religion switching guide available?

[Brain]

Has anyone written much about switching religions in detail? I feel like I want to try a multi-god strategy but not sure of the pitfalls or unforseen consequences.

[KoboldLord]

I don't know of a detailed one, but if you ask about your particular plan you can probably get an answer.

There are two usual pitfalls:

#1: Your old deity will usually try to kill you. Wrath lasts a LONG time, and in nearly every case is certain death until you're already in the later parts of the game. By the time you're thinking about hitting Zot, every form of divine wrath is tedious but largely manageable.

#2: There isn't necessarily going to be any incentive for switching. The most important god abilities and gifts are the ones you get at the beginning of the game; later on you can kludge something workable together from almost any package. For instance, a big perk of Okawaru is the equipment gifts, but once you've got a good weapon and a full set of armor you are basically never going to switch to the latest gift. Fantastic when you get a katana of flaming dropped in your lap in mid-Lair, less awesome when you already have a +9/+9 weapon and Okawaru is dropping weapons in the +2 to +5 range.

[FilthyApe]

Read up on the punishment of the god you are abandoning, and decide whether or not you are strong enough to survive it. You can either wait the punishment out in a safe area, or continue on and deal with the punishment until it is finished. The first is obviously less risky, but it will eat into your score, if you care about that.

Okawaru->TSO is a pretty common switch for characters that are planning on doing the extended endgame. It is a good switch for crusaders, as TSO is extremely useful in hell, pan, and tomb, but less than compelling in early branches. My first 15 rune win was a MfCr that did this switch.

I would suggest going about the Oka->TSO switch as follows.
1) Use Oka until you've cleaned out the lair branches, the dungeon, and vault down to 7.
2) Go do hall of blades, and tank your piety by spamming might/heroism with any experience you get there.
3) Switch to TSO, and go do crypt. This should get you enough piety to bless your weapon.

The rN+++ will be helpful for vault 8, what with the shadow dragons.

I've also switched to Zin before, but only because I really needed a way to wipe my mutations. It isn't something I would do normally.

[Tiber]

TSO is extremely useful in hell, pan, and tomb, but less than compelling in early branches.

He's still not bad in the early-mid game, at least going by when I tried Paladin in 0.7.2. He gives SInv and an accuracy boost, plus rN. The real problem is that it's hard to build piety in the early game, which makes training invocations difficult. So if you plan on switching to him, get that built up first.

[rabidweasel]

I've been thinking about dropping Kiku for Ash once I get Necromutation easily castable, how bad is his wrath if I'm in undead form all the time? Or will his added chance of necro miscasts make casting Necromutation dangerous in the first place?

[KoboldLord]

Kiku's wrath is virtually irrelevant by the time you reach the point in the game where Necromutation is remotely viable, but on the other hand Ashenzari isn't going to offer you very much by then either. Once you can access Pan safely, xp is already a post-scarcity resource, and you'll already have a full set of fully identified equipment already. You'd basically be going for the slotless clarity and see invisible, and monster detection IF there's anything left that still needs clearing. These three passives are good, but are they clearly better than Kiku's abilities? It's hard to say.

[galehar]

I heard portal detection is useful in Pan. And reskilling can be very useful for late game char.