(brutally) merge WJC into Uskayaw

[luckless]

...into a god with Usk-like piety gain/decay and the following powers:

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.

[Sprucery]

Both are natural late-game switches from Okawaru or Trog

I don't mean to derail the topic, but do people really switch to Uskayaw from Okawaru or Trog? I would never...

[luckless]

Both are natural late-game switches from Okawaru or Trog

I don't mean to derail the topic, but do people really switch to Uskayaw from Okawaru or Trog? I would never...

I do it a bunch. It might be a stupid idea, though. (Uskayaw is pretty good late game, though--better than Okawaru, in my opinion.)

[bel]

I think it's a good idea. When I was trying to come up with a mechanism to fix WJC's broken mechanics, I found that many of the things work quite similarly to Usk. Since many people seem unreceptive to "not always on" martial attacks, merging the two gods is probably the next best thing.

I tend to underuse Stomp in my games. Whirlwind being available only at 2*, and being combined with Usk piety mechanics would largely mitigate the problem I identified in my posts in the other thread: the current implementation of WJC basically just asks you to move as quickly as possible to a corridor to Tab.

The issues I foresee are:
(a) This proposal pushes Usk more towards a melee style than it already is. I believe Lasty was not keen on this outcome in the other thread about Stomp.
(b) The abilities would probably need to be tweaked somewhat for balance.

[Steel Neuron]

If my opinion matters at this point, please just remove WJC before this. If you want to disassemble Usk and use ideas from WJC, whatever.

Adding some/most of them to the most fun part of WJC would result in more fun all around.

I wonder what qualifies at fun around these parts, but I'm starting to think it's down to authority and preference of a few select people.

[luckless]

I wonder what qualifies at fun around these parts, but I'm starting to think it's down to authority and preference of a few select people.

maybe, but my own conception of fun in Crawl may be pretty unpopular. I thought the most fun part of the council god was the opportunity to randomly receive, and then steal, a divine speed-branded greatsword, but that was the first thing to go as far as the devs were concerned.

edit: also, the weapon crosstraining was pretty cool.

[Steel Neuron]

You see, the problem I have (and the reason why my change of attitude since my last post, where I wasn't necessarily upset at the changes) is the absolute lack of a metric of success.

It has become very clear to me that ##crawl-dev are closed to player feedback. Any dissenting opinions from the player base are dismissed on the grounds of people not knowing what they want, which can be a valid opinion at times but it's taken to the extreme of absurdity. If it doesn't matter what players want, where exactly is the metric of "fun"? It upsets me that all of these changes that are being thrown around here and in ##crawl-dev are completely aimless. Everyone has their own opinion on how the god would improve, and it feels like the actual choices that get implemented are just subject to a few people's whims.

You can say anything you want about the god's design but it was extremely well received when it was first put in Trunk, and that is in no small part thanks to all the effort that I spent listening to player and dev feedback and measuring the impact that every change had in how people played and enjoyed the god during the experimental period. For each hour I spent coding, I spent five spectating and watching. You can say it's down to general excitement for new stuff, but I think threads like this are quite telling when they compare several new features, and Brannock himself frequently sent me private messages from his friends praising the god and expressing how much they were enjoying. Even ##crawl-dev celebrated briefly that it had been well received. Surely that's not random chance?

I could be on board with these last changes if we gave them some time to stabilize and see how they turn out in a couple weeks. In fact, I raised that last post in GDD for this very reason: To make predictions about how the god would work with them. The point of making predictions is that I would change my mind if the evidence didn't adjust to them. But I seem to be the only one actually interested in measuring the impact of the changes. Everyone else is talking about what the next big sweeping change is, and how fun it's going to be under their own particular metric of fun.

The only dev who ever expressed that the positive reception of the god was a good thing was Brannock. In fact, he asked me to be conservative and give the god time before proposing any further changes. I wasn't pushing for anything because of Brannock's warning, and I feel a little bit betrayed to see that we have hit an imaginary milestone that nobody warned me about, after which it's free for all rework time.

