Why can't I get Enslave Soul to ever work?

[GHOSTofWILL]

I'm a lvl 12 MiDk and can't ever seem to get the Enslave Soul ability to work. It say's I have about a 30% chance to fail but still I've tried it quite a lot and have never had success. I'm using it on intelligent uninjured creatures but I just can't figure out what I'm doing wrong or why it's never successful. thanks

[duvessa]

After using enslave soul on a monster, you have to kill it within Invocations*3/4 + 2 turns.

[GHOSTofWILL]

Yeah I saw that in the ability description but what I'm saying is every time I cast it, it says the ability failed so I'm not even getting a chance to kill the monster afterwards. Maybe I'm just having terrible luck when it comes to the fail percentage because my character does have a 30% chance to fail on cast.

[PerverseSuffering]

Maybe you shouldn't invoke complicated powers in front of a potentially deadly (you wouldn't want a spectral bat, right?) opponent then. Get them invokations up.

[triorph]

Is it a 30% fail to invoke at all? or a 30% fail to bypass the monster's MR? If its the first then it might be failing on the second check.

[Sar]

I don't think it checks MR at all.

[GHOSTofWILL]

When I go to cast it all my other invocations say 1% fail and enslave soul says 30%. I've been trying it on decent level monster's to I guess like hydras,griffons, and lindwurms so that may also have something to do with it failing. Also it might be because I have other creatures under my command that were gift's from my god plus a pretty sizable undead army but idk. I've tried it 20+ times on different monsters with no luck. It's not a big deal and I'm sure I'll eventually figure it out but just thought someone might know a few things about the ability.

[neil]

When I go to cast it all my other invocations say 1% fail and enslave soul says 30%. I've been trying it on decent level monster's to I guess like hydras,griffons, and lindwurms so that may also have something to do with it failing. Also it might be because I have other creatures under my command that were gift's from my god plus a pretty sizable undead army but idk. I've tried it 20+ times on different monsters with no luck. It's not a big deal and I'm sure I'll eventually figure it out but just thought someone might know a few things about the ability.

You can only enslave intelligent monsters. However, you should be getting the message "You see nothing there you can enslave the soul of!", not "You fail to use your ability." (and it shouldn't take any turns).

[GHOSTofWILL]

When I go to cast it all my other invocations say 1% fail and enslave soul says 30%. I've been trying it on decent level monster's to I guess like hydras,griffons, and lindwurms so that may also have something to do with it failing. Also it might be because I have other creatures under my command that were gift's from my god plus a pretty sizable undead army but idk. I've tried it 20+ times on different monsters with no luck. It's not a big deal and I'm sure I'll eventually figure it out but just thought someone might know a few things about the ability.

You can only enslave intelligent monsters. However, you should be getting the message "You see nothing there you can enslave the soul of!", not "You fail to use your ability." (and it shouldn't take any turns).

Ok and yeah I was under the impression that the monster's I named were considered intelligent. I was going off the Enslave Soul section of Yred's wiki page, I believe it's a link that says natural holiness. Also I am getting the "you fail to use your ability" message and it does take a turn and lower my piety level. I've never had the other message you mentioned pop up. But thank you all for taking the time to try and help and btw idk if it changes anything but I'm playing version 0.15.2

[adozu]

turns out hydras, dragons and various beasts are all pretty dumb.

a general rule of thumb is "if it can't open a door it's probably too stupid to enslave"

(there are exceptions)

[neil]

I just pushed a commit that makes the monster description in xv say "It is intelligent." Yred also requires natural holiness and a zombifiable body (the ability doesn't require a the monster to actually drop a corpse, just that it is capable of doing so), which are not displayed but mabe should be.

[njvack]

If you're willing to make xv messages depend on which god you're worshipping, it could just say "Yred will let you enslave its soul" or something along those lines. Knowing it's intelligent is all good and nice, but it's not clear why one would care about IQ unless worshipping Yred or Zin or maybe TSO?

Anyhow, making xv say "It is intelligent. Its corpse can be animated. It a natural monster." might be a little much. Or maybe not?

[neil]

If you're willing to make xv messages depend on which god you're worshipping, it could just say "Yred will let you enslave its soul" or something along those lines. Knowing it's intelligent is all good and nice, but it's not clear why one would care about IQ unless worshipping Yred or Zin or maybe TSO?

Anyhow, making xv say "It is intelligent. Its corpse can be animated. It a natural monster." might be a little much. Or maybe not?

Also Gozag and Alistair's Intoxication, and some spoilery monster behaviours, some of which can be deduced through observation (e.g. pathing around shallow water).

I think ability-specific messages would be good as well, but intelligence matters for enough different things that (IMO) it should mentioned regardless. Probably holiness is even more important in this respect, but I didn't do that yet.

[Lasty]

When I go to cast it all my other invocations say 1% fail and enslave soul says 30%.

Enslave Soul is Yred's most Invocations-demanding ability; if you keep training Invocations the failure rate will decrease, eventually reaching 1% (or 0%? I forget which). It's probably not worth training it that much unless you use the AOE drain life ability extensively.

[tasonir]

Invocations are generally easier to get to 0% fail than spells are, but still it's generally only worth bringing them to 1% fail. When you have a god with a low requirement invocation and a high requirement one, getting the high one to 1% will probably bring the low one to 0%, but I don't lower the high-invocation to 0% as well.

[GHOSTofWILL]

Huzzah I finally got it to work on a deep troll shaman. It worked on him with the first cast and I killed him in a few turns and now I have his ugly green blob of a soul. So yeah I must have been failing because the creatures I was trying it on were unintelligent. It would be nice to have more in-game info on creature intelligence or just a better message for why the ability was failing in future versions of the game.