I said I would give you more information when the proposal process was done, and that time has now come.

The first major piece of work I will do has three components.

1) The guildskill, named Conviction unless I have a radical change of mind, will be implemented, a circle req put into place, and a grandfathering scheme put into place.

2) The soul/power pool will see some changes. Overall, the floor on how small your pool can be is being raised while the maximum potential pool size remains the same. This will allow me to put soul costs on abilities more consistently, since right now the difference between min and max can be pretty extreme. Specifically:
2a) Your circle and Stamina will no longer affect soul pool size.
2b) Your Charisma, Discipline and Wisdom will continue to under a new formula that weighs toward Charisma.
2c) The positive effect of Soul State on the pool will increase pretty significantly.

And finally...

3) Smite will be updated in a few ways.
3a) Smite will be available at 1st circle.
3b) It will teach Conviction upon use.
3c) Its damage modifier will scale higher than it does now.
3d) It will stop emulating specific attack styles and instead will allow you to choose a style per attack (SMITE CHOP, SMITE DRAW, etc).
3e) The smite pool will be abandoned in favor of a number of "free" strikes based on your Conviction. Once those free strikes are used up, Smite will cost soul pool instead.
3f) There may be a short reuse timer on the new Smite, depending on if I feel it's necessary to balance the increased everything.

While Smite is not intended to be the sole teacher of Conviction, it will be the first and will hopefully be scaled to teach consistently across circles.

-Armifer
"Perinthia's astronomers are faced with a difficult choice. Either they must admit that all their calculations were wrong ... or else they must reveal that the order of the gods is reflected exactly in the city of monsters." - Italo Calvino