Triad of Darkness Guide

Guild Location:

• Continent: Laenor
• World Location: Cathedral of Darkness
• Travel to the south of the mountain range, by Zoy's Inn
• Go to the Gates of Serinna
• To get past the gate guard, you need to leave all your weapons behind. They can not even been in your backpack/frame.
• This only applies to joining. Once you are a member you can bring your weapons with you.
• Shovels count as weapons. If you can wield it you need to leave it behind.
• This is super annoying. I tend to drop my weapons nearby so I can find them. If you have a chest or room leave them there.
• More advanced players can fly you there and/or teleport your to get past the guard.
• Joining Location in Cathedral : 
• Go to the north of the cathedral, and go a bit west until you find Marcie who is normally near the chapel.
• Note, if Marcie isn't there (sometimes players kill them) you can not join until they respawn.

Guild Requirements:

• Evil Religious

My Overview of the Guild:

Triad of Darkness is the first of three guilds [triad, curate, and seminary] for players who want to be spellcasters with the Evil Religious background. These three guilds are collectively called the Evil Priests guild and are a complete replacement to the old Evil Priests guild, which while technically still exists isn't being maintained anymore. Most players only join the first of these guilds (Triad) to gain access to healing spells. For players who want to advance more though, this is a surprisingly deep guild that offers a lot of community engagement. At the top levels members of the Seminary have one of the highest potential damage spells in the game (harm body) which can reduce a target's hit points in half. Evil Priests also have the distinction of possessing the only attack/spell that ignores all resistances. Harm spells can not be resisted and always do full damage. The downside is that harm spells are technically melee attacks. The priest needs to touch their target which requires a free hand (until you have the spell damn armament), has the possibility of missing, and becomes less accurate the farther back in the party ranks you are. At the highest level of the Evil Priests guilds you can also craft a custom swamp headquarters, and there are a number of special spells revolving around blood magic and mummified corpses.

This guide will focus on players who are joining Triad as their secondary class. More advanced evil priest tips will be covered in follow-up guides for the Curate and Seminary guilds. As a disclaimer, I'm currently only joining Triad for a few healing spells so I don't know when I'll have a chance to learn more to create these follow up guilds.

Pros:

•  Offers healing spells for players choosing the Evil Religious background
• The most advanced healing spell is "Cure Serious Wounds" but that's the mainstay mana-efficient spell even for Good Religious healers.
• Unlike the healing offered by the Reaver guild, this spell lets you heal other players as well.
• It lets you be a good pick-up healer for EXP parties.
• Their damage spells can not be resisted
• This is very helpful when taking on top-tier monsters
• As one of the newest guilds, it offers a ton of community engagement and depth
•  If you want to roleplay a character and/or join a guild which has more to it than just showing up and training, this is the guild for you.
• This guild pairs well with a lot of the other Evil Religious guilds
• As most Evil Religious guilds are front-row damage dealers, this guild fits into them very well and helps fill some of the gaps in other guilds.
• It is a great secondary guild to join.
• You can eventually develop your own personal swamp with structures which is pretty cool
• If you like base building in World of Warcraft, this is a similar experience.

Cons:

• This guild is incredibly weak on its own
• I would strongly recommend against picking this as your first guild. That is playing Batmud on hard mode.
• You really should gain 10 to 15 levels in a different guild first before you even think about joining the Triad.
• Their main damage spells have a ton of downsides
• To make up for the fact that harm spells can't be resisted there were a number of balancing factors added onto them
• You need to touch your target.
• This means you first need to cast the spell successfully (which can fail) then succeed in a melee attack (which can also fail).
• Long story short, expect roughly 50% of your spells to fail to do damage when you are starting out. Even advanced priests will only have a success rate of 80-90%
• Harm spells can not kill, only harm
• This means the best a harm spell can do is reduce your target to one hit-point.
• You will need to have a follow up attack to kill your target
• This also means you can't one-shot kill monsters.
• I hope you like to read
• There are sooo many books to read for this guild.
• This might be a plus for you. But given the focus on community engagement that also means you need to devote the time to participating this guild vs. adventuring.
• The healing is lackluster
• Being the best Evil Religious healer is kind of saying you are the tallest leprechaun. It doesn't mean a whole lot compared to Good Religious healers.
• Even Civilized background players can often heal better than you.

