Now that Saint Alessia is released, I'd like to provide my take on the Saint Alessia Patron

Personofsecrets

Since the announcement of the Gold Road chapter, around April 8th, I found out about the Saint Alessia Patron. Out of wanting to test my skills and also having some distaste for the recently designed Mora patron, I got the desire to come out with my own Saint Alessia Patron and see how it compares. This self-challenge has the following aspects that I've tried to set out to do.

- Not view or know the effects of any of the Saint Alessia effects or cards in advance. This was 90% done by shielding myself from the PTS and other mentions of the Patron.
- Come up with fresh ideas for TOT that would be interesting to play out. I want to see if I made something that other people may want to play with.
- Come close to what I believe the designers vision of the game is. I want to see if I made something that is within the realm of possibility from the design perspective.
- Not make something that is too powerful. I complain all of the time about power level, so I want to see how close I can design to what I personally enjoy.

First and foremost, I'm not the most familiar with ESO lore, so I did do some research. The research notes are part of the below spoiler.

I'd like to find out who Saint Alessia is and what she represents.

Alessia was a human slave through which Akatosh became channeled. Apparently, via a combination of visions that she received from Akatosh and various alliances made, she led forces that pushed back the Ayleids from the land and found the humans of Cyrodiil their freedom.

It seems that Alessia became queen of the resulting empire that encompassed Cyrodiil and Skyrim. Later the empire expanded under different leaders.

Alessia setup the religious system for the empire and became a subject of worship herself. She is relevant within ESO via the the Amulet of Kings in the main quest line and through the Dragonfires within the Imperial City.

Saint Alessia is mentioned as part of as Cyrodiil based armor set - the Alessian Order.

Alessian Order
LEVEL 50 - CP 160
ESO-Hub.com
Type PvP
ArmorSet bonus
(2 items) Adds 1487 Armor
(3 items) Adds 1487 Armor
(4 items) Adds 1206 Maximum Health
(5 items) Increase your Health Recovery by 2% of your sum total Physical Resistance and Spell Resistance, up to a maximum of 1320.

Aditionally, there are some items that are no longer able to be obtained that are related to her story. These are the items from the "Relics of the Rebellion" set; inclusions are the "Elf-Doom Maul," Shield of the Man-Bull," and "Necklace of Sardavar." I've made a video that showcases this set and it can be viewed below. This is one of my most favorite sets for nostalgia reasons.

Relics of the Rebellion
LEVEL 50 - CP 160
ESO-Hub.com
Type Unknown
ArmorSet bonus
(2 items) Adds 1206 Maximum Health
(3 items) When you deal damage, you have a 5% chance to gain a damage shield that absorbs 3010 damage for 5 seconds

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPXdm1XjMfc

Finally, I should mention the Hide of Morihaus and Balharza's Band

Hide of Morihaus
LEVEL 50 - CP 160
ESO-Hub.com
Type Overland
ArmorSet bonus
(2 items) Adds 1206 Maximum Health
(3 items) Adds 1487 Armor
(4 items) Adds 1096 Maximum Stamina
(5 items) Adds 129 Stamina Recovery, When you Roll Dodge through an enemy, you deal 0 Physical Damage and knock them down for 3 seconds. This effect scales off the higher of your Physical or Spell Resistance.

Belharza's Band
LEVEL 50 - CP 160
ESO-Hub.com
Type Mythic
ArmorSet bonus
(1 item) Increase the damage of your Light Attacks by 900. When you deal damage with consecutive melee Light Attacks, gain a stack of Belharza's Temper for 10 seconds, up to 5 stacks max. At 5 stacks, consume Belharza's Temper and after 1 second, deal 1471 Physical Damage to enemies in a line and stun them for 3 seconds. This effect can occur once every 10 seconds and scales off the higher of your Weapon or Spell Damage.

The flavor that can be gleaned from the lore and existing representations of the Alessian struggle deal with Perseverance, coalition forming, protection of one's people, matrial spirit, and momentum. I'll therefore give Alessia a setup that includes Agents and agent based bonuses, similar to Druid King. I would also like to build in some Agent protection aspect to the Agent strategy because I perceive that players find the some forms of Agent play as frustrating. Lastly, it may be good to enrich the game with something new.

