God of Summoning

[bcadren]

Just a simple god concept that I feel could be to summoning what Vehumet is to Conjurations.

God could either require you know a summoning spell (excluding Abjuration variations and Summon Butterflies) or give a few Summoning spells immediately upon joining. Due to the unique piety mechanic and most the of the abilities, lack of any summoning spells means the god won't help you.

Piety Gain: You gain piety on allied kills.
Piety Loss: Time.

Abilities: Uses Summoning instead of invocations on all active abilities.

• [0] Durable Summons (Your god) is protecting you from Abjuration. (Passive)
• ** Allied HP on Kills Your allies heal on their kills. (Passive)
• *** Mark Attempts two checks. Summoning Spell Power vs. Target MR and Summoning Skill vs. Target HD. If either passes, the target is given 'Mark' Status. Marked enemies will appear on your minimap, your allies will attack them automatically (targets specifically that enemy when summoned), even when out of your LoS. But, the target acts as if you were in LoS at all times. (It will summon against your summons, while you can't see either. It will smite you from beyond your LoS, etc.) (Active, 6MP, Large Piety)
• **** Extension Your allies get more time in this world on kills (extend their own abjuration timer). Allies also show a bar indicating their abjuration time (letting you know about when they will time out.) (Passive)
• **** Growth Your allies gain large amounts of XP on kills and are allowed to gain HD. (Passive)
• ***** Greater Summoning For additional cost, you may choose to cast a stronger version of all summoning spells. The stronger version, in most cases either summons more things...or summons more powerful ones. For example; the greater version of Summon Hydra gives 8-20 heads depending on power, instead of only 4-12. (Active, 3MP, Small Piety)
• ****** God Summon A spell so powerful you couldn't cast it without your god's help. A 'level 15' spell. Fail rate is based on if it was a Level 11 spell (Spell difficulty of 500 [level 9 is 330]). Summons an Eldritch abomination. (Active, 15MP, Huge Piety, irresistible INT drain)

  Code:

eldritch abomination (w) | Spd: 15 (stationary) | HD: 30 | HP:  184-254 | AC/EV: 15/15 | Dam: 60(chaos), 40 (Drain Int) | non-living, eats corpses, amphibious, see invisible, lev | Res: magic(immune),
hellfire, fire+++, cold+++, elec+++, poison+++, acid+++, drown, rot+++, neg+++, torm, napalm | XP: 15000 | Sp: Spawn Tentacles, Mass Confusion | Sz: Giant | Int: animal.

(Basically the thing you summon only one tentacle of with Malign Gateway.)

Anyways; the two active abilities are a bit out there and probably too powerful; though the rest of it I stand by. Of the God Summon though...I do like the concept, though my first thoughts 'of spell too powerful to perform on your own.' are what I posted (1) and summoning panlords (2); both of which are potentially too powerful.

[Sar]

I didn't read the proposal very thoroughly, but I am going to comment on two things: firstly, giving piety only on your summons' kills can lead to some very awkward gameplay, and secondly, there has been a desire in god development to move from narrowly useful gods to broadly useful gods, and god that supports exactly 1 (one!) skill is as narrow as it gets.

[bcadren]

god that supports exactly 1 (one!) skill is as narrow as it gets.

Kiku and Vehu set precident and the other schools could use some love; especially Hexes and Summoning. [Elemental schools cross with everything else and all.] And...like Vehu, if you didn't summon before, taking up Summoning instead of Invo is a fair choice.

[Sar]

Kiku and Veh are those older gods (and Kiku is more broadly useful due to how it's implemented, on a typically not-caster dude you can really just grab pain weapon, Necro buffs and Animate Dead and it will be useful for you), also Veh supports a lot of Elementalists). Invocations don't depend on your Int or armour and most races have neutral or positive Invo apt.

[TeshiAlair]

Veh is fantastic for anyone who wants some range without going over to bows, since the Conj buff means you don't need to train quite as deep.

