(New Tome) Hollow Eulogy

#1

HOLLOW EULOGY

image

Written records from the echoes of the souls trapped in the void. Its spoken rites were created so one could make inscriptions which allow the void spirits a momentary escape. However, their anguish and agony tarnishes the ground, effectively preventing the same magic from being cast on it.

STATS:

Tier UT
MP Cost: 120 MP
On Equip: +10 DEF, +5 VIT
Effect(s): Party Effect: image Healing for image seconds
Destroys all enemy projectiles within image tiles. Create a Sigil of the same size on your position.
Sigil:
• Dark Gratitude: While you are inside the sigil, Gain Darkness Darkness
• Sacrilege: You cannot cast this ability nearby a sigil or have the sigils which overlap.
XP Bonus: 7%
Soulbound: Soulbound
Feed Power: 1100

Drops From:

More info:


While I was discussing about item ideas, I briefly recall there was some interest in making a ‘tome which deletes projectiles’ like a sort of pre-emptive heal. So I wanted to give my own take on such an idea. The drawback being you would have ‘limited’ uses.

To make up for the lack of an instant heal, it has a significantly longer healing buff duration as well as the ability to cast a sigil within an area/dungeon. The sigil would take on a circular shape and essentially be the original tiles except with a darker tone. Any enemy bullets within these tiles when the sigil has been made will be destroyed or deleted.

This bullet-deleting effect doesn’t linger. Meaning you’ll be able to remove a large area of bullets once, and once only, within where you casted the ability.

However, this sigil will persist until the said priest switches area, this will also be a drawback to the priest to place too many sigils down due to the passive of ‘Dark Gratitude’ so the priest using this item would have to deal with darkness upon crossing the area. This would hopefully make it be more strategic as to when and where to use this.

More on self-inflicted darkness, all bullets will still render outside the player’s vision, however they will only see the bullets nearby them.

More about additional interactions, Dark Gratitude will not proc for other players, however the passive of Sacrilege will be applicable to any player using the tome, so players can’t override or abuse multiple Hollow Eulogies.


Let me know what you think of the ability in the comments or what you think about the idea in the poll! I’m generally open to suggestions and thoughts to edit this idea so about this so feel free to comment what you think about it!

Edit History
  • Changed Darkness from ‘Dark Gratitude’ Passive to Blinded + VIT Boost for balancing purposes. Possible revert.
  • Added additional clarification to Sigil Function in Description.
  • Reverted back to Darkness as ‘Dark Gratitude’. Specified the way Darkness would work self-inflicted.

What do you think about the idea?

  • The idea is great!
  • The idea is good.
  • The idea is okay.
  • The idea is bad.

0 voters

#2

I like it in principle, but it is highly, highly abusable as-is. I’m just picturing a priest placing a single one of these in the MBC fight and everyone standing there with no fear of dying. Also, I may misunderstand how darkness works, but I’m pretty sure the priest could still shoot and damage enemies, they would just have to do so based on the minimap instead.

My suggestion would be to change it to only block incoming bullets for 2 seconds or something. It would still be incredibly powerful, honestly that would probably still be broken in the MBC fight, but it is a step in the right direction. There could be a particle effect distinguishing an “active” sigil area vs a “used-up” one (and priests still could not place another sigil close to a used-up location.

#3

Oh um, I may have been unclear but it only deletes the bullets upon spawning the sigil, the sigil does nothing afterwards except give the priest himself the Dark Gratitude Passive. So you’ll be able to delete bullets within a large area once, but only that one time.

Not only that but that area would be ‘used up’ as you won’t be able to place another sigil on the same area, so there’s only a few times you’ll be able to feasibly use this in fights. However, your suggestion was what I originally had planned for the idea, I just found it too hard to balance it out so I went for this variation.

Darkness would still work the same as the priest can still deal damage and shoot enemies.

#4

Not going to happen. I can’t remember where I read it but pretty sure developers/designers have said Darkness can never be added to a player ability/proc as it’s open to abuse.

You get invulnerability on a couple of abilities, but they are very limited in how you can use them and on melee abilities so designed for classes that need to get close. Plus they are two of the rarest whites in the game.

#5

Fair enough, although I would say its adjustable. The darkness part of the ability is meant to act more of a debuff anyway so its pretty adjustable in terms of what it (Dark Gratitude) is meant to do, prevent the player from using too much space due to this ability. Would most likely edit the ability towards something more of a blind or such.

Thanks for the heads up though!

Edit: If I remember correctly didn’t they rework darkness as a debuff or some sort of thing a few updates back? I remember fighting the sentry and gotten inflicted with darkness but I could still see all the bullets the sentry shot out at me but instead couldn’t see any of the enemy gods/monsters surrounding the boss.

#6

Darkness unrenders enemies outside a certain range meaning you won’t see bullets from them, but since bosses (anything with a boss HP bar) are always rendered it means that you can still see bullets from them despite being darknessed.

The tome’s concept is really interesting but it’s incredibly difficult to balance. Right now it looks like the range is really short so it will be hard to even use on stationary bosses and also dangerous to pull off on chasing bosses since you’ll be blinded the moment you use it. But if you give it too much range or power it will effectively invalidate certain important boss phases and becomes a sort of short stun which ignores stun immunity.

Maybe instead it could slow down projectiles and be the opposite of the inspired buff (but increase the projectile lifetime so the bullet travels the same distance as it would normally to prevent safespots)?

#7

Ahhhh much thanks for the clarification. I guess that puts darkness out of the picture.

