New God Proposal: Phos, God of Transformation

[wakeman]

This idea stems for the fact that all the major playstyles (stabber, conjurer, fighter) have obvious default Gods. Transmuters don't.

Phos is the God of Transformations:

Restrictions
No Undead or Demigods

Appreciates
Killing living, holy, undead, or demonic creatures. Higher chance of piety for creatures killed while you're transformed.
Devolving enemies.

Deprecates
Forgetting him. Piety falls over time.

Abilities
Piety level *

Devolve: Transform a living or demonic creature into a lesser version of itself (Costs 4 MP, hunger)

Death Yaks become Yaks, Spiny Frogs become Giant Frogs, Orcs become kobolds, Demons drop a tier, etc,
All the way down to goblins for humanoids, bats/rats for mammals, newts/pythons for reptiles, roaches for bugs, imps for demons, etc.

Grants piety on success but reduces XP gained obviously. Success depends on enemy HD and your Piety and Transmutation skill.

Piety level **

Extends the duration of your transmutations. Twice as long at full Piety. (Passive)
Resistance to petrify, polymorph, and enemy mutation effects. Full immunity at full Piety. (Passive)
Your armour morphs with you. Retain benefit of armour's intrinsics when transformed, but half the AC. (Think Incredible Hulk's shorts.)

Piety level ***

Stones to Gold: Pray over a stack of stones to turn it into gold (Costs MP, Piety, hunger)
Strange Brew: Pray over a stack of potions to combine and convert them into different potions (Costs MP, Piety, hunger)

Success (more gold, more/better potions) rises with Transmutations and Piety

You'll always lose some amount of potions and there will always be some chance of bad potions.

Piety level ****

Potions of Beneficial Mutation offer you 3 options for good mutations. Potions of Mutation work like regular Potions of Beneficial Mutation (random good mutation). (Passive)

Piety level *****

Mass Devolve: Attempt to devolve all devolvable creatures in LOS (Cost 8 MP, hunger)

(Useful for Pan/Hell)

Piety level ******

Evolve: Once per game, you may Pray over an alter of Phos to Evolve.

Gain a permanent increase to Max HP, STR, INT, and DEX, and additional race-dependent bonuses:

Centaurs become Yaktaurs: Increased AC, HP
Naga become Guardian Naga: Increased speed, AC
Deep Dwarves become Deeper Dwarves: Increased damage shaving and rN++.
Deep Elves become Deeper Elves: Increased Max MP
Octopodes become Kraken: Gain 2 (1?) additional tentacles, Gelatinous Body 3 and a Beak. ( <3 Octopodes )
Vine Stalkers become Ironwood Stalkers: gain AC (bark)
Ogres become Ettin: Second head, gaining a bonus To-Hit and another hat slot.
Tengu become Garuda: Increased AC (thick feathers), See Invisible, and speed when flying.
Felid become Panthers: Claw 3
Humans become Homo Superior: Another increase to all stats.

Draconians gain AC and another level of their intrinsic resistance (or a different resistance if that's not possible)
Demonspawn gain an additional full set of demonspawn mutations.
Formicids and Gargoyles gain AC and STR

Other races could gain additional bonus stats relative to their starting stats. Room for more creativity here.

Punishments
Transmutation miscast effects, weighted toward bad mutations
Enemies around you evolve into tougher versions of themselves
When gold/potions on the floor first enters your LOS, chance they turn into stones/bad potions.

[dowan]

Wow, the 1* ability is outrageously good, and it also gives you piety?!?
It's funny that you slipped in an extra head for ogres too!
The rocks to gold thing is never going to fly either, can you imagine the tedium of traveling to every single rock pile to get a little bit of gold? I mean, you've got infinite piety due to the 1* ability...

Wow this god is ridiculously powerful, which is OK, but aside from the whole absurd power thing, would it be any fun to play?

[CanOfWorms]

I thought Chei was the default Tm god due to his stat boosts?

Devolve should cost a tiny amount of piety, otherwise there is no reason not to constantly spam this until it lands if you know it can succeed.

Stone to gold encourages tediously picking up every stone. It's also not clear if you get gold proportional to the number of stones in the stack, in which case it's also optimal to only use it when you have a lot of stones. Strange Brew's downsides are pointless, because you always want to use it with either strictly bad potions or useless potions (poison, degeneration, etc.) All it does is make the player push more buttons and use more piety, so you could accomplish the same effect by just removing the bad potion downside and increasing the piety cost. It also has the same problem of being optimal to use after collecting a lot of potions.

Mass Devolve has the same problem as Devolve, no piety cost means spamming it as enemies approach you has no downsides.

[wakeman]

The downside would be a loss of XP, but yeah I can see what you guys are saying.

[CanOfWorms]

Pacify had XP loss back when it was spammable and it was perfectly viable to spam it.

[tasonir]

Overall I like the concept, I play a ton of transmuters. It's true that chei is something of a default transmuter god, but lots of people don't want to take on the slow movement speed, so this would give you a default transmuter god which doesn't come with a huge drawback. Similar to how trog is a default melee god, but doesn't allow you to use spells, so okawaru is the default melee god who still supports spells (or Makhleb, etc etc).