[Magipi]

Veh is fantastic for anyone who wants some range without going over to bows, since the Conj buff means you don't need to train quite as deep.

I doubt this. In heavy armour even mid-level conjurations are hard to get. And it is surely suboptimal to pick a god who only helps your secondary attack and does nothing else.

[and into]

Conjurations is also far and away the largest spell school and the school with the most appearances in starting books. It also helps a lot that both Kiku and Veh have been calibrated to help you branch into their respective schools, and the form of support they give can be put to many different kinds of use in practice. (E.g., Veh's wizardry can be used to rush higher level spells, or cast level 4, 5, and 6 conjuration and other direct damage spells in heavy armor earlier and more easily than you otherwise would.)

Also Kiku already supports a spell school that gives you lots of minions/allies, and there are already other gods that support you with minions/allies, and ones that let you summon via invocations. So I feel this niche is covered already in multiple different ways.

Beyond that, an ability (Mark) that gets around a recent change to summonings that disallows kills outside of LOS because they weren't fun is probably going to be unacceptable. I think TSO heals your divine bros when they kill evil stuff, so that's covered (if I am misremembering how TSO summons work I beg your pardon, been a while since I played TSO). Extension and growth make summoning more like the perma-allies that other gods already offer.

Getting a super "level 10" spell and greater summoning could be neat and would be a sort of spell support that other gods don't offer (Veh's range extension comes closest), but I don't think that those abilities plus abjuration resistance is enough unique/novel content to carry a god. That's aside from the more general problem, namely that I'm not sure the concept itself ("god of summoning") is sound given the god options that already exist in the game.

[and into]

Veh is fantastic for anyone who wants some range without going over to bows, since the Conj buff means you don't need to train quite as deep.

I doubt this. In heavy armour even mid-level conjurations are hard to get. And it is surely suboptimal to pick a god who only helps your secondary attack and does nothing else.

I've often used Veh to make casting in heavy armor easier on characters who ended up doing lots of melee and lots of blasting. Of course if you went with a really low strength or low int species/background combo, however, it doesn't work out too well unless you luck into some really great items with +stats (not something you can count on obviously).

[TeshiAlair]

Yeah, and I really like Veh on Monks/Tmuters

[gammafunk]

I like Sif Muna. A lot.

[mikee]

I think TSO heals your divine bros when they kill evil stuff, so that's covered (if I am misremembering how TSO summons work I beg your pardon, been a while since I played TSO). Extension and growth make summoning more like the perma-allies that other gods already offer.

Actually, three of these abilities are already done by TSO. And growth, as far as I can tell, is already available to all characters regardless of god.

[Laraso]

I remember back in 0.7 (I think?), Vehumet actually used to be a god of summoning. He has since decided that summons are for chumps, and only specializes in conjurations now.

Since that change, I've always viewed Sif Muna as -the- summoner god. Channeling in-combat works very well when you have meat shields keeping the enemy back, and that tactic synergizes with itself since while your minions are protecting you, you're generating magic to make more minions. Sif Muna means that you will eventually get every summoning spell in the game, while also allowing you to swap between them at will so you can tackle your current situation most effectively. Not only are you probably going to get your big summon spells sooner, you're also going to be able to cast them sooner too because Sif's miscast protection means you can miscast a spell without having to worry about something silly like miscasting Monstrous Menagerie and getting abyssed (this has happened to me).

So even though Sif is made out to be the "generalist", the generic magic god, really all of her abilities go very well with summoning.

[DracheReborn]

I think it was more like 0.11 that Veh still had summoning support. But even then, Sif was the summoning god of choice, for all the reasons you mentioned. Veh's only advantage probably was the more predictable gifting of books, but when that went there probably wasn't enough reason to keep summoning support for Veh.

