So I want to kill Mindcraft. How should I handle priests?

[Lord Estraven]

At the moment priests are heavily reliant on Mindcraft. Problem is, Mindcraft offers a lot more than most spell schools for a lot less in terms of spell points. It's got some spells that no school has (e.g. berserk), but most importantly all the spells are at constant and low mana cost. So after playing as a warper for a bit and finding the game much more fun and balanced that way, I kind of have a mind to get rid of Mindcraft entirely in my branch of T2.

But that leaves priests with much less power. Especially if their god abandons them - then they're just a weak warrior with good saving throw. So what should I do about this?

- I could merge some Mindcraft stuff into the Mind school and give them that, but I don't want to make other schools less worthwhile for mages. Also, part of the problem in Mindcraft is "too much stuff in one place," and this would just be recreating that condition.

- I could give priests access to Conveyance and Divination at a good rate. But this feels kind of cheap IMO, especially seeing as Eru already does this.

- I could replace the priest's "Detect Curses" ability with a "Heal Self" ability invoked with 'U'. This would be more in line with priests in Vanilla, whose mediocre damage dealing ability is offset by cheap healing spells. However, it would also create a powerful ability limited to a specific class, which might not go so well with skills system and all. (And would seem kind of weird for Dark-priests, too.)

Any other suggestions? I'd like to make priestly gameplay interesting and hopefully somewhat unique, without making it too hard compared to other classes...

[Yottle]

I think the two big problems with priests are 1) most of the god spells are fairly useless and 2) other classes have no problem getting high level prayer skill.

The one spell that is really overpowering is Curse, and anyone worshiping Melkor can get it high enough to reduce speed. At that point the game becomes trivial. A swordmaster with Curse maximized probably is going to take out Morgy without him getting in more than one round of combat. The Tulkas spells aren't as good, but a swordmaster can max them out also. The Eru spells can be useful, but above a certain level become counter-productive.

1) I would up the power of the god spells, especially for the high level ones.

2) I would make it much more difficult to raise prayer level for non-priests. That would involve toning down the lost temple rewards and cutting the increment. I think that a non-priest should almost never be able to get prayer above 25.

2a) Make Mindcraft much harder to get for non-priests (take it away from FF).

[madmonk]

I completely agree.
You might even consider adding in a few more God spells.

[Lord Estraven]

Okay, I now have a plan. You'll see...