The Channeler, and the Priest/Inquisitor/Archer

[Chorkstain]

I'm resigned to the fact that most classes will be a successor to something that has come before, however I'm confident that one of these is quite solid.

I present the Channeler for the 'modal' playing style. It could be very fun switching between the spiritual 'inhabitants' to deal with different situations. I consider this somewhat analogous to the Paladin in terms of strategy (even though no one really switched between auras in combat) although thematically completely different. I don't think this character should be tied to either melee or ranged combat, and the forms would retain a noticeable humanoid aspect, enabling them to still hold their weapons and attack with them similarly. Essentially I'm talking about a shapeshifter with a different theme.

Some possible forms:

Blaze Conduit: This form causes the Channeler to become enveloped in magical fire. He deals area damage (a la Holy Fire) however in somewhat deadlier proportion. He sustains fire damage during this time. Prospective passive abilities would grant the Channeler additional powers during this form, such as fire resistance, or a chance per time unit to fire off a fireball of some kind. This form would be ideal for dealing with hordes, and I consider the health drain to be necessary to force the player to deviate from this powerful form. There could however, be a passive ability to reduce this penalty.

Ether Glider: The Channeler becomes inhabited by an air spirit of sorts, becoming less substantial, but faster and capable of flight. With Passives, enemies struck by the Channeler have a large chance of sustaining critical lightning damage, critical arcane damage, and the Ether Glider becomes more mobile and evasive. The drawback to this form is increased damage sustained across the board. It would be useful when trying to escape or out-manoeuvre strong, slow foes, and the penchant for critical effects means the Ether Glider excels at disabling foes in myriad ways.

Brute: The Channeler is possessed by a chaotic, powerful spirit which transforms the Channeler so that he is tougher and more deadly. With passives, the Brute drains health upon strike, deals poison damage and so forth. The Brute has a few bonus HP, but he's not as resilient as the Barbarian. On the other hand, he can dispatch mobs without having to build up rage. There may not be many drawbacks to this form, however the Brute is not presented with many area attack options, nor can he withstand thick combat indefinitely so the Channeler may need to fall back on other forms.

In terms of statistics, the Channeler would not suffer greatly anywhere. Although he sounds like a strongly magical character, he is still reliant on weapons to deal most of his damage so perhaps something like 25 ST 25 DX 15 VT 20 WP, if the stats have the same scale as the first two games.

As it stands, this is not a complete idea. There are no active skills besides the forms themselves, and the abilities of the forms are all from passive skills. Possibly some of these could be transferred to being active skills. Also even though there are three forms, they may not necessarily be a skill tree each, and there could be more forms. Perhaps this is only one side of the character, but as I say, I'm quite fuzzy on the whole idea.


Now, I think it's likely that there will be a ranged character, however I'm not a fan of using pets to supplement his playing style since 'pets', as they're called, since they're often something that is summoned and then forgotten about. Necromancer summoning was interactive in Diablo 2 since you were actively cursing to maximise their effect, and it seems to be so with the Witch Doctor.

I like the idea of a cross between a priest and a ranged character, and this is because the kinds of magic a priest might use (divination, abjuration, invocation) would supplement a character who is defensive and excels at killing single targets. This character is the spiritual successor to the Amazon, perhaps, but I don't think a ranged character with many area attacks is the best way to differentiate the class... don't we have the Wizard for that? Strategically, my ranged character can quickly kill the 'keystone' monster, the shaman, the demon summoner, (perhaps with a skill like an Arcing Shot) and then having weakened the formation, picks off the rest of the horde. He is somewhat disadvantaged when facing a large, tough horde, however we have seen the broad scope of the other classes and this will not necessarily be so. Given time to prepare, this character can augment his weapons and shape the battlefield to his advantage, however if caught unaware, or faced with a long, dangerous battle, he may be easily routed.

[raveharu]

The so-called "healer" in D3 would most probably be the Witch Doctor, which makes more sense.
It would come under the "Spirit Skills" category.