Really, I don't think crawl needs any more summoning gods. If anything, there is probably too much summoning going on. Arguably TSO, Makhleb, Trog, and Nem are already summons gods, in that they provide summons as the top end god ability (like the god proposed here).

[Hopeless]

I think it was more like 0.11 that Veh still had summoning support. But even then, Sif was the summoning god of choice, for all the reasons you mentioned. Veh's only advantage probably was the more predictable gifting of books, but when that went there probably wasn't enough reason to keep summoning support for Veh.

Really, I don't think crawl needs any more summoning gods. If anything, there is probably too much summoning going on. Arguably TSO, Makhleb, Trog, and Nem are already summons gods, in that they provide summons as the top end god ability (like the god proposed here).

Beogh is a summons god as well really, though not under your control all the time. I mean ab = summon orc followers you have already converted else where. And then there are the spontaneous gifts of orc crews.

[Laraso]

I think it was more like 0.11 that Veh still had summoning support. But even then, Sif was the summoning god of choice, for all the reasons you mentioned. Veh's only advantage probably was the more predictable gifting of books, but when that went there probably wasn't enough reason to keep summoning support for Veh.

Really, I don't think crawl needs any more summoning gods. If anything, there is probably too much summoning going on. Arguably TSO, Makhleb, Trog, and Nem are already summons gods, in that they provide summons as the top end god ability (like the god proposed here).

Beogh is a summons god as well really, though not under your control all the time. I mean ab = summon orc followers you have already converted else where. And then there are the spontaneous gifts of orc crews.

Actually that isn't quite true, here we are not talking about gods which provide summoning or summoning-esque abilities such as Makhleb, Yred, and Beogh, we're talking about gods that support the magical school of summoning. Mahk's demons, or Beogh's orcs, are not supplements for summoning, rather they are substitutions.

[DracheReborn]

Is being able to summon many different allies very different from summoning just one type of ally? In practice, you'd only use your top summon in tough fights anyway, and for easy fights its whatever (use melee or or use lesser summons, does it matter that much?)

With respect to summon support, Trog and TSO already provide protection from abjuration, TSO does extension and ally upgrade, Makhleb and Nem both do the "like normal spell summon but better", and TSO/Trog both have their version of "God summon". What makes the proposal a summon god while these others aren't?

Btw, I do regard Yred and Beogh as slightly different. Care and feeding of perma allies makes it a bit different from temporary allies from summons, IMO. Unfortunately, in current implemention it's generally more tedious. Recall is a big help though, that's true.

[vengefulcarrot]

I like Sif Muna. A lot.

Who?

[Laraso]

Is being able to summon many different allies very different from summoning just one type of ally? In practice, you'd only use your top summon in tough fights anyway, and for easy fights its whatever (use melee or or use lesser summons, does it matter that much?)

With respect to summon support, Trog and TSO already provide protection from abjuration, TSO does extension and ally upgrade, Makhleb and Nem both do the "like normal spell summon but better", and TSO/Trog both have their version of "God summon". What makes the proposal a summon god while these others aren't?

Having summon invocation support doesn't make them gods of summoning, in the same way that Makhleb's conjuration invocation support doesn't make him the god of conjurations. That's the key difference here, Vehumet is the god of conjurations but there is currently no "god of summoning", although I do consider Sif Muna to fill that role.

[bcadren]

Having summon invocation support doesn't make them gods of summoning, in the same way that Makhleb's conjuration invocation support doesn't make him the god of conjurations. That's the key difference here, Vehumet is the god of conjurations but there is currently no "god of summoning", although I do consider Sif Muna to fill that role.

That's basically what I was going to say. This was a god to support use of the summoning skill and not just offer summons for piety. That said, looks like most the abilities I thought up that would make summon god interesting TSO already has...but no one really thinks of TSO as a summoning god? Do people realize he has those abilities? And that's it's not JUST his angels that can't be abjured? Because I don't think they do. I've never heard anyone think of playing a Summoner of TSO.