The Tavern

Berserk, insane magic resistance+regen, berserking brothers in arms...he is OP as fuck, and we must deal with it.

Maybe it's good that there is an (relatively) easy and noob-friendly god? Not everyone is good at this game.

Trog is still problematic as it makes otherwise weak combos like KoFi pretty powerful.
IMHO it is not an excuse to have an OP god for new players, there must be other solutions like:
1) The only way to worship Trog is via starting as Be
2) Trog can be worshiped only by players who have never won before
3) Explicit difficulty levels
etc.

Trog is still problematic as it makes otherwise weak combos like KoFi pretty powerful.[\quote]
I disagree. The point of a god is to make combos more powerful.
If you don't like it don't use it, but maybe some players need a power boost to succeed. Also, while it does give a significant boost in damage and survivability, I wouldn't call it OP. (An illustration from my personal experience : I have won 3 games, none of them with Trog) Trog doesn't trivialize the game, and it takes some practice and foresight to use his abilities effectively.

The idea of Trog as berserker-only, non-dungeon god is pretty good in my opinion. It takes a poorly balanced god out of the equation for most games and makes a clear distinction between berserker and other backgrounds that stays with you through the whole game. The power of early Trog altars smashes a lot of games into the same thing, making the right choice from a winrate perspective to go Trog even on some magic-oriented combos.

I don't really see the argument that the game needs a lot of easy options. It's already pretty easy, you got the berserker option, and you've got Fedhas. Okawaru is similar in offering very straightforward, physical combat oriented play with mechanics that are considerably easier to use effectively -- indeed, the only real mistake you can make is not using the abilities. There's no niche there that needs Trog as a temple god to fill.

Why my thread got moved here? I am pretty serious - Trog is a really broken god, and needs at least some serious nerfs. Or I should write a wall of text explaining this obvious fact?

Personally, I am thinking that he needs a rework, and merging him with Okawaru is a pretty good idea. Okawaru is a god with similiar concept, but he has, like, 2 abilities. He seems not finished. But if we merge him with Trog, and give this new god abilities based on those two, it would be pretty good, I think

This char used a spear all game.
http://dobrazupa.org/morgue/Sandman26/m ... 141214.txt

This char used a spear all game and invoked berserk zero times (103 brothers-in-arms is OP too).
http://dobrazupa.org/morgue/Sandman26/m ... 234754.txt

I believe it is obvious to devs too and they consider it ok, also OP does not conform to GDD rules as far as i know.

Gods aren't balanced against each other, and people enjoy Trog, so I don't expect significant nerfs to him anytime soon.

I like the idea of Trog restricted to Berserkers.

As for gods not balanced against one another, a little bit of non-balance is probably ok. However, if the balance is too out of whack, it's not a good thing. Because the opportunity cost of taking another god is too much, I feel bad in passing up a stronger god when it is available, just to have a different experience.

By the way, same goes for playstyles and backgrounds. I have often heard people argue that backgrounds are not meant to be balanced. That is fine, but playstyles should still be roughly balanced. Some people already think that the game is too unbalanced towards heavy armour melee. I recall an old thread which calculated the Elo ratings of various characters: most of the easiest ones were "fighter" types. One should not take the calculation too seriously, but the outcome is suggestive.

Making Trog a background exclusive sounds good to me. It's just too good to be left as an option in the Temple, since there is no reason not to go Trog as a heavy warrior, and I don't think it right to have no mechanical reason to choose something else over it.

This way it would still remain a way to help new players.

The problem is that then some other god is the best option...

Crawl doesn't need an easy mode god and it certainly does not need multiple easy mode gods and multiple easy mode species. Bad players don't even play Ce/DD or Fedhas/Kiku/Gozag very much. The same goes for challenge mode gods and species, conducts are a cleaner way to accomplish that.

Painting Trog as a god for new players to easily win is also a mischaracterization of how new players play, I think. I hate to use Crawl games to support arguments because they're anecdotal evidence, but if you watch some Trog splats I think you'll find that pretty much all of them would have been avoided if the player used brothers in arms. Most players do not use abilities with piety costs if they think they can possibly avoid it, especially with gifting gods. So they berserk a lot (badly) and that gets them to Lair relatively often, and then they splat because melee tactics are probably the hardest thing in Crawl and they don't use brothers in arms.

Easy mode options are also only useful inasmuch as players can actually recognize them as easy mode options. Bad players usually don't realize Fedhas is good, or centaurs or deep dwarves or demigods or even trolls or Kiku. They often think XXFi of Okawaru is better than XXBe. The players that are able to recognize which of the 20 options are overpowered tend to also be players that don't need those overpowered options to win. That's why games with actual difficulty levels call them some variation of "Easy, Normal, Hard" instead of "Trog, Okawaru, Xom". They also don't give their difficulty levels a bunch of mechanical differences that are unrelated to difficulty, or make you choose two difficulty levels at the start of the game and a third one between D:2 and D:9. The "oh, they're just difficulty levels" rationalization misses the fact that species, backgrounds, and gods, in addition to being badly balanced, are also bad at being difficulty levels. If they were difficulty levels, you wouldn't get nearly as many complaints about their balance.

(For what it's worth, while species and god balance has been stagnant for basically forever, non-zealot background balance has improved significantly over DCSS's lifespan.)

It's Dowan who supposed to be smart, not Duvessa!

Ahem, anyway, the idea of merging Okawaru and Trog into a one god and giving it abilities based on those two is still floating in my head. Because Trog is overpowered, and Okawaru is good, but unfinished. And also, almost similiar concept.

I dont see why Trog should be merged with Oka. Gifts are not their main points and even then Oka gives armour.

Yeah, Trog is strong, but so what? Gods are supposed to be strong.

If you wanna fix a god, fix Xom. It is completely ridiculous to have a god that is clearly worse than no god.

If you're playing Okawaru or Trog for their gifts you're doing it wrong.

Please read the GDD guidelines for more information. We don't move topics all that often anymore, but GDD OPs will ideally lead to more structured discussion than "I like/dislike this god."

For the record, I think Crawl without Trog would be boring and sad. I also don't super get the obsession with balancing character options in a single-player game, though, so maybe I don't have anything to add to this conversation.

While we're at it: is it possible to make a GDD subforum names BadGDD or something like this and move these ill-fated stuff there instead? I think that these topics don't belong in CYC which is a place of fun.

Slight hyperbole: Trog exists as training to use god abilities.

Well, I suspect Trog is the least friendly one for training, no other god has "You invoked an ability at wrong time, now you will die because all you can do is to move and attack in melee".

I would consider Lugonu such "training" except it does require training Invocations and thus is not that easy for new players.
A very dangerous monster in view? Check Banish
The monster has too high MR for Banish to work? Check Bend Space to escape
Too many very dangerous monsters? Check Corrupt
Got to 6 stars of piety? Check distortion-branding