Ok, after everyone forsake the Sadhu improvement (not enough love it seems),
let’s talk about improving Pardoner today.
Since IMC stated in their post (30.12. 2016, developers blog)
Adjustments should be carefully planned to avoid one class dominating its rank or being left out, and to achieve a fairly equal distribution of classes in each rank.
and Monk was “improved”, Pardoner has to be improved a lot to be at least “equal” (since it was already a lot worse than[= inferior to] Monk initially).
Improvement have to take these two facts into consideration:
1st: the attack skills of Pardoner are practically the worst out there
and 2nd: the silver costs for the Pardoner skills are too high to make them viable
Let’s first see what defines the Pardoner. Pardoner is supposed to be a Class about dealing with money, i.e. collecting silver by selling “Parchments” in the form of scrolls which allow you to get away with your “sins” by means of indulgence.
Yet currently, “scrolling” is probably the least profitable part of being a Pardoner. Most skills are bad at low levels, and the high costs of Parchments per scroll-skillevel combined with 500 silver per skilllevel makes it not viable to scroll skills beyond level 5, resulting in level 6-15 Simony becoming the most useless skillpoint waste ever created in this game.
Aside from the stupidly broken main characteristic of the Class (which became the famous Priest buff shop in the process because it lacks usefulness in both Simony and battle power), there is little left to call it a working Class. If the buff shop skill was on Pardoner Circle 1, I bet that noone would want to create a Pardoner beyond that.
This leads us to the next point: combat skills.
Aside from the crafting and selling skills, Pardoner features 4 skills, 2 attack skills and 3 support skills (I counted Indulgentia twice since it’s both debuff removal and damage skill at once).
Increase Magic Defence and Discerning Evil are two badly designed support skills, as they do basically nothing for the Pardoner himself and/or are scaling quite badly.
While Increase Magic Defense is practically only useful on a status point build with high amounts of SPR, it lasts only 50% of its CD time [Meanwhile, Priests Aspersion increases 50% physical defence with 100% uptime although it’s only a Rank 2 skill].
Discerning Evil has its uses on a Plague Doctor for Incineration or to aid some other non-Cleric Classes to keep their debuffs on enemies running, it’s useless for Pardoner itself as he can’t debuff.
Now let’s look at the skills that can deal damage, Indulgentia and Decatose.
Indulgentia is a very solid damage skill because it provides a good amount of targets which increase with the skilllevel, but it lacks in attractiveness due to its Silver cost and the simple fact that the CD time of 30 seconds is way too high for the only damaging skill of the Pardoner until Circle 3. Just look at the Monk with 0-25 seconds CD time on most of his Circle 1 and 2 skills and you’ll realize just how much inferior the Pardoner is.
Decatose comes very late at Circle 3 and has 3 extreme flaws:
1st: The only thing that scales with baselevel is the base damage, and the scaling is really bad for a Rank 7 skill
2nd: The skill costs 1500 silver to use
3rd: The skill has no damage-increasing attribute
Aside from the 10% instant kill chance, the skill is not very good, and has only merits by leveling it beyong 1 (higher SP costs and only 100 more damage per point invested)…
So, looking at the developers improvement of Monk, let’s come up with some ideas that are not exceeding the “balances” that have been made.
I’d say the following steps need to be taken to make Pardoner a viable Class choice aside from being a dead end-shop Class:
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reduce the costs of Simony. Simony is supposed to keep the base Classes where the skills stem from viable and provide some help, but the current system punishes everyone who skills Simony beyond level 5.
To change this, the base costs should be reduced to 400 silver per skilllevel scrolled + 1 parchment every 3 skillevels consumed (meaning level 1-3 scrolls require 1 parchment, level 4-6 scrolls require 2 parchments and so on). -
reduce the CD time of Indulgentia. Although it serves as a debuff removal skill, the damage aspect should be the main focus, so 15-20 seconds would be a proper CD time to make it more useful.
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introduce a Pardoner Circle 3 Class attribute that reduces the silver costs of all skills (Simony,Indulgentia and Decatose) by 50%. Since Monk got a very useful Circle 3 Class attribute focused on strike attacks (main Class focus), the money-focused Pardoner should recieve a Class attribute that revolves about money, too. Giving a 50% silver cost discount on all skills would make the Class and its skills more attractive.
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since Monk got additional %-scaling on most of his skills now, Pardoner should get it,too. However, since Pardoner is a little different, how about changing the way Oblation works instead? Change the attribute effect of Oblation from 1 fixed damage per item inside Oblation to 0,1% additional damage with Indulgentia and you have your %scaling while also giving Oblation some use later on.
Now’s your time: Throw your $$$… errr, I mean ideas at me and plead for indulgence of your sins of playing TOS 
