The Knights Templar in CLOK: Reawakened

[Ela]

As CLOK: Reawakening moves forward, I wanted to broach this topic while guilds are still being finalized. I currently play a Templar missing a number of abilities and features the other players have right now, so it will be near enough to the experience a new player to the guild will have when they're initiated. Maybe we can help smooth things out for our new knights with some ideas. Here are some of mine.

Guild Points, Related Services and Ranks

As of the time of this posting, we can't earn guild points right now. It would be helpful to have this restored so that players can start building up their guild points, especially newer or lower ranked players that have had to use their points for supplies ( read: armor, food, weaponry, training ) to set their characters up.

In CLOK 1.0, Templars had a repair service through NPCs which ran half the normal time - 12 hours instead of 24 hours. It cost guild points to repair items, but having this restored would help a lot since we aren't supposed to be acquiring massive amounts of riln. Most of the NPCs I fight on my Templar don't even leave bodies behind when they die to loot/bury, so I'm encouraged to either ask other players for wealth, acts of generosity by offering their services for free or grind out tasks from town hall to cover repair costs; low level NPCs no longer drop enough riln with a recent change to prevent high level players from farming lower level areas.

Another service was a monk which would offer free healing so that we didn't have to pay Hildibrand or other NPCs healers. It'd be great to get this NPC back, too!

Something I don't recall ever being told or shown was that we could earn warhorses from NPCs at a certain rank. The destriers apparently required a certain rank and guild points to purchase but I'll defer to another player with more experience here.

Abilities are hit or miss right now. Stalwart doesn't function as far as I can tell, but Spear of Light, Halo, Sacred Chants ( minus Zeal ) and Serafina's Blessing all work. You can't acquire them from NPCs, but if a legacy character had them, they'll still know them. Word of mouth is that Sun Disc isn't being restored.

Patrol tabards are currently bugged. They're Templar items but require you to be in the Monastic Order to use them.

I'd love to see abilities most abilities detached from rank and instead be based on stat training OR the implementation of a system to track your total earned rank, allowing you to spend points without losing/dropping ranks. I want to emphasize this because ranks aren't saved based off of the total guild points you have. If you buy any of the services I've listed, your rank could go down, true to any guild in the game I imagine but most don't have story limitations attached to them like the Church does. You're being asked to choose between hoarding guild points to inflate your rank to train an ability, after which you can spend them immediately, or buying items/services you might need in the present. Coming back to CLOK: Reawakened, for the longest time, my character didn't have a full set of plate armor because I felt the need to preserve guild points to be able to train Serafina's Blessing, allowing her to channel in the armor, when it would be reimplemented. She went from rank 9 to rank 6 buying arms, armor and some amazing flavor items purchased as duplicates to use while pieces are being repaired, as replacements lost due to bugs, or simply for story reasons.

Channeling

Right now, per a message from the GM(s), the ability for players to earn or learn Serafina's Blessing isn't in the game. The ability exists since other Templars don't seem to struggle with short-term channeling, but we're unable to acquire it. Without it, channeling is difficult and inconsistent while wearing the metal heavy armor supplied by the vendors in the guild area. The results are either instantaneous loss of the channel or it lasting sometimes beyond thirty seconds or so. My experience is that the channel is weighted heavily towards losing it instantly, putting you in a +3 RT.

The new Occult stat hasn't had any noticeable impact which makes total sense because we don't want Sorcerers or Elemancers with high occult stats being able to wear heavy armor while channeling simply because the sum of their casting stats allow it.

A certain guild has certain armor which allows for an easier time channeling something they have. If we could get something similar, that'd be great!

Ideas

With changes to the guard system, we can reasonably expect the Protector's Vow line of abilities to be revamped or removed. I never used Minor Beacon but I'd like to see its return with additional functionality similar to Novas ( hits everyone not currently grouped with the user ) if it currently lacks it. Stalwart offering some protection from the surprise status would be nice. An ability which grants bonuses for fighting together would be neat but I'd also enjoy for another ability which grants bonuses when you're fighting alone or while guarding a person for Dreadnoughts. I'd also really enjoy having a disarm ability, weapon or option to allow us to subdue enemies rather than outright kill them.

Tl;dr
Please allow us to earn guild points.

[Smoothcoffee]

I'm thankful for this post.
I understand that we could gather riln as long as it is for an explicit purpose. But I came around in 2020 when that wasn't an option, and suddenly having to farm riln for repairs of arms/armor/food/healing feels outside of the scope of the code. I know of a templar who is completely out of merit since they used it for food. I went from about rank ten to maybe four simply buying food. I believe our scripture books are no longer supposed to work as it served a specific purpose, (was it channeling or thaumaturgy)?
One last thing is more specific to eeveryone. I'll be really grateful for when we can have grit training back on war mounts. Right now, even the destriers are frightened of a leaf fluttering in front of their faces, so they'll bolt and we'll accidentally stop guarding. The bandaid solution is simply not to train mounted, of course.
Thanks again for posting on this!

[Gorth]

I'm not a templar, but I feel like, as a specialized, hard to get into guild, these would be nice things to add. Even just having these systems in place would be good, for when other guilds start getting slotted back in.

[Ela]

In less than twenty-four hours, our tabards fixed ( patrols aren't in the game as a whole but we can wear them and that's what matters right now), guild merit/guild points can be earned again ( a number of guilds can earn them now! ), a number of our abilities have been reinstituted and can now be trained without needing rank and Occultism now factors into some of our abilities. I'm certain I'm missing things.

In short, Rias has vastly improved quality of life for characters in the guild. Thank you for looking out for us.

[verel]

That's great for the Templars. Good to hear that abilities are now restored. It was always neat as a non-Templarr to see these abilities in action and it makes y'all pretty reliable in sticky situations.