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Eldurian

Is The Path Of Love Underpowered? Love Vs. Insanity For A Fo Priest

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This is an honest question I'd really like to get some answers to. My character is a follower of Fo planning to go priest of Fo on the epic server. As such the path of love seems natural for him RP-wise. But it just looks... gimped to me.

I looked at insanity and it seems to have in it the workings for an INCREDIBLY powerful Fo priest. Here is my analysis. Please point out if I am wrong or under/overvaluing an ability. All my knowledge comes from the wiki so I could very well be wrong.

1st Ability

Refresh vs. Clean Wound. Once every 18 hours you can fully feed someone (including yourself) and give them 99% nutrition. Solid useful ability... though this is pretty much a once a day thing. Clean Wound allows you to clean an infected wound. From the sounds of it an unlimited number of times. I'm assuming that could really come in handy while fighting HoTs players. Not too handy otherwise. And I can always use spells to deal with infected wounds as a Fo priest. I'm going to say Love narrowly wins this one.

2nd Ability

Enchant vs. Fill. When I first heard of enchant I thought that ability alone justified the path of love. Now I kind of wonder... what's the point? It makes trees so you can't chop them and it used to make grass so it couldn't be trampled or grazed away but I guess that got nerfed. So I could plant thorn bushes around my place that only Fo priests and those they protect can get through? No enchanted thorns do no damage. I could enchant rare trees and fruit trees I don't want people to cut so I can harvest them for fruits and sprouts... no they can't be harvested or have their sprouts picked... I could use it to protect a tree I assign some RP value to so as long as I look after it, it will never die? No... you can't prune enchanted trees... SO what is the point?!?!?! .......I have no idea. Fill can be used to fill food/water and gives 30-60 nutrition once a day. Kind of useless in my opinion as it's easy to get 30-60 nutrition food for anyone who is this far into the game. That makes both abilities pretty useless. This round is tied.

3rd Ability

Love Effect vs. Teleport. Once every 18 hours (so once a day in most cases) I can make all animals within a large radius friendly to me for 3 minutes unless the are tamed / dominated by an enemy player. Marginally useful if this includes trolls and other things that won't already be friendly to my Fo priest after 60 faith. Even then it could be kind of handy if my favor is below 40. Now teleport can be used once every hour to randomly teleport me anywhere on the map. That could be a cliff, lava, middle of the ocean or inside someone's deed. Could also be a perfectly safe and regular location. So I'm surrounded by a superior force of enemy players I have little chance of escaping... even on their home server this spell offers me a chance of survival. On ours... I would have to have extremely bad luck not to. Especially if I have some favor filled gems left. I can heal my wounds and refresh my stamina. This can get me out of most situations other than being locked inside someone's fence, in which case I could use teleport again in another hour. So I say insanity is the CLEAR winner on this one. It's a marginally useful ability one a day or a very useful one, once an hour.

4th Ability

Fast Healing vs. Shield of The Gone. Fast healing makes it so all of your wounds heal faster. It even makes medium wounds heal 3 per tick. Not bad, especially if it stacks with the already enhanced healing rate I get as a follower of Fo. Shield of The Gones halves damage and healing received, effectively doubling my health. Also a quite solid ability. But then look at this spell. What's half of infinity? Infinity. If my assumption that this heals you entirely even with shield of the gone is correct... Think about how powerful a Fo pries with Shield of The Gone and a bag full of favor filled gems would be... Correct me if I am wrong on any of this but I am putting down insanity as the clear winner here.

Overall

While they are fairly close with love even leading a bit at the start, the 2nd to abilities blow love clean out of the water. The insane Fo priest is able to heal his doubled health entirely and teleport away if overwhelmed, while the loving Fo priest just enjoys some buffs to the fast healing and animal protection abilities he already has.

Please weigh in with your comments and analysis. Especially if you know more than I do about these paths or Fo priests.

Edited by Eldurian

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In my opinion, the thing about meditation paths is that you can't really compare them with eachother. They're all just completely different and have entirely different purposes, so you should choose the one that fits your needs the most. I don't think you should make your gameplay decisions based on seems best RP-wise or you will just make the game less fun for yourself.

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Too me its like comparing Non pvp servers to Pvp... Love is more for non pvp and insanity is for pvp.

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As one of the higher tier of 'meditators' in path of love on freedom/chaos, I do feel that sometimes the level 11 Path of Love ability seems disproportionately unbalanced when compared to the level 11 abilities of the other paths.

Path of Hate gets immunity from enemy spells. This is amazingly useful in PVP.

Path of Insanity gets shield of the gone. This is a constant buff that reduces damage and healing by 50%, it appears that certain damage types are protected against more so than others. I have witnessed one player being shot 3 times deadly hard/damage in the head with war arrows, she was not wearing a helmet and was still only on (hurt).

