Pariah Question

[danuaphoenix]

Hi, I'm new here and I never did play the original EQ game, so I had an important question. I'm going to be playing some with a friend of mine and i'm not sure what alignment they are going for. Does being a pariah affect your alignment any? Do you have to stay neutral? But my biggest question is (from what ive read on SODwiki), if my friend is a lawful good cleric and wants to rez me, can they do so (assuming i stick with pariah)? Or is alignment seperate entirely from pariah? If so, do our alignments still have to match?


P.S. Sorry for all the questions, I'm coming from WOW and Darkfall Online, so this game is a little confusing.

 

[Otcho]

If you become pariah you don't have to worry about alignments you just gain a 15% bonus at all times, the only other "consequence" is any deity flagged mob will straight up kill you.

You can be rezzed etc whatever regardless of deity choice.

I highly recommend you just ignore the gods until you are more well established into the game since the benefits are not that great and there is no real incentive to pick one until later on in the game.


Tl;dr dont pledge a god

 

[Ellman02]

Alignment doesn't affect your relations with other player characters directly. Your friend could be evil and you could be good and you can still trade, group, talk together. If you're pledged to a deity you cannot attack monsters of that deity. This usually means you wont be able to raid one of the raidzones. So if your friend wants to raid a plane that you're pledged to you can't play with him in that plane besides scouting ahead. You wont be raiding until you're well into lvl 65 though.

You'll also want to match up your silvercrown(lawful), council of innovation(good), blackscale(Evil) choice with your alignment. You don't have to, but you'll gain alignment shifts from quests with those groups that boost your alignment bonus. There are a limited number of alignment boost quests available to you as a fresh 65 so you'll want to make use of the quests you can.

You also gain a deity augment specific to the religion that you choose. Pariah doesn't and will not have an augment quest. Thats just a downside of not having to worry about alignment and being able to kill in every plane.

Check out this page on the wiki too. It describes it pretty well and has links to quest walkthroughs and descriptions of the gods.

http://wiki.shardsofdalaya.com/index.php/Religion

 

[lynnettell]

Pariah doesn't and will not have an augment quest. Thats just a downside of not having to worry about alignment and being able to kill in every plane.

Not true, pariah augs just haven't been implemented yet. They will be the worst augment, along with Divine Light.

Info from here

 

[vistachiri]

Figure out which god you're going to pledge pre-doing main quest, or go along faction lines, and the choices you made (alignment wise) doing the quest. It will make your life WAY easier. If you've killed in a plane, you can't swear to that diety. Once you're pariah you stay pariah, it is a good choice if you fucked up your spec bonus to a deity beyond repair. No way to change it after it's selected.

Swearing to a diety grants you extra spec bonus over pariah provided you max your alignment in a particular direction, and an aug that corresponds extremely roughly with the tier raid zone that god has. Other than that, swearing tarhyl is a generally bad idea. Marlow and Althuna are both solid choices, as there will already be people generally in your guild pre-sworn to either of these (paladins, sk's). Also it is really stupid easy to manage alignment extremes (lawful evil, lawful good), whereas neutral alignments have no indicator of which way you are leaning sometimes leading to poor decisions.

If you are a bard or rogue, swear to something chaotic. You get as many free chaotic spec points as you damn well please pretty much free, and with pretty minimal effort.

The benefits for max spec are actually pretty great, the augs are pretty eh overall, and most if not all of the planes are skippable.

 

[Otcho]

If you are a bard or rogue, swear to something chaotic. You get as many free chaotic spec points as you damn well please pretty much free, and with pretty minimal effort.

Last time I heard this was changed and is no longer infinite chaotic points although I couldn't tell you if its true or not.

 

[Slagar]

Also it is really stupid easy to manage alignment extremes (lawful evil, lawful good), whereas neutral alignments have no indicator of which way you are leaning sometimes leading to poor decisions.

I dunno, I find chaotic and evil tend to be kind of ambiguous in a lot of cases. Generally speaking I think most people have an easier time managing the good/evil alignment than the lawful/chaotic. I think the latest edition of dungeons and dragons eliminated lawful evil and chaotic good from the alignment options for basically this reason, namely that they are kind of ridiculous ideas that only really exist because some nerds decided that ethics could be made in to a Nolan chart.

Also, if you have a neutral element and you end up taking a hit against it, you can always just go the other way the next time to keep it even, right?

 

[vistachiri]

Last time I heard this was changed and is no longer infinite chaotic points although I couldn't tell you if its true or not.

About time if so, I wouldn't know though. I only load the rogue when I have to for chests.

I dunno, I find chaotic and evil tend to be kind of ambiguous in a lot of cases.

In the context that they mean it v w yes. It's difficult to separate the two, since they're pretty incongruous.

Generally speaking I think most people have an easier time managing the good/evil alignment than the lawful/chaotic.

That I think has more to do with the paradigm you find in video games of

Choices:
A) Save the orphanage of burning puppies.
B) Fuel the fire with gas and the hair of children.

Kind of easy to pick out which is which, because they go to such extremes. We're not talking as extreme with alignment choices, but they're going to be pretty obvious, most of the time, also partially because we've all been trained to recognize them extensively. Not really so with lawfulness and such.

I think the latest edition of dungeons and dragons eliminated lawful evil and chaotic good from the alignment options for basically this reason, namely that they are kind of ridiculous ideas that only really exist because some nerds decided that ethics could be made in to a Nolan chart.

