Good news for haters of sorcs, player-driven events

that could easily have been covered by giving high karma players the ext subguild option w/ sorcerer mainguild which would have been hilariously op (sorcs already are anyways) but also covered the 'act normal' shit w/o having to remove a player option

No. thankfully nothing so drastic. They have limited sorcs to a single "Path of Magick". spells are limited by what they're used for rather than by element. IIRC: Path of movement, for example, would have Mark, Travel Gate, and portal (Nilaz); levitate and Teleport (Whira); and so on, but lack Forbid Elements (Nilaz) or Detect invisible (Whira).

i started up a more spoiler-ish thread in class discussion. but yeah, they seem to match up pretty closely. i do think they're fairly weak overall, but the pro theorycrafters will probably correct me. the branches had a synergy that worked with each other, i.e. flying out of the sky suddenly while invis and dropping fireballs. that's going to be impossible now since it looks like each of those three spells are in entirely different branches.

Whatever the details, it's clear that this is a gigantic loss of power for sorcerers. Even if I'm very generous with the potential spell allocations, the outcomes don't seem better than the more well-rounded of the elementalist guilds. I frankly can't imagine I would even care to play a sorcerer without the ability to fly, invis, and teleport. Any path that gets these spells seems like it gets little to no offensive magick, which also rather defeats the appeal of playing a sorcerer.

Also, psionicists are now by far the most powerful playable characters by many orders of magnitude. Maybe next month we'll get various paths of the mind...

i just want to know what this staff vision of the game is supposed to be or what the idealized version is. the producers seem so incredibly out of touch with the pbase. besides nyr running around playing roles he would probably dock karma from players for, do top level staff actually play the game @anaiah? like what kind of characters does nessalin roll with?

The only admin or higher to play that I know of besides Nyr was Uruz - who left shortly after I left some horrible notes on his mortal account (that he was playing Kiven from). I'm not sure if that was part of the reason or no.

Originally, it was to expand and flesh out the world and create new, fun, novel, interesting things for players. If it's been updated since the entry in the wiki that suggested that (along with tips for building wilderness hidey holes), I don't know what it's been changed to, but I know that, affectwise, it has been nothing but the opposite of that, resulting in a reductive world which is stagnating for lack of plot, progress, or perceptible change outside totally world-boggling events players are barely on the fringes of (ala the volcano RPT)

Sorcerers were a bit too powerful, but it was basically the last venue for players to do anything truly immense in the game. Everything else has been systematically taken away over the course of the last four years. Being a sorcerer, or a sorcerer's lackey, was one of the only ways you could do something that seems like it might have made it into the book if one were to write one about Zalanthas in its current state. Psionicists are a bit too covert for it, but sorcerers were the sole remaining aspect of Armageddon that felt like a relic of the game's glory days.

Everything else has become such a contrived and artificial facade where any attempt to do something relevant or unusual is invariably met with staunch denial. It feels like roleplaying on a WoW server. You can play your character, and while you do it, you might get reactions; but the game world stays the same and you can't really do anything truly interesting. Sorcerers were the exception to this, both due to their power and because of their place in the game's history.

If the reason behind this change was truly mere concern with the extreme power of the sorcerer guild, they could have reduced their power by a moderate amount instead of completely shattering the class into different bits that are each worth a fraction of what it used to be. It doesn't seem to me that sorcerers will be much more powerful than elementalists now - possibly less so, in fact - while still having the restrictions and hindrances inherent to sorcery; the ones that you needed all that power in order to live with. This is one of the most severe nerfs I have ever seen in any kind of game.