The Tavern

Okay, I don't play Elyvilon followers/Healers much, but at the same time one of the great things about crawl is how many weird and wonderful possibilities it contains, so along with Vampire Monks of Mahkleb I'm finding High Elf Fighters of Elyvilon cropping up in my rotation a fair bit these days. So anyway a couple of things that it-seems-to-me about this religion:

Faith-scumming: My first run with Ellie happened to give me the lair right after I got out of the temple, which resulted in very slow faith building (lack of weapons to sacrifice) which led to me running back to D:1 with a goddam yard brush to sweep up every last piece of cutlery I could lay my hands on, and there was just enough between there and L:1 to get me my first star for faith.
There is a related issue with weapon sacrificing where rushing into battle screaming "Mahkleb! Mahkleb! Blood & souls for Mahkleb!" feels an awful lot like rushing into battle screaming "Arms amnesty for Elyvion!" and disarming your foes at the shoulder. (The same problem also applies to Sif who appreciates scholarship rather than feats of arms but whose piety can still only be fuelled by XP, which means we're back to screaming "BLOOD & SOULS!!!" But then crawl is crawl and if you want lengthy cut scenes and character development there's a door way on D:1 just for you).

Over costed main power: The hunger hit from Lesser Healing seems really ferocious, like I'm talking worse than filling my entire LOS with poison gas and fireballs in other builds. In part this is no doubt because I'm spamming it at low Invocation which is dumb, but there's no other piety friendly option for new followers. Trying to just harvest XP to drive my Invocations also seems iffy because it means trying to get ahead of the dungeons curve on monster badness. The main thing here though is that, for me, the limiting factor to using it at all is the fact that I get less XP from pacification than I do with the tried and tested "blood & souls" approach and the main thing stopping me from spamming it is limited MP, although that would vary a lot by build/level.
Also from an absolute first glance the ability has a rather misleading title, given that you will mostly be using it on creatures with full health, and your objective is primarily to stop them from killing you, and only secondarily thinking it's nice that they feel better.

Otherwise though it's really cool having an option that isn't purely about smashing and blasting.

P.s. Please take this as comment rather than wish-listing, the whole point is that I'm new to Ellie and may have missed all kinds of reasons and angles for things.

If a pacified creature is blocking the passage for many hostile creatures, you may heal it. And sometimes you should heal it. One of my Healers stood behind an lone orc who stood against the rage of his brethren and survived because of the former's help.

Carry a wand of healing if you can find one. It is the Biogun of Crawl for pacifying -- though it either helps or hinders, since it still heals the opponent.

Most animals in the dungeons are just territorial: helping them understand you are not a threat is a good thing, especially if they are weak (rats and so on).

Do not focus on breaking weapons past the second star, unless you find something really bad.

Nice, I didn't realise you could use wands for the same effect.

Wait don't use a wand to heal monsters. I think ever? Certainly almost ever.

Hunger is the thing that keeps Ely from being insanely overpowered as opposed to just really really strong. Feeding your healing will be a constant need.

Also I'm moving this to Advice which is probably a more good place for it?

Using a wand of heal wounds to pacify is pretty much always a really stupid idea. It uses evocations instead of invocations so the success rate will only be better than greater healing if you have a lot of evocations compared to invocations, which is a completely insane thing to have.
I wish wand pacification would just be removed since it seems most people don't know about it and a lot of people mistakenly think it's useful when they do learn about it.

FR: potion pacification. Drop a potion of HW, let a monster walk over it and quaff it, roll for pacification.

The thing here is you don't actually need much xp with elyvilon, because you have elyvilon. Pacification is a very xp-efficient offense, and additionally you have nearly unlimited self-healing for cases where you need to actually kill things in other ways so you can spend less xp on making your character strong there also (it's really hard to die when you can use greater healing every turn). The only character-type that might need less xp than healers to win effectively is enchanters.

As for gaining piety via weapon sacrifices I think this feature should just be removed entirely, at least for non-evil weapons. It's problematic like with nemelex (encourages exactly the go-back-to-d:1 behaviour you did and encourages using it all the time to prevent monsters from picking up weapons), it doesn't really give much piety, Ely works fine without it, and once you reach a certain piety threshold once in a particular game the ability stops giving you piety.

I'm starting to get that from a more successful run, getting Inv up and running makes all the difference. Not yet got Greater Heal yet, but also not at the stage that I need it. Got a quick peek at purification but really needed it*, used it and lost in the process. Characters still CiP so I'm looking forward to finding out more about how the build works. Funny no one really talks about Ellie/Healers when they have so much access to the one commodity that crawl is always so frugal with.

I only played one Ely character and won it as a 3-rune (DDHe) following this quick Ely guide :

And it worked quite well !

The OP reads as though he has found a problem which needs redesign or justification. Also the Wand of Healing abuse is why I used to read that Deep Dwarves make good Ely choices.

Trying Merfolk Healer just now - not got a very satisfactory plan for Sigmund or Grinder but there's always running and praying - and in this case prayer might just work...

That should be your plan for most characters when you first meet Sigmund and Grinder if you want to win.

Let's say consideration rather than redesign/justify, I mean a few games in and the hunger from it does still seem brutal (and also anti-thematic: you need to kill to get the nice big chunks of bloody meat you need to fuel your quest to bring peace and love to the dungeon). That doesn't mean it's wrong though - the answers above are all valid - Ely is (surprisingly) powerful, and does need something to balance her(?) virtually risk free threat elimination.
I am a big fan of the way Vehumet turned out though, and if Elyivilon/Healers haven't come under much scrutiny for a while maybe the powers could be rebalanced to avoid giving the player a driving need to kill. In an environment as stark as crawls the pacifist niche is always going to be a difficult one to make work satisfactorily.

Yeah I guess that was a bad example - I can probably lower the bar to include Ijyb in this case though!

Speaking of the devil:

Does Ijyb have a wand?
Yes: Hit Ijyb until he stops moving.
No: Go down stairs. Accidentally step on Ijyb during orb run.

Yeah Ijyb is secretly at least as dangerous as Sigmund/Grinder.