Make Trog Care About Invocations

[MainiacJoe]

[split from Nerf Pure melee! thread]

I agree with where that thread has ended up, that Trog and especially Be are OP. When I play them, I find that the penalty of no-magic just means I am awash in skill points and don’t have very many meaningful decisions to make with them. The slow, exhaustion, and passing out penalties at the end of berserk don’t hinder me much anymore, since I’ve learned to be careful when, where, and how frequently I berserk.

The real strength of Trog IMO is in the gifts and especially abilities. So why not have Invocations affect these instead of piety?

• Trog’s Hand: Duration increased by Invocations. Maybe even the HP regenerated per turn and the amount of MR boost, too.
• BiA: strength and/or duration of allies based on Invocations.
• Keep the gifts based on piety, so players aren’t tempted to be at exactly **** plus a tiny amount.
• Perhaps even berserking duration extension on kill or passing-out mitigation afterwards could be based on Invocations as well.

I think making Trog care about Invocations, and perhaps even making him care a lot about it, would nerf Trog by tightening skill points available for melee, without being too burdensome for new players just learning the skill system. But it’s such an obvious idea I’m sure it’s been thought of before, so ultimately I’ll be curious to learn why it has been rejected in the past.

[Midn8]

Scaling off of invoc instead of piety would make him both far more balanced and far more difficult to skill for new players. Plus, some things are OP already and don't need a boost because they have a great invoc apt (DD, Ds). This would also make trog scale way better into the late game.

[MainiacJoe]

Scaling off of invoc instead of piety would make him ... far more difficult to skill for new players.

This is the part I don't get. How hard is, "If you want your abilities to work better, train Invocations"? Are you worried they'll overinvest in it at the expense of defenses or weapon?

[amaril]

When i was a newer player i definitely overvalued having low fail rates, to the point that i wouldn't use evokable rage/invis unless i had already trained a lot of evo. Likewise, i never casted spells with yellow miscast rates and wouldnt have deemed a 30% fail support spell viable. Granted, this was dumb and i reaped the reward of my idiocy by basically not having access to the most powerful items in the game. The point though is that yes, newer players (based on my sample size of 1) may overtrain invo or not use invo abilities that are powerful w/o any training if they have not trained invo.