The Conjury Guild’s Newest Addition

You read that right! As of this past weekend, Amon has joined the Conjury Guild under the direct tutelage of Scylla. This is no joke.

I warned folks in the last Author’s Notes that I’d start to talk about Amon’s current development arcs. While we still have to write and make public the long process Amon went through to develop his Red Magery skills, this is the newest current development challenge he’s undertaking.

Character-wise, there’s a long and complicated explanation for taking him in this direction. While Amon does care about people in general, he’s fairly lacking in the deep empathy department for individuals outside of his closest circle. That comes from having to close himself off emotionally from so much in his previous life… but now that he’s in a relationship with Scylla, that’s a concerning thing to her!

So in learning to heal, he’s also trying to learn empathy for others and how to make true connections with people. But the first hurdle he has to overcome is even figuring out how to tap into aether outside of himself – most of the magic he’s cast through his life was pulled from his own aether reserves, magnified by a focus or some sort of alteration. It’s a big shift in mindset for him to have to rely on something other than himself.

Like many things, this development all started with a joke. Well, sorta a joke.

I’ve been considering a long-term development project for Amon lately. At this point, I’ve leveled his Bard and Red Mage… all of his crafters and gatherers. And while there’s plenty of things still to explore, I have much more fun writing for him as a character when I’m working on developing something in tandem with game development.

I thought about all the possible things, and then I went beyond to the things I normally wouldn’t choose to do. Like healing. While I have all of my healers to level 80 on my main character, that was done through beast tribe quests. The last time I actually healed in a party was probably back when you still had to stance dance Cleric Stance for proper damage output vs. healing.

I tossed this idea out to Scylla prefacing it with: “It’ll probably never happen, but I thought about…” And it went from there.

Just like for Amon, healing is something outside of my comfort zone as a player. While I don’t know how far I’ll get with trying it, I decided that if I’m going to do this, I’m going to start from the very beginning and learn everything again from the ground up.

And, so, Amon vowed to embrace nature.

Because, honestly, given the fact that he is Forestborn and has distant connections to the elementals through his family line, only Conjury made sense to choose as a healer class. I didn’t want to go Scholar because I absolutely do not want Amon to unlock Summoner – it’s not in his character to ever have that ability. And Astrologian, while it’s a neat class, would force Amon to suspend his disbelief in what he’d consider superstition.

Conjury not only encourages him to understand empathy, but has a direct connection to his childhood and the better parts of his past. I can only see good coming from him going back to his roots as a forest Elezen.

Of course, Amon will always be Amon, so don’t expect him to be a shining beacon of goodness if this all pans out. I don’t even know if I can really muster up the courage to heal!