This suggest was prompt up by the existence of the new devs looking through the Forums and Discord to find changes the community wants— personally, I think this is probably the best time to suggest an idea to fix a cardinal sin of the game: Spirit having fixed colors.
Every prior suggestion to this atrocity was met with the fact that this would contradict the lore. Personally, I think there is a simple fix for this, that can both leave the lore (mostly) intact, and, let players pick a good color palette: use the prior requirements to change the VFX instead of the color.
General Details
As of now, there is one VFX style for spirit— the cloudy aura effect— if each of the four spirit types had instead their own particles, our issue would be resolved.
Every spirit user would start with the default blue and cloudy particles, upon the Elius decision, it’d change the particle type yet leave the color; and upon awakening, the particle type could evolve one final time. Throughout this entire process, the color of the players spirit would not change unless they go out of their way to do so.
As for changing the color of your spirit color, I’ll state that the Spirit color shouldn’t be separate between the relics, just like how it is now— but I think there’s one simple option for what item can change Spirit color, Quartz:
Spirit Color changed via Quartz
Instead of making anything too absurd, you could simply sail to the dark seas, pick up a quartz, and eat it. They’re cooked in a pot (for some reason), so eating a quartz would change your spirit color.
Personally, this feels fairest, and is probably the most convenient for people. It is a bit silly to eat the quartz whenever though; I could suggest having it be used at specific locations, like within the dark sea or Poseidon’s temple. This could be any random item, but creating an extra item when we already have something for coloring seems pointless.
Visual Representation Examples
These are a couple visual examples I made in Unity and Krita for this suggestion. I’ve provided 3 color examples for all 4 Spirit types: Base Spirit Blue (Cerulean), Viridian, and White VFX examples; then one Spirit Icon for each type[1]— the icons would have a fixed color, which I think should be the gold color that is used by the Spirit-Stat.
For reading simplicity, the Spirit types will be referred to as: Merciful/Base Spirit, Ruthless Spirit, Godly Merciful, and Godly Ruthless.
Again, these are examples, hopefully showing that you’d be able to tell what Spirit type is what regardless of color. I’m sure the VFX aren’t perfect, but I hope they get the prior across.
Merciful / Base Spirit
Ruthless Spirit
Godly Merciful
Godly Ruthless
You can hopefully see, that even with horrid Gif Compression, you can still differentiate all of the Spirit Types. If, at the ABSOLUTE LORE EFFICIENCY, having to require a color between the Godly variants, we can at least do what weapons does, and provide a Golden Sub-tone around Hallowed and Profane Spirit Energies, which would leave enough differences when combined with the unique VFX.
As of now, Spirit Imbue/Icon uses 3 Light-magic icons in its representative color, but this would need to change with my suggestion. ↩︎