So I hope you understand that when the word "fun" is thrown around as an argument to rework the god completely it sounds like a mockery to me. If you want to make the argument that the god needs to go because it opposes some ideal principles of design, I will have to agree even though I find the argument boring. But it's clear we are not making changes in the interest of player fun, but rather how very specific people interpret it.

[watertreatmentRL]

I believe the signature and most substantive change of .20 will be the addition of the council god. Only the wand reform strikes me as similar in magnitude, but it is much more lateral and probably will be less liked by players. In a real sense, the new god will justify the progression from one version to the next.

With this in mind, I reiterate my comment on the gdd thread: If you find the process constraining or just feel ill-used by it, you should know that what you are doing is enough to make a new version of the game. There is an audience for new versions of the game and it will grow as more people go outside the process.

[Lasty]

You see, the problem I have (and the reason why my change of attitude since my last post, where I wasn't necessarily upset at the changes) is the absolute lack of a metric of success. [...]

It has become very clear to me that ##crawl-dev are closed to player feedback. Any dissenting opinions from the player base are dismissed on the grounds of people not knowing what they want. [...]

You can say anything you want about the god's design but it was extremely well received when it was first put in Trunk . . . Surely that's not random chance? [...]

I could be on board with these last changes if we gave them some time to stabilize and see how they turn out in a couple weeks. [...]

The only dev who ever expressed that the positive reception of the god was a good thing was Brannock. [...]

I wasn't pushing for anything because of Brannock's warning, and I feel a little bit betrayed to see that we have hit an imaginary milestone that nobody warned me about, after which it's free for all rework time. [...]

If you want to make the argument that the god needs to go because it opposes some ideal principles of design, I will have to agree even though I find the argument boring. But it's clear we are not making changes in the interest of player fun, but rather how very specific people interpret it.

You have put a ton of work into designing, developing, and editing this god, and I can imagine that it would be frustrating to see that the end result of that work may not be fully in-line with your vision -- or even your edited vision. A very small percentage of crawl designs get any life at all, and you've achieved quite a lot more than that. You're not the first person to see their crawl designs, or even largely functional gods, change over the long run, though. At least 4 gods have been largely developed and then scrapped or taken back for additional work. The development of the game isn't about preserving any one creator's vision because its a collaborative design project.

I'm disappointed to hear that you feel hard-used by the dev team as a whole, and I'm sadder for seeing that a thread started on the tavern by someone that is not a dev seems to be the straw that broke the camel's back. You mention feeling unsupported by any dev team member but Brannock, but I know I put a non-trivial amount of effort into trying to help you edit your ideas into something that would be a good addition to crawl, and I know that a number of other devs supported you along the way as well. There came a point where what I thought was the ideal way forward differed from yours, and as I said here, I was personally willing to let it remain in a state that I saw as a promising but flawed design as long as players largely found it fun. My prediction was that players would stop finding it fun upon repeated plays after the thrill of power wore off because of what I perceived as significant issues in the design of the god. Pakellas was removed for similar reasons, despite being very powerful and popular among a significant number of players.

The dev team isn't a united entity with strict rules governing the behavior of the participants. It's a loose coalition, and things happen as individual devs feel strongly about them; sometimes it happens that other devs feel strongly the opposite, and then we need to find a way to resolve that. What changes one way today may well change another way tomorrow. As such, it's unreasonable to hold the entire group to the expectation that they would honor a promise that one person made to you. It's even more unreasonable if that promise wasn't known to the group as a whole, which is certainly the case here.

The dev team listens to player feedback, but as you know, the team doesn't take player feedback as the ultimate goal or guidepost. Overall, the team is most concerned with making the game better as they see it, which may not line up with the majority opinions of players, or of the vocal subset of online players, or even the dev team itself. You're right that there's no absolute metric of success; the closest thing we have is a guiding design document, and each member no doubt interprets it and its applications a little differently.

You present "player fun" as a monolith here, but at the end of the day, chasing "player fun" is a doomed proposition; players aren't of one mind, and they aren't going to steer you in one direction. At best you'd end up steering towards the aims of one group of people, and potentially alienating others. Our approach has always been instead to make a game we find fun and assume that if we do that earnestly and well there will also be players who find it fun.

