Level 9 Transmutation spell

[Rumbleguts]

With the addition of Hydra Form, there are now solid Transmutation spells for levels 1-8. Clearly there is a need for a level NINE spell! Here are the obvious suggestions.

OoForm: turn into an Orb of Fire. You are immediately hasted, immune/highly-resistant to just about everything, tiny (large EV bonus), mutate everything in the vicinity continuously (wretched: it's not just for Beoghite followers anymore!), and can only attack via fireball and bolts of fire (at 200+ spellpower of course).

Cerebovification: transform into Cerebov, sword and all. I think it's clear why this would be powerful. +100% HP, at-will iron shot and firestorm. Some pretty good immunities (though rDrown is a notable exception).

I challenge the Tavern to come up with more powerful forms than these. Hydrataur doesn't count.

[Sar]

orb of zot form

[Sandman25]

It should be level 10. Some other thread mentioned crawl's code is supporting such levels.

[Jeremiah]

How about a spell that lets you combine the best bits from your other transmutations? Statue form with blade hands, stone dragon form, or dragon hydra (can breathe with all heads at once.)

[Rumbleguts]

Orb of Zot form: Level 9 (or 10) Transmutations/Summoning. You transform into the most powerful artifact known to DCSS. Has one of four effects:

1.) If cast on the dungeon entrance, you win the game. Good job.

2.) If cast over the actual Orb in Zot, summons player ghosts to play a tower-defense style game around you against ever more dangerous waves of monsters.

3.) If cast during the ascent, causes a Zot singularity that deletes DCSS from your computer and erases all your online accounts.

4.) If cast elsewhere, you are stationary but Orb Guardians are continually summoned to trash anything in LOS.

[Jeremiah]

Xom's teddy bear form.

[and into]

Seriously though, a form spell (tmut or tmut/summoning) that immobilized you but summoned powerful stuff in a manner similar to dragon's call could be pretty cool.

[Rumbleguts]

Ice Statue Form: Tmut/Ice/Summ (Level???) you spawn ice beasts like crazy and can fire off icicles and freezing clouds.

Silver Statue Form: Tmut/Summ... you spawn demons like crazy. And chaotic things don't like to touch you. Zin has mixed feelings about this spell, since silver=good but demons=bad.

Curse Skull Form: Tmut/Summ/Necro... you are immobile with all the lichform immunities, but you can summon undead and invoke torment. Wait, are curse skulls fixed in place now or are they already back to stalking or chasing you or what?

edit: some grammar
2nd edit: Transm -> tmut

[Rumbleguts]

Dissolution Pool: tmut/summ... you transform into a jelly similar to Dissolution, but as an immobile shallow pool. However, you may still perform Dissolution's most important function. You continuously spawn (friendly) eyeballs of various sorts. The eyes are heavily weighted toward eyes of devastation so that some damage can be dealt to all the monsters confused/paralyzed/mutated/magic-drained by your other eye-babies.

[Siegurt]

2.) If cast over the actual Orb in Zot, summons player ghosts to play a tower-defense style game around you against ever more dangerous waves of monsters.
.

So wait, if we cast this over the orb of Zot, we have to play a game of Zot defense *within* our standard game of dungeon crawl? Do we go to half life if we lose and if we win do we half the health of all the monsters in the game or something?

That's some wicked Shahrazad stuff you got going on there.

[Rumbleguts]

Scroll of Random Uselessness Form: tmut/summ... you continuously do awesome things such as make enemy's weapons or the dust on the floor glow a brilliant puce, reassemble yourself, and occasionally summon a vicious swarm of butterflies.

Hall of Blades Entrance Mimic Form: tmut/summ... you take the form of a creature faking the entrance to a branch that was confiscated by the Deep Elves and incorporated in the Elven Halls. What does this mean? Like other branch entrance mimics, monsters that would normally dwell in that branch are attracted to you. In this case: animated weaponry! Perhaps they appear at edge of LOS to battle enemies. (Alternate name: Terpsichore Statue form)

[Greyr]

Trans/sum(/Trans) lv9: Deuplikate slef

u duplikat selph

(No but really, I like this idea.)

[Sar]

There's a new card that allows you to do precisely that (works like Mara's Illusion, only friendly, obviously).

[Greyr]

Whoa, really? That's pretty cool.

[XuaXua]

Seriously though, a form spell (tmut or tmut/summoning) that immobilized you but summoned powerful stuff in a manner similar to dragon's call could be pretty cool.

Perhaps something that gave you independent parts to "control"? Land-Kraken Form? It'd be like a natural extension of Hydra Form.

Isn't Necromutation considered the level 9 TMUT spell?

