Just wondering what the reasoning is for disabling FoC and regenerate for fully shocked empaths? Every ability on the list you lose is directly tied to empathy in some way. Linking, healing, heart link, perceiving health, etc, with the exception of these two spells. Regenerate and FoC both seem like nothing other than manifestations of life magic to me, and have no direct reliance to an empathic sense. I get that our empathic sense gives a boost to potency of our healing spells, hence the diminished effect on Heal, Heal Wounds, and Heal Scars. That being said, why is it that we can't have continued use of FoC and regenerate, at a similar penalty seen on Heal?

I don't have a link to the discussion because I am lazy*, but I believe GM Melete said at one point that technically shocked empaths should have access to zero healing spells. The reason player Empaths are given access to any at all is for playability reasons, to make it so that playing a completely shocked empath is reasonably possible at all. Technically all the healing spells require access to Empathy as a confound, which is why other guilds are not able to use them via sorcery. Losing your Empathy should mean you lose all healing spell access.

So the fact that we're even able to use some of them, reduced potency while shocked, was already fairly major change for playability around 2009-20011. Losing access to the highest tier ones such as FOC, and REGEN is intended to still give the fully shocked state some teeth. It's supposed to be possible to play it if a player chooses, but it's not supposed to come without some major drawbacks. As for why player Empaths can manage the spells they do, you can chalk it up to player Empaths just being better than your average bear at Empath-ing, I guess.

*(I actually looked for her posts, but didn't find them. It's somewhere in the pre-3.0 discussion I believe if someone else has more patience than I do.)

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Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

>>technically shocked empaths should have access to zero healing spells

>I'm a little leery of this phrasing, because it seems to imply that self-healing perma'd empaths goes against the lore. I think it's more accurate to say that we designed the lore to allow for self-healing permashocked Empaths.

Yea my phrasing could have been better. I didn't mean that it was against the lore, more of that in the past it mechanically wasn't possible. That and when other guilds lose access to their guild confounds (in theory) they generally can't cast their confound spells either. Not much on that front though outside of Empaths, though Moon Mages have Sovereign Destiny.

Lore wise there have been lots of stories of NPCs sort of doing weird things with or without shock (and I'm not just talking about Jomay or Beezell stuff). It's a fun, murky world for the potentials of Empathy and its restrictions. Thanks for clearing that up again. I'll be sure to archive this one so I can actually find it later...

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Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

>>Gamergirl151: I don't have a link to the discussion because I am lazy*

Here is the post you are thinking of: http://forums.play.net/forums/DragonRealms/The%20Empaths/General%20Discussions%20-%20Empaths/view/1392

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Re: Shock Rewrite on 07/22/2012 07:37 AM EDT

>>From what I knew, spells like FOC, REG ,HL, INNO, etc had no direct correlation with your empathy skill. Is this just a lore connection or are these spells going to be tied directly into empathy in 3.0? Or was I wrong in the first place?

HL, IIRC, already requires intact empathy to use. Innocence does not, but to my mind this (and compel) is a manifestation of empathic manipulation, bolstered by magic, so to me it does make sense to require at least some amount of Empathy to use those.

As to FoC and Regen ... the idea is that as a totally shocked Empath, you will still have access to some self-healing (HW, HS, HEAL, FP and CD) but you won't be a stupendous healing badass anymore. This is for game balance reasons, mainly.

Requiring Empathy to use the healing spells is definitely a shift, but again, I want the shock-lock state to have some teeth. Obviously an Empath who hasn't hit the circle cap yet will have some incentives to keep their empathy intact, but I don't want to encourage Empaths who have hit the circle cap to view shock-lock as the default state. Thus, some of the more awesome healing spells do require at least some empathy to use.

Once we get to that point I will see about trying to figure out how to fit this into the lore without doing it any truly grievous insults.

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"Empathy doesn't make people nice." --GM Armifer

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>>In the case of the low-grade healing spells, it's a matter of knowing how it's supposed to work, and sort of kind of managing despite the lack of empathic sense.

That's interesting in the scope of confounds. Sounds downright thanatology-ish, even!

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Uzmam! The Chairman will NOT be pleased to know you're trying to build outside of approved zones. I'd hate for you to be charged the taxes needed to have this place re-zoned. Head for the manor if you're feeling creative.

Well, we do know the zombie chicken came first. That just raises funny questions about the egg.

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Thayet
Twitter: @thayelf
Tumblr: thayette.tumblr.com

>Which came first, the Necromantic chicken or the Empathic egg?

Thayet's...pun...aside, Armifer (or someone) commented either here or in the Necromancer folders that Necromancy as a whole predates Empathy by thousands of years (the current flavor available to players is a relatively new branch).

I wondered how long it would be before someone brought up that Necromancer propaganda.

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Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.