[Steel Neuron]

At least 4 gods have been largely developed and then scrapped or taken back for additional work. The development of the game isn't about preserving any one creator's vision because its a collaborative design project.

It's a bit off putting that you find it necessary to remind me of this now. The god is absolutely nothing like my october proposal, let alone the original one years ago. Being annoyed now has nothing to do with "my vision". This is not my god anymore, it is also your god, and luckless's god, and shping's god, and MarvinPA's god. I could trace every one of the current mechanics to input from a player or a dev. I have renounced to dozens of mechanics that I personally found fun because they were seen as contrary to the game design.

I have already been part of this process, Lasty; I haven't developed the god in isolation. If anything, I'm surprised that yourself or any of the other devs that have been directly involved in taking the god to the point it is now aren't offering a modicum of resistance to sweeping changes. The god's design isn't that green anymore thanks to everyone's input and my effort, and we are treating it like an experimental branch thrown together last weekend.

My prediction was that players would stop finding it fun upon repeated plays after the thrill of power wore off because of what I perceived as significant issues in the design of the god.

That's fair, but I haven't seen that manifest yet. In theory we were waiting for that prediction to come true. The only hint in that direction was some players being annoyed at the superiority of whirlwind, for which I had proposed a change backed up by a dev (reducing damage). I was then told to wait further.

If you aren't going to wait for the playerbase to confirm your prediction, when does it stop being a prediction and start being dogma?

[bel]

Zerothly, realize that this is CYC and none of the people who have commented on the proposal are devs. Wacky proposals based on dubious assumptions is what we do here. By the way, GDD is not much better. People vastly overestimate the importance of Tavern. The devs may read what goes on here and occasionally participate, but it's not much more important than that.

About the general process, there are many more ways for things to be wrong than to be right. It's good that you changed the god significantly based on player feedback. You are correct that "fun" is a rather elusive concept; I think it's not really a desirable goal to pursue. For instance, I saw the quote from SA you posted in the other thread about someone kiting a hydra using wall jump; and I didn't say to myself: "Great, people are having fun!", but rather: "This is more evidence that wall jump is broken." Broken mechanics can be "fun" to play, but that fact doesn't mean much by itself.

At the moment, the only things which have been changed are: removing slow from whirlwind and changing wall jump behaviour. Both were reasonable changes to fix the broken mechanics, though I don't agree with them, for reasons I've explained elsewhere.

From what I understand of dev-team behaviour (from the outside; I have no special insight), if some dev wants to implement something and nobody seriously objects, they do so. Many things are done on the basis of "let's try it out and see if it works". The new changes have only been around a couple of days, and might well mutate into something else altogether.

I have no idea what communication was going on between you and the dev-team, so I won't comment on that.

[Lasty]

At least 4 gods have been largely developed and then scrapped or taken back for additional work. The development of the game isn't about preserving any one creator's vision because its a collaborative design project.

It's a bit off putting that you find it necessary to remind me of this now. The god is absolutely nothing like my october proposal, let alone the original one years ago. Being annoyed now has nothing to do with "my vision". This is not my god anymore, it is also your god, and luckless's god, and shping's god, and MarvinPA's god. I could trace every one of the current mechanics to input from a player or a dev. I have renounced to dozens of mechanics that I personally found fun because they were seen as contrary to the game design.

I have already been part of this process, Lasty; I haven't developed the god in isolation. If anything, I'm surprised that yourself or any of the other devs that have been directly involved in taking the god to the point it is now aren't offering a modicum of resistance to sweeping changes. The god's design isn't that green anymore thanks to everyone's input and my effort, and we are treating it like an experimental branch thrown together last weekend.

I agree that it's off-putting that I find it necessary to remind you now, since I have previously been under the impression that you were very much on board with the situation, and over the last few days, I have the opposite impression. Perhaps I've misunderstood your argument here? From your last sentence here, it sounds like you're saying you felt the god was "done", but for what it's worth nothing is "done" -- Pakellas, for example, made it into a release and still got removed later.

