Nice work @Smaw, I had been awaiting your post for quite some time. After reading through it,
I've found the following (a tl;dr as it were):
- They remain in their corrupted state, I approve of this
- Mental corruption, excellent. This should be present at every DS iteration and I approve of this
- A choice of three powerful abilities, and then an arsenale of what I perceive as 'anti-elementalism'. This is an interesting choice - and I'm liking it.
- Corruption of the stagnant spirits within existing elements. No entrapment of immortals and or ancestrals. I like this idea more because in the past I was always puzzled as to how a simple dark shaman could take on immortal entities as such with relative ease. Taking on stagnant spirits in the mortal realm is much more realistic - much simpler and an excellent basis to advance from.
- Reasonable weaknesses, mainly holy magics and air for the miser. I made a point below regarding this. I'm missing Shamanism.
-Regarding the Miser, I am personally against the 'very very privileged' magic types. Meaning only one or two people on the server can have this. But as long as this role can be switched around (so there will always be an active miser around) this is fin.
Some things I miss are:
- the usage of old blah. So far I see manipulation by means of focus and I'd like to see mandatory chants - this would give them the same weakness shamanism has: loss of speech = loss of magic (which would add in a way for shamans to shun / fight dark shamans)
- following the shaman vs. dark shaman conflict I'd like to see Farseeing added to the list of magics that are effective against them, as they are all about healing corruption.
- I see a lot of disadvantages (Wither, Weaknesses) and relatively few abilities (Truths & Anti-Elementalism). Perhaps for now leave it as such and later make an addition with a few more truths for Dark Shamans to play with, or branch out to the immortal realm and thus: immortal corruption in the mortal plane. (Not all immortal spirits have relatable stagnant spirits in the mortal plane, but some do. This might be interesting for a later addition).