The element of fire, unsurprisingly, is also given to the WD as an area of specialization, even compared to the Wizard.

[Chorkstain]

Um no that's not what I said Dr. Phil...

[Telzen]

Great idea on the Channeler, would make a cool class to play. I would add more, but I suck at coming up with ideas.

[Chorkstain]

I might add that the way the skills are being planned, a class like this could be customized in such a way that you could tailor each form to your overall strategy, since with diverse passives each form would have a fair bit of scope for customisation.

[Thrakhath]

Absolutely love the Channeller idea, but it lacks a lot of detail here. Thought I'd have a go at designing a character like this, so here goes:

The Channeller

Overview
The Channeller is effectively a shapeshifter, but much less specialized than the Druid from Diablo II. His skills are aimed at rewarding regular shapeshifting rather than encouraging him to specialize in one form. Many skills are also aimed at using enemy attacks against them in some way.

Forms
Fire-based: Character gains +X% damage as fire damage while in this form, dealing significantly more damage. He also gains fire resistance, but takes damage over time while in this form and has half normal mana regeneration.
Ice-based: Character has a percentage of damage converted to cold damage, gains cold resistance and physical resistance, and health regenerates over time. Movement speed is slowed, and mana regeneration is halved.
Lightning-based: Character moves faster, has a percentage of damage converted to lightning damage, gains lightning resistance, and his attack hits multiple targets. Reduced fire, cold, poison and arcane resistance, and half mana regeneration.
Poison-based: Character moves even faster, and targets are struck with a massive amount of extra poison damage over time, dependent on original damage. Character has a slower hit recovery, reduced physical resistance, and half mana regeneration.
Arcane-based: Character has a percentage of damage converted to arcane damage and has increased damage, along with increased speed, health and arcane resistance. This is a much higher-level skill than the others, and mana regeneration is halted in this form.

To make using multiple forms viable, additional points in these will not increase damage output. Instead, additional points increase elemental resistances and maximum resistances, so that by about level 10 characters are actually absorbing elemental damage. After changing forms there is a time delay before characters can change again. Form changing costs no mana.


Passive Skills
Thorns type skill: Reflects damage at melee attackers, perhaps in an 'Attacker takes damage of X' form rather than a percentage-based form.
Reflect missiles: Enemy projectiles have a chance to be reflected back at them.
Energising: Each form change generates some mana for the character.
Other ideas:
-Skill that boosts health when in elemental forms
-Skill that improves a characters damage for the first minute after changing form
-Skill that increases critical hit chance while in forms
-Skill that increases mana regeneration significantly in human form
-Skill that reduces the delay between changing forms
-Other passive skills could perhaps boost different forms in different ways, making them more specialised.

Other Active Skills
Enrage: Attack which enhances damage but temporarily boosts the speed and attack speed of the target.
Bloodstrike: Attack which increases damage depending on how much health the channeller has lost.
Swarm Attack: Attack which does additional damage to the target for every other nearby enemy.
Unleash: Does extra elemental damage, where the type depends on the current form.
Channel life: Forms a temporary link with the target that drains life over time (like the wraiiths in the demo, but the character is free to take other actions during this time). If an ally is targetted, this link will transfer health from the channeller to the ally instead.
Stealth: The channeller becomes temporarily invisible, and enemies will ignore him. This has a very short duration with a long cooldown time, and ends when the channeller attacks. A melee attck made by the channeller while invisible will deal significantly more damage.


The idea is that there will be many combinations of form and attack skill, allowing for a significant amount of customisation. Runes would be extremely interesting here, since every form and attack skill can have different effects depending on the rune.

[Chorkstain]

The Channeler appears to be a class that doesn't have dramatically different skills from other class, however he would provide a very different gameplay experience because as Thrakhath said, his skills reward frequent form changes.

I probably should have provided more detail with my first post, but I didn't think it would facilitate imaginings of the Channeler gameplay any better than an overall description.