My prediction was that players would stop finding it fun upon repeated plays after the thrill of power wore off because of what I perceived as significant issues in the design of the god.

That's fair, but I haven't seen that manifest yet. In theory we were waiting for that prediction to come true. The only hint in that direction was some players being annoyed at the superiority of whirlwind, for which I had proposed a change backed up by a dev (reducing damage). I was then told to wait further.

If you aren't going to wait for the playerbase to confirm your prediction, when does it stop being a prediction and start being dogma?

It sounds like you're saying that I wasn't willing to wait, which, if true is manifestly incorrect. I made no changes of any kind, and was perfectly happy to wait, but as I said above, I am not the dev team. We are individuals, as I've explained many times, and we don't have a single viewpoint or a single point of approval. If you're going to work on crawl, you need to understand that you're working with a group of individuals.

I'm sure you'd be irritated, or at least confused, if I blamed you for creating spoiler accounts to ruin peoples' streaks on the basis that the person who did that and you are both players.

[Steel Neuron]

I agree that it's off-putting that I find it necessary to remind you now, since I have previously been under the impression that you were very much on board with the situation, and over the last few days, I have the opposite impression. Perhaps I've misunderstood your argument here? From your last sentence here, it sounds like you're saying you felt the god was "done", but for what it's worth nothing is "done" -- Pakellas, for example, made it into a release and still got removed later.

Yes, I think you have misunderstood me. The god is nowhere close to done. Before the changes, it was too powerful, whirlwind was tedious and spammable, and wall jump took fewer AUTs than it should. You know what, I could even get behind wall jump being restricted to moving into, and away from, the vicinity to enemies. Serpent's Lash is undercosted and there's a lot of room to improve Heaven on Earth.

My problem is that the narrative was all about being cautious and conservative, and all of a sudden two completely unrelated, fairly arbitrary "fixes" have been pushed, and instead of talking about whether they are working out, we are discussing the next set. I'm not talking about this thread, I'm fully aware of what's discussed on crawl-dev, and the conversation has been about reworking the god rather than iterating over the design or even paying attention to the impact of the changes.

It sounds like you're saying that I wasn't willing to wait, which, if true is manifestly incorrect. I made no changes of any kind, and was perfectly happy to wait, but as I said above, I am not the dev team. We are individuals, as I've explained many times, and we don't have a single viewpoint or a single point of approval. If you're going to work on crawl, you need to understand that you're working with a group of individuals.

I don't see what the big deal with being annoyed is. I can understand the process and be annoyed about it. I would be of much better disposition if I saw the process followed any particular metric or seemed to be based in evidence, further than personal taste, because those are the standards that I imposed myself when I was working on it. What we are doing now if we keep changing stuff without a concrete aim is a hack job. Even the two changes that have been made are something I could get behind, given enough time to see their impact. But if it's going to be changing at this pace, I honestly believe it should go back to an experimental branch, regardless of whether I'm involved with it.

[duvessa]

Jesus, how conceited can you get? Everything you do is carefully thought out and players love it and everything the devteam does is a hack job done on a whim that players hate.

[papilio]

I had posted here a post like "remove uskayaw cause it largely overlaps with wjc" but mods removed it because they thought it was a joke post. (it was not a joke and I feel ironic to see that a similar post gets large number of thanks)

Also many of CWZ(korean) players thought so; i saw many of them saying "hey, why both of uskayaw and wjc exist?? remove one of them or merge them", though most of them form and be within their own (korean) community and usually do not participate tavern or ##crawl-dev.

So "hey, players are happy with wjc so there's no prob" is not true

[Steel Neuron]

Jesus, how conceited can you get? Everything you do is carefully thought out and players love it and everything the devteam does is a hack job done on a whim that players hate.

Sure, that's exactly what I meant, thanks for summarising it to me.

FWIW, working with the devs has been pleasant and I hold no personal grudge against any of them. I'm annoyed at my perceived lack of communication and direction, not towards them as individuals.

