God Proposal re-draft: Inhaca, the Vile (Makhlike?)

[Pollen_Golem]

NEW - heal-on-kills like with Makhleb

"Spread a plague worse than death!"

Inhaca is a depraved god that spreads sickness and wallows in the infliction of horrible death, or worse!

Appreciates: causing the deaths of all non-undead, non-nonliving (living, holy, and demonic) beings.
Deprecates: Forgetting him (piety falls as fast as with Trog).

Wrath: players are pelted with flesh and random needles, become surrounded with temporary woods, and remain sick whenever enemies are present, until Incaha is mollified.

All active abilities use invocations for success rate.

Piety level (0): "Diseased"
Passive Aura of Sickness: whenever a hostile monster is in sight, no creature in sight regenerates, including you!
Passive See Invisible.
Sic Brainless (e button): does not work until and unless you have Brainless allies. The Brainless are recalled near your enemies, like how Dragon's Call works, but they don't disappear because they are permanent allies and not summons.
Costs 3 mp?

Piety level (*): "Stink"
Hurl Flesh (a button): works like throwing a plain tomahawk; uses invo instead of throwing; the target's AC is halved for calculating damage.
Costs 1 hp.

Piety level (**): "Virulent"
Passive Vile Stench: enemies in LOS may fail when attempting to do anything that requires breath, including shouting, casting spells, convoking, and spitting. They choke on your stench instead.
(Piety-50)/300 chance to affect poison-vulnerable monsters
(Piety-50)/450 chance to affect monsters without rPois
(Piety-50)/900 chance to affect monsters with rPois
no chance to affect monsters immune to poison

Piety level (***): "Putrid"
Volley of Spikes (b button): works like Iron Rod, using random needles instead of shots. Uses invo instead of evo/throwing.
Costs 28-1d(invocations) hp, breath, and requires you to have at least 30 hp.

Piety level (****): "Plagued"
Summon woods (c button): briefly create a patch of trees at a smite-targeted location. Duration, size, and completeness (for there might be holes in the patch) depend on invocations.
Costs 5-8 piety. Some MP? Noise and breath?

Piety level (*****): "Decayed"
Make Brainless (d button): Target an adjacent living/demonic/holy monster to infect it with brain-eating parasites. The monster remains hostile for 100 + 5d(HD) - 3d(invo) turns, after which it becomes mindless, losing all its abilities and spells. It becomes your ally after you lay your eyes on it in this state. There is no limit to the number of such minions you may have. This ability cannot affect already mindless creatures.
Costs half of your HP and 1d5 + 2dX piety where X is the HD of the monster affected.

Piety level (******): "The Plague"
No new abilities.

Original: viewtopic.php?f=17&t=18274

[chequers]

Given brainless never regenerate health, the cost to acquire one seems excessive. I also feel that dealing with allies doesn't really got the rest of this god's kit, even if tomahawks and iron rod don't hit allies.

Edit: the health cost would be larger on low hp species. If this isnt desired, you could make abilities cost 1% of Max health (minimum 1).

[Pollen_Golem]

Nah, the Brainless would regenerate health normally. They just gain incest-level intelligence and lose special abilities. They're not zombies or undead or anything like that. So I don't think the cost to acquire is high at all. You would just need to pick targets for their brute resilience and melee damage output.

I think God Worship Costs being proportionately different across species is fine, in fact there's tons of it across the board already.

I don't know about the allies going against the kit - Trog, Nemelex, Makhleb, even Qazlal give allies.
Sic Brainless may be welcome when you're trying to get some peace and regenerate, or you lose too much HP through damage and/or abilities.

[milski]

I feel like sic brainless should be given when you get the ability to generate brainless, not at piety zero. I understand that you could lose piety and be unable to use sic brainless while still having allies, but that feels more reasonable than starting with an ability that has absolutely no effect.

The passive see invisible is necessary for the -Regen status, but feels kinda clunky.

Hurl Flesh is sort of boring but I guess it works if you think there should be a second god that can do indefinite damage with invocations.

Vile Stench feels like a much weaker version of Ru's aura.

Volley of Spikes costs way too much, and I don't think such a widely variable health cost is a great plan either. I guess the idea is to make the cost significant without making it cost piety, but breath alone prevents it from being spammed.

Summon Woods: Seems super strong but also really weird. Getting to spawn smite targeted LoS blockers monsters can't work around is very strong, but I don't quite get why a god of plague is just making healthy trees show up.

Make Brainless: A guaranteed kill on uniques is pretty nice. The piety and health cost are pretty significant, though; for any high-end monster that's worth making brainless, you are probably going to want to read tele, hit it, and then find it later. While having a guaranteed kill is pretty bad, the optimal play seems really tedious, especially since it can let you get massively OoD allies with a little luck.

[Pollen_Golem]

I would make having allied Brainless the only criteria for having Sic Brainless available. I just see no point in making the ability piety-dependent. Ideally, Sic Brainless is just hidden from view if you have no Brainless anywhere.

Passive SInv is easy to write off, especially since few undead have it: Inhaca so craves the dejection of mortals that he lets not one being escape the hunt of his servant. Obsidian axe does virtually the same thing.

Vile Stench triggers more often than Ru aura of power, but works against fewer enemy actions - I guess that's the main difference. Just cancelling shouts is a good and distinctive thing.

Volley of Spikes can slow, confuse, paralyze, give many levels of poisoning. If the health cost was low, you could kite monsters quite a bit even with breath as an anti-spam measure.

Yeah, summon woods seems really strong and pretty unique (tomb card comes closest to mind) so it's one of only two abilities that use piety, and is made to be unreliable with trees potentially missing. I'm not going by theme so much as what would make the god a complete package gameplay-wise. Of course the trees would not be healthy but the sickly kind found in crypt:



Guaranteed kill is pretty nice and pretty bad? Not sure what means. Make Brainless demands tag-and-run play, which sounds risky rather than tedious, and as we see it can be fun on a smaller scale with Sticky Flame for example. The whole process sounds cool to me, and it's not like you'd be doing it every floor.

[Pollen_Golem]

It was brought up quickly in the other thread that it feels wrong to have considerable HP costs without a way to rapidly recoup that loss, and too dangerous.

So then how about this god give healing on kills, like Makhleb? Makhleb abilities are unbelievably good when you first get them in the early game, which actually requires the hack of having servants immediately spawn hostile sometimes, and rather trash in the late game. Whereas the usefulness of the abilities here is rather impervious to what stage of the game you're in. I'm starting to think that this god + heal-on-kills could be a good replacement for Makhleb. It all makes sense, too! Nerf or remove some of these features and it's fine. What do you think?