Triad Quick Start Guide:

1. Join the guild. 
• Stash your weapons somewhere safe. You can't take them with you to join the guild
• Go to the Cathedral of Darkness
• Find the the trainer Marcie in the guild. They wander and are sometimes killed by players so this might take a while
• See the "Guild Location" section above for more information
2. Focus on training heal spells/skills first.
3. Only train "Cause light wounds" to 40%
• You need it trained to 40% to advance in the guild.
• Otherwise you'll be casting "Cause Serious Wounds", and later "Cause Critical Wounds", as your main damage spell.
4. Most other skills/spells in this guild are situational, so you can advance very quickly only focusing on the core skills/spells unlike with many other guilds.
5. Look at advancing your level more than pumping EXP into skills/spells.
6. If this is a secondary guild for you focus on advancing in your primary guild and only put a few levels into this guild first to gain access to better healing spells.
7. If this is your primary guild, I'd recommend looking for parties where you can help with healing to earn your EXP.
8. There will be various guild related events such as sermons. Feel free to participate in them or ignore them as you want. They don't make a big impact until you start getting into the more advanced parts of curate and seminary.

Guild Help

• (Highly Recommended): Batwiki's Guide to the new Evil Priests: Link 
• There is more information here than will ever make it into this blog.
• List of materials to build up your swamp base: Link

Complimentary Guilds

Evil Priests [triad, curate, and seminary] struggle as being the primary guild. Here are a brief overview of possible pairings

• (Highly Recommended): Tigers
• Bat.org Description: Link
• Quick Overview:
• This is a "secret" guild for the Evil Religious background that focuses on martial arts and assassination
• Tigers provides a lot of avoid skills to enhance your survivability in the front row of a party
• The fact that Tigers are martial arts focused also helps with your harm spells, making them hit more reliably and negating the "must have a hand free" penalty.
• Evil priests provide Tigers healing, big hitting spells, and a number of other helping options to help enhance them.
• Long story short, these two guilds go very well together.
• (Recommended): Tzarakk
• Bat.org Description: Link
• Guild Writeup: Link
• Quick Overview:
• Tzarak are a defensive guild that focuses on riding a demonic steed
• Given their ability for their mount to take a lot of damage, Tzarakk provides Evil Priests the ability to survive in the front row of a party.
• The heal spells of Evil Priests is very helpful for Tzarakks to get back in the fight. Also Tzarakks tend to run out of endurance points when using skills, so being able to cast offensive spells using spellpoints really helps them limit downtime regenerating.
• The downside is that the need to keep one hand free for harm spells limits Tzarakk's a lot since ideally they should be wielding a polearm and a shield. This can be mitigated once you can learn the "Damn armament" spell.
• All Tzarakk players will likely benefit from having a few levels in Triad. While not as good a pairing as Tigers, Tzarakks still make a good complimentary guild to Evil Priests.
• (Neutral): Reavers
• Bat.org Description: Link
• Quick Overview:
• I'll admit a lot of ignorance when it comes to Reavers since I've never played them. That being said, Reavers can benefit Evil Priests, but the Evil Priests background is less helpful to Reavers.
• Reavers have their own self-healing spells so they don't need as much help from Triad levels.
• Reavers are also a primarily offensive guild so their offensive attacks don't pair well with Evil Priest spells.
• It's not a bad pairing so if this is something you want to do go ahead. But it will be a harder path forward.
• (Neutral): Aelena
• Bat.org Description: Link
• Quick Overview:
• I'll admit a lot of ignorance when it comes to Aelena since I've never played them. 
• Aelena is a primary dodge based guild like the Tigers, and focuses on using poisons in their attacks.
• In general, Aelena is considered one of the weaker guilds for Evil Religious players (it is a popular guild for Civilized background players though), so I don't know if I would recommend it.
• (Tough Fit): Kharim
• Bat.org Description: Link
• Quick Overview:
• I'll admit a lot of ignorance when it comes to Kharim since I've never played them. 
• Kharim is a primary defensive guild that focuses on development of a chaos blade
• Kharim can benifit from the healing provided by the Triad guild, but the Kharim guild really guides players to wielding a chaos blade and a shield which makes casting harm spells problematic unless you keep up "damn armament" all the time.
• (Tough Fit): Nergal
• Bat.org Description: Link
• Quick Overview:
• I'll admit a lot of ignorance when it comes to Nergal since I've never played them. 
• I've heard Nergal is a really fun guild that lets you zombify monsters and make them your hosts to take damage and attack for you.
• The downside is that you invest your statistics into your hosts to make them more powerful. This means you will have significantly less spell points to cast Evil Priest spells.
• I've heard that this combo can work but only for more advanced players who have very good equipment sets. It is a tough guild pairing to do. 