[Greyr]

Necromutation is lv8 (unless that was changed), so not exactly

[Sphara]

Negation Form. Gives you rN+, rCorr, Dmsl, Shroud and ranged antimagic attacks.

[The Ferret]

Demonify: you draw Hell's mystical force into yourself, and contort into a wrathful demon, bent on destruction.

Level 9 Transmutations.

You gain rF+, rC+, rN+++, rTorment, rPois, but are vulnerable to both holy damage and silver. Hell's mystical force will not strike at you while you are demonified.

Your arm, hand, and head slots meld into your body. You temporarily gain the Deformed Body mutation (penalty to AC from armor). You gain +3 to all stats in this form.

Melee: you arms change into supernaturally sharp claws. Each attack deals 6 + (STR+DEX)/4 + UC bonus piercing damage, with a chance to inflict bleeding.

Hellfire: you gain the ability to hurl hellfire (from the [a]bilities screen). Each such attack drains your reserves of Hell's mystical force, reducing the duration of your demonification. (At max spellpower, you can hurl hellfire five times in a row before your transmutation ends prematurely.)

Repeat casting: mortals are corrupted by repeatedly drawing Hell's mystical force into themselves. Casting Demonify during your transmutation, or soon after it, inflicts a large amount of magical contamination. (Inflict a Corrupt status on the caster for 2d3 turns to track this. "You feel corrupted by Hell's mystical force." "You feel Hell's corruption leaving your body." "You feel free of Hell's corruption.")

This is an especially evil spell. If cast when worshiping a good god, you will be excommunicated, and immediately face the god's wrath.

=====================

Angelify: you fill yourself with purifying energy, and transform into a shining angel.

Level 9 Transmutations

You gain rF+, rC+, rN+, rPois. You gain one level of regeneration.

Your wings grant you intrinsic flight and a bonus to EV.

Melee: your fists are suffused with holy energy, speeding your attacks. Each attack deals [can't be bothered thinking of the proper numbers] holy damage. Minimum attack delay is reduced to 0.4.

Ranged: you hurl bolts of blessed fire. (Acts the same as TSO's cleansing flame.) As with Demonify, this action reduces your transmutation duration.

Conduct: while you need not follow a good god to use Angelify, the good gods pay special attention to those who use this spell. While angelified, you are bound to follow the good gods' common rules of honorable conduct. Should your conduct violate these rules, your transmutation immediately ends, and you are subject to one episode of wrath from a randomly chosen good god. (If you already follow a good god, your transmutation immediately ends, but you are subject to penance as normal for your sins.)

Followers of evil gods are subject to excommunication for using this spell.

[nilsbloodaxe]

There's a new card that allows you to do precisely that (works like Mara's Illusion, only friendly, obviously).

gammafunk was saying online the other day that they are moving towards eliminating Nemelex and cards. But they want to keep the interesting cards somehow. Maybe a spell.

[Hirsch I]

True Metamorphosis
you can change forms freely at no cost, and no cast time (like delayed fireball).
when the spell ends, you are paralyzed and get yellow/red glow, based on how much you changed.

[Greyr]

^How useful is that though?

[The Ferret]

^How useful is that though?

Not useful enough to justify the spell levels, since you can already steamroll with Blade Hands alone.

[Greyr]

Blade hands is pretty ridiculous

[Jeremiah]

If anything, there should be a lower level transmutations spell whose damage scales up significantly with spell power, so there is an incentive to keep training the skill beyond the minimum to get it castable.

[Greyr]

^hydra form

[Sar]

Well shit, I kind of liked Nemelex.

[Greyr]

Take THAT Blizzard.

[nicolae]

Perhaps something that gave you independent parts to "control"? Land-Kraken Form? It'd be like a natural extension of Hydra Form.

That would be a pain to control each individual tentacle, even with ally commands. A stationary form might be fun... a really powerful form where you spawn multiple tentacles, malign-gateway-style, but you can't move from your spot and damage to your tentacles damages you. Some kind of Lovecraftian horror "Eldritch Form" or the like.

[and into]

Well shit, I kind of liked Nemelex.

Yeah, me too, but I kind of feel this has been coming for a while. I hope someone comes up with some revisions that pull the god back together, but I'm gearing up for the worst.

I gave new Nemelex a few tries and while it is less annoying in some respects, mixing summonings and destruction plus some buffs into war has made the god not only less powerful (which would be fine), but also so much variety in decks of war means that normal drawing is frustrating in new ways. It made Nem feel more chaotic (but in a way different from Makhleb), and that could be a niche for a god, except that drawing only costs you a turn,* so you'd usually just spam five or six cards until you got a summon that could actually help you in the fight, and if not, then you would use consumables or triple draw escape and get away. And even when you do hit summon, you get hostiles quite a bit even with high piety and evocations.