MarvinPA in particular has been very critical of my ideas and rejected many of them, and since he put a lot of effort and detail in his reviews I really enjoyed interacting with him. dpeg has been extremely supportive, and so have Lasty, Brannock and everyone else who have backed up their points even if I didn't agree. They never held back in telling me an idea was shit if they thought was shit, so I owe them to say that I think we are fucking up now. The value they give my opinion is entirely up to them.

[luckless]

My problem is that the narrative was all about being cautious and conservative, and all of a sudden two completely unrelated, fairly arbitrary "fixes" have been pushed, and instead of talking about whether they are working out, we are discussing the next set.

I really don't think the trunk fixes are arbitrary or that further fixes would be impulsive hack jobs. Here it helps to compare versions. (All versions also let you use lunge to occasionally* do more damage and grant decent-but-not-amazing active abilities at high pieties.) First, the original trunk version:

• Just using whirlwind lets you do somewhat more single-target damage per enemy action than tabbing (thanks to the slow effect). Plus you get repositioning and full AoE damage.
• If you go to the extra effort of playing WJC as the combo god--by which I mean "the god where you laboriously monitor (a) the status effects you randomly proc in relation to (b) enemy positioning and (c) terrain, in order to either step back or wall jump and then lunge for extra damage"--you can turn "somewhat more" into "way more."
• Plus you get a free and extremely powerful escape ability.

Everyone agreed that was broken. So now consider the version you wanted (where whirlwind does 70% damage and wall jump doesn't do any):

• Just using whirlwind lets you do substantially less single-target damage per enemy action than tabbing (if your targets were slowed all the time, the reduced damage and the slow effect would even out, but obviously they're not slowed all the time). You still get repositioning, but your AoE damage is likewise reduced to be about on par with axe cleaving.
• If you go to the extra effort of playing WJC as the combo god, you can turn "substantially less" into "about as much, on average." (If the slow lands early enough you can do more, but that's obviously not guaranteed.)
• Plus you get a free and still-very-powerful escape ability.

Now finally consider the current trunk version:

• Just using whirlwind lets you do just as much single-target damage per enemy action as tabbing. Plus you get repositioning and full AoE damage.
• Plus you can use wall jump to avoid getting trapped in corners, though no longer to escape.
• Plus in the right terrain you can bounce between walls to replicate the AoE+debuff function of the original whirlwind, only with confuse instead of slow.

So the version you wanted would have preserved the free escape, while the current trunk version preserves a degenerate mutant offspring of the original whirlwind's melee AoE+debuff effect. Otherwise, the only difference is that the version you wanted would demand a lot more effort from the player (which in my experience gets super repetitive really quickly) to achieve what is effectively the same result; the current trunk version cuts out the middleman. Hardly arbitrary! Nor are potential revisions that build on the current trunk version (as I think mine would) betrayals of the god's essential design!

---
[*] of course "occasionally" becomes "often" or even "typically" if you abuse summons to constantly switch positions.

[Steel Neuron]

Let's just look at whirlwind for a second and leave wall jump aside.

You are focusing on the wrong problem. Nobody has complained that whirlwind is tedious because of the need to change action when slow lands. This feedback and constant adaptation is what people find fun about the god (with a caveat that I'll go into in a minute). People have repeteadly complained that whirlwind is so strong that it's optimal to spam even in absence of the other moves, which imposes some level of attention for every fight that is not always desirable.

The caveat to people enjoying the constant adaptation, is that they stop enjoying it when it's forced on every fight. This is why I was campaigning to make tab relevant again by giving it the role of simple, efficient damage dealer, reserving the martial attacks for difficult fights where the player wants to be 100% engaged and use the kit.

The reason why current trunk whirlwind is the absolute wrong direction is that it fails to give tab a role, since it's still strictly better than it even in single target scenarios, because of damage frontloading. You are rewarded from spamming jkjkjkjk to a worse extent that the previous version, because without slow there isn't an incentive to change into a different move, and without reduced damage there is no justification to tab instead of whirlwind, because if your melee weapon is twice as fast as your move speed, it's always better to swing twice first and then give the monster their turn.