Based on those notes, I decided to go with an Agent based strategy. Thematically speaking and also with some regards to the sets that have been designed in Alessia adjacent spaces, I decided that the way that Agents can fight and create momentum would be a good place to create cards around. I want to capture how people can come together as part of a slave rebellion and do battle. The resulting effects and cards, which I completed the final design aspects of today, are part of the below spoiler.

Patron
St. Alessia
UNFAVORED, Cost 1 Gold: Play an Order Faithful. This Patron now FAVORS you.
NEUTRAL Cost 2 Gold: Play an Order Faithful. This Patron Now FAVORS you.
Favored, Cost 3 Gold: Play an Order Faithful. If you have 8 "Order" Agents in play, Play Belharza, Man-Bull

"Alessia, the slave. Alessia, the Paravant. Alessia, the saint. Her will found the bonds of her people broken and realized the Cyrodilic Empire. Her line destined to protect Tamriel by way of the Dragonfires."
"- Pelinal Whitestrake"


Starter Card
Aedric Prayer
Gain 1 gold
Combo 4: Play an Order Faithful


Card 1
War Contributions
Copies: 4
Tavern Cost: 3
Gain 1 gold
Multi-Combo: Gain 1 gold


Card 2
Freedoms Call
Copies: 4
Tavern Cost: 3
Play an Order Faithful
Combo 4: Play an Order Faithful


Card 3
Through Strife
Copies: 3
Tavern Cost: 4
Gain 2 gold. Place an active Agent into their Cooldown Pile.
Combo 4: Gain 2 gold. Place two active Agents into their Cooldown Pile


Card 4
Rebellion's Charge
Copies: 3
Tavern Cost: 4
Gain 2 Power
Multi-Combo: Gain 1 Power


Card 5
Order Siege Wagon
Copies 2
Tavern Cost: 6
Contract
Agent: 5 Health
Taunt
Gain 2 Power.
Your other Agents gain 1 Health.


Card 6
The Doctrines
Copies: 3
Tavern Cost: 6
Play an Order Priest


Card 7
Divine Vision
Copies 2
Tavern Cost: 7
Gain 3 Power. Gain 3 Gold
Combo 4: Call on 1 additional Patron this turn.


Card 8
Spoils of War
Copies: 2
Tavern Cost: 8
Gain 2 gold. Place all active agents into their Cooldown Pile.
Multi-Combo: Play an Order Faithful


Token 1
Order Faithful
Tavern Cost: 0
Agent: 1 Health
Gain 1 gold
If this card would go to the Cooldown Pile, destroy it.


Token 2
Order Priest
Tavern Cost: 0
Agent: 1 Health
Play an Order Faithful
Combo 4: Your agents Gain 1 Health
If this card would go to the Cooldown Pile, destroy it.


Token 3
Belharza the Man Bull
Tavern Cost: 0
Agent: 10 Health
Until the end of the turn, your other Agents gain "Gain 1 power."
When this card leaves play, your Agents gain 1 Health.
Multi-Combo: Gain 1 Power
If this card would go to the Cooldown Pile, destroy it.


Unique Effect
"Multi-Combo"
The effect triggers once for each card of the same suit that has been played during the turn and for each card of the same suit that is played until the end of the turn.

With the effects and cards out of the way, I'd now like to share the things that excite me about this design.

Most of all is the idea of Multi-Combo. This is an effect that does more the more that it combos. Combined with the Agent aspect of the deck, I theorize that these combos can get big, but not necessarily be too big too quickly and certainly not without some counter-play. Hopefully that is the case!

The next aspect of the deck that I made which I find to be appreciated is that there is one of the Elder Scrolls legends, the Man-Bull, who get's an appearance. A place where TOT is sort of lacking, even if this is intentional, is with not having cards depicting some of it's notable characters.

