0/4", the Osamodas casts Canine on an enemy monster. He then changes to the state "Summoning Charge 1/4 (Tofu)". Casting Canine again will put him in the state "Summoning Charge 2/4 (Tofu)", and so on.

Warning! Changing elements will not allow you to continue charging in another family, but will instead switch you to the state "Summoning Charge 1/4" for the new family. The charge for the previous family is then lost.

Now it's finally time to talk about summoning.

Summoning

Once you've understood summoning charges, summoning a creature is easy. Just use one of the six summoning spells and the current charge will determine which creature is summoned.

• The monster's family corresponds to the family (or element) of the charge: Tofu, Gobball, Toad, Wyrmling or Noformo (no charge).
• The color of the Summons, on the other hand, will be determined by the number of charges you have, i.e. "Melanic", "Albino" or "Colourful" for 1, 2 or 3 charges, respectively.

Note that summoning charges are consumed by the Osamodas to create the Summons.

Once summoned, the creature is tied to the spell that was used to summon it. Casting the spell again will not summon a new creature, but simply moves the existing one. Therefore, the number of Summons an Osamodas can have is limited not only by the "Summons" characteristic like for everyone else, but more importantly by the number of summoning spells he knows.

When a Summons dies, the spell that was used to summon it enters a cooldown phase, making it unusable for 0, 1, 2 or 3 turns (corresponding to its cost in summoning charges). It is therefore extremely dangerous for an Osamodas to use all of his summoning spells at the same time, because if all the Summons were to die during the turn, the summoner would be left all alone for the following turn.

So one of the most important skills for Osamodas players to master will be knowing when to summon and when to hold off. Fortunately, there are lots of new spells to fill this gap, and the summoning charges will not be lost because they can be used to access Osamodas' hidden power: animal transformation.
 

Animal Transformation

When Osamodas reach the fourth summoning charge in a family, they transform. When this happens, the Osamodas's allies gain a bonus based on the animal family of that transformation if they are within 2 cells of him or one of his Summons. Osamodas are really generous with their teammates.
 
 

The new Sacrier

The main goal of the changes we've made to Sacriers is to make them into true berserkers, in order to better represent the background story for this class. We've done this by modifying the Suffering system, as we'll explain in more detail in a moment, and by revising the class's utility and elemental spells. We've tried to move as far away as possible from the monotonous older gameplay that encouraged players to spam the same spells all the time, in order to ensure that each turn will now force Sacriers to adapt dynamically to different situations.

We've also tried to eliminate the separation between Sacriers' tanking and damage-dealing abilities, while still preserving the idea of making a choice between the two, but more at the level of individual turns than an entire battle. Similarly, we want to give the elemental paths a strong identity so that each one has a specific role that meets Sacriers' different needs, thereby creating a better synergy between the spells in a given elemental path. To do this, we have also rebalanced the elemental paths with respect to one another, so that each one is viable in its given role. Whether it's through their elemental spells or their utility spells, we want Sacriers to gain additional utility effects to help them integrate more effectively into a team gameplay style, without necessarily having to play "full health/resistance/lock/no-brainer".

Finally, we also want to help players get better use out of the multi-element approach, which should allow them to put together much more varied Sacrier builds than before so that they can surprise both allies and opponents alike. We also hope that all of these changes will allow Sacriers to find a place for themselves in PvM, especially at higher and very high levels, where they are currently having difficulties.

The new Suffering system:

The problem with the current Suffering system is that it limits Sacriers to a single role that is selected at the start of combat and cannot be changed for the rest of the fight, which limits the number of spells that can be used. This leads to monotony and a lack of depth. While the initial intention was to allow Sacriers to transition from Positive Suffering to Negative Suffering to adapt to the situation, people have wound up having to play only at maximum Suffering in order to get the best bonuses, whether Positive or Negative (but we won't lie, it's actually almost exclusively Negative Suffering, especially in PvP).

