Many things have been said in the thread already that I agree with, I believe that I should throw a response in this thread regardless because I have my own thoughts on rework as a whole.
To begin I think we need to ask ourselves why this rework happened. This is just going to be speculation from me, so don’t take what I say as what the Staff think. I believe the reason Spiritblessed were reworked was due to multiple factors. They weren’t played that much or brought up that much in rp, many people were turned off by the idea that becoming a Spiritblessed essentially “killed” your character off. As reaching higher tiers would drastically alter your emotions and personality. Example being Fire blessed at consumed being much more aggressive. From what I heard from others this pushed them away from the idea of becoming a permanent Spiritblessed. They’d get the first tier, rp it out for a bit but then get it cured as keeping it longer would’ve risked changing their character drastically. This in my opinion and from what I’ve gathered, lead people to not really want to play Spiritblessed unless it was on a character made for becoming consumed. One they didn’t really mind throwing away to this power.
The second reason as to why I believe Spiritblessed were reworked was to tweak/fix their passives and abilities. Whether this be because some abilities were too op, written weirdly and in a way that might’ve been confusing or it conflicted and raised questions with other lore on the server. I can understand why Spiritblessed were reworked because they weren’t getting that much rp. As well as their current powers were hard to balance. Maybe also the lore they brought was another contributing factor to their rework. So a rework was made to try and make Spiritblessed more impactful on the server similar to Vyres. Again this is all just speculation based on what I’ve heard and seen.
What should the goal of a rework be though? In my opinion I believe that when a rework happens it should fix things that are broken/need tweaking, bring more people into it and try to stay true to what it originally was. An example of a recent rework is the Vyre rework. In the old system of Vyres there were issues with their powers and their impact on rp in general. Issues such as their strength made them quite hard to fight especially when it was such a drastic buff. There were also issues in the process of ranking up, wanting to rank up was a difficult task to do since you needed big chains to do so. If you wanted to reach the maximum level of abilities you’d need to get yourself a chain of 9. There were also issues with their interaction with the sun, this usually forced people to only rp at night IC since going out during the day would be deadly or just make you so weak overall. Unless of course you were the right bloodline then it just helped a bit.
So when Vyre’s got reworked they addressed these issues, added new lore as well as made tweaks to the Vyre to fix these issues. Vyres now can walk in the sun with no issue as it’s no longer detrimental but has the trade off of being super flammable. Which I think is a real good thing that balances out all the new powers they have. Vyres now have options to go into, they can go Nobel, Lover, Feral or even Biter. These new branches were a good addition because it allows people’s Vyre’s to be somewhat more different from one another. Along with these changes to Vyre strengths, they no longer had super strength which is a relatively good thing. The new changes traded the upgraded strength for more abilities which was a real good way to tweak that issue. Of course some issues are still in the new system but that’s being tweaked as we go along. The new system also fixed the issues of going up the ranks, now there being 3 new ways to go up those ranks. Now people don’t simply need to recruit others to go up a rank. This was a good quality of life change because now underlings can become just as powerful as those above them without the need to go out and turn others. So when looking at the Vyre rework we see that not only did it fix present issues but it also added new ideas that stayed true to what it was. Vyres in the old system was a monstrous curse, so this new one reflects it quite well. It was a successful rework that I didn’t hear many complaints about, it set out to fix Vyres and draw in more people towards it. Which it has done so greatly.
Comparing the rework of Vyres to that of Spiritblessed, I don’t believe it hit the mark. It changed in a way that didn’t stay true to its original self, its lore and went about balancing its powers by simply nerfing them drastically. The key of the rework seems to be a heavy focus on flavour, we went from Fire blessed being able to walk on lava and throwing fireballs. To be able to withstand hotter environments, hand and feet immunity to fire and make a small flame at their fingertips. A nerf in the abilities but allowing more aesthetic changes. Spiritblessed used to be quite powerful when you reached the higher tiers, we’ve lost that ability for simple aesthetic and flavour. It feels no different from a character getting a tattoo. We removed the ability for them to cast spells simply because of the new rework for magic, I personally think that Spiritblessed should be able to cast spells. The reason for this being that three big powers on the server are Divine, Arcane and Elementals. Divine are granted their powers from their god and their god has major impacts on the lore of the server. Arcane get the power from themselves and are able to affect the server in quite large ways similar to that of Divine. Elementals are also a huge thing on this server, there are some elementals that I'm sure not even the Divine can deal with, or least be bothered to fight them. But out of the three, elementals don’t seem to have any real impact however in the old system they did. They used to have quite strong powers and make a character quite powerful that one could argue was on par with Adept and tier 3 of Divine. Now though Spiritblessed were simply nerfed to the ground to focus more on the flavour and aesthetic that they brought.
For every rework there seemed to be a grandfathering or move in the power. Vyre’s who had high chains can shift their power over into consumed. In the new magic rework characters who are at Adept can shift their powers over towards the new system and start off high. Even in hollowcrafting people were able to grandfather in their experience to reflect their ic knowledge. However when it comes to Spiritblessed those who are at higher tiers are simply stripped of power, growing weaker and never being able to achieve higher power. We went from Spiritblessed being a quite interesting and powerful alternative to the big three to being nothing but flavour. We shifted away from the spell casting and from what I can gather simply because staff didn’t wish to give Spiritblessed spells and wanted that to be more of a magic thing. Originally Spiritblessed was something staff didn’t need to monitor, you didn’t need a prayer log to get your power it was something you can give yourself. They would come in and move you into a higher tier when your character deserved it. Maybe they didn’t wish to come in and update peoples powers and wanted Spiritblessed to be something they didn’t need to look over. In which case I understand but the tiers of strength could still be there. We already have a self-governed system through Vyres that staff don’t really need to pay that much attention too, so why can’t we have a similar system to that of Spiritblessed?
The Spiritblessed rework is one that I feel didn’t quite hit the mark, it's a step in the right direction but there needs to be more. We can’t leave this system as it is as a simple flavour thing, I would prefer us going back to the old system or at least an attempt to adopt the two. Personally, I really liked the fact that Spiritblessed had endless casts/abilities. They already had a limited amount of spells they could use so giving them one they can use over and over again was good. We still do have the ability to cast spells an infinite amount of times with the small abilities, but those abilities at the end of the day are nothing but flavour. Spiritblessed shouldn’t simply be flavour like a tattoo, they should have an impact upon the server and be a new option of power that people can go into.
This is what I think about the current Spiritblessed, if you disagree feel free to reply here or PM on Discord if you don’t want to clog the thread. If any of this is wrong feel free to correct me. I wanted to say more but this is already long enough.
