Reworking possession

[Lord Estraven]

The way I see it, possession has a couple major issues:

1. Melee attack strength seems to be independent of any skill
2. It's completely incompatible with any other sort of spellcasting.

(1) strikes me as simple to deal with - add a bonus to melee attacks based on the Weaponmastery skill. Granted that possessor attacks should be at least somewhat dependent on getting a good body, and should not be overpowered when you do get a good one, a lot should depend on the character's skill level.

(2) should IMHO be dealt with by making SP independent of the body being possessed, as with sanity points. To compensate for the increased mana capacity, higher spell point usage for monster powers is obviously recommended.

[IckyThingBane]

Melee attack is based on barehand/weaponmastery for Possessors.

I'd say it's important to keep Possessor SP low for balance reasons. When you're sitting in a body with a bazillion HP, arbitrarily many attacks and the ability to chain-summon GWoPs, you really don't need to have access to Necromancy, Mindcraft and powerful god spells like Genocide and Stone Prison.

Don't get me wrong - I love Possession, but it can be a bit OP.

[Lord Estraven]

Interesting... I tried possessing a GWoP (with a debug character) and even with 50 Weaponmastery the dragon body's attacks were pretty weak (compared to weapon-based attacks by a character with maxed Weaponmastery). And breaths and whatnot are far too weak to do anything to high-level monsters... Which basically leaves chain-summoning, and IMHO the game shouldn't revolve around that at any point.

[IckyThingBane]

Sorry, I assumed you were talking about eg. Eol attacking with a wielded sword. If you're talking about innate creature attacks then you may well be right, but they are still affected by bare-hand.

[AnonymousHero]

You need to wield a weapon for Weaponmastery to have any effect... and GWoPs cannot wield weapons. However, Barehand should work just fine.