I'm having a little trouble with paragons at the moment which I hope I can resolve shortly.
Pray, elaborate?
I'd rather not, at this point, since I've spent half of the day fiddling with it without much success, but I suppose it needs to be said.
Simply put, the resurrect effect isn't working the way it's supposed to. For some obscure technical reason, the ANIMATE effect allows you to fully heal an already transformed unit with another transformation, but the RESURRECT effect does not. In other words, paragons are resurrecting, but not being transformed for that brief moment that would allow them to heal up to full, meaning that they're being revived with all of the injuries that killed them the first time around. In other words, few of them are surviving for more than a frame or two, and limbs are not regenerating at all.
This never showed up in arena testing because I can spawn a paragon directly into arena mode without any active transform effects, but when a dwarf in fortress mode is transformed into a paragon, the transformation interferes with the resurrect effect. Curiously, the same is not true if the resurrect is changed to an animation effect, but doing that raises all sorts of other issues. I can get paragons to work, and I can get a reaction to get dwarves turned into paragons, but I can't get the dwarves turned into paragons to work.
What it means is that I'm going to have to do a pretty radical redesign of the entire paragon concept if I can't find a workaround, and so far, I haven't found a workaround. I tried a variety of different tricks, including pairing the resurrect effect with an animate effect (the animate effect overrides it). Unless someone far better at coding than I am finds a way to do it with an internal call to DFHack, it's not looking so good.
Since paragons work if they are born as such, I may elect to make them a rare caste instead of a ritual unit. I'm tossing around ideas for what this would mean going forward, but at the moment it just means that a lot of editing needs to be done.
Here's the idea I'm leaning towards at the moment - paragons will be a rare caste of dwarf that are born, much in the same way that savants work currently. Paragons are ageless and deathless, but are otherwise identical to regular dwarves and have no innate abilities. Paragons, however, can be "dedicated" at the Temple of Origin to one of the five original gods, which bestows upon them a set of abilities, but locks them out of the abilities of the other four options. Paragons dedicated to Visthel will be able to resurrect other paragons. This does not require an active transformation, so it *should* work.
A reaction will be added to the Temple of Origin to dedicate a paragon to Visthel, bestowing a few abilities onto them. This reaction will be fairly inexpensive - the rarest component will be the paragon. The current expensive and/or risky reactions to "create" a paragon will be reworked to have a much more interesting function.
I apologize for the abrupt change and any delays it may end up causing, but I simply see no other alternative at this point. Hopefully it will still turn out in a way somewhat resembling the original concept. It actually may be for the better that this issue raised its head now, as it gives me a few ideas moving forward.