Name | Purgatory? |
---|---|
Summary | The often-requested holy branch, restrained and focused. |
Proposer | regret-index |
Version | 0.19 |
See first | Hell-Pan Roulette |
A single-floor branch in one simple, brief, and harrowing encompass vault, to house a new rune and make regular use of the obscure and aimless holy monster set. This is meant to slot into the Hell-Pan Roulette proposal as minimized additional content to keep an equal amount of runes per-game when Pan doesn't spawn, so be sure to read that first.
A gateway is stuck in the middle of the Vestibule of Hell, which opens up when it detects the presence of (some number of) runes from the other Hells- as with holypan, the angels are always readying for wars against the devils on the edge of their realm.
The eternal question in Crawl about slaying “good” monsters of the same deities as one may worship has to continue to be ignored here. I'm also not very attached to the name Purgatory or what names might be given to the rune (consecrated, celestial, pearl, whatever)- there are a lot of potential names and references to collectively write-up eventually.
Unholy player races struggle here as they do in holypan, but they already have some benefits in the other extended branches.
A subvaulted trio of structures (church fortresses and decorative rivers and caves) holding shrines to the three “Good” gods Elyvilon, Zin, and the Shining One, with a minor ambush at the start. The rune is randomly inside one of these three chambers, guarded by dual Seraphim. Each chamber has Daevas and Angels, as well as specific aligned contents to use the variety of an entire set: Cherubs + Ophanim for Zin, Apis + Pearl Dragons for Elyvilon, and Fravashi + Dharmapala for the Shining One. No hell effects, and with some of the same holy weapon / healing / cure mutation potions rewards as holypan uses.
Ignore most of the other write-ups on this wiki regarding holy monsters. Many of them are from five or six years ago, with massive amounts of context changes.
Instead, to expand on the above, and pull out a functional extended branch from a total of nine monsters:
A bland (holy-brand) melee-only enemy as stands. A unique new ability to reflect the dedication to Elyvilon and its fertility-healing connection: something like a [Chant Mass Health Ward], splitting off the +50% current/max health boost from berserk onto a status and applying it to everything in the caster's LOS after several immobile charging turns. High-priority support unit that can then fall back on its melee stats.
Perfectly fine and lethal as stands, due to their nearly-irresistable 3d36 holy flame breath attacks.
The unique Battlecry case should probably be moved to another name and spell, as rousing all other holies is in direct contradiction to how Battlecry works for “weaker” (lower-hd) monsters and the following two monsters bring non-holy monsters around. Their current ranged damage could be significantly upgraded and with (uniquely) silver-branded launchers, for flavour and damage variety and to capitalize on how only demonspawn warmongers really provide any ranged monsters to extended.
…need something to match the capabilities of these other high-stat effects, but are stuck with low-hd Bolt of Fire and a unique but minor effect of surrounding players in holy flame clouds. This particular field of buffing is uncertain.
Rename the generic but vicious Juggernaut, introduce some more mythological variety to the bog-standard elemental giants, and get some further use out of the threat for extended by presenting large numbers of them- but don't change the other stats, and definitely don't give holy-brand attacks. Meaningfully high amounts of raw melee damage is a rarity in late-game, and the branch already has plenty of holy damage.
Technically, the sole new monster here. A normal-speed [A]ngel with the health but not speed, defenses, or smiting of Angels or Daevas, it instead covers the Shining One's divine warriors in a weaker capacity with another unique summoning group: two top-tier warriors (Spriggan Defender, Deep Elf Blademaster, maybe Draconian Monks? TSO-adjacency makes summoning the poisonous green monks questionable, though), both at once, hard-capped at two.