As before here is an outline I believe would make the religions much more active and important in CE gameplay.
Equality, fill in the blanks of the non beta religions, for instance Relic hunters call out battle crys to Set or Defari mention Yog upon death. Most of the other religions dont have this nor do they have emotes to thier religious customs. For example a worship emote that does an animalist howl for Sag or sexually suggestive emote for Derketo. As well add in a few GODDESS religions, such as Ishtar (earth, Healing, and Fertility), Kali (Death, Healing, and War), and Wiccana (plants, healing, and nature).
Balance. Each religion should offer similar things but within the restriction of that religions customs. As a guideline for this balance ALL religions should have:
A. A healing/vitality item.
B. A combat weapon.
C. In addition to religious attire should have a set of each type of combat armor.
D. A banner/placeable identifying religious claim.
E. An animal skin for specific animal types rendering them into effigies/Demi-Avatars.
F. Religion specific Warpaints that aesthetically blends well with their armor colors scheme and provides minor buffs and or decreases the rate religion offerings decay.
CROM would be included but in a different aspec. Croms faithful would have to be found worthy. Said religious recipes would be obtainable only through a series of quests given by Conan himself. Much like the process of removing the bracelet in the Exiled Lands. This would unlock the Forge of Crom and his religious artifacts.
Religion rivalry. NPC aggro would be able to identify player primary religion and aggro if said religion is of a rival to thier own. Example, a Mitra player heads to Sepermarru ALL NPCâs there would aggro where a Set player only the bandits would aggro. But more emphasis should be put into long held rivalries between gods and on their allies. For instance, Setâs primary enemies are Dagon and Mitra, and his primary allies are his wife Derketo. Derketoâs primary enemies are Ishtar, Zath, and Wiccana. Her allies are Set and Kali. Though for Zath and Crom they extremely dispise ALL the other gods and have no allies. Only NPCs with specific religious ties will be effected, such as Relic hunters, Dogs of Desert, Cultists of Dagon, Derketo worshipers. Wearing the armor of an enemy god would negate the aggro but would impose a debuff while wearing it. Also would like to add that Priest thrall be placeable and used in combat as buff/debuff thralls in base defense.
Divine Notoriety. Much like the purge meter this bar would fill based on the clanâs faith or how often they craft in each shrine, thrall count, discovered points of interest and so on. As players progress through their story their notoriety/infamy grows making them more well known by the NPCs rendering disguises in effective once full. However with full Divine notoriety comes a few benefits. On of which you would now have the attention of the gods themselves for better or worse and as such gain favor from your chosen god ie longer lasting warpaints, offerings, religious item durability, or in very rare cases a chance to respawn in the last location you died. These favors would be random and not controlled by the players.
Primary? As ive mentioned a few times, with religion trainers would be impossible to restrict players to just one religion, and so under Clan Tab the clan leader would have the option to choose the clanâs primary religion otherwise primary will be chosen by the majority of what the clan members chose at character creation⊠Which would give access to Tier 4 shrines. As before you gain access to all previous items. However a T4 shine has a 1 per clan limit and can only be accessed if that god is the clans chosen primary. T4 shrines would give access to the religious combat gear previously mentioned, allow clans to declare a religion war onto a clan with an opposing T4 shrine, and T4 shrines are immune to destruction when summoning a god token albeit at a higher crafting cost of the token. Primary religion can be changed but to do so would require a tablet of power and an offering for the new primary god.
Alliance. For too long players whose friends are in different clans have had to be careful not to hit their buddies when fighting mobs. With this new religious system its time to fix that. There should be two types of alliance. The first Temporary Alliance would work much like joining a party or voice chat group where its on an individual basis and is disband once all have logged out or left the group. The other is Clan Alliance. In a clan you clan mates names show up green, you cant target lock them and do significantly reduced damage. Clan Allies names would show up as blue, you cant target lock them, but if you hit them the damage is only reduced by half the normal friendly fire reduction. This would make it fair but also less complicated when fighting side by side. However there is one downsideâŠYou can only form Clan Alliances with those whose Primary God is an Allie of your clanâs primary god. For ie if Set is your clanâs primary you could only Allie with other Set clans or Derketo clans.
