oka's heroism should ignore the SL 27 cap

[luckless]

Okawaru's Heroism ability raises all your non-magic skills by 5, up to the normal limit of 27. In my view, this cap should be removed: Heroism should let you raise your skills all the way to 32.

As far as I can tell, the cap has two practical consequences:

(1) it makes Okawaru weaker in extended, and
(2) it incentivizes (though probably weakly) players to stop raising their non-magic skills over 22, and instead rely on Heroism for cases where the extra five levels would matter.

But (1) is unnecessary. While it's a good thing that Oka is weaker in extended, it would be weak enough without the Heroism cap: the real reasons why Oka is weaker in extended is that your equipment has gotten good enough that further gifts will be increasingly unlikely to matter, and that the tactical benefits of other gods matter more than the bigger numbers Heroism and Finesse provide. And (2) is both unnecessary--diminishing returns on XP are reason to diversify enough--and annoyingly meta-gamey.

On the other hand, removing the cap would have gameplay and thematic benefits. Gameplay-wise, all things being equal it's (a) good for abilities to have unified effects throughout the life of a character, and (b) good for gods to provide multiple ways of spending piety. Thematically, Okawaru is all about pushing your abilities beyond normal levels. It's both fitting and flavorful for Okawaru to grant the greatest worshippers the ability to transcend mortal limitations.

[Shtopit]

Cool, it also means minimum delay with the largest crossbows (I think it's at 28?).

[NhorianScum]

Spamming Finesse more is pretty nice.

[papilio]

Okawaru doesn't need buff in extended. It's quite strong in extended as it is now.

Raising combat skills up to 22 and putting spare xp to magic/evoc/other skills is quite good strategy.

[TonberryJam]

Basically what papilio said. Oka is like the most hybrid friendly god in the game. It's a pretty strong ability. And, you can always go back to raising those skills when done with magic skills.

[bel]

I don't see any harm in the proposal, but I don't see any benefits either. The benefits given in the OP seem rather weaksauce.

[luckless]

I don't see any harm in the proposal, but I don't see any benefits either. The benefits given in the OP seem rather weaksauce.

Yeah, I guess they are. Really a more honest rationale would've been: "the cap is annoying and removing it would be harmless, so why not remove it?"

[tasonir]

I don't think it would have too much of an impact on most skills, since this would largely only affect extended and doing more melee damage/having slightly better defenses isn't really that big of a deal in extended, where characters are already assumed to have too much ac/ev to take much normal damage, and thus damnation/torment are the big threats.

I think crossbows have an explicit min delay of 10 auts and even if you had 32 skill, they would never reach 7 auts, and it should stay that way. Unarmed would also need to stay at a min delay of 5 aut, although having 3 + 32 skill = 35 base damage would be pretty funny. Again, it probably wouldn't matter much since you can already slaughter everything with 27 unarmed, but it might be the largest benefit to level 32 skills.

[Jeremiah]

Flavour wise: if you have 27 in a skill, you are already a hero, so Oka can't help you any more.

[njvack]

My main reason for agreeing with the OP: it makes the mechanic clearer. Heroism adds 5 to the relevant skills. End of story. I'd also argue that you should see the HP boost from Fighting as well.

It's also kind of cool to have a way to have your skills go past 27, if only temporarily.