Spider Stomper
Posts: 236
Joined: Saturday, 2nd July 2016, 13:16
(brutally) merge WJC into Uskayaw
0-1*: nothing
2*: Whirlwind (effectively replacing Stomp)
3*: Line Pass (effectively replacing Wall Jump)
4-6*: Some combination of Serpent's Lash, Solo Time, Pain Bond, and Grand Finale (depending on balance etc.)
rationale:
First, the gods have largely overlapping niches. Both focus on essentially passive enhancements to the player's existing combat abilities (passive in the sense that they are available in principle in every encounter, largely come online automatically, and have no permanent or semi-permanent costs). Both combine offense with creative mobility options. Both are designed to encourage risky, dramatic tactics in general and fighting in groups specifically. Both are natural late-game switches from Okawaru or Trog, once you've gotten more gifts and battlefield control starts becoming more important than raw stat buffs.
Second, I bet it would solve a lot of problems with both WJC and Usk. Consider:
--) As an active power, Stomp is too annoying to use as often as it's meant to be. (I actually made a post complaining about this about a year or so ago, and someone suggested replacing it with an ability identical to what turned out to be Whirlwind.) Whirlwind provides a similar melee AoE effect but is more fun, interesting, and useful.
--) Putting Whirlwind behind a small Usk piety threshold would help rein it in. While you'd be able to use it most of the time (and always for free), you wouldn't get it at the beginning of a fight (unless you opened with something that did a lot of damage), and you wouldn't always be able to rely on it. (In particular, Grand Finale or whatever high-piety nuke the god ended up having would usually disable it for a bit.) This in itself may make for some interesting tactical questions, for instance by making initial positioning more important.
--) The new Wall Jump differs from Line Pass only in that it (a) trades a reliable confuse for a bit of damage, (b) is much clumsier as a mobility mechanism, and (c) is spammable, but only in the right terrain. In my view, all these things just make it a worse Line Pass from a design and playability perspective.
--) The most fun part of Usk are its high-piety abilities. Adding some/most of them to the most fun part of WJC would result in more fun all around.
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