Higher classes?

[OrionJAnderson]

It's been a long time since I've played a Higher, and I'd to take a few for a spin. The trouble is that it's surprisingly hard to find a class I want to play as a Higher; magic classes have the option to be shalore, and willpower-boosters have thalore and yeek as options. I have been playing a ton of yeeks, although actually that was because I needed the solipsist unlock. Now that I have that I'll probably leave yeeks alone for a long while. Higher design leaves them very boxed-in. Their first skill only scales on one stat, like dwarves and halflings, not on two like elves. The trouble is that Willpower is less generally applicable than cunning or constitution. There just aren't that many classes that use it. Also, their third skill only works if they have spells. The number of classes that both cast spells and stack willpower is pretty low. Among your spellcasting will classes, you then need to find someone who actually wants the benefits Higher have (regeneration, single-type damage boost, free resources) more than they want a cat point or thalore damage. Free resources are often unnecessary if you're stacking will, so it's especially puzzling. I won't ask you to find a class where higher bonuses are better than timeless, but can you guys help me come up with a list of classes where higher is at least as good as cornac or thalore? The general principles I'm seeing:

Higher are good
--for characters with the time to use regen
--for characters who deal damage of one type
--for characters who have extreme resource costs
--with eye of the tiger or that run forever prodigy

My first batch of ideas:

Aether Archmage: The obvious one. All your damage is arcane damage and your free arcane resist resists everything.
Corruptor: Blight damage, poor self-healing, and massive vim costs everywhere
Chronomancer: Both classes have physical-heavy and temporal-heavy builds, and some skills with crazy high paradox cost.
Caster Wyrmic: You could use an acid wave rune or a lightning rune to proc a damage bonus onto the appropriate dragon tree, and use highborn bloom to pay for a nature's balance build.

After that it gets dicy:

Doombringer: you can boost physical or fire, you can regen your way out of blazing rebirth, and highborn bloom could help you manage the costs of stuff like fearscape.
Stone Arcane Blade: Use Earthen Missiles to grant yourself a bonus to physical damage?
Thermal Mindslayer: use a fire rune (or a wand, if that works) to pump pyrokinesis and thermal aura; use bloom to save points in voracity
Darkness-based Arcane Blade?

Am I missing anything good?

[Radon26]

how about Sun Pal?
they only ever use light (+some fire on that one talent) and are plenty durable. with higher's healing they would be pretty much invincible.
when i played as a ghoul sun pal, i used the retch quite often.
while all their healing talents (light tree) and some attack talents (absorption strike, retribution, sun strikeray) give them light, their sustains greatly limit their light pool.
with eye of the tiger and HBB, you can create quite a long combo chain... although, i guess if you are stacking crits, you will probably get some free sun rays to power your talents.

dark anorithil?
their only source of darkness, is the twilight and twilight surge, while they can spend it fast, especially with the hymn of moonlight.
i have not much experience with this class so i can't say much more.

marauder?
on an adventurer i once tryed their generic tree with some fast hitting talents.
they drain your stamina insanely fast.

hammer time solipsist
the hammers are just way too expansive... actually you probably wont survive to get the HBB.

[OrionJAnderson]

I considered anorithil. Negative looks limiting on paper, but the amount generated by Twilight scales up with Cunning to become very large. Highborn healing gets amplified by bathe in light, but ultimately anorithils already have enough healing to survive anything that doesn't burst or disable them. I hate to make the comparison with Shalore, but they just do it better. Instead of conditional +darkness damage, they have always-on +crit chance and crit damage, which stacks beautifully with anorithil damage skills. They have a global haste they can use to run away or cast one of their many 0-cost defense spells, and they can use timeless to clear statuses. Admittedly, higher might be as good as any other non-shalore race for anorithils, but that's because anorithils are bad and specialized class with very little flexibility in play.

[Micbran]

No necro? Necro have high mana costs

[Atarlost]

The problem is that Born into Magic only works on spells and the vast majority of willpower using classes use mindpowers or nature powers.

