Suggestion
Range: Special (Target must be able to hear and understand caster)
1 Minute Cooldown
100 Mana
Mana cost halved due to title Mesmer’s Heir.
Effectiveness doubled due to title Mesmer’s Heir.
Allows the caster to give the target a single command, not more than five words long and taking not more than five seconds to execute, which will be obeyed if caster is at least five levels higher than target or sum of caster’s Intelligence and Charisma is at least five points higher than target’s.
Psychic Healing
Range: Thirty feet and line-of-sight
1 Minute Cooldown
100 Mana plus 50 Mana per minute
Mana cost halved due to title Mesmer’s Heir.
Effectiveness doubled due to title Mesmer’s Heir.
Encourages the target’s body to use ambient Mana to repair itself faster. Increases target’s Hit Point regeneration by 100% to 300% depending on ambient Mana levels.
Truth Compulsion
Range: Ten feet
1 Hour Cooldown
100 Mana plus 100 Mana per minute
Mana cost halved due to title Mesmer’s Heir.
Effectiveness doubled due to title Mesmer’s Heir.
Compels the target to either speak the truth, or be silent. Target cannot be forced to speak against their will either by threat or by action or the skill will stop working and cannot be used on that target again for 24 hours. Targets at least 10 levels higher than the caster have a chance, proportional to the level difference and the difference between the sum of the caster’s Intelligence and Charisma and their own, to be able to speak falsely even when this skill is in effect.
Perfect Recall
Range: Special (Target must be able to hear and understand caster)
10 Minute Cooldown
100 Mana and 100 Mana per minute
Mana cost halved due to title Mesmer’s Heir.
Effectiveness doubled due to title Mesmer’s Heir.
Allows target to perfectly recall anything that they have ever sensed or experienced. Information provided to target during skill’s effect will be retained perfectly by target, though suggestions will no more effective than they would be otherwise.
Body Control
Range: Special (Target must be able to hear and understand caster)
10 Minute Cooldown
100 Mana and 100 Mana per minute
Mana cost halved due to title Mesmer’s Heir.
Effectiveness doubled due to title Mesmer’s Heir.
Target can control their physical body to the limits of the possible. They can assume any position they can imagine or which can be described to them, perfectly, and hold it with no discomfort so long as the skill is in effect. They can make any or all of their body totally relaxed or completely rigid to the limit of their strength and durability. They can slow their metabolism to a point where casual inspection would lead most beings to believe they were dead or increase it to the limit of their mental and physical capacity.
Mana Shield
Range: Ten feet
1 minute Cooldown
50 Mana and 1 point Mana per damage point to be absorbed
Forms a shield made of Mana around the target. This shield will absorb one point of damage for every point of Mana used in its creation after the initial casting cost of 50 Mana is paid. The shield will begin to dissipate one minute after casting at a rate of one point of max damage absorbed per minute.
Mana Surge
Range: Touch
5 Second Cooldown
1-20 Mana, does 2 points of damage per Mana used.
Allows the caster to used stored Mana to inflict damage on a target they are touching. (Skin-to-skin contact not required, but must be touching target’s clothing or armor.)
Mana Bolt
Range: Fifty feet and line-of-sight
5 Second Cooldown
1-20 Mana, does 1 point of damage per Mana used.
Allows the caster to form a bolt of Mana and fire it at a target within fifty feet. Autotargets by default. If used with autotargeting, the bolt will never miss, although it can be deflected or countered. Chance to miss if bolt is manually targeted, depending on range. Manually targeted bolts may cause status effects depending on where they hit the target.
(Look, EVERY wizard learns Magic Missile.)
“Yikes,” I said to myself. “Going to be a bit of a glass cannon.”
This didn’t worry me as much as it probably should have. I liked playing magic-users in video games and they typically could do a lot of damage but couldn’t take as much as sturdier classes. This class in particular was going to be bad, because the Mesmerist spells weren’t all that useful in combat. But I had to have some kind of direct damage spell, so the first choice was simple.
“Select Class Skill ‘Mana Bolt,’” I whispered.
Danielle hadn’t so much as twitched since I put her in trance, but I didn’t see any need to share secrets with her just in case she could hear me. I mean, I liked her a lot, but… control issues.
SYSTEM MESSAGE: Class Skill “Mana Bolt” selected.
Well, that was easy. Now the harder ones.
That healing skill was very tempting. If I was reading it right, because of my Title, it would increase healing speed anywhere from two to six times for not a lot of Mana. Since it looked like you regenerated around five percent of your hit points per minute, this could take someone from almost dead to good as new in somewhere between ten minutes to less than five minutes. Eat your hearts out, Druid healers!
I really wanted most… okay, all… of those mess-with-minds Mesmerist skills, but that message about how dangerous this area was going to get frightened me. So I took the Psychic Healing skill. One left.
‘Suggestion’ was a classic Dungeons and Dragons wizard spell, and the System seemed to have implemented it in basically the same form it had in traditional role-playing games. It could be used in a huge variety of ways but it was limited by the fact that it basically only worked to make people do a singe thing, right away, unless they resisted it.
“Instant Induction,” obviously a play on a technical term used by hypnotists, looked much more flexible. The fact that it could be used on an unwilling target was both awesome and terrifying. With “regular” hypnosis - that is, hypnosis as it existed before today - it was nearly impossible to hypnotize someone who didn’t want to be hypnotized and even harder to give them suggestions that would be followed after the trance ended. The description of this ability made it sound like if the target didn’t resist, they would accept suggestions even if they didn’t want to accept them.
I admit it: that was more temptation than I could bear. I mean, I’m not a terrible person. But… that idea was pushing a big red button in the back of my head. In the end, there was no other choice to make.
“Select Cl...*cough*’”
My voice caught the first time I tried to say it, even in a whisper.
“Select Class Skill ‘Instant Induction.’”
SYSTEM MESSAGE: Class Skill “Instant Induction” selected.
I had one Attribute point to allocate. It was tempting to put it in Intelligence and power up my Mesmerist skills, especially since it was pretty clear that would also increase my Mana. But I was feeling particularly brittle thinking about what was probably coming so I dropped it into Constitution and called up my Status screen.