I would like to thank all those who commented on my last thread that resulted in the edits. But special shout outs to those who helped improve my idea. @Croms_Faithful@CodeMage@IPL_Victim
Not exactly sure how balanced this system would be or if it would prevent exploitation as intended, but perhaps an excellent Modder could find a way to implement and test this theory?
I will have to digest your ideas but one question pops in my mind. What happens to players with multiple religions? On PvE type servers at least, many players tend to complete all the religions.
Also would Crom not be hated by anyone since who is Crom to other other Gods⊠or hated by all?
Back again hey RavenS117? All good, keep up the good fight friend. I wont respond to all sub-categories, but will point out a few standoit points instead.
Yeah I am definately up for adding in more religions. Some may disagree, but I say you can never have too much of a good thing. Wiccana sounds especially, especially if it were to expand the catalogue of plants in the game, and possibly alchemy too. Another member once mentioned that one of the gods favours a bow, but I cannot remember who. This would be good, as not of the gods currently offer craftable bows.
Sounds good to me. All of the above make sense, and none are a stretch of the imahination. In all honesty, virtually everything I feel that each of the religions should have is covered in the original post.
I still like this idea. As long as we are free to switch our primary or T4 option later. But only having one active favourite sounds good, especially if it opens up some new crafting recipes.
Crom Forge you say! For the record, Funcom has previously announced that they do not intend to add fetch quests to the game, so this could be tricky to get it to work. The best way would probably be to use an existing model. Something similar to taking all of the pieces of the Scourgestone to Petruso the Sandstorm Maniac, with a selectble dialogue option to turn in all artifacts may be a good approach.
The only thing Crom worshippers would need would be a legendary crafting station (reskinned improved blacksmithing bench) called the âAnvil of Cromâ that plays Basil Poledourisâ Anvil of Cromâ when you craft something worthy from steel. Iâm still hoping for more religious goodies like Derketo cat statues, Ymir black ice throne with bear or wolf pelts so as not to freeze ones butt, Jhebbal Sag animal pelt rugs and tapestry, massive Set serpent statues (pref Ron Cobb stuff), Yog âsomething with tentaclesâ, Zath spider silk tapestry and carpet, no clue on Mitra. Never actively worshipped him.
Equal in the items types offered by each religion. But each item will differ from its counterparts in other religions based on the Godâs domain. For instance Derketoâs healing item would be far superior to the other religions, but her combat armor set would be weaker. Another example, Jhebbal Sagâs religion pet would be far superior but the rest of his offerings would be average, maybe have a craftable potion that turns the user into a werewolf for 30 seconds.
That being said I may have to write up an addendum that sort of lays out what the âequitableâ items are.
When your character dies he asks you the riddle of steel, if you answer wrong he will laugh and cast you out of Valhalla! At which point your character wakes back up in your spawn point
If you answer correctly he will welcome you to Valhalla. Unfortunately that means your character is dead and he deletes it from the game
The problem with giving each religion buffs such as deadlier pets for Jhebbal Sag is balancing. Bring it in and thereâll end up being a bazillion posts saying players only need to go for x god because of buffs. Pvpers will also most likely scream and cry for nerfs on religion.
Could even have the religious weapons, such as Ymirâs axe as an option for ritual kills /harvesting for max level characters instead of ye olde ritual hatchet or murder knife.
You know RavenS117 I had an idea on how we could actually wield a fragment of Cromâs power in the game. But much like with forging Star Metal meteorites into weapons, NOT by asking him for aid. But rather by ingeniously using what he has actually sent into the world to destroy things. I hear some people say âalright, so whats the idea alreadyâŠ!?â. It involves to some extent restoring the original feature idea which Funcom once had [quoted by Jens Erik during a Developer Stream]:
âIn early development, the idea was to have [Crom] send a monster after you if you tried to pray to him.â
This idea for a Crom Purge mechanic is not new as we can see here, and there is also Conan lore chronicling a purge incident taking place. So I thought to myself, suppose Crom sent the aforementioned monster (or possibly a horde of them) to kill the player and we successfully slayed the creature. NOW what if we were to harvest the slain creature for parts; blood, bones, hide, you name it, and used these to construct our own weapons, armor, or even a Forge itself using parts from the creature, or imbued other raw materials with these parts??
