crate wrote:There are a couple major problems with Pakellas.
1) He includes several things that were removed from crawl in the past, presumably for reasons the devs still agree with.
Included: giving a god haste, infinite enslavement, infinite polymorph, infinite self-teleport, possibly other things
It's hard to justify removing those in the past and simultaneously including them with Pakellas.
They're not infinite, though - You're limited by (A) inventory and (B) wand charges - which translates into "killing stuff to recharge your mp to get wand charges while saving enough MP so you can cast aura of abjuration and save you're life" You could probably get one of the listed things infinite-ish if you really worked at it, but it's not like you have infinite teleport and infinite enslavement all the time in every game.
Honestly (again) I see the only real problem here being the 50,000 potions of magic mean that you can effectively bank your kills and charge the wands willy-nilly. Which is a real problem.
2) He steps on the toes of several other gods
He gives you Ely's healing, Makhleb's destruction. Nemelex is already an evoker god, and there's a lot of overlap with Gozag also (partly since Nemelex and Gozag themselves have a lot of overlap).
Sometimes, yes but so does basically every God, so? and I don't really see it.
A of heal wounds isn't guaranteed in even a 15 runer and Paky only gives out 5 (?? Too lazy to check the actual number) wand gifts... It's not like you're getting instant, reliable Ely-type healing. Sure you can if the RNG is good to you, but it's the equivalent of a + 11 longbow of speed from Trog. Sometimes it'll happen and that game will be easy.
Mahkleb has kill-everything type abilities. So do Nemlex, Chei, Ru, Quazal, Fedhas although that usually kills you instead and also damn near everyone else in the Pantheon. Gods basically have two powers: Kill your enemies and escape from your enemies. Paky, like Mahkleb, tends to focus on the former but also work really well for the latter.
Why does it matter that their are two evoker Gods? My counter argument (that starts with three magic gods) is so obvious I feel dumb even making it.
Explain because I'm not seeing it. Gozag and Nemlex feel very different to me.
3) Gods using evocations skill cannot be balanced.
This one is pretty easy: either evokables are only useful if you get double-duty out of the skill (from a god); or the god is too strong because evokables are already super good so you get too much for free; or the god just sucks and doesn't do anything. Nemelex kind of manages to be both of the last two, since he's actually completely useless right away but then lategame he is super strong. This also means that adjusting the power of evokables messes with the power level of the evoker gods, which is a problem. I guess there's another alternative which is to remove evocations skill entirely, which might work but probably won't happen.
Okay, I can see that one. Training invocations on Pahkellus is a bit of a no-brainer because the returns on your investment are much better than training invocations on other Gods.
Stilll.. overall big picture balance wise Pahkellus he's really just Nemlex big daddy - He doesn't turn killer 'till late game when you have a bunch of wands/rods. Unless you start as an artificer (and are already overpowered!) you've got a small handful of random wands in the early game, and the early game is when your God really matters. He's still not on the level of Fedhas or Trog that give you guaranteed, predictable, life-saving powers at * piety. Paky can make LATE game kind of a cakewalk, but there are a dozen other ways to make late game a cakewalk.
The potions of magic thing and the no-MP-regen conduct are also awkward (since in practice this doesn't actually do what it was presumably intended to do), but those are more minor.
Yep, but I don't see 'em as minor at all.
Thursday, 26th May 2016, 02:05 
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