Item/Quest/Tree idea - Pact with a demon? Seems legit.

[AlexMdle]

Following idea includes quite a number of elements. Please bear with me.

Firstly, the idea centers around an artifact wand (Game really needs a few more of those) - Xa'Vieth's Reign.

This peculiar wand is a random boss drop, between the levels 4 and 18.
Appearance-wise, it is a skeletal arm, made of dark, petrified bone that clutches a smooth, black, jagged surface with a glowing red eye embedded within it.
It increases your arcane, fire and blight damage by 6% and your spellpower by 13, while also granting telepathy attuned to Demon/Major.

Additionally, you can activate the wand, the same way you would the Orb of Scrying. Doing so contacts Xa'Vieth, who the eye on the wand belongs to. While surprised at first, this major demon would like you to do him a favor, provided your are a Defiler class. Otherwise he will just laugh you off. Your level also has to be 10 or higher, or he will remark that you look a bit too scrawny for the job and will ask you to contact him when you grow strong enough.

Once the requirements are met, he divulges the details of the quest: Apparently a group of antimagic users has converged in the land and contacted Zigur in hopes of joining the order. While this band is made up of inexperienced warriors, if they received proper training in the town they could some day become a far more potent threat. Your task is very simple.

Kill them all before they can reach Zigur.

You can refuse the quest with no penalities. Xa'Vieth just merely scoffs at your cowardice and refuses to talk to you anymore.

If you accept the task, be prepared for battle.

Basically the band manifests in the form of an overworld group, spawning in a far-off corner of the map and making a direct beeline for the hidden city. The band itself is composed of 10-ish wyrmics, berserkers, bullwarks, basically all possible variants of classes that can enter Zigur. The only thing that sets them apart is that they all utilize Antimagic talents and wear arcane-disrupting gear.

ALL of them have to die for the quest to be completed. Fleeing (which you can) fails the quest. The reason is that the group is now spooked and having evaded you, will now go for Zigur as fast as they can - you're not going to catch up to them anymore.

Xa'Vieth gets understandably pissed at your failure to the point where the wand now reacts with hostility to you. It's bonuses are now inverted to penalities, making it useless. Trying to talk to Xa'Vieth is fruitless now.


HOWEVER. Should you manage to kill them all, Xa'Vieth will be happy enough to grant you a wish of your choosing:

Wealth.
Power.
Wisdom.
Nothing.
Surprise me.

Wealth has him shower you with gold and valuables. Your receive a large sum of gold and some gems and valuables of varying quality, possibly even randarts.

Power increases your total physical, mental and spell power by 6% (Scales as you increase those).

Wisdom grants you 75% of the xp you would need to level up from the 0% of this level.

"Nothing" surprises the demon. He can't let you go away with nothing though, so he allows you to call in a favor as well if you're in a pinch. In effect it removes the ability to chatter with him through the wand and instead gives it an active ability, which is basically a powerful AoE blight/fire/arcane damage spell.

"Surprise me" is only possible to be picked once through all your playthroughs. This option only appears if your current class is Reaver or Doombringer. In that case Xa'Vieth teaches you the Blighted Arms generic talent tree.


And the story would end there...


...except there's more. Completing the quest makes it possible to find Xa'Vieth randomly in a Fearscape Invasion portal. He is minding his own business there, not attacking the player. You have the choice to fight him if you want, for whatever standard juicy boss reward of xp and artifact. However, doing so removes all powers from the wand. It loses all enhancements or active ability and becomes blank.

