Another concern: when, in several more years, design philosophy changes, and other guilds magic becomes more powerful or cleric magic is tweaked to be less omgbbq powerful, clerics are still going to have the nasty net penalty from align. See HH design under 'new' AoE TM model years ago, which was scrapped, but left clerics with a less-than-amazing aoe TM spell because it was in place and no one was going to re-evaluate it for a lot of reasons. But the TM concept/model changed, and even GMs agreed HH wasn't a stellar spell.

Once a system goes into place, it's much more difficult to get it removed/changed. Even if the central concept behind it is no longer valid. It's a huge hanging blade of pain for clerics, with a lot of bad potential in the future.

I would honestly rather see magic power tweaked down to give align a net 0 +/- (two skills bumped, two skills burned), or a much smaller penalty, if we must. Something in the single digits, prefferably 5%.

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Adding nothing to the conversation since 1834.

> Align drains about four levels and has a minimum req for devotion, but it does not teach Theurgy at all. Is this intended? I like the concept of switching alignment based on task at hand and think it would be neat to learn from it.

I'm going to guess they don't want people alignment dancing to learn theurgy, as amusing as that might be mentally for me.

I'm also wondering if they intend/desire for clerics to swap alignments frequently. If it's a free, easy, no penalty, action, align stops being a penalty or drawback, and stars being a free 15% buff to 2 skills.

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Adding nothing to the conversation since 1834.

It was a nice dream. :)

>and yeah the -15% to two skills kind of stinks

3 skills. Bonuses 2, penalizes 3. That's important. It's a net penalty, and that's the requirement to balance cleric magic. Which I still think is dangerous and crippling when considering power creep later.

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Adding nothing to the conversation since 1834.