The Siderealist Class

Cosmic forces have awakened across the realm, bringing brand new forms of magic to Aetolia that have never been seen or felt in its entire history. Even in the face of these unknown forces and their risks, a newly minted group of arcanists stands ready to bend these cosmic powers into weapons and tools…

Introducing our newest class, the Siderealist!

The Siderealist class is a new neutral-tether class available to anyone who seeks to control and wield the arts of the cosmos and the forces it hides within. Not only do they wield their own brand of luminescent magic, marking them as our first neutral mage class in the game, they can also don the regalia of constellar legend – including clothing, weapons, shields, and various trinkets associated with their mythos.

If you want to learn the Siderealist class, you can do so by visiting Heiress Rashemi in the Vashnar Mountains at v4342, who now resides next to the Pool of Stars where once Hycanthus called home. Once there, you can LEARN SIDEREALIST FROM RASHEMI to obtain the class at a cost of 40 credits, much like our other guildless classes. For the first few weeks, this will be the only way to acquire the class, as apprenticeship through players will not be available until the teachings proliferate through the realm.

Here’s a quick list of information about the Siderealist!

– The three skills of the Siderealist are Ostension, Astranomia, and Crystalism.
– For the time being, lessons in these skills can only be learned from Rashemi or another player.
– The skill of Crystalism is very similiar to the Crystalism of the now-past Magi.
– Siderealists make use of FIELDPLATE armour.
– Siderealists summon forth constellar REGALIA with various abilities.
– Siderealists do NOT have a home guild they are part of.
– Siderealists CAN be selected through creation with the same limitations as other unguilded classes.

Stats & PvE
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As a mage class, Siderealists primarily rely on the INTELLIGENCE stat to deal the vast majority of their damage, however they obtain some benefit from STRENGTH through the use of their regalia’s weaponry in player combat. Astranomia and Crystalism rely mostly on equilibrium in order to dish out their abilities, however Ostension often uses balance for their regalia’s active abilities. Faster equilibrium is generally favoured though.

PvP Routes
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For those of you familiar with Ascendril and Sciomancer before they were properly given unique skillsets separate from each other, you’ll find the kill routes of Siderealist to be rather familiar. Those older classes were favourites of mine, so what I have done is taken a lot of their original concept and brought it up to speed with the current state of Aetolia.

That means that this class relies heavily on afflictions as their chosen kill route into a damage finisher. However, keep in mind the class may struggle a little bit to do this solely on its own – the design of this class relies on the returning Replicate skill in order to copy your opponents abilities and use them against them to gain an advantage. You can think of it as a ‘blue mage’ theme in some manner.

If you’ve used Replicate before it was removed from Ascendril and Sciomancer, you’ll find it’s been greatly improved to allow access to a larger pool of abilities from all classes, both old and new.

And lastly, there is now also a limb route that you can take up against limb classes, which it didn’t have before.

Lore
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For the lore hungry, we have created HELP SIDEREALIST RP so that you can roleplay the class to its fullest extent, along with help files for its three skills.

Artifacts
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The class also comes with the standard ‘hunt_siderealist(1-3)’ artifact if you are looking for such. They also benefit from the ‘magic_potence’ artifact to boost the damage output of Ray, their main bashing attack.

Final Notes
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Lastly, a final note just to set expectations. There are a lot of passive components to this class, which is especially true if you have heard of and used Crystalism before. For some, they might like the more simple style offered from passive abilities, while others might prefer a more active class. Make sure you decide that the class is for you!

I’ll be keeping an eye on them over the coming days and likely tweaking them after seeing how they perform in the live game. Feel free to let me know how you feel about it as it is put through it’s paces.

P.S. Siderealist will be banned for the upcoming Grand Duel to keep things competitive. Don’t dive into it if you’re expecting to use it for the Grand Duel!

Thanks
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A whole class can take quite a bit of effort! I want to give thanks to both Razmael, who helped with the lore side of the class, and Emellan, who did a lot of the writing for the skills of class. Send them some thanks their way!

I also want to thank the beta testers who helped out with the class, but I’ll leave it up to them if they want to reveal their help in its balancing.

That’s all for now, enjoy!

Penned by my hand on Tisday, the 10th of Chakros, in the year 8 AC.