Path of Power gets a 50% reduction in stamina.

Path of Knowledge gets 25% permanent increased skillgain. Imagine playing and having infinite half sleep bonus on all the time.

Path of love heals 3hp more per tick. This isn't faster healing, it's a bigger healing tick but 3hp is perhaps the equivalent of slapping on the lowest possible potency healing cover. It is so insignificant that it is not noticeable nor useful.

I would suggest that the level 11 ability for path of love be changed into a very weak constant health regen (Similar to how favor regens) rather than a +3hp healing tick every 10minutes.

Edited by RomaN
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Love is amazing at low levels; less so at higher levels. Knowledge (trader draining excepted) is rubbish at low levels and amazing at high levels. There's a sort of balance there, for sure, and it seems OK to me.

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Level 9 love ability might be useful for someone who doesn't have high fighting, to get through chokepoints packed with critters. But level 11 ability is basically useless as it is right now.

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Balance doesn't necessarily mean everything has to be equal.

The Path of love is easy to get into and get some nice rewards quickly, but it's not that much later on.

Knowledge is a novelty at best at low levels. but the later exp boost is amazing.

Insanity level 11 keeps you alive during combat, Love makes it easier to heal afterwards.

Edited by Keldun

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If you don't intend to go all the way to at least level 11 in a path, then path of love is most likely the best, as it offers well-rounded quality of life improvements. Without their signature bonus at 11, most other paths are gimmicky.

If you do intend to advance to level 11 or higher, path of love is arguably the worst. While other paths get a defining ability at level 11 that changes your character forever, love's 11 ability is outclassed by good cotton, an LT enchant on your weapon, or by having a friendly Fo priest in your vicinity. Compared solely to the other paths' level 11 bonuses, it really is terrible, and all the time you spent meditating and waiting to advance is just plain not returning as much a benefit as you would have gotten, had you been another path.

Meditation is funny like that.

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Refresh also gives you a full bar of stamina, somewhat useful for pvp, but it can't be used in combat,, you must back out. You are able to climb higher slopes with it and save boat captains that get involved in melee without stamina.

Love effect, making all mobs green to you, I found, is so useful in open field fights with lots of mobs around, like a mine or the elevation steppe.

Just as many others and myself have said, the level 11 path of love ability should be changed to be on-level with the other paths.

Just my input from playing on a pvp server

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If you don't intend to go all the way to at least level 11 in a path, then path of love is most likely the best, as it offers well-rounded quality of life improvements. Without their signature bonus at 11, most other paths are gimmicky.

If you do intend to advance to level 11 or higher, path of love is arguably the worst. While other paths get a defining ability at level 11 that changes your character forever, love's 11 ability is outclassed by good cotton, an LT enchant on your weapon, or by having a friendly Fo priest in your vicinity. Compared solely to the other paths' level 11 bonuses, it really is terrible, and all the time you spent meditating and waiting to advance is just plain not returning as much a benefit as you would have gotten, had you been another path.

Meditation is funny like that.

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Heh aye... Love is definitely not a pvp path. The other paths are far more useful in various ways.

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Love needs some love.

All of these bonuses are passive, but love is not exactly passive and can only work once every 10 minute healing tick, and pointless if you're not damaged.

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Would be interesting to see a break down of game population vs meditation paths. I would guess almost half of regularly played toons probably have no path at all.

Considering that meditation really begins at 20 when you are limited 5 attempts per day and 30 is not too terrible of grind for lv7, Path of Love probably is 2/3 of those who make it to choosing a path (dont PVP so my number could be off, PVE certainly has greater use for Love), and they mostly go no further. Refresh (lv4) is arguably the most powerful meditation ability when compared with the time investment.

My numbers are guesses but it is almost certain that No Choice and Path of Love are the top 2 meditation choices by a large margin, IMO Path of Love needs no buff.

Edited by Pollo

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For a free player, Path of love is the no-brainer as you can get refresh with only 15 skill. Makes life a great deal easier for someone with capped skills.

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By the way, Fill does not affect water and doesn't give you 99% nutrition. It gives you a varying amount of nutrition based on how much food bar you had when you use Fill, and your current nutrition might even play into it as well. So not nearly as good as Refresh - if you use Fill under 1/3 food bar you're asking for a skillgain penalty from poor nutrition.

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By the way, Fill does not affect water and doesn't give you 99% nutrition. It gives you a varying amount of nutrition based on how much food bar you had when you use Fill, and your current nutrition might even play into it as well. So not nearly as good as Refresh - if you use Fill under 1/3 food bar you're asking for a skillgain penalty from poor nutrition.

