Ash and Skill Transfer

[Sar]

I just cleared Shoals:5 and would have been very very happy to find the rune in the first hut as opposed to the last hut

In my experience all the huts but the rune one usually offer much more sensible challenge (you normally get one professional merfolk per loot hut, maybe two, while in the rune hut there will be much more of these), and Ilsuiw never actually spawns in a hut (she has that fancy sunken Stonehenge thing with deep water).

[Moanerette]

The commit is a straight up nerf imo, if I'd taken Ash since then I'd have been thoroughly wrongfooted by it.

Move Scrying to 2* to encourage more use of it, and shift the skill boost to
3* and Clarity/SInv to 4*. The skill boost also depends on piety rank so having
it available slightly later should make it more noticeable when it kicks in.

At 2* piety you'll probably be in Lair, not a place where scrying is overly useful imo. The first place I'd use it would likely be the Orc 4 vault - if you do Lair first you should be up to 4* piety at least by then. Early skill boosts are of far more value (as is getting SInv and clarity earlier, when those orc wizards/unseen horrors/disappearing casters can be big menaces). The comment about making the boost more noticeable is a red herring; at low levels, getting just a couple of points of EV/AC, a bit more stealth etc. makes the game easier.

My only win is with Ash (a DrIE). I used scrying (an ability I really like and don't hesitate to use) 35 times in a 4-rune game, mainly between XL 19 and 24, which suggests Vaults, Depths and Elf.

I used Transfer Knowledge once, but the log doesn't indicate precisely where or what I did; it was between XL 13-15, so probably late Lair. I think it may have been to get Freezing Cloud online quickly.

[pickled_heretic]

ayup, I was going to write a post with my thoughts saying more or less the same thing. "turn on skill boost later so it's more noticeable" has to be among the most convoluted reasonings I have ever seen. I've won with ash a few times, ash is a great god, but like others have said he is among the weakest gods in the early game. he doesn't actually do anything, even after some piety gain. which, by the way, piety gain can also be really hard if remove curse scrolls are scarce.

the commit seems to make the disadvantages of early ash (he doesn't actually do anything) more pronounced while doing nothing about his late game.

I propose making remove curse scrolls be unusable by worshippers of ash, but instead both cursing and uncursing is a god ability granted at low levels of piety. uncursing costs piety, cursing is essentially free.