Update 75 Preview 3 - Dark Gift Shrine

[Torc]

In this preview players can find the Shrine to the Mists in the Lamordia Landscape. This shrine allows any player the possibility of acquiring a dark gift or for legendary players, to upgrade a dark gift...

The rules of the bargain...

1. To gain a dark gift you must provide an offering to the shrine. The item called "Offerings to the Dark Powers" appears in the saga reward table for both heroic and legendary.
2. You can only have one Shrine Dark Gift at a time.
3. The Shrine's Dark Gifts are considered a temporary feat and do not interact with Fred.
4. You are free to swap to another gift at any time but it requires another offering. You will lose any upgrade to that feat you may have acquired.
5. You may reject your gift (removing it) at any time at the shrine. The Dark Powers will not be happy with you.
6. Once a player is level 30+ they may upgrade their gift with a "Great Offering to the Dark Powers" found in the legendary saga reward table
7. Dark Bargainers may use the shrine to take an additional gift, but they may only upgrade the gift granted by the shrine, not the one they take in character creation in this build.
8. TR'ing will remove the gift and a new offering will need to be made to restore it
9. Note both offering types are available in the legendary saga table so a cap level character can immediately engage with the system without having to do a slum run in heroic.
   
   Legendary Dark Gift Upgrades

Dark Gift	Upgrade description
Living Shadow	Shadow Weakness becomes Shadow Defense. While it still reduces damage by 15% it also increases dodge by 15%
Mist Walker	The duration of the mist walker buff now lasts 6 seconds after you use the ability assuming the mists aren't hungry
Minion of The Eldritch	If the Dark Powers scorn you it now only lasts for 12 seconds instead of 30.
Touch of Death	You benefit from death block
Webtouched Wretch	You gain immunity to certain web effects. This doesn't include your webs but the duration of those are reduced to 4 seconds from 6.
Echoing Souls	The duration of your suffering for when your echos begin to shout is reduced from 6 seconds to 3 seconds.
Form of Pain	Passive, gain an additional 10PRR/MRR

Known issues:

1. The text of the shrine is incorrect and indicates a Dark Bargainer can upgrade the dark gift granted during character creation. That doesn't work in this build. Only the gift granted by the shrine itself can be upgraded.
   
   
2. Dark Offerings were suppose to be in the test dojo but that file didn't make it into the build in time. :(

-T

 

[Torc]

I reply to myself to go up...

 

[Matuse]

Not related to the post itself, but it's strange that the OP doesn't appear in the staff tracker but the bump post does.

 

[pirotessa]

For slayer's/explorers areas, especially if we have to run through them...time to allow VIP to set the size to max for scalability of monsters and not need to form a group.

 

[Raedier]

I tried out minion of the eldritch and it's actually still bugged and it feels like the proc rate is 50/50, atm taking this feat and actively using it feels like actually just gimping your character since it can give 170% crit damage for 12 sec yea but also takes away 170% crit damage for 30....
I think a better negative effect would be either:
- Always take 50% increased damage while minion of the eldritch is active
- 30% chance for a massive damage spike to hit you each time you fire a spell under the effect of minion of the eldritch (could be anything, hand of vecna, lightning bolt for example)
- Suffer from a slow dot until you die, dot gets more powerful with each usage of minion of the eldritch and is just slow enough so you can shrine and make it go away.

 

[rabidfox]

I guess I should check to see if the base dark gifts are working correctly on lam; on live they're buggy as all heck.

 

[glass_jaws]

I assume you lose these when you TR?

 

[Aeywin]

Questions: is this only for iconic dark bargainer? The post seems to indicate it can be aquired by all players? Does it function throughout the game or only in Lamordia?

On my reading, sounds like its for all players that's usable everywhere in game, and dark bargainer iconics can choose 1 at creation and get a second one via this method?