Could I possibly be onto something here, I would like to ask a few friends for an honest opinion. RavenS117, @Broc, @Twitchy, @IPL_Victim. Any other friends and members who would like to offer their thoughts are welcome to do so too.
Crom is a god, donât you think he would foresee this potential benefit to you and not simply make them dissipate into the ether when they were slain?
Reiterating my thoughts from previous, similar threads:
the gods of the Exiled Lands are not (necessarily) the real Hyborian gods (whose existence is never proven in canon, anyway). As Conan says in the game, the gods are what people want them to be - weapons. Tools of power. Exiles are selfish worshippers. They donât venerate their gods for the godsâ sake, but for their own, and the power harvested from living souls turns those prayers into reality.
From this perspective, whatever boons the deities in Conan Exiles grant, they donât necessarily have to reflect the lore or the godâs portfolio perfectly. If youâre dehydrating in the desert, youâre going to pray your god for water, whether itâs Manann or Asura. If youâre assailed by savages, youâre going to pray for strength to crush your enemies, see them driven before you and hear the lamentation of their women, whether you worship Ymir or Ishtar.
And whether the actual gods Mitra, Ymir, Derketo, Yog, Set, Jhebbal Sag and Crom care one whit about what people in the Exiled Lands are doing in their name, or whether they even exist, doesnât matter. The gods of the Exiled Lands were created by man.
I agree Kapoteeni. This aspect of the lore has afforded us some unique opportunities which would not likely be plausible in other Conan stories. However, the manifestation of the monster may actually have some unintended accuracy to it.
âTheir gods are Crom and his dark race, who rule over a sunless place of everlasting mistâ-The Phoenix on the Sword.
"Cromâs devils! Let men worship what gods they will.â-The Hour of the Dragon.
That is of course not my suggesting that the monster is Crom himself, but it could actually be one of his reportedly dark minions.
Personally I like the idea. I can see it going down along the lines of building small shrine-esque structure to incur the wraith of crom, large force of hostiles begin assailing you and your fortress, let the slaying commence, harvest said baddies for valuable materials, throw in a little starmetal, proceed to wear your enemies like a hat. I like it.
It also seems fitting to me, by your own hand you fell great enemies and turn them into weapons by your own strength.
Love the idea; it feels right, whether âlore appropriateâ or not .
On a side note, when I invoked Crom this morning after I broke a tenon off that I was painstakingly shaping, Crom rewarded me immediately when the mallet then landed on my foot. Now thatâs divine intervention you can count on.
Hmm. Interesting. From a certain point of view, it could be argued that the implementation of the purge/surge trap is similar.
*Set up a trap (altar)
*Feed the trap (altar)
*Encourage/discourage a swarm of creatures
*Harvest said creatures
It wouldnât take much work, I think, to use that mechanic for Crom. Perhaps the fuel is the religious paraphernalia of the other avatars. Summoned critters could be the same twisted and mutated surge beasts, or a set of dark vanir or some such. Or, even variants based on the offerings burnt in the trap.
*set: snakes, relic hunters, etc.
*yog: darfari, dogs of desert, desert animals
*ymir: frost giants, young dragons, wolves and such
*etc.
Interesting idea and the mechanics to make it work are already in game since the Siptah update.
Some may disagree, but I say you can never have too much of a good thing. Wiccana sounds especially, especially if it were to expand the catalogue of plants in the game, and possibly alchemy too. Another member once mentioned that one of the gods favours a bow, but I cannot remember who. This would be good, as not of the gods currently offer craftable bows.
For the record, Funcom has previously announced that they do not intend to add fetch quests to the game, so this could be tricky to get it to work. The best way would probably be to use an existing model. Something similar to taking all of the pieces of the Scourgestone to Petruso the Sandstorm Maniac, with a selectble dialogue option to turn in all artifacts may be a good approach.