New "Occult Proficiency" stat (and phasing out Channeling skill)

[Rias]

Per the changelog: The new Occult Proficiency character stat has been implemented to provide a proficiency rating based on the sum of a character's occult skills. This Occult Proficiency rating will replace instances of Channeling skill prerequisites such as those required to take the Quickchannel Adept and Quickchannel Master abilities. A character's current Occult Proficiency rating can be viewed in the output of the OCCULT command.

Why: The old Channeling skill was pretty bad, particularly when it came to skilling it up. The usual technique was to start channeling something, idle until exhausted, idle until energy regenerated, and repeat. It wasn't fun to do and it didn't feel rewarding or meaningful. If anything, it felt like excessive tedious drudgery, and attempts to come up with ideas to make channeling practice feel more interesting were unsuccessful or just didn't feel worth the effort considering the limited application of this "skill" overall. So we figured it would be better to just come up with a different means of determining a character's general proficiency at occult channeling (for the purposes of ability prerequisites and such) that felt more natural and didn't require additional tedium.

[jerc]

Huzzah! Love this change!

Never having experienced the old Channeling skill, my understanding is that it reduced the energy burden of additional channels beyond the initial one. As I recall, this was a feature of the Sorcery skill in COGG. Is that also the case here?

[Rias]

There's a chance to avoid additional energy cost for additional channels (beyond the first) based on the specific skill associated with the additional channel. Basing it on Occult Proficiency would be giving an advantage to classes with more occult skills like Elemancers, so we probably want to avoid that.

[jerc]

Cool, yeah, that's what I meant!

How does that work with heterogeneous channels? e.g. if my sorcery is 600 and my cryomancy is, say, 2, is it better to open cryomancy and then sorcery since sorcery would be the "additional" channel?

[Rias]

Yep, that'd be the most advantageous way to do it. Presumably because you're so much more proficient with sorcery, it's easier to treat it as the secondary channel and keep your focus and effort on the cryomancy one as the first/primary channel.

[xavier]

is this going to affect monks and templars with the thaum?

[Mystry]

Very cool, I look forward to seeing this Occult Proficiency stat in game, and how it comes to be intertwined with abilities and skills further.