[henrebotha]

I like the Channeler. I also envision the mystical fifth class (since everyone seems to half-agree that the fourth will be a ranged combatant of some sort) to be a shapeshifter.

One problem with the fire form is that, given that life replenish works the same in D3 as in D2, you could amass enough life replenish equip to cancel the life drain, thereby allowing you to stay in a very powerful form permanently.

I do agree, however, that the class would need to encourage changing shapes often - otherwise it would just be a Druid palette swap.

I like the idea that shapeshifting should cost no mana. It should also be possible to shift directly from one form into another (I'm kind of assuming that this is not possible with the Druid, as I've never bothered to test it), otherwise the process would become very clunky.

I would prefer this class to be more interesting than simply having a form for each element, as the elemental presence has been asserted ad nauseum (with both Wizard and WD having heavy elemental flava). Chorkstain's original idea of the Channeler being a vessel for various spirits is interesting. "Medium" is perhaps a better title, as I think "Channeler" is somewhat more ambiguous (in modern fantasy anyway).

I actually was thinking of something very similar to this for a potential fifth class: a Diabolist (or somesuch) who can transform into various demonic forms. The cool thing about this, design-wise, is that the class could go the way of melee fighter, ranged fighter, physical, elemental, support, or any combination of the above.

I like the Channeler. It's a cool concept. I would love to play a character like that who can swoop unnoticed into the midst of a crowd of skeletons in ethereal form, then suddenly become a raging inferno that sets them all ablaze, then shift into a hulking power form to take down their leader.

[Chorkstain]

Medium, that is a better name. I henceforth shall refer to my class as the Medium.

Few though the replies here are, they're pretty well thought out and I feel we're sharing the same ideas here. I'd love to actually plan an idea of this out in some detail however I don't see the point since Blizzard will probably do that for me.

A few things. I strongly suspect that Life replenish will NOT function the same way since this would strongly tamper with the health orb system they've got rolling. I don't think one could equip so much of it to cancel the life drain. However...

...what would cancel the life drain, is the dropping of health orbs. If you're killing things pretty fast then there's a high health orb turnover. That said, things are still hitting you and all that, so I wouldn't rely on the Blaze Conduit to produce a health-engine indefinitely.

It would be cool for the Blaze Conduit form if the damage taken came in random, powerful bursts. So if you were taking 1-20 damage at irregular intervals you'd constantly have to stay on guard and not stay in the form for too long, since eventually you'd get hit by a string of bad luck and take a huge amount of damage very quickly.

Maybe if I'm bored sometime, I'll introduce some threads dealing with each of the Medium's forms separately. The advantage of this will be the flooding of the forums with my idea, since it will quadruple the amount of threads about my class. Now that I think of it, it seems necessary since each form plays like a totally different character on its own. We'll see.

[henrebotha]

I was thinking about two related points on the train this morning.

1) Are we talking Druidic, full-form changing effects, or does the Medium retain his more or less human shape and therefore his equipment? It seems like (and this is pure conjecture, I have no basis for it) the former would not be in keeping with the new game's feel.

2) How do attacks work? I can tell you right now that even with the new skill bar, I would HATE to play a class that has (say) five different forms, and then different skills for each form. If each form only has two skills, that's already fifteen skills that have to be managed! It would never work. I propose that the default 'attack' action changes for every form, so that maybe the fire form has a Frenzy-style attack, and the hulk form has a Bash-style heavy attack, and the ethereal form has a defense-ignoring attack (or whatever, these are merely quick examples). I figure that giving all of the forms a persistent but slow mana drain effect would not be enough to discourage use of shapeshifting skills (I'm assuming here that the forms' default attacks cost no mana), but would temper the class's apparent power somewhat.

I also propose that the class be physically frail but magically powerful - maybe Str 20 Dex 20 Vit 15 Will 30. He would be reliant on his forms for attack rating, damage, and defense anyway, but would be completely ****ed if he were cornered and ran out of mana to sustain his forms. The threat of extreme danger should always be there to encourage players to manage their resources effectively.