* Yes you are limited by number of cards, but the problem is that the more underwhelming cards are still going to be in a deck whether you use them, or not. So even apart from quantity, how decks actually work also encourages you to burn through the dross (might as well) until you hit a card that really helps. In a particularly dangerous situation you use your abilities, and in those cases it is less annoying. Still there are enough underwhelming or just highly situational card effects that you can draw four and still not really get too much.

[Sprucery]

Nemelex in 0.14 was fun and I greatly enjoyed it. I really think Nemelex should have been left that way for those who enjoy it. For those who don't, there's plenty of other gods to follow.

[and into]

Yeah. Especially with weight limits removed, I honestly think summoning, destruction, escape would be fine (some offense-oriented buffs could be implemented in destruction).

In fact, if you compressed the types of decks into just "normal" and "legendary," you'd have only slightly more inventory clutter as you do now. (3*2 vs 2*3 while still receiving both deck types regularly; once you switch to legendary only, it would be 3 deck types compared to 2.)

Right now, there are just so many effects in each of the two categories that it is very difficult to use war; at least escape is a bit better in that most of the stuff is geared toward one purpose.

On paper Nem is still strong, but a lot less fun to play, and actually harder to learn. I say the latter because, while Nem has and probably always will have a pretty steep learning curve, back when decks of summoning were separate it was at least pretty easy to figure out naturally, in the course of normal play, that you could lean hard on summoning cards for a lot of tough situations, and use decks of defense for escape/defensive purposes. Once you pieced that together you could play NX to good effect, and just experiment with the other decks slowly over time (or just ignore them tbh). In this way you could actually learn a lot about how to play the god well without too much craziness. (Also summoning is what you'd normally get the most of, anyway, since corpses are very prevalent and usually without value apart from sacrificing.) Now I'd imagine NX is harder to get the hang of, actually, even if the interface is technically simpler (which was undoubtedly an improvement).

[Brannock]

Level 9 Transmutation? I don't see that as a forme, but rather something along the lines of "Severely malmutate every monster in LOS."

[Brannock]

Frankly Transmutation is too overly focused on self-formes anyway. Stuff like Irradiate is a good step away from that.

[Hirsch I]

^How useful is that though?

at no cost, and taking no time to transform means you can use blade hands when attacking, then swich forms to statue form if something bad appears. if you want to flee, just swich again to any faster form. you would have lots of versatility.
use blade hands to beat an orb guardian. ancient lich enters LOS and summons any tormenting demon. instantly changes forms to statue or lich form, get close, blades again, turn him into bone meal.
I hate blade hands tho. too strong, no penalties whatsoever, every possible trsmut spell you could create will not be worth it because bhands is just too powerful.

[PleasingFungus]

gammafunk was saying online the other day that they are moving towards eliminating Nemelex and cards. But they want to keep the interesting cards somehow. Maybe a spell.

gammafunk has wanted to remove nemelex for literally years. it is not going to happen

[Greyr]

^How useful is that though?

at no cost, and taking no time to transform means you can use blade hands when attacking, then swich forms to statue form if something bad appears. if you want to flee, just swich again to any faster form. you would have lots of versatility.
use blade hands to beat an orb guardian. ancient lich enters LOS and summons any tormenting demon. instantly changes forms to statue or lich form, get close, blades again, turn him into bone meal.
I hate blade hands tho. too strong, no penalties whatsoever, every possible trsmut spell you could create will not be worth it because bhands is just too powerful.

I see what you're saying, being able to change forms without taking a turn would be pretty neat. However, with blade hands you get that casting penalty thing so the level 9 spell you barely had castable just became a red 50% (maybe not that extreme, but you know what I'm saying). Also, (and frustratingly) there are no more "faster forms"... Spider form can't even cling anymore! Bah!

This spell might see some use at lower levels, but not 9.

[Hirsch I]

faster than statue form, i mean.
and the way the spell would work, you would just need to cast True Metamorphosis once, then swich freely trough your forms, without having to cast anything. no cost, no time, no spell failure.

[and into]

gammafunk was saying online the other day that they are moving towards eliminating Nemelex and cards. But they want to keep the interesting cards somehow. Maybe a spell.

gammafunk has wanted to remove nemelex for literally years. it is not going to happen

Sorry for the derail, got all worked up over nothin'.

[duvessa]

man and here i was all ready to draw another comic about balls

[Greyr]

faster than statue form, i mean.
and the way the spell would work, you would just need to cast True Metamorphosis once, then swich freely trough your forms, without having to cast anything. no cost, no time, no spell failure.

Ohhh. That makes more sense.