Skills and Spells Learned from the Triad Guild:

A Quick Note about Harm Spells:

• The spells have a melee attack component
• In addition to successfully casting the spell, you also need to "touch" your enemy for it to harm them.
• This means you have two chances to "fail" to damage your target (failed cast, and failed touch)
• The ability to "touch" your target gets harder the further back you are in a party. So you have the best chance when you are in the front row, and diminished chances when you are in the second and third row.
• Therefore, evil priests should avoid being in the back row of a party.
• Harm spells are more effective if you use your right hand vs. your left hand.
• Skills like martial arts makes these unarmed harm strikes more likely to hit
• You need a free hand to cast harm spells.
• You can not wield a weapon or shield in that hand, or carry casting equipment
• This can be mitigated by the damn armament spell. This spell cast on your primary weapon will allow you to channel harm spells though it. The downside is this spell only lasts about 10 minutes or so.
• Harm spells can not be resisted.
• This is where harm spells shine against high level monsters
• This is less important against lower level monsters
• Harm spells can not kill monsters on their own
• If a harm spell would result in death, it will instead reduce the target to one hitpoint

Harm Spells:

• (Spell) Cause Light Wounds
• Description: The lowest level harm spell
• Training Priority: (High to 40%. Low/Skip afterwards)
• You need to train it to 40% to advance to level 5 in the guild
• After that you will probably be using more advanced harm spells
• Notes:
• With your 30% Evil Religious background bonus that means the 40% training is effectively having the skill at 70% which makes it very reliable from a casting perspective.
• This also means if you train this spell to 100% you will have an effective cast percentage of 130%. This reduces the spell cost of this spell making it almost "free" to cast.
• Cause Serious Wounds takes the same time to cast as Cause Light Wounds. Even though this spell is more mana efficient you'll want to cast more advanced spells for the higher damage.
• This spell does equivalent damage to the Push skill
• (Spell) Cause Serious Wounds
• Description: A solid replacement for Cause Light Wounds
• Training Priority: (High to 33%. Medium to 60%)
• You need to train it to 33% to advance to level 6 in the guild
• Cause Serious Wounds will eventually be replaced by more advanced spells, but with a one round cast time this will still stay in your arsenal for when you need to cast a spell quickly and run away to avoid massive nukes a monster is casting.
• Notes:
• This spell does equivalent damage to the Kick skill
• (Spell) Cause Critical Wounds
• Description: The "top level" offensive spell for Triad (but better spells are available in the follow up guilds)
• Training Priority: (Very High to 31%. High to 60%. Medium/Low after that)
• You need to train it to 31% to get to level 10 in the Triad guild.
• With the 10% bonus from your Evil Religious background, training it to 60% gives you an effective spell percentage of 70% which is pretty reliable.
• Notes:
• This is a two round spell compared to the one rounds of the previous two harm spells
• That being said, all spells are essentially two rounds since you need one round for the spell to actually "fire". The enhanced damage of this spells make up for the 33% increased effective time it takes to cast it.

Other Offensive Spells:

• (Spell) Make Scar
• Description: Gives a player character a scar
• Training Priority: (Skip. Don't even think about studying this spell)
• This is a pure anti-player spell
• What's worse, this is a "jerk" spell. It doesn't help you kill a player. It just makes it more likely they will fumble when recovering from death ending up in a forced reincarnation (and them losing 20% of their total EXP)
• Notes:
• If you want to get on someone's permanent player killing list then go ahead and cast this spell. For everyone else, skip this spell.

Triad Specific Utility Skills and Spells:

• (Spell) Damn Armament
• Description: Lets you channel harm spells through your weapon so you don't need to keep a hand free.
• Training Priority: (Very high unless you are a Tiger and have Martial Arts)
• This is very important if you are a member of a different guild since keeping a free hand to cast harm spells really hurts your survivability (no shield) and damage output (can't dual wield two weapons).
• Notes:
• This spell lasts roughly 10 minutes in which case you will need to cast it again
• I'd recommend creating a trigger that highlights the text "The curse on your" to let you know your curse has faded away
• You can always refresh the spell so it doesn't run out in the middle of a fight
• If you can only train Damn Armaments to a low percentage due to Triad being a secondary guild for the healing, you can use the ceremony skill before casting it. This makes this spell much more reliable.
• (Spell) Mellon Collie
• Description: This spell will reduce the target's accuracy and damage they do. It's a good spell to cast before initiating combat as it is not an offensive spell.
• Training Priority: (Medium)
• This is not a spell you'll be casting every fight. But it's a very helpful spell to cast before a big fight.
• Notes:
• I need to perform more tests to see how long this effect lasts
• Also, I don't have any hard data about how much this impacts the target.