Proposal: Buff sif muna

[arcanist]

I think that currently best god for a conjurer is vehumet. From my perspective, he completey outshines every other god in terms of spellcasting.

He is so good, that it is almost nobrainer decision - if you need conjurer - go vehumet. This leads to a very boring situation that if I want to play conjurer, I almost always bound to vehumet if I want to win.

I basically want to understand, if other people share my feelings and then possibly there could be some suggestions on how to improve other gods viability for a conjurer. I would think about sif muna at the first place since she(he?) currently provides very little compared to vehumet:
1. mana - you probably better use staff of energy since evocation would also power up your other options and the hunger cost is not so devastating
2. books - coming very late, may easily contain something you dont need and normally outshined by the vehumet gifts. anyway books are not so rare, so it is not comparable to the gifts of trog and okawaru.
3. protection from miscast effects - you normally dont want to cast something that cause miscasts effect anyway
4. amnesia - quite a usefull ability, but since you can use books to remove spells, not that really required.

[TheDefiniteArticle]

I think that currently best god for a conjurer is vehumet.

Well considering that vehumet is the god of conjurations...uh...

For the record, I agree with buffing Sif, but it is because I find Sif underwhelming and boring in general. Vehumet is far from a no-brainer for any character. By the same logic you could argue that it is a no-brainer to pick Trog on every melee character (or, indeed, a no-brainer to pick Trog on every character, period).

[DracheReborn]

There was a long thread about this not long ago:

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=11017

[ontoclasm]

He is so good, that it is almost nobrainer decision - if you need conjurer - go vehumet.

Have you tried gods that aren't Sif or Vehumet?

[and into]

If the thread DracheReborn posted is TL;DR:

The basic consensus there was that Sif had some (relatively) minor problems that could be improved, but none of which were really geared toward buffing her. It was also felt that keeping Sif straightforward was important. For the most part if anything changes I think Sif's piety gain might be supplemented in some way, and her book giving might be tweaked such that you aren't showered with books constantly. These changes would improve game play but would not meaningfully buff Sif (though supplementing her current piety mechanic would make her more appealing to a wider range of backgrounds which is definitely a problem now; currently you can only gain piety if you are actively training magic skills).

FWIW I proposed that Sif get a strong activated ability, with piety cost, at **** or something, as currently you don't usually spend much piety on her amnesia ability throughout the game, so in my experience you just get enough piety and get tons of books, then more books, then even more books.... But nothing concrete came of that and it didn't get the support of the folks who matter. What can ya do?

[and into]

I basically want to understand, if other people share my feelings and then possibly there could be some suggestions on how to improve other gods viability for a conjurer. I would think about sif muna at the first place since she(he?) currently provides very little compared to vehumet:
1. mana - you probably better use staff of energy since evocation would also power up your other options and the hunger cost is not so devastating
2. books - coming very late, may easily contain something you dont need and normally outshined by the vehumet gifts. anyway books are not so rare, so it is not comparable to the gifts of trog and okawaru.
3. protection from miscast effects - you normally dont want to cast something that cause miscasts effect anyway
4. amnesia - quite a usefull ability, but since you can use books to remove spells, not that really required.

1.) Sif's channeling is guaranteed and you get it at * piety (extremely early) and with about 4 levels in invocations it is stronger than a staff of energy at 27 evocations. Yes it does have a higher hunger cost but that's because it is way, way stronger than item-based channeling, with the exception of the (super rare, and risky) staff of wucad mu.

2.) Sif's book gifts are awesome the problem there is that you get showered with them and it can be quite annoying. Being gifted every spell in the game is a lot better than Okawaru's gifts, except maybe for a character that is focusing heavily on ranged combat throughout the game. In which case they may be somewhat comparable in power though Sif's gifting is still better.

3.) If you are protected from miscast effects you can actually get away with higher spell failure. This is the form of "wizardry" that Sif provides and while it isn't as good as what Vehumet does for conjurations, Sif provides it for *all* spells. Obviously some spells you don't want to have very high spell failure, but you can get away with less training on a number of them and still use them repeatedly and safely thanks to Sif. I agree that it is hard to gauge that though, and this is something that was brought up in the other thread (so maybe there will be some interface change that will make the effect more transparent, and thus help you plan out your skill training more effectively under Sif).

One interesting idea that I liked from the other thread (not my idea), which would be a buff to Sif, is to have her refund some of the mana when you miscast.

4.) Sif's basically infinite selective amnesia is great if you want to experiment with different spells, but if you more or less know exactly what you want then yes it is rather lackluster, basically an insurance policy against an unusually ?amnesia-scarce game (which does happen sometimes so the ability is still welcome, yet a bit bland, I agree).

[DracheReborn]

FWIW I proposed that Sif get a strong activated ability, with piety cost, at **** or something, as currently you don't usually spend much piety on her amnesia ability throughout the game, so in my experience you just get enough piety and get tons of books, then more books, then even more books.... But nothing concrete came of that and it didn't get the support of the folks who matter. What can ya do?

Btw, I learned recently (from source diving) that miscast protection is piety dependent, from about 60% at 4* to 100% at 6*. So apparently keeping piety up on a Sif worshipper *is* useful!

[and into]

FWIW I proposed that Sif get a strong activated ability, with piety cost, at **** or something, as currently you don't usually spend much piety on her amnesia ability throughout the game, so in my experience you just get enough piety and get tons of books, then more books, then even more books.... But nothing concrete came of that and it didn't get the support of the folks who matter. What can ya do?