The solution we came up with to make the Suffering system more flexible and interesting to use is to make Suffering directly dependent on Sacriers' Vitality. Each range of Vitality values corresponds to a certain degree of Suffering: for example, a Sacrier who is between 50% and 40% of their maximum Vitality will be at Suffering 6. Therefore, Suffering can no longer be negative, and varies between 0 and 10, with each degree of Suffering providing ever-greater bonuses on final damage inflicted and ever-greater reduction of final damage received.

In this way, Sacriers will no longer be able to inflict huge damage or severely reduce incoming damage while they have full Vitality; instead, they will have to take risks and take damage in order to get these bonuses, which better reflects the "berserker" fighting style that they're intended to have. For Sacriers, Vitality therefore becomes a resource in its own right - one that you'll sometimes have to spend in order to violently finish off your enemies, and sometimes conserve in order to survive or to protect your allies by using your body as a shield. So this new Suffering system will more effectively reward Sacriers who expose themselves (eagerly!) to damage, and a Sacrier on the brink of death will be a threat that enemies will find impossible to ignore.

In this system, Sacriers will naturally have more tools to manage their Vitality, including self-injury spells and healing/health steal spells, which will of course affect their Suffering at the same time as their Vitality.

Degrees of Suffering (based on % of current max Vitality):

• = at 100% → Suffering 0: Damage received x 100% + Damage inflicted x 100%
• < 100% → Suffering 1: Damage received x 95% + Damage inflicted x 105%
• < 90% → Suffering 2: Damage received x 90% + Damage inflicted x 110%
• < 80% → Suffering 3: Damage received x 85% + Damage inflicted x 115%
• < 70% → Suffering 4: Damage received x 80% + Damage inflicted x 120%
• < 60% → Suffering 5: Damage received x 75% + Damage inflicted x 125%
• < 50% → Suffering 6: Damage received x 70% + Damage inflicted x 130% → Berserker Transformation
• < 40% → Suffering 7: Damage received x 65% + Damage inflicted x 135%
• < 30% → Suffering 8: Damage received x 60% + Damage inflicted x 140%
• < 20% → Suffering 9: Damage received x 55% + Damage inflicted x 145%
• < 10% → Suffering 10: Damage received x 50% + Damage inflicted x 150%

Changes to elemental paths:

As mentioned above, we have also reworked Sacriers' elemental paths to make them unique and give each one its own specific identity and use. Here's how they're organized:

• The Earth path serves as the melee tanking path, with a Lock bonus, an area-of-effect health steal, damage reduction and spells to get close to enemies or keep them in close-combat range.
• The Fire path is the path for area-of-effect damage at short range, fine-tuned positioning, and bonuses to allies, like healing or Power bonuses.
• The Water path is the path to counter enemies playing at long range, using MP and RA reduction, spells without line of sight, spells for symmetrical teleportation of the caster, or area-of-effect attraction spells.
• The Air path is based on mobility and movement, offering an MP bonus for the caster, a Lock penalty for enemies, and spells to switch places or teleport without line of sight.

Be aware that even though the different elemental paths are labeled as "high-damage" or "tank", they are not mutually exclusive, and that every path includes both high-damage spells and health steal spells. Labels like these serve more to indicate a general orientation for each path that makes it especially effective in this or that specific situation, even though it has some spells of each type.

Note also that each path now also includes a big damage spell that casters can use to inflict damage on themselves if they cast it on themselves or are inside its area of effect. These spells allow Sacriers to intentionally reduce their Vitality in order to increase their Suffering, but also to boost the damage caused by the spell they use, for the current turn and the following one. This gives Sacriers a burst ability and a way to manipulate their Vitality, but at the cost of exposing themselves to an opponent's burst, since they will have to continue to inflict damage on themselves if they want to maintain the damage boost for the given spell.

A number of all-new spells will also be making their appearance, but we won't say anything about them here so that you can have the pleasure of discovering them in-game!