Another point that I sort of implied: the class needs many forms. At LEAST four, but probably more. Otherwise, it remains too similar to a shapeshifter Druid. We want the player to shift between forms near-constantly, not remain statically in one form. You should need to shift forms to kill a mob the same way my D2 Amazon needs to switch between Immolation Arrow, Decoy, and Multiple Shot to take down a group of enemies, except more. :D

I actually just had another thought: what if the Medium's passive skills boost different forms? You cold have skills similar to Lycanthropy which just give more life, attack, defense, etc to all forms, and then more specialised stuff. Like say 'Spirits of Chaos' (I'm not very creative this early in the day :() would be a passive skill that increases attack rate for the fire form and gives the ethereal form the ability to reflect damage. Or something like that. The point is you need passive skills that don't favour just one class over others, otherwise many players will want to create specialised builds that focus on one form only, which is not the point.

Wow I have a lot of thoughts. I suspect drugs.

[Chorkstain]

1.) The Medium is always humanoid, although the spirits that inhabit him would leave a noticeable mark on him.

2.) I've avoided this question mostly because it's hard to answer. Erm, for the moment I'll say that I agree with you. Also, I think if there were many forms like you say, it could be interesting for the Medium to simply have the attack of each form. Not necessarily the best idea, but worth thinking about. The only problem I see with having too many forms is that in an action RPG it it's hard to make them all super-diverse. At this point each form becomes more like a single active skill. Still conjecture here, however, and it's not necessarily a bad thing either.

He'd be a lot like the Paladin this way if the Paladin's auras were more powerful and if it were necessary to change between them. I mentioned earlier that this was a take on a modal playing style so it would still work. In any case, this version of the Medium would have a spectrum of forms with overlap in each form. You could customise the forms with the Passive abilities. I don't think you meant what I'm describing in such an extreme format but I'm just putting it out there.

[henrebotha]

Well, sort of. This is obviously where that tricky 'balance' thing comes in. The Paladin had nothing encouraging him to change auras, so it was more sensible just to max out one and stick with it. The trick with this class is to make the player want to shapeshift often. It's probably also wise to avoid having the character end up playing like an Assassin (mouse-wheeling like it's going out of fashion), because the franchise already has one of those.

As an aside, I just thought of another way to encourage frequent shapeshifting: a related spell-like effect is cast when you transform into a new shape. (This doesn't have to be a part of the shapeshifting skill by default, but could be its own separate skill to invest points in.) When you take on the ethereal form, a burst of icy death explodes from you (frost nova). When you become the hulking brute, your enemies are filled with terror for a moment. When you go 'flame on!', white-hot cinders scald your foes, creating an amplify damage effect. Stuff like that, as long as it's not too powerful, would be a great way to encourage players to shift often.

'Nother thing (man, I'm just on fire today aren't I), a good skill for the Medium to have would be something like the WD's Soul Harvest spell. Particularly if the Medium has something that destroys undead, releasing their trapped souls for his consumption, adding to his mana pool. Or empowering his next transformation. Or something.

[Chorkstain]

Another thing that would encourage frequent shapeshifting is if the different forms were highly specialised. Anything that is great versus undead would fit the bill nicely.

O.K, so here's my current stance on the class.

Four or five forms. All of these forms, for whatever reason, are not self-sufficient, whether that be a health drain, extreme frailty, etc. The passive abilities for the class should aid in specialised areas, so that no one form becomes sufficient to deal with all situations. The 'active abilities' for these forms would come in the shape of the "transformation spell effects" you mentioned earlier, as well as special effects that happen at irregular time intervals. So, things that happen without direct input from the player.

Now, that last point: It may seem like a very passive way to play a character. But I argue that since the player knows to a degree what each form can do, the player can actively point the Medium's 'passive' outbursts in the right direction.

P.S. Did you ever play Spectromancer? Made by the guys who made Magic, similar style of game. The transformation spell effects reminded me of it, since many critters you summon spit out a spell-type effect when they come onto the screen. I'm not sure if this happens in other games, but there it is.