I've heard they make good necromancers because they can bypass the soul resource. They're also pretty good for archmages because the arcane resist reduces the damage from disruption shield breaking. The extra vision is useful for anything where the radius and range can exceed 10. Stone and fire and I think aether mages have at least one spell each that can take advantage of that. Disruption shield using mages probably want to build willpower.

Paradox Mages may also work. They can be built to a single damage type and build willpower.

[OrionJAnderson]

Would it bother anyone if their regen skill scaling on best of will and magic, or will and con?

[Atarlost]

Would it bother anyone if their regen skill scaling on best of will and magic, or will and con?

Probably not. It wouldn't help much, but Anorthil get more from con than will and there are con/mag/cun archmage builds as well as the already higher friendly mag/wil/cun builds.

It would help more if they had less focused racial skills. Overseer is only useful to casters (at least some mind or nature power casters have powers that get range+radius greater than 10) and Born is only useful to magic users. No other racial tree is that specific. Often there's one skill that's useless to some classes, but usually only to one of mind/magic/physical and not also a skill only useful to one style of class.

[HousePet]

Would it bother anyone if their regen skill scaling on best of will and magic, or will and con?

It would bother me.
If you go with that, you may as well just make it scale with your highest stat.

[Davion Fuxa]

Would it bother anyone if their regen skill scaling on best of will and magic, or will and con?

It would bother me.
If you go with that, you may as well just make it scale with your highest stat.

You mean have it so that Higher's don't have any specialized stat, instead they just have skills which will scale with their highest stat? That actually sounds kind of interesting to do for Higher's since they come off being highly rounded characters stat wise.

[HousePet]

That would also bother me, as it removes a consideration for what stats would be good to build.

[Davion Fuxa]

I take it Cornacs also bother you then, seeing as how they also don't have any consideration as to what stats are good to build with them?

[HousePet]

A little, but the extra category point supplies its own source of decisioning.

[Brent Not Broken]

Necromancers are nice, partly because you no longer need souls to summon undead, but also because if you go for lichform, your health regen talent still works (and infusions do not).

The regen talent is also a great combo with fungus, if you're playing an oozemancer or other antimagic class. Can't remember the exact interaction, maybe it's the fungal blood prodigy, I don't remember.

I like Higher for Doomed, also, because Hate is such a pain to deal with. It's not a popular combo, though, from what I can tell.

[OrionJAnderson]

Higher necromancer is starting to sound pretty good. Thank you for the recommendation. Not only do higher talents sound useful, necromancers don't really need elf talents that much. Necromancer minions reduce the utility of global speed and of stacking crit, and they have few temporary self-buffs to extend, so walking away from Shalore is actually tolerable. Liches don't need thalore resistances, and necros generally don't need trees to block for them.

Brent, the fungus interaction you're thinking of is indeed in the Fungus tree. "Ancestral life" gives you an extra turn when you cast a regen effect. This makes regen infusions effectively free, but since gift of the highborn is already free, it actually lets you follow up with 2 other actions at once. However, I'm not convinced the synergy is all that strong. Gift of the higborn is instant and long-lasting, but much weaker than an infusion, and Fungus talents substantially erode the benefits of duration. According to the wiki, GotH would heals 45 points per round if you have 80 willpower. I've seen regen infusions restore 80-90 per turn keyed to stats much lower than that. Given +2-3 rounds from fungus, I'd rather heal 100 per round for 7-8 rounds than 50 per round for 12-13, especially because I can probably get a lesser regen effect from an instant heal to run during the downtime.

As for Doomed, I don't get it. Doomed have a reduced heal mod and their own CD-6 healing skill. It's tough to think of a worse candidate for regeneration. They don't have enough range to care about extended vision, they don't really care if they're blinded, they don't have built-in spells, and there are few good ways to get a darkness spell (and 0 ways to get a mind spell). It's not even close to matching the benefits you'd get as a thalore, an ogre, or a halfling.

EDIT: Or doomelf

[Atarlost]

I think the free fungus turns from instant regens was fixed several versions ago. Since instant regens also come off the second Fungus talent if they haven't been fixed you don't need to bother with Higher to get them.