Mechanically speaking, for those at high level play, I also slipped in an aspect that players must be thinking about their combos before playing their cards out. As I've documented in the past, there are some slightly complicated ways that combos work when a card that is part of the Combo is in the cooldown pile, in the process of being destroyed, or has already been destroyed. So this gives something for players such as myself to get their teeth into.

I do enjoy the idea of how the Agents may play together in order to create powerful effects and board-states. I think that I accomplished the flavor dimension of my goals.

Along with the above bonuses, I also found some challenges in design.

I really dislike the morph system, so I didn't bother to create morphs of the cards. Maybe some of the cards could be lowered in power by a half-step and still be interesting. This is just not something that I thought of while designing, so it is a bit of a failure. That said, i think that it is also a failure of the morph system to not let players chose which morphs the wish to play with.

Because of how the Combo effects work, I struggled to come up with what I thought would be a balanced approach to combos. I had worked myself up to "Combo 6" on some cards and that just seemed too out of reach for what I perceive to be the average TOT audience. By stroke of luck, I discovered "Multi-Combo.

I'm obviously not able to playtest my creation and I genuinely worry that the Agent strategy may be more of an out of control "snow ball" instead of back and forth "war" or steady march in "momentum"

For an Agent based strategy, I like what I came up with, but I'm a little worried that there isn't a great number of different Agent cards, like what Druid King has, in order to showcase the different types of actors who are concerned with Alessia.

There were some materials that I couldn't avoid but to see. For example, a Reddit post seemed to indicate that some of the legendary characters, maybe even Alessia herself, would be playable cards via the Alessia Patron. There was a post in this forum were I saw Agents mentioned. Lastly, the idea of Agent removal was sort of hinted at by multiple patch-notes which indicated fixes to simultaneous hit the Cooldown Pile triggers such as what Haruspex and Wraith generate. Even though I think that I was 90% true to my intent of doing something completely out of my own brain, there is maybe this 10% doubt that some of my ideas were slightly influenced by this material that I came across.

The last worth mentioning challenge is that I had wanted the favored patron effect to summon Pelinal Whitestrake. After that, a player would sacrifice their Whitestrake to summon the Man-Bull. After that, Alessia would be summoned and immediately win the game. I thought it would be exceptionally awesome to have an alternate way to win with Patron play. that is especially because of how Patron play can sometimes be inhibited by not having enough Power or something like the Lore Master Celarus Patron or St. Pellin Patron being too hard to flip. I also wanted to showcase more cool characters in card form. That all said, I decided that the chain of doing the Alessia Patron as mentioned would probably be too hard and too confusing for players to accomplish, so I settled on just the powerful Man-Bull effect.

With everything out of the way, I would like to emphasize that the above cards are not the official cards of the game. One of the reason that I waited to today to finish things up and make this post is so that there is no confusion about what the official Alessia cards do. You can find them in game. The cards here are just fantasy cards and I'm interested in knowing what you all may think about them. If any designers would like to give me feedback, then I'd like to hear from you. Thank you for reading and I'm about to download the update and see the new cards for the first time myself.

Edit: P.S. There are a couple of cards that can destroy a players very own Agents. I added this dimension to the Patron because not only does war and freedom demand sacrifice, but also because I wanted to show what a real "risk versus reward" effect is. I don't like how such effects were handled with Mora, and wanted to show a different way of doing that type of thing.

Edit: P.P.S. During creation of the above cards, I had the thought that Multi-Combo may be difficult design space to get into. I've critiqued the animations for being too slow in TOT and it's very possible that this new mechanic could be implemented in a way that causes animation bleeding into the opponents turn. Even if their turn timer is kept from being taken up, it could take too much time for animations to play out, so the system would have to be treated delicately for the mechanic to work well and be enjoyed best.

Seraphayel

Thanks a lot, that’s a very interesting read and I’m curious to try the new patron as soon as Gold Road is live on consoles.

Personofsecrets

Seraphayel wrote: »

Thanks a lot, that’s a very interesting read and I’m curious to try the new patron as soon as Gold Road is live on consoles.

You're welcome. You can check out the official card list at the below link.

https://eso-hub.com/en/tales-of-tribute/saint-alessia

I'm still gathering my thoughts on them as I've only played a few games.