The Tavern

Just a quick question - since praying on corpses have been removed from these gods, is it harder to obtain piety, and thus gifts from Oka? Or is it for the most part irrelevant?

And does anyone feel like 0.16 (offline tiles version) feel a lot more "blocky" in movement compared to 0.15?

The removal of corpse piety was paired with an increase in kill piety for that specific reason. In theory, it should not make a difference. As I understand it, the point of the change was to remove a repetitive and non-challenging chore, not to alter the power of the affected deities.

Perphas it's only confirmation bias, but in my lastest games with oka I had major problems to get and keep piety up until later lair /orcs.
Gettting the first * has become for me much slower and certainly heroism cost (the major if not only reason why I chose Oka over other gods) has increased, which is a huge nerf to a already bad god

I'm pretty sure the increases in kill piety were much smaller than necessary to compensate for the sacrifice piety lost. They look like they were based on something like sacrificing 50% of corpses.

That's messed up, considering you typically sacrifice 100% of non-edible corpses and more like 95-98% of those you can actually eat.

There were already plans to reduce the rate of piety gain for most gods with corpse sacrifices before corpse sacrifice removal happened, so reducing the rate of piety gain was a desirable side-effect. (Or rather: I have no idea whether the actual change as committed was intended to reduce the overall rate of piety gain, but if it hadn't done then it would have been reduced separately later on anyway).

Was it really a desirable side-effect that you made a huge nerf to an already bad god?

Okawaru is regularly placed fairly highly on the god-tier rankings on this forum. While not as powerful as Fedhas, Mahkleb, Vehemut or Trog, he does offer a cheap, spammable ability that will help carry you through the early to mid-game, as well as finesse for the mid-to-late game which is generally considered to be a powerful alternative version of haste, already unanimously considered to be one of the most OP game-breakers in crawl.

Even his gift mechanic, which often sucks and shouldn't go into the decision making process for choosing him, cant be said to be outright bad.

I have nothing to say about Chei. Sorry, guys.

I wouldn't consider heriosm spammable anymore - because of its cost increase and piety gain reduction.
And the most powerful effect of haste is the increase of move speed, which finesse hasn't: overall, the latter is good, but in practically any real situation if I had to chose between haste and finesse, I would prefer the first, because it's much much better for that reason.

Surely, Oka isn't bad as chei or gozag or whatever, but still I think he's one of the weakest god by now (btw, if you wanna list gods better than Oka you should list at least Lugonu, Yred, Kiku, Ru and Jiyva if avaiable. Also Qzlol, if you can manage the shitload of noise and also old Ely, no idea of new Ely altough.. Hei, I've listed most of the pantheon! I wouldn't add Nmelex, Ash, Dith only because they are quite bad early on so I don't consider them really comparable to Oka, but on the long run they're much more stronger.)

Yeah I didnt want to get into the whole mess so I just listed the gods that are regularly given top-tier status and definitely better than Oka, then one God who is commonly thought to be good but in most circumstances is actually quite bad. I also was talking about his abilities pre-nerf, as that is the context of the argument.

As it stands now, he is significantly weaker if piety gain has been nerfed, which means he has moved well down the ranks and may very well be hovering just above 'bad' now.

I never played with Okawaru pre-"nerf". Post-"nerf", the few times I've played with Okawaru, I use Heroism pretty much whenever I like (for pretty much any "tough" fight) and my piety remains fine. Of course I might be using it less than older people are used to.