Yeah, this is mainly why I tried to strike something that I thought would be a sort of middle ground for the item. But I wouldn’t say the item has a short range, I was actually worried that the item had too much range due to it being able to reach 6.5-9.9 tile AoE of range where all the bullets would just be gone. Although its equally difficult due to having to navigate or manage through such a large area blinded as you are on the center of the sigil.

I remember suggesting something like this or a mystic orb that can ‘Stasis Bullets’ but the discussion from that and realizing in hindsight that its just too much potential for trolling. Rapid shotguns can still end up stacking and such and make it hard to survive in situations for other players as well as streams of bullets.

#8

It’s nothing against you and list of your (pretty cool) ideas, but I’ve never liked anything that does any form of deleting, deflection, deformation of any kind with enemy bullets and their patterns. It’s a can of worms I wouldn’t want being opened for a plethora of reasons, no matter how much you’re punishing yourself to get the job done.

The idea and description of the tome are cool, but I’d never want it implemented.

#9

Respectable! Also no offense taken here :slight_smile:

I appreciate all critique as long as I can get something out of it to make better ideas. I can understand the concern though, the main reason I put this on priest was how it was made to be to sort of ‘undo’ mistakes by being able to heal off damage but instead have it prevent the mistake in the first place so I thought it would stick to the theme to some extent.

However I don’t really want to change the idea too much to the point of losing the bullet removal part as I’m trying to vary this from the traditional heal so I might keep it as is for now.

#10

This looks really cool and with the permanence of sigils as a built-in cooldown I think it’s fairly well balanced. I believe the concept of “erasing bullets” isn’t inherently overpowered. It’s the spammability of that which is dangerous (eg: puri pre- combat update). After all this is being given to a class that has a very accessible time which outright negates anything less than 120 dmg/s (on one use, greater when you stack multiple up, which you can’t on this one). My initial reaction was that the old sigils should have a cooldown or fade away over time (maybe 30s?) to make this more usable even :sweat_smile:.

Without accounting for the debuffs, this would be most usable in rushing (can you imagine in fs halls? :grin:) with good timing and as a swap out for certain high bullet density phases (crossing tentacles as a group in survival?, maybe beisa?). I don’t think it would be used a lot in Osanc because bullets are generally replaced pretty quickly (fleeing, Miasma, most of leuc) and it wouldn’t affect beams or aoe attacks (which fungal does help with).
I think it woul be interesting to see if this would help encourage groups to change up their “safe spots” in raids more often as fights progressed.

On further thought I think sigil permanence is fine, but I do have one concern: this inflicts blind on the whole group, not just the caster? Like Skandling, I don’t like that. Having it on caster so there is some added risk in using it would be sufficient imo. And I think it could be kept as darkness (the more thematically appropriate choice). I don’t play on a super high brightness so I find blind more annoying personally. With this kind of change I still see it as a situational swapout for fungal, which functions with an honestly similar purpose, but doesn’t require precise timing.

#11

Maybe me being anti-raid is making me additionally biased. I don’t like giving raids more excuses to dominate the game than they have to, whether or not they’re nice people. :no_mouth:

#12

Interesting item, as I see this thing as a pseudo-Oreo for Priests. Capable to delete bullets but in certain area, requiring you not to move for the full effect.

#13

Hmm Sigil Lifetime seems interesting and adjusting it to a long duration is something I would look to consider. Although I currently am leaning towards Sigil Permanence I feel like the trade-off would be even for such a powerful effect.

Same thoughts, I hate blinded as a debuff which is why I would have personally preferred to have kept darkness. To clarify though this would only affect the caster as I am really not a fan of having a group debuff on an item. Personally if there could be a way to implement self-inflicted darkness such that it could be a straight debuff to the player I’d be all for it but at the moment I’d need to do more research on the it.

#14

That’s fair, a bit more off topic here but I personally have no problem with raids or its accessibility. My main gripe with the game is the amount of people who can be in the dungeons at once. Thematically, it just feels weird for Oryx to just let SO MUCH people through his portals and enter his own or his henchmen’s dungeons. Like, what possible reason could there be to allow up to EIGHTY-FIVE people at ONCE.

Mechanically, having a group of players where you can have multitudes of specific skills or abilities just feels like there’s no real point to your class identity and makes it all about DPS-Loot Acquisition. Why be anything BUT something that can get you loot if someone else can be [insert class here] and you could benefit from them?

Sorry for that tangent, have a fungal tome shroom: :mushroom:

#15

To some extent, I guess one could see it like that! But I feel like its more appropriate to say it deters you from moving or just staying into the area you just made. I can imagine groups being able to ‘circle’ bosses with this in effect (although I’d worry about the caster as that is a large area to navigate while blinded/darkness).

#16

Very OP and that is bored.

#17

I appreciate the effort to make a comment but could you elaborate a bit? Also I think you mean ‘boring’ not bored.

#18

It’s a cooperative multiplayer game, so of course you can gang up on the enemies like Oryx. All dungeons now have capacity limits, i.e. caps, but they don’t apply to Oryx, O2, O3 as they are meant to be the ultimate bosses of the whole game. For them there’s usually significant attrition due to difficulty, but not always.

#19

As I want to stay on topic, I guess we can just agree to disagree. I personally just dislike how we players would tend to worry more about dealing more damage than other people/getting good loot than the actual fights themselves, and one of the main reasons I believe this happens is because the dungeon caps are so high. This might not be a change most people would want as the system right now as the loot can be very rewarding.

#20

It’s a great idea but it needs a different drop location. There’s already 5 whites on void, 6 is way too much.