All martial moves need a mechanism that eventually makes themselves obsolete, that the player has to pay attention to. Otherwise they become a worse version of tab with more keypresses and less built in quality of life. This is the point that I'm trying to make: No martial move should be mindlessly spammable, and for this to work, tab needs to be useful as a direct, hands-free damage dealer while martial moves need to be just positioning utility (the reason why I chose slow and distraction is because they changed the way enemies move), and I'd be perfectly willing to make whirlwind distract instead of slow, as long as someone agrees with me that whirlwind needs to deal less damage . Note I'm not talking about combos, this is entirely about not making any of the moves overcentralizing, and the current whirlwind is a step back.

Offensive wall jump (that is, jumping over a monster) has the exact same problem and I am very concerned when dpeg brings up that "now that wall jump can't be used for escaping, we can buff it". Adding more offensive effects to wall jump will only push it to be an "open loop, spam until everything is dead" move, while just like the other two, it should have a built in mechanic that makes itself suboptimal if you spam it without looking. I'm not even that opposed to making wall jump unusable as a travel move (although I think it should work when jumping into and away from pack, not only into a pack). My worry is about the more fundamental misunderstanding that it is meant to be a damage tool first and a utility tool second.

The only move that you're incentivized to spam mindlessly until everything is dead should be tab, because it has built in QOL for this very purpose.

[Steel Neuron]

As an addendum to my previous post, tweaking whirlwind damage in absence of slow accomplishes nothing. If you have a whirlwind that causes no status effects and make it do 99% weapon damage, you've caused a very subtle spoilery problem: While most builds will still prefer to whirlwind due to the damage frontloading mechanic I explained above, the few for which attack delay is exactly equal to move delay would prefer to tab because damage frontloading doesn't apply to them. Same thing with 101% damage.

Any implementation of whirlwind that doesn't cause a status effect (be it slow or distraction, or anything else that doesn't stack for that matter) is fundamentally broken and cannot be fixed with damage increases or decreases. My mistake was making it cause a status effect and also excel as a damage dealer, when it needs to only be the former. In hindsight I wish I got the god into Trunk with a version of whirlwind and wall jump that dealt very little damage or no damage at all, to make my design intention clear. They are not meant to be a tab substitute or a flowchart combo, but a way to force monsters to be where you want them to be to apply the real damage dealers (tab and lunge). Trunk is going in the diametrically opposed direction and that's leading nowhere.

Otherwise, the only difference is that the version you wanted would have a lot more effort from the player (which in my experience gets super repetitive really quickly) to achieve what is effectively the same result; the current trunk version cuts out the middleman. Hardly arbitrary! Nor are potential revisions that build on the current trunk version (as I think mine would) betrayals of the god's essential design!

This is completely backwards. The current trunk version mandates locking down a particular move and repeating the same keypresses again and again. Frankensteining the god with Uskayaw without understanding this issue would be just as bad, just gated until your piety has reached some arbitrary point. Uskayaw's and WJC's (at least intended) roles are very different. Uskayaw is a god of mass damage, that rewards using mobility skills to damage many enemies quickly. WJC was never meant to be that, or as some people have called it, a "combo god". The point of WJC is giving you tools to stay mobile and fight packs of monsters by messing with their movement patterns (hence the debuffing) and picking them apart with precision without the need to retreat to a corridor. Instead, WJC is being pushed towards a mass AoE brawling god, and it's at this point that the overlap with Uskayaw is naturally coming up, because it's invading its design space.

It is particularly painful to read the main argument for this potential god merge is that people dislike the constant "aa" stomp spam, and they are proposing as a substitute a bastardized version of whirlwind that has the exact same issue, except the keys are "jk".

[Siegurt]

As an addendum to my previous post, tweaking whirlwind damage in absence of slow accomplishes nothing. If you have a whirlwind that causes no status effects and make it do 99% weapon damage, you've caused a very subtle spoilery problem: While most builds will still prefer to whirlwind due to the damage frontloading mechanic I explained above, the few for which attack delay is exactly equal to move delay would prefer to tab because damage frontloading doesn't apply to them. Same thing with 101% damage.