Btw, I learned recently (from source diving) that miscast protection is piety dependent, from about 60% at 4* to 100% at 6*. So apparently keeping piety up on a Sif worshipper *is* useful!

True, but yes my main point is that you just accumulate piety and don't use it much. Though this is true of other gods (Vehumet being the main, obvious offender) so I don't think this is considered a problem per se, though it is something that I don't like, personally.

[rchandra]

If Sif Muna were to encourage spending piety more, she'd need a different piety gain/decay system - like the standard ones.

[Confidence Interval]

she'd

Wait... Sif's a lady?

[khalil]

The gods aren't given genders.
This makes me sad, as a genderless mythology looses out on wacky hijinks like the time Loki tied a goat to his balls.(It made sense in context.)

[duvessa]

i had a dream that i was in a romantic relationship with sif muna and that vehumet was her sister and vehumet had a crush on me but i really hated her and so did sif so we decied to play a prank on vehumet where i pretended to break up with sif and approached vehumet but then i went zin instead and then i switched back to sif (no zin wrath) vehumet was crying at this point and sif and i thought it was hilarious it was a pretty good dream

[One-Eyed Jack]

Loki was also impregnated and gave birth while in the form of a mare so

[TheDefiniteArticle]

The problem with gods having gender is that for a while approximately 78% of the population of Greece was Zeus's children.

[Mattchew]

I agree that Sif is plenty strong but not very exciting. I haven't played her in a long time.

Part of this is her gifts not being very exciting. Being able to burn piety and ask for a particular spell sooner ("sooner", not necessarily "next") would increase anticipation.

There were interesting ideas in that previous thread too.

[khalil]

The problem is most of her stuff can be imitated via items, with the exception of miscast protection which is given by all three magic gods. This causes people to think Sif is weak because they aren't sacrificing corpses to cast torment or getting extra range on their conj spells(both things you can't get via items).
What I'd do is nerf a few of her abilities (have her give less books or reduce the miscast rate reduction, something like that) and then give her some ability that can't be gained anywhere else, like a piety dependent chance to be able to cast spells while silenced.

[Sar]

So you would nerf an actually useful ability and give it a useless one?

[Grimm]

The problem with gods having gender is that for a while approximately 78% of the population of Greece was Zeus's children.

@TehDruid

[khalil]

So you would nerf an actually useful ability and give it a useless one?

No, that's why I said "or something". If that wouldn't be powerful enough, something else would have to be given.
(I actually thought it'd be fairly powerful when fighting other casters. You'd cast silence and wouldn't be affected, whereas the ancient lich or whatever will be unable to cast.)

[Sar]

You can already cast Silence and beat an alich up because it does like 20 damage in melee and doesn't use weapons.

Edit: I still don't get why'd you nerf a good ability to buff a god.

[bcadren]

I'd like to see Sif start taking 'ignorant' worshipers. You don't know a spell? ...train spellcasting to raise piety so you can get a spellbook of things low enough level that you can probably cast them without studying specific schools with the level 12 in SplCast you got getting you piety high enough. Notably Channel Energy is the only Invo that's remotely useful without spells (and then for things like the Staff of Dispater and Spirit Shield)...

[dck]

That sounds pretty unfun. Take up a god you have literally no use for whatsoever and train an useless skill for a ridiculously long time so there's a chance he'll actually give you spells (which you may have zero interest in); literally every other god except chei and including being godless would be better than that.

[khalil]

You can already cast Silence and beat an alich up because it does like 20 damage in melee and doesn't use weapons.

Edit: I still don't get why'd you nerf a good ability to buff a god.

A: Sure, but then you get into problems with actual dedicated melee fighters showing up while you're still silenced.
B: Because Sif doesn't need a buff. She's already an amazing god. aa after casting tornado, and then you get enough mp to cast tornado again once the current one wears off. The idea is to keep Sif at her current powerlevel, but make it look like she got buffed so people will stop saying "buff the god what gives me infinite mana plz".
If I did want to buff Sif, I'd just switch her channel magic ability to operate on Spellcasting instead of Invocations, because anyone worshiping Sif is going to already have buckets of spellcasting.

[dpeg]

I don't think we need new Sif threads all the time. What I jotted down from the last one was a more interesting gifting system. The miscast protection is really good, but was too opaque. Thankfully that has been addressed very recently. (Side note: Try not to confuse the concepts of "not fun for me", "overpowered" and "no-brainer". It really helps to figure out what you mean.)

[Sar]

Sure, but then you get into problems with actual dedicated melee fighters showing up while you're still silenced.

Well ideally you fight things like aliches in a controlled environment.
And, well, most of my "casters" will give "dedicated melee monsters" a run for their money, so...

[DracheReborn]

The miscast protection is really good, but was too opaque. Thankfully that has been addressed very recently.

It was?

Actually, I'd be grateful if you could comment on my patch:

https://crawl.develz.org/mantis/view.php?id=8301

Thanks!

[dpeg]

DracheReborn: Oh, I got carried away. Somehow confused the Mantis mail with a commit Many thanks for this, I hope this enters trunk as soon as possible. (Don't be angry about missing 0.14, the crucial property is to land in *some* stable release.)

[DracheReborn]

dpeg: thanks and no worries. Yeah, I guess with the rush to polish the upcoming release, new features are less of a priority right now. Still wouldn't mind your feedback though