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Alpha Two testing is currently taking place five days each week. More information about Phase II and Phase III testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two testing is currently taking place five days each week. More information about Phase II and Phase III testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Lore thoughts: Summoners and the Gods
Halae
Member, Alpha Two
We were told in the most recent livestream that summoners draw on unformed souls to give them bodies that can be made use of in combat. With that in mind, it seems to me that summoner is probably the closest archetype to acting with proper high-concept divine magic.
Before anybody gets up in arms about that being the cleric, I'm gonna point to something Steven's said previously:
Moving on, according to lore, the gods didn't create the Essence, but they are the foremost manipulators of it, and they create souls as conduit points for the Essence to flow through. This is particularly interesting, since it suggests that souls are essentially tools through which the gods themselves manipulate the Essence, or else why would they have needed to start from scratch following the debacle with the Ancients? The "Mortal Coil", AKA the Soul within AoC terminology, thus necessarily is amplifying the Essence for use in some way.
The thing is, the Ancients do all their finest work based on soulstuff; it's how they manipulated their species into a caste system, how they warped the world via corruption, how they became totally immortal, and how they introduced necromancy to the people of Verra. The Ancients learned immortality, manipulation of physical existence, and the warping of souls in general from the three gods known as the "Others".
With that in mind, it seems to me that the manipulation of souls, crafting bodies for them, and things like that are fundamentally the same, if lesser, versions of what the gods do with their own magic, and necromancy is like its bastard little cousin. Far moreso than the pure energy types of magic the other magical classes are using, because summoners are interacting with the fundamental structures of the world far more directly than a bard, a mage, or a cleric due to the fact that they're interfacing with souls themselves.
Before anybody gets up in arms about that being the cleric, I'm gonna point to something Steven's said previously:
One of the probably biggest delineations from your standard trope in MMORPGs is that the Cleric does not receive their powers from a divine source. At least not in the sense that is standard. It is still something that is tied intrinsically to the use of manipulation of the Essence as a source of magic. Now, the source of that Essence is up to question: There are some claims about it that might apply a divine interaction, but generally it's not as though you're being imbued by these powers from the gods and that the gods can take them away should you step out of line in your alignment.
Clerics are doing 'radiant' magic for healing, manipulating Essence towards that fact, the same way mages are doing 'elemental' and 'arcane' magic.Moving on, according to lore, the gods didn't create the Essence, but they are the foremost manipulators of it, and they create souls as conduit points for the Essence to flow through. This is particularly interesting, since it suggests that souls are essentially tools through which the gods themselves manipulate the Essence, or else why would they have needed to start from scratch following the debacle with the Ancients? The "Mortal Coil", AKA the Soul within AoC terminology, thus necessarily is amplifying the Essence for use in some way.
The thing is, the Ancients do all their finest work based on soulstuff; it's how they manipulated their species into a caste system, how they warped the world via corruption, how they became totally immortal, and how they introduced necromancy to the people of Verra. The Ancients learned immortality, manipulation of physical existence, and the warping of souls in general from the three gods known as the "Others".
With that in mind, it seems to me that the manipulation of souls, crafting bodies for them, and things like that are fundamentally the same, if lesser, versions of what the gods do with their own magic, and necromancy is like its bastard little cousin. Far moreso than the pure energy types of magic the other magical classes are using, because summoners are interacting with the fundamental structures of the world far more directly than a bard, a mage, or a cleric due to the fact that they're interfacing with souls themselves.
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I am intrigued to learn more about this as more hints of lore are dropped in and out of game.
EDIT: They did state in the stream that "just" the summoner archetype will have summons that are "barely" holding together in essence (thus their more spirit-ish design) - but that secondary archetypes will allow them to get more concrete forms. I wonder what will be the case for summoner/summoner; if they'll just continue to have more spirit-ish summons or perhaps something... more?
That has some implication for the lore. With Summoner/Summoner, what are we doing when we summon a single super-pet? Are we making the soul we've summoned more stable? Are we giving it a stronger material base to work off of? It's a fascinating question.