Any implementation of whirlwind that doesn't cause a status effect (be it slow or distraction, or anything else that doesn't stack for that matter) is fundamentally broken and cannot be fixed with damage increases or decreases. My mistake was making it cause a status effect and also excel as a damage dealer, when it needs to only be the former. In hindsight I wish I got the god into Trunk with a version of whirlwind and wall jump that dealt very little damage or no damage at all, to make my design intention clear. They are not meant to be a tab substitute or a flowchart combo, but a way to force monsters to be where you want them to be to apply the real damage dealers (tab and lunge). Trunk is going in the diametrically opposed direction and that's leading nowhere.

Otherwise, the only difference is that the version you wanted would have a lot more effort from the player (which in my experience gets super repetitive really quickly) to achieve what is effectively the same result; the current trunk version cuts out the middleman. Hardly arbitrary! Nor are potential revisions that build on the current trunk version (as I think mine would) betrayals of the god's essential design!

This is completely backwards. The current trunk version mandates locking down a particular move and repeating the same keypresses again and again. Frankensteining the god with Uskayaw without understanding this issue would be just as bad, just gated until your piety has reached some arbitrary point. Uskayaw's and WJC's (at least intended) roles are very different. Uskayaw is a god of mass damage, that rewards using mobility skills to damage many enemies quickly. WJC was never meant to be that, or as some people have called it, a "combo god". The point of WJC is giving you tools to stay mobile and fight packs of monsters by messing with their movement patterns (hence the debuffing) and picking them apart with precision without the need to retreat to a corridor. Instead, WJC is being pushed towards a mass AoE brawling god, and it's at this point that the overlap with Uskayaw is naturally coming up, because it's invading its design space.

It is particularly painful to read the main argument for this potential god merge is that people dislike the constant "aa" stomp spam, and they are proposing as a substitute a bastardized version of whirlwind that has the exact same issue, except the keys are "jk".

Fwiw i always though you should get lunge first (with better damage increases for higher piety), and whirlwind and wall jump should come later, cause status effects (or just reposition enemies) and do no damage, probably should also cost some piety too.

[duvessa]

Nobody has complained that whirlwind is tedious because of the need to change action when slow lands.

I've complained about exactly that...jkjk until slow lands, followed by other martial attacks, or followed by tab, is a lot more cumbersome than just jkjkjkjkjkjk, or just tab. It is correct that current whirlwind being better than tab is a big problem, but the devs aren't blind to it as you're implying; they're working on fixing that right now. It's a lot easier to develop with incremental changes, so they're making one change to whirlwind and wall jump at a time instead of trying to fix every problem with them at once.

It's possible that everyone is wildly misunderstanding your intended design but it's a lot more likely that they understand your intended design and just don't like it.

The point of WJC is giving you tools to stay mobile and fight packs of monsters by messing with their movement patterns (hence the debuffing) and picking them apart with precision without the need to retreat to a corridor.

As you've been told over and over, the debuffing does the exact opposite and further encourages you to fight one monster at a time. Why would I put in the effort to "pick them apart with precision" when fighting the monsters one at a time is easier and better? (using corners and stairs, not a corridor, which I apparently have to clarify now because people suddenly think corridors are the most broken thing ever) And if "picking them apart with precision" were made better, it'd be pretty obnoxious to do it in every fight in the game, since you say it's also essential to the design that the martial attacks are free. Incidentally, "picking them apart with precision" sounds like the same thing as "combo god" to me.

AoE damage is a much more practical way to incentivize fighting multiple monsters at a time. Axes+berserk is the most prominent example already in the game. Ignition would be another one, if it were lowered in level so it was useful.

[luckless]

You are focusing on the wrong problem. Nobody has complained that whirlwind is tedious because of the need to change action when slow lands.

I bet that's because there never was that need. You could keep whirlwinding and do all the damage you needed.