Indeed, it's pretty useless because using it to fil your food bar will hit your nutrition hard, unless your food bar is already high, and then why would you bother using it??? I guess you could eat really low QL food to get food bar high, then use fill to boost your nutrition...

But having said that, I kept some numbers a few times, and these two are slightly at odds with it:

51% food, 20% nutrition went to 58 nutrition. (41% water)

84% food, 38% nutrition went to 47% nutrition. (93% water)

It's insane... But perhaps that's why.

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Hi,

My character is a follower of Fo planning to go priest of Fo on the epic server. As such the path of love seems natural for him RP-wise.

Edited by Xandra

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1st Ability

Refresh vs. Clean Wound. Once every 18 hours you can fully feed someone (including yourself) and give them 99% nutrition. Solid useful ability... though this is pretty much a once a day thing. Clean Wound allows you to clean an infected wound. From the sounds of it an unlimited number of times. I'm assuming that could really come in handy while fighting HoTs players. Not too handy otherwise. And I can always use spells to deal with infected wounds as a Fo priest. I'm going to say Love narrowly wins this one.

Nope, the clean wound ability only works once. It's really only useful against RT wounds which you'll almost never get on a Freedom server unless you're desecrating or sparring someone with an RT weapon.

2nd Ability

Enchant vs. Fill. When I first heard of enchant I thought that ability alone justified the path of love. Now I kind of wonder... what's the point? It makes trees so you can't chop them and it used to make grass so it couldn't be trampled or grazed away but I guess that got nerfed. So I could plant thorn bushes around my place that only Fo priests and those they protect can get through? No enchanted thorns do no damage. I could enchant rare trees and fruit trees I don't want people to cut so I can harvest them for fruits and sprouts... no they can't be harvested or have their sprouts picked... I could use it to protect a tree I assign some RP value to so as long as I look after it, it will never die? No... you can't prune enchanted trees... SO what is the point?!?!?! .......I have no idea. Fill can be used to fill food/water and gives 30-60 nutrition once a day. Kind of useless in my opinion as it's easy to get 30-60 nutrition food for anyone who is this far into the game. That makes both abilities pretty useless. This round is tied.

It can also take nutrition away and doesn't give water like 'Refresh'. Fairly useless unless you want a dice-rolled nutrition level. The food refill is still good though.

3rd Ability

Love Effect vs. Teleport. Once every 18 hours (so once a day in most cases) I can make all animals within a large radius friendly to me for 3 minutes unless the are tamed / dominated by an enemy player. Marginally useful if this includes trolls and other things that won't already be friendly to my Fo priest after 60 faith. Even then it could be kind of handy if my favor is below 40. Now teleport can be used once every hour to randomly teleport me anywhere on the map. That could be a cliff, lava, middle of the ocean or inside someone's deed. Could also be a perfectly safe and regular location. So I'm surrounded by a superior force of enemy players I have little chance of escaping... even on their home server this spell offers me a chance of survival. On ours... I would have to have extremely bad luck not to. Especially if I have some favor filled gems left. I can heal my wounds and refresh my stamina. This can get me out of most situations other than being locked inside someone's fence, in which case I could use teleport again in another hour. So I say insanity is the CLEAR winner on this one. It's a marginally useful ability one a day or a very useful one, once an hour.

Teleport, I believe is blocked in combat now. I have only used it twice. Once put me across the map, the second time threw me in the ocean around 150 tiles from land. It's a risky ability.

Love Effect, yeah seems pretty useless, probably only good if you're trying to get home and the road is crawling with creatures.

4th Ability

Fast Healing vs. Shield of The Gone. Fast healing makes it so all of your wounds heal faster. It even makes medium wounds heal 3 per tick. Not bad, especially if it stacks with the already enhanced healing rate I get as a follower of Fo. Shield of The Gones halves damage and healing received, effectively doubling my health. Also a quite solid ability. But then look at this spell. What's half of infinity? Infinity. If my assumption that this heals you entirely even with shield of the gone is correct... Think about how powerful a Fo pries with Shield of The Gone and a bag full of favor filled gems would be... Correct me if I am wrong on any of this but I am putting down insanity as the clear winner here.

You're clearly picking on Fo Priests now even though they've been nerfed many times.

Anyone that isn't a Fo priest will not have the ability to heal themselves like one.

Overall

While they are fairly close with love even leading a bit at the start, the 2nd to abilities blow love clean out of the water. The insane Fo priest is able to heal his doubled health entirely and teleport away if overwhelmed, while the loving Fo priest just enjoys some buffs to the fast healing and animal protection abilities he already has.

Please weigh in with your comments and analysis. Especially if you know more than I do about these paths or Fo priests.