Devolve is a great ability, but it should cost piety (and probably a medium instead of small piety cost), not grant it. It may be easier to have it simply pick random monsters of lower HD, being a reverse polymorph, rather than having it respect genus, but I'm not terribly familiar with how monster genus/types work, so either way is fine by me.

We don't want to encourage scumming, so remove the transmute stones to gold and probably also the potion shuffling. Potion of beneficial mutation offering you 3 choices is probably fine, and powerful; letting potions of mutation only pick good mutations is very, very overpowered. You'd end up with a huge list of positive mutations, and the god also gives you 100% mutation resistance (which I assume these intentional mutations would get through).

Mass devolve needs a large piety cost, otherwise fine.

Melded equipment giving egos + half ac might be too much - how about just egos, and no ac/ev impact?

Adding so many race specific final gifts is overly complex and most of them are too strong. Something simple like +10% hp and +2-3 to all stats would be easy to understand and universally useful. If you want to adjust the stats somewhat more, you could base the stat gain on the racial stat distributions, but that may be more work than it's worth.

With the above cuts, Phos only has 2 actives, which are the same skill, in single target/aoe form. Might have room for another active ability, it's currently weighted towards passives.

In the spoiler I've pasted a copy of the OP with the removals I recommended, with some other minor adjustments:

Spoiler: show

Phos is the God of Transformations:

Restrictions
No Undead or Demigods

Appreciates
Killing monsters. Higher chance of piety for creatures killed while you're transformed.
Devolving enemies.

Deprecates
Forgetting him. Piety falls over time.

Abilities
Piety level *

Devolve: Transform a corporeal creature into a lesser version of itself (Costs 4 MP, medium piety, hunger)

Death Yaks become Yaks, Spiny Frogs become Giant Frogs, Orcs become kobolds, Demons drop a tier, etc,
All the way down to goblins for humanoids, bats/rats for mammals, newts/pythons for reptiles, roaches for bugs, imps for demons, etc.

Success depends on enemy HD and your Piety and Transmutation skill. Killing the monster grants the lowered monster's exp.

Piety level **

Extends the duration of your transmutations. Twice as long at full Piety. (Passive)
Resistance to petrify, polymorph, and enemy mutation effects. Full immunity at full Piety. (Passive)

Piety level ***
Melded equipment still grants its egos and bonus stats/effects; but still no ac/ev impact. (Passive)

Piety level ****

Potions of Beneficial Mutation offer you 3 options for good mutations. (Passive)

Piety level *****

Mass Devolve: Attempt to devolve all devolvable creatures in LOS (Cost 8 MP, hunger)

Piety level ******

Evolve: Once per game, you may Pray over an alter of Phos to Evolve.

Gain a permanent increase to Max HP, STR, INT, and DEX.

Punishments
Transmutation miscast effects, weighted toward bad mutations
Enemies around you are polymorphed into tougher monsters, with possible other 'fake mutations' (higher hp, ac, ev)

Even my version still has a lot of potential for farming mutations, or gaining the final gift and then abandoning to keep the increased hp/stats. Benefits should probably all be removed if you abandon.

[KittenInMyCerealz]

This idea stems for the fact that all the major playstyles (stabber, conjurer, fighter) have obvious default Gods. Transmuters don't.

I hardly think this is true
stabber gods: Dith, Trog, Oka, Kiku. (and pretty much any others as well)
mages usually go for sif of vehu for books
mainly melee dudes can pick any of them.

Transmuter is just another variation of spell-casting fighter.

[byrel]

Who goes Trog on a stabber? I think you're bound to want spell support...

[tasonir]

That would be the rare and elusive needle-stabber build, not your more traditional stabber build. I've never bothered to do one myself, and I would think that Okawaru would be better overall, but hey. Less needles but you'd be able to use all the standard stabbing spells for a more 'full stabber' kind of character. Trog does give more needles though, so there's that. I'm not a needle stabber expert, YMMV, etc.

[dowan]

Tasonir's suggestion brings the god closer to something that might kinda work, but the transmuter focus seems a bit unfortunate. Even ignoring the transmuter only stuff though, he'd still be useful, if you didn't base ability power on transmutation skill. I know kiku already does that with necromancy, so it's not without precedent, but necromancy also has far wider applicability than transmutations.

Maybe the transmuter specific stuff could be tweaked to be applicable to more characters. The 3* seems a bit too good for tms even in Tasonir's version, although I have no idea what could possibly replace it while remaining on theme somehow.

I don't see why you should need to pray for the final ability, why not just give it immediately?

[bcadren]

So Octopodes become Grell?

[byrel]

I actually liked the race-specific effects of Evolve. I know it complicates the game somewhat, but only the effect relevant to your current race needs to be displayed in the god description. It's really cool from a player perspective, because it's not just generic minmaxy stats, but more taking a Level in Badass.

I disagree about Naga's getting speed though... Upgraded monster nagas don't speed up, after all. They do have increased HP and MR, so that would be my notion of the buff. Maybe bump it to 6 or 7 MR per level. Or give them a flat 40 like a ring of MR.