[Planetus]

I like the overall idea, but I'd say something different for rewards:
WEALTH: Since gold and gems are rather bland in this game, especially late game (and probably by the mid-late teens), I'd suggest wealth gives you a couple of randarts specifically generated for your class (i.e. armor, weapons, armored gloves, etc for reavers, robes, staves, mage hats, etc for corruptors).
POWER: Increased phys/ment/spell power is an interesting idea, but I'd also like to suggest the possibility of some free stat points, or maybe +X to all physical stats.
WISDOM: I don't think a one-time bonus of xp instead of power boost would be ever chosen. If you want free experience, you can get it from wandering adventurers or farportal runs. I'd rather see WISDOM be some talent points, or maybe +X to all mental stats if power gives physical stats.
NOTHING: I'd make this give the blighted arms talent tree, with talents that would be useful to boost the attack power of either reavers or corruptors, maybe something like increasing blight damage, increasing vim received from kills, maybe the ability to permanently add the +vim on hit (or is it kill, or critical, the bonus that some mage staves get) to any weapon (akin to the mindslayers weapon and armor bonus talents), and I don't know what else. Are you thinking this would be an addition to just this character, or it is a one-time choice for all characters that unlocks such a talent tree for defiler classes?
SURPRISE ME: This turns the wand into something that grants a bonus when activated, instead of contacting the demon again, or maybe the bonus comes from contacting the demon, like it is him granting a favor. The bonus could be an attack of a random element, or some kind of shielding, or whatever, but it should be something useful for either melee or mage classes.

I'm also a little skeptical about anything like this that would be for ONLY two classes. Maybe allow it for other non-AM characters, but the bonuses are different, or maybe 'nothing' isn't an option, or just results in something different.

[bricks]

I'm not sure that demons care about antimagic/Zigur, nor am I convinced that Reavers have any special connection with demons.

[Sirrocco]

Demons might care a bit. The Zig certainly puts a lot of effort into wiping out demons and the corrupters that serve them.

The reaver thing kind of depends on how closely linked Reavers and Corrupters are.

[AlexMdle]

Yeah, most people asked on irc said that it would be a better idea to admit all non-antimagic classes for the quest.

The alternate suggestions for wealth/wisdom are also a good idea, but could use different bonuses in the latter's case.

[Sirrocco]

I'm also not real fond of the "you only get to do this once ever" unless the thing it's doing applies to all future characters as much as the current one. It wasn't *entirely* clear what was intended here.

Oh... and a wacky thought. What if, rather than just opening more trees, it rearranged them a bit - so, say, it unlocks a tree for your corrupters and reavers, but it removes the "free fungus tree" bonus from your antimagic characters. Finding him in the farportal and killing him, on the flip side, would reverse that effect.

I rather like the idea of a series of back-and-forth quests that would make magic choices or antimagic choices more valuable for a given profile.

(another might make antimagic gear more common while making arcane gear less common, and be equally reversible, and so forth).

[AlexMdle]

'm also not real fond of the "you only get to do this once ever" unless the thing it's doing applies to all future characters as much as the current one.

Sorry I forgot to write it, but yes, it applies to all future Reavers and Doombringers. Hell, Pure proposed making it available to all mellee classes as a generic tree once learned in the quest.

[PureQuestion]

Oh, as a permanent unlock? ehhhh probably not as likely.

As a permanent unlock (ie, the same boat as poisons and the high end archmage trees) it should probably be limited to melee defiler classes.

As a per-game unlock, like harmony, hexes, escort trees, then yeah it makes more sense to let anyone take it.

[Sirrocco]

Perhaps both? You get the temporary unlock on whatever you do the quest with, but the permanent unlock applies only to Reavers/Corrupters?

I'd still want to be sure that you could do it more than once if we did it that way, though, just so that you don't get one shot and only one shot at playing a non-reaver/corrupter with the tree.

[bricks]

Maybe I'm being really dense here, but what is Blighted Arms? Just a hypothetical category?

[PureQuestion]

Blighted Arms is a tree I will be making sometime in the near future for the Doombringer. Alex has it pretty firmly in his head that the class is getting added.

I'm certainly hoping it will be.

The tree consists of mutually exclusive weapon buffs in a form similar to chants and hymns.

[bricks]

Oh, right. I thought it sounded familiar. Those talents would probably be overkill on a Reaver.

[Sirrocco]

perhaps freeing the demon from the wand and asking for the appropriate boon could give you access to the tree and unlock the Doombringer class?

[PureQuestion]

mhmmm possibly.

[AlexMdle]

The demon isn't trapped in the wand, he just uses it as a beacon to spy from within the fearscape. The idea is good however.