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For PvE:

Refresh vs. Clean Wound ~Love wins easy

Enchant vs. Fill ~Love wins again easy

Love Effect vs. Teleport ~Toss up, if you hate fighting love wins again, if not teleport is mighty cool

Fast Healing vs. Shield of The Gone ~ Insanity wins easy

So for PvE, I'd say its about even, maybe leaning towards love a smidge.

For PvP there is no point in measuring, since Love is clearly not designed with any pvp abilities and thus balance is a silly concept.

I could see bumping the Love Fast Healing to 5 though.

Edited by Elen

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I suppose what's frustrating me is this:

Knowledge is a great path for the very non combat oriented Vynoran priests. It will allow them to grind channeling, prayer, hot food cooking and all the other skills they still use as a priest faster. Additionally it's useful on both PVE and PVP servers. PVP servers still need crafters and having someone who can read thei enemy's stats is pretty handy.

I find power the 2nd most useless from my reading but it does look pretty handy for a Mag priest. Being a battle priest this allows them to bull through the front lines with trap and elemental immunity. It also allows them to use lava (which they can walk on) creatively in the defense of their village and mines, or to remove it if it's bothering people. The lava and increased stam abilities make this path useful on PVE servers as well.

Hate gives one useful PVP ability after another ending in an ability that really hoses their enemy's Mag priests. Entirely useless in PVE but this path isn't even available without Mycelium to meditate on. Great for HoTs priests and followers.

Love. Some of it's abilities are rendered nearly useless by priest abilities. It's level 11 isn't needed that badly by a priest, and none of it's abilities seem to really complement it's priests. It's useful ability (enchant) has so many limitations on it that it's more a novelty than anything. Insanity is better PVP, Knowledge is better PVE, primarily just a path to take early and ditch as soon as you get high meditation from the sounds of it.

I would really like to see Love altered to complement it's OBVIOUS Fo theme better. Nerf refresh and buff love effect and fast healing. I would knock refresh's nutrition down to 50. Make it so enchanted trees can be harvested for fruit, picked for sprouts, and pruned or make enchanted thorns do at least some damage. Half the rate of fast healing or make it more powerful but only useable once a day and make it the 3rd ability, make Love effect an increased dodge rating and make it the 4th ability.

The other thing I could see doing is knocking out the 2nd two abilities entirely and making it so at the 2nd ability is enchant grass, the 3rd is enchant trees and bushes (which can be pruned and thorns now do damage), and the 4th allows you to harvest from enchanted trees. Make enchanted fruit refresh stam and enchanted beverages give their regular effect plus treat all wounds with potency 3 if you drink at least 50% of your thirst bar.

Again I'm a newb to meditation/priesthood but I would really like to see love more linked to Fo like the other paths are to their deities.

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For a fo priest love path is fairly useless - a lot of the effects are already available to Fo priests in some way or form. Refresh is nice, but really, sacrifice any rare object and you have the same, and that doesnt have a cooldown. For the extra stamina Fo has an identical named spell. Enchanting grass and trees is nice but not incredbily useful if you dont plan on keeping any animals.. Neutral animals is somethign fo priests already have for the most part, and teleport to token is something all meditating paths get.

As for the argument that most peoepl choose love path, is solely for the enchanted grass, which are most likely a lot of alternative characters for the purpose of maintaining enchanted pens. Throw a rug on the floor and see how many people are at the level of rock and not higher, it should give you a good estimate what the aim is.

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Well being an insanity path follower on 3 different servers I can say that insanity is pretty bad actually.

1. Clean wound is completely useless when compared to all the other first level abilities cleaning the wound is very limited to high damage RT wounds. Also it has a cool down, if it was infinite that would be quite different.

2. Fill can only be used on ones self, and for it to give a dice roll of nutrition (usually not worth it anyway) makes it practically useless, not mention the completely lack of water gains and no stamina is given back.

3. Teleport is nifty, but in reality far to risky on large servers to even bother doing. It is also blocked when enemies are in local, much like karma recall home.

4. Shield of the Gone is pretty good, but the level is insanely hard to achieve so it makes up for it. I think the love path ability is fine at this level, mainly because the other abilities are so great.

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From the sounds of it only ~50% of active players bother with meditation and most of them go love because it's the only one that really pays off early.

Perhaps the solution is to buff the early abilities of most paths to match the usefulness of love early on.

Correct me if I'm wrong but mediation does not rise as fast as your progress in a given path, and you can mentor under other players to accelerate that progress even faster.

So most players are wise to take love early on then ditch it and train another path as they draw close to 70 meditation.

Wouldn't you rather all have 5 paths that are relatively balanced from start to finish?

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