Here's a number of proposed changes to Crawl gods. Including a deicide!
Trog
====
He's in a dire need of a severe nerf. Tourney0.8 had nearly thrice as many
berserkers as the second most popular class.
His overpoweredness in the early game comes from berserk making any hard
encounter trivial. Later on, the Bros annihilate opposition: a single
berserk stone giant can snuff in several greater servants or a few daevas.
Proposal:
* let's reduce berserk speed boost to haste levels: ×1.5 instead of ×2
* perhaps we could reduce the slaying you get below might levels too?
* no-combat penalty needs to be greatly increased. Let's revert 06efac65
which halved them compared to 0.6 and 0.7. Galehar proposes to tie this
to whether you're moving towards or away from enemies, too.
* gifts: currently Trog gives a mixture of regular items, randarts and
unrands. His randarts are greatly better than those Okawaru gives.
Let's give only ordinary gear, all branded with antimagic. Weapon
blessing was considered, but it'd make him too much like TSO, Kiku and
Lugonu. We can make him grant you weapons based on your skills and piety:
* an antimagic hand axe at Axes 5, *** piety
* an antimagic war axe at Axes 10, ***** piety
* an antimagic broad axe at Axes 15, ****** piety
Okawaru
=======
0.8 changes were good, he's no longer the default god -- and is somewhat
less boring as well. Gifts for popcorn are a problem, though -- places like
Orc or Hive are a promised land, with tons of cheap kills and corpses.
Let's tie his gifts to Ash tiers. Because of how gift timeout works, it'd
be simpler to use this for piety gains as well. Instead of a nearly fixed
reward per kill and a fixed reward per corpse, let's give instead tier²: 0
for trivial, 1 for easy, 4 for tough, 9 for nasty. Or perhaps even with no
gain for "easy" opponents as well.
(These are relative numbers, multiply them by 0.8 to roughly preserve
current gift frequency.)
Tiers would have to be fuzzed, we don't want spoilers like "do this branch
now, once you level the monsters there will fall one tier lower".
Makhleb
=======
I don't think recently making him worthless for casters was a good idea.
With invocations redundant with summoning magic, and healing hp only, he
became a melee-only god, and nearly strictly worse than TSO in places where
TSO is relevant:
+Makhleb: no ban on Necromancy. It's a single school, with a few very
useful spells, but it's nowhere close to Charms or Conjurations.
+Makhleb: stealth still works
+TSO: mana for kills
+TSO: see invis
+TSO: +12,0 accuracy slaying vs everything
+TSO: blessing with a brand that's better than speed[1]
+TSO: -1,+1*str slaying on certain weapons
+TSO: much better summons
+TSO: summons guaranteed to not be hostile
+TSO: better conjuration, actually useful in some places
[1]. In 0.8+, speed effectively does:
+50% with delay 5 (min for short blades, whips, spear)
+80% with delay 6 (new demon blade, tridents, some junk)
+58% with delay 7 (most weapons)
Holy wrath does +75%.
If you think there should be some nerf, we can nerf something else. This
particular one just removes a niche, removing choice for no other gain.
The main reasoning mentioned was redundancy with Vehumet. Vehumet, though,
is redundant with basically everything, and more about this here:
Sifumet
=======
There's little difference between Sif Muna and Vehumet. Both have mostly
the same portfolio and similar abilities. Let's merge them. The new god
would be named "Sif Muna" since she actually has a theme. Vehumet -- "god
of destruction and mayhem" -- come on, really? Makhleb, Trog?
Let's compare the two:
* book gifts, check
* a form of wizardry, check
* help you regain mana, check
Also, when the anti victory dancing plan gets implemented:
* piety for kills, check
(you get xp only for kills, and since it gets immediately distributed,
Sif Muna effectively rewards kills if you cast spells beforehand, or
turn them on in manual mode)
Real differences:
+Sif Muna: wider selection of books
+Vehumet: +1 range in conjurations
My proposal:
* god's name: "Sif Muna"
* Sif Muna's book gifts. With jpeg's randart book code, it's different
from scroll acquirement, while Vehumet's way is a copy of Kikubaaqudgha.
There are more drastic proposals like a virtual library, but for now,
let's try a small change.
* piety for XP assigned to magical skills
* [passive] faster mana regeneration
* [passive] reduced cost of high level spells
* [passive] increased range of all spells (+Apportation, +Dig)
One of:
* [passive] some miscast protection or wizardry
* [invocation] "Channel Magic": greatly improved mana regen, halved cost of
all spells, wizardry bonus. Ie, "Sif's Hand".
Dpeg really hates traditional channeling, so I guess that's off the table :p
Balancing can be easily done by tweaking the numbers or striking one of the
powers.
Cheibriados
===========
Ponderifying armour leads to problems with races that have fewer slots, it
also causes theme problems like "why would heavy gloves impact my walking
speed but not fighting/casting?".
Proposal:
* let's axe ponderification, reducing the brand to just to something bad
highly enchanted plates can be generated with.
* give CB two invocations: "Slow down" and "Hurry up". When used, they take
some time to happen -- you don't expect CB to act quickly, do you? Even
abandoning the god doesn't let you shed the slowness away instantly when
in an emergency, your speed will take a while to creep back to normal.
This would solve both races with few slots, and theme problems.
There is a concern, though: you'd be able to use artefact armour, and I'm
not sure if we want to take away this downside of CB.
Xom
===
Currently worse than GOD_NO_GOD. You suffer him all the time, many of his
acts being permanently detrimental, while goodies are mostly temporary and
never happen when you could actually use them. In the past, you received
Xom armour, today, all you can do is have a high-level mummy sit in the
temple, scumming for gifts.
Proposal:
* let's remove Xom ticks, making him check tension every turn. The chances
of acting would greatly increase when there's action around, without
affecting whether the act is good or bad.
* reduce or remove draining and stat loss, it's most of what he does
Nemelex
=======
I recently added a powerful card to the deck of destruction, in some cases
it is brokenly good. I don't care much for annihilating statues you find in
completely open areas, but it might be too good elsewhere as well.
Please test.
Proposal:
* let's do more such changes to the deck of Torment
* decks of summoning, though, could use a chance of hostiles even at higher
levels. Currently emptying 1-2 legendary decks does Zot:5 without you
lifting a finger.
The Shining One
===============
So we have a god that's all-powerful in the late game but utterly useless
in early and midgame. With removal of Paladins, there's no reason to take
him before the God Switch Time -- you won't have piety anyway.
No concrete proposal here, yet, merely a vague idea:
in medieval European and Russian legends, there's a number of paladins and
knightly-themed saints, yet I can't recall a single one where they fight
against devils. A devil would be dealt with a priest or outwitted by a
peasant -- heroes instead fought mythical beasts: dragons, hydras, giant
winged serpents (zmeys), basilisks, amphisbaenas, that stuff. These could
be added to monsters dispatching whom TSO rewards, while demonic popcorn
considered "too lowly to be anything beyond your regular duty".
There's a thematic problem with that concept, though: in Crawl's world,
hydras might be just as natural as death yaks.
--
1KB // Microsoft corollary to Hanlon's razor:
// Never attribute to stupidity what can be
// adequately explained by malice.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Simplify data backup and recovery for your virtual environment with vRanger.
Installation's a snap, and flexible recovery options mean your data is safe,
secure and there when you need it. Discover what all the cheering's about.
Get your free trial download today.
http://p.sf.net/sfu/quest-dev2dev2
_______________________________________________
Crawl-ref-discuss mailing list
Crawl-ref-discuss@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/crawl-ref-discuss