 

[Thad]

Hey Torc,

Was looking at this and it looks like an interesting system.
I would have liked to see an additional side to this system where if you were a Cleric, Paladin, or Favored soul and destroy that shrine it would provide additional bonuses to your deity feats.

 

[Hobgoblin]

Not related to the post itself, but it's strange that the OP doesn't appear in the staff tracker but the bump post does.

because they write them up a week or so up and are in an area we cant see. so steel and now torc post in it once its moved to make it visable

 

[Fae]

Has anyone else noticed the one item you can only get in the raid for crafting....can you guess how many you'll need to make anything?

 

[Lotoc]

Touch of Death's upgrade is really rather sad considering how prolific death block is (consider that Pale Masters are meant to get it in their capstone, and they're like the main candidate to be taking this shrine bargain.), I get it that you can't use the death ward spell if undead and high level death block items seem to be 'upgraded' to lifesealed which is kind of awful for undead but I don't think this is really the most compelling system to address the deathblock issue for neg-aligned characters.

 

[Ying]

Looks pretty cool and thematic. Hopefully the dark gift feats get fixed. Like @rabidfox said, they're a mess.

 

[droid327]

Legendary Dark Gift Upgrades

Dark Gift	Upgrade description
Touch of Death	You benefit from death block

This one seems odd....Touch of Death only has any value to someone who's in undead form. As I understand it (and the wiki says), undead form already grants you immunity to (almost all?) death effects that death block would protect against.

I mean its hardly the only example of "no one would ever take this option" in the Dark Bargain system, but since this is probably the most useful out of all the Dark Gifts, its the one whose upgrade is most relevant

If you made it, idk, 25% Light Absorption, that might be something people would actually spend a saga reward on.

 

[rabidfox]

Last I checked; the leap dark gift was applying a 2second slow 100% of the time when used. And occasionally reducing my spell crit damage by 10% Spell Critical Damage for every 2 Character Levels. Which is supposed to be the negative effect for a different gift; and 10 times the value that that negative is supposed to have. So buggy.

 

[droid327]

high level death block items seem to be 'upgraded' to lifesealed which is kind of awful for undead

There's an easily acquired deathblock augment that can still be used at cap

 

[Warsaga]

because they write them up a week or so up and are in an area we cant see. so steel and now torc post in it once its moved to make it visable

"an area we can't see" is likely the seldom talked about *secret forums*

 

[Torc]

I assume you lose these when you TR?

Yes, I'll update the post on that

 

[LeoLionxxx]

Using a shrine in the wilderness sounds like a cool acquisition method! I was afraid the Gift Feats would be totally gated behind feat slots, which would make them a struggle to fit in.

Needing a special items for this is a reasonable requirement. I would like to see additional acquisition methods beyond Saga reward though. Making it a rare drop in chests seems reasonable - that way you get excited when it drops, but if it doesn't you know you can get it at the very end when you're done all the quests.

I am concerned about the regular Offering only being available by playing the heroic content. I myself tend to skip the heroic expansion content while leveling so I can enjoy it in Legendary (and not bloat my bank with the Heroic loot I would be incentivized to hoard). At minimum I'd like to see a trade-down system for Greater Offerings to instead count as regular offerings so you can obtain the base feats.

It could also be cool if we could "offer" existing rare items in order to gain the offering token. Such as:

• A +4/8 Stat Tome
• A suitably sized Siberys Dragonshard (or pile thereof)
• X number of Curse Cards
• Threads of fate
• Stacks of the pack crafting ingredients
• The party's Halfling

 

[Torc]

Questions: is this only for iconic dark bargainer? The post seems to indicate it can be aquired by all players? Does it function throughout the game or only in Lamordia?

On my reading, sounds like its for all players that's usable everywhere in game, and dark bargainer iconics can choose 1 at creation and get a second one via this method?

Any player can acquire one gift and upgrade, and it functions everywhere.

Dark Bargainer Iconics can get two gifts, one from character creation and one from this shrine (can't be the same gift) but only the shrine one can be upgraded currently.