The caveat to people enjoying the constant adaptation, is that they stop enjoying it when it's forced on every fight. This is why I was campaigning to make tab relevant again by giving it the role of simple, efficient damage dealer, reserving the martial attacks for difficult fights where the player wants to be 100% engaged and use the kit.

So in order to get people to only use the martial attacks sometimes, you want to make them bad unless the player uses them all, in the most laborious manner possible. bel wanted to do this by giving them a piety cost. Of the two, I prefer the piety cost.

The point of WJC is giving you tools to stay mobile and fight packs of monsters by messing with their movement patterns (hence the debuffing) and picking them apart with precision without the need to retreat to a corridor.

Being able to reposition without losing damage, spend piety to move at will to the other end of a whole line of enemies while irresistibly confusing them, and periodically paralyze everything in light of sight by passing a piety threshold are all pretty good ways of doing this.

[duvessa]

Also, imo, claims that the devteam "develops the game for themselves" (or for a minority of players) are fundamentally insulting, if not always intentionally hostile.
Many active developers don't actively play the game much at all. Even with the ones that do, a great deal of thought and discussion is spent on clarity for unspoiled players - something that will never affect a devteam member or highlevel player's games. For example, a big part of the reason book amnesia died is that players often didn't know it existed. If you look at the commit log you'll find a ton of changes that will never affect a developer's games. They still get made because the devs want to make a better game for everyone, not just for themselves.

[bananaken]

I will quote Floodkiller from elsewhere, since it's relevant:

Once you volunteered your code to the project, you opted into surrendering your control over the design focus; you can still contribute and advise, but it no longer is yours to drive. What looks like the Frankenstein process of desecrating your work is them taking what they feel are the most interesting (from a design viewpoint) features and trying to get it to work within the design philosophy of Crawl to keep them.

More specifically, once WJC made it to trunk you should expect any number of incremental changes into any direction based on what the team feels is best. It's just their modus operandi and it seems to me that this wasn't clear enough so expectations weren't tempered before the tweaking began (particularly in the direction that deviates from the creator).

It's pretty painful to see this back and forth since I like Crawl and I like WJC's concept and enjoyed playtesting it, I don't think anything said here will change people's minds on the current approach being taken since it's a development process that's been ongoing for many years, hopefully next time someone decides to make a big contribution expectations will be clearer beforehand.

[bel]

I think either it was a case of mismatched expectations, or some sort of miscommunication. Things in trunk change all the time (and trunk is work in progress, so they might not remain in the same state in the future); and the dev team has the final say on what gets implemented. One can prod them and/or argue for this or that proposition, not much more.

I see in another thread that WJC was not envisioned to be a "combo god" specifically, though it was one feature. The aim was to give people mobility to fight in an open area, instead of a corridor. I have noted a couple of times that the current implementation of WJC encourages you to do the opposite; reposition to a corridor so you can Tab. I think this is one reason SN is not happy with the changes.

One way in which this goal could be achieved is to make whirlwind use the "armour of mutuality" mechanic in Brogue. Suppose you are adjacent to n monsters; all damage you take from monster A is distributed between you and the n - 1 monsters (all monsters except A). Fighting single monsters gives you no benefit at all. Thus, you effectively only take damage from one monster, even if you're surrounded.

Of course, this is a very powerful effect and should not be a free ability. But I repeat myself on this point. I would prefer piety costs and a restriction on body armour, at the minimum.

[Steel Neuron]

I'm not claiming that developers are making the game for themselves, neither I have misunderstood the development process and thought that I'd still have control.

I just want to make sure what the developer intentions are, and offer my experience with different god mechanics and suggest that they might be going in the wrong direction for a particular goal they want to achieve.

Frankly, if what the devs intend is, as duvessa said, to center the god in AoE damage and move away from repositioning and utility, then these changes make sense, but I would find it strange since it really invades Uskayaw's design and I'm aware the dev team wants to prevent these sort of conflicts for the most part.

If that's truly the dev team's intention I'll shut up, because I was operating on the wrong assumption. I said all that I needed to say.