Maybe, but fuck that, 2e 4 life. Or y'know, unknown armies, CoC, and gurps and shit. Also, dark sun had a cool mechanic for chaotic, in half giants I think, the latter part of your alignment would change every day.

Also, if you have a neutral element and you end up taking a hit against it, you can always just go the other way the next time to keep it even, right?

Which works fine given that you have an infinite amount of hits and/or a way of determining how big said hits are, and if all those hits have a similar difficulty level then no biggie. Also provided those hits come anywhere near each other, and aren't months apart (granted someone doing the run now is going to have them alot closer together than someone years ago running out of hits and waiting for more).

In practice this does not happen.

Honestly I was hoping the one bounty set (not the faction or money one, been a while, I think there were 3) was originally intended for small repeatable alignment hits, but I didn't see any movement either way across limited runs with my characters.

 

[Slagar]

Alignment question

Unknown Shift

You say, 'That is the point, my dear. It is ALL empty and pointless. And I shall return it to such.

Unknown shift

You say, 'The water bitch has no power here. Gradalsh always triumphs over her in the end.'

Unknown Shift

You say, 'Shut your trap.
Chieftan Warren McAston smirks, and leaves with his family

Here's an example of how chaotic and evil are basically pretty ambiguous. I suppose the thing about the water bitch is more evil than chaotic, and the thing about everything being empty and nothing might be more chaotic than evil. But there is a pretty obvious case for that statement about returning everything to emptiness and nothingness is evil. I mean, here you're saying something that's kind of chaotic because you're saying that everything is chaos, but then that other omnicidal thing is pretty blatantly evil.

 

[vistachiri]

Here's an example of how chaotic and evil are basically pretty ambiguous. I suppose the thing about the water bitch is more evil than chaotic, and the thing about everything being empty and nothing might be more chaotic than evil. But there is a pretty obvious case for that statement about returning everything to emptiness and nothingness is evil. I mean, here you're saying something that's kind of chaotic because you're saying that everything is chaos, but then that other omnicidal thing is pretty blatantly evil.

Sometimes, but you're also forgetting a pretty obvious process of elimination to some degree, also returning things to being empty and pointless I'd really want to know the context of how one was going to do that (never did that particular quest) because depending, that could be a pretty evil response if for instance you wanted to obliterate everything.

But chaotic hits are often a pain in the balls to figure out, believe me I know (except in the rare cases where you explicitly lie to people). I generally recommend not going chaotic for anyone but bards and rogues.

All 3 factions falling into the alignments I mentioned certainly doesn't hurt things either, since you get massive hits in each. Thus if you have problems with lawful, you pick Silver crown, and call it a day. Chaotic has no such luck.

 

[Slagar]

there's really no context to it, I think it's basically just a mean thing to say to someone who you are doing mean things to during the quest.

But really, what context would make wanting to destroy everything anything but evil?

 

[vistachiri]

there's really no context to it, I think it's basically just a mean thing to say to someone who you are doing mean things to during the quest.

But really, what context would make wanting to destroy everything anything but evil?

How one was going to do that in the sense of, are you just taking a nihilistic viewpoint, and aren't going to do anything in particular other than whatever you damn well please (seeing as it doesn't matter anyways), or are you actually going to destroy everything. That's probably analyzing it a bit much.

 

[Sateru]

Other than that, swearing tarhyl is a generally bad idea.

As someone who pledged Tarhyl and raided at that tier it's really not bad of an idea. And that was before Ikisith came out. Pretty much anything you can get in ToT you can get at the same tier in another zone. And anyone who can get to the point where they can raid ToT can probably get passed it. In the long run Tarhyl is one of the better gods to pledge to.

Also the Tarhyl aug quest rules. Really low on the tedious boring stuff. Lots of violence.

 

[vistachiri]

As someone who pledged Tarhyl and raided at that tier it's really not bad of an idea. And that was before Ikisith came out. Pretty much anything you can get in ToT you can get at the same tier in another zone.

Did I miss tot weapons suddenly coming from somewhere else? Some granted are ignorable, but some (ashpyre for instance) are the most hilariously useful things ever.

Also difference between the tarhyl aug and say the althuna aug

+5hp
+25m
+4 resist
-1ac
+8str
+2sta
+4 cha
+6 int/wis

So skipping like a tier 5 zone v tier 8-10 counting generals?


You also miss out on the some of the most hilariously good healer pants in the game, and some awesome and extremely useful clickies
Magistrate band (Amazing pet buff when you have recall, hate + a damage proc. Tbh I would miss this more than mindfire and pretty much everything else)
Self port clicky to rsm
2 different resist debuff clickies (tarhyl's fiery sundering is extremely useful when a druid isn't around, and actually pretty useful even when one is if they're going to be busy early in a fight, you can pre-debuff resistant mobs with this clicky, saving them mana and time)
A large 2 tick damage increase clicky

Pretty much any guild not already past it is going to be doing it as well.

 

[Sateru]

If someone is at the point where they are picking their deity chances are good that raiding ToT is still a long ways away. CoM is a much more likely raid zone for most players.

And if you can get to tier 10 chances are you can make anything from ToT a bagged clicky.

The point i'm trying to get across is that if someone wants to pledge Tarhyl they should. You wouldn't miss ToT nearly as much as most people suggest. Also it's still possible to raid the Well and there is a mob in frost that drops some ToT loot so you won't miss it entirely.