To make the now unlimited use of Gematria and Notarikon more useful, even without decreasing the CD time of number-related skills, I suggest the introduction of a new Class attribute affecting both skills, called Temurah.
The reason why I chose Temurah is because it is the only method used by Kabbalists besides Gematria and Notarikon that is not featured in the game so far, and without Temurah, the trias of Kabbalistic practices is incomplete.
Temurah
is the practice of partially or wholely changing the numerical value of a word/sentence with 3 simple alterations:
-
exchanging the first and the last letter of the word (which would make no real difference being introduced as an effect in the game as in wouldn’t affect Gematrias or Notarikon calculated value)
-
replacing each letter with the preceding letter in the alphabet (this would cause heavy calculation traffic and would most likely make the results of the skill worse)
-
replacing the first letter of the alphabet with another letters value, and keeping the normal continuity from there onwards (this is the interesting method right for this game)
So, the effect should be based off the third of these 3 methods.
However, it should be boiled down to a more easy and/or practical use of the skill by adding or substracting a certain number to the calculated value.
Before I come to the examples, another thing to mention here is that the attributes effect should scale with the number of Circles advanced in the Kabbalist Class as he deepened his understandings of Kabbalism and number mysticism, allowing him to use this highly professional method of reinterpretation[i.e. Temurah] freely and effectively.
About the effect of the attribute:
As I mentioned earlier, the effect should be about random addition and substraction of number values calculated, as this is what Temurah actually does, it increases or decreases the value of a word calculated with Gematria or Notarikon by exchanging letter values.
To make it simple, this adds an RNG-calculated(either positive or negative) number to the calculated number at the end of calculation, e.g. Gematria calculates a 7 but Temurah adds a -1 at the end, so the result will be 7 - 1 = 6.
For the scaling, I use the Kabbalistic tree of life Etz haChayim (עץ החיים)
as a base, which features 11 Sephiroth in total(with Da’at sometimes featured and sometimes not, that’s why you find 10 or 11 Sephirot in the descriptions), so the highest number attainable with Temurah should be fixed as 11(i.e. 9+2), while the lowest number should be fixed as 0 (negative numbers might cause bugs or other problems).
As the attribute scales with your Kabbalist Circle, I propose the following scaling for the attribute:
Kabbalist Circle 1: Temurah adds a number between -2 and +1 to your calculated result
Kabbalist Circle 2: Temurah adds a number between -2 and +2 to your calculated result
Kabbalist Circle 3: Temurah adds a number between -1 and +2 to your calculated result
Higher scalings are an option but might or might not be so good for the players experience using them, and would potentially make Kabbalists too strong if they could just turn every number into 9 or a higher value, while ±2 gives a certain limitation to the value of the attribute while providing the Kabbalist a reason to use his Gematria&Notarikon skills more often(as they only have 1 second CD time now).