The Tavern

Gosh, she seems really cool from a flavor/design stand-point... but I haven't been able to make her do much of anything, and I never got above ** piety. Is it worth training a bunch of invocations for her stomp ability?

I'm a level ten kobold enchanter, if that matters.

Wait, whoah, she just paralyzed a whole howler monkey pack! Maybe I need to desperately try to keep her ** piety?

So, basically, she seems like the God of fighting large groups. Her paralyze powers seems kick in more when there are more enemies on the screen, stomp does cleaving-type damage to all close enemies, and line pass can confuse a bunch of monsters in a line.

It's a neat idea but none of her abilities don't seem quite as effective as positioning yourself in the middle of a corridor. The only really useful power is the paralysis power, but it's random, and takes quite a few combat rounds to kick in IF it does.

On the upside, as a Kobold enchanter I am basically RPing Sonja, and that is awesome.

Y'know, if you're willing to get really fiddly, you could absolutely destroy with Uskayaw.

Apparently the paralysis kicks in as soon as you hit *** piety. I spent a long time dragging a kobold band, one by one, up the stairs so I could kill them next to a player ghost.

And you are really, really, really good against summoners.

Reptisaurus: Yes, good abuse alert. There should be something done about this. I have some ideas and will either direct Lasty to this thread or talk to him about it.

On the recurring complaint about power level (in this case, "underpowered"): this is why the god is being playtested. Note that it'd be very easy to make the god arbitrarily strong. (In my experience, the god is strong, and there's the Korean community feedback that the god is overpowered to a ridiculous extent.)

I can see that if you're a faaaaarrrr more patient player than I am. if you lure trivial enemies around and figure out exactly what you need to do to gain piety when there are a lot of neat tricks you could do. (Leave all the vanilla orcs alive in Orc until you need something grand finaled, for instance.)

But that can backfire. I tried to be SO CAREFUL killing spiders but Nikolai blinked, I lost all my piety, and then he blinked again and followed me upstairs. I think I was down to 12 hit points, and I coulda died easily quaffing my only potion of resistance.

In general:

Pros:

The theme and flavor are prrrrooooobbbbaaaabbbbblllly my favorite of any God. (Except maybe Xom. Love ya Xom!)
None of the powers are useless - I used stomp + stairdance to clear a particularly nasty Spider: 1
Using the *** Line Dance ability to get into an ice cave (past the ice beasts) before it melted was one of my favorite crawl moments.
And the ***** is just fun when you really get a chance to use it. Honestly, I figure she'll totally come alive in Vaults and Depths where you're fighting huge packs all the time.
Huge piety spikes really do differentiate her from all the other Gods where you mostly just cruise through the game at ******.

Cons:

Again, designed for more patient/attentive players than myself.
Not particularly useful in the early dungeon: There just aren't enough packs of monsters to get your piety up. That might counter the "too strong" argument - In general the strongest Gods are the ones that help you a lot, early, when you're weak and vulnerable.

Still, design wise, I generally dislike Gods/Species that only kick in late dungeon.

Hey, it's Donald!

So excited to see if he has some new quotes!

Yeah, the vaults are significantly less dangerous when everything is paralyzed after 20 or so turns of fighting. Especially for a stabber. A pretty good late game stabber God if nothing else.

Does the "replace and destroy" ability work on orbs of fire and pan lords? It would come up rarely that you'd get enough kills while you're in the presence of a really dangerous monster to use it (and trying could for sure get you killed) but it would be funny!

On the subject of luring and abuse, it's already the case that fighting summons gives you no piety and fighting weak monsters gives you much less piety than fighting strong ones. Luring a bunch of chaff is generally not as effective as just fighting the thing you're trying to kill, since damaging that one thing gives you about as much or more piety than damaging an entire horde of chaff.

If this still has abusive cases, I can lower the piety from chaff even further.

Grand Finale works on everything that isn't mindless, and I think MPA is interested in removing that restriction.

Got an unpleasant surprise here when my positioning got ruined by a lost soul.

If you want people to fight the thing they want to use Grand Finale on, why do you allow Grand Finale to work on unhurt monsters? Nothing about this god makes sense to me!

Well, made it to Zot:5 (and then died!) my in my first Uskayaw game.

Maybe it was just my bad play, but Uskayaw felt pretty much useless all through Zot- I couldn't risk fighting huge packs. Maybe better in extended?

Did you figure out how to work around your original problems, Reptisaurus? I am having similar ones. It seems almost always better to lure and fight enemies one on one if they are at all scary, but then I get very little access to Usk's abilities. Maybe I need to put more points into invocations?---but I am reluctant to go further than I already have (~11) without some confirmation that this is the right idea....

My opinion: with high invo (15+) paralysis and pain bound are strong, but you're still fighting in a sub-optimal and too dangerous way - in comparison to normal tactics. Especially considering the god doesn't give any panic button if you suffer a damage spike or whatever.
Dance guy is kinda okay with an already strong char, especially if having a vamp weapon or somehow you can suck a lot of damage during prolonged fights, because he improves your already good abilities of mindlessly tab through the game.

Otherwise, pick Trog, Makh or any other good god and play the game the usual way, which is much better, at least if you want to win.

Nah, not really. I didn't put too much into invocations, either.

I get the sense that Uakayaw worked better for me as a stabber 'cause I got more hits in stabbing away with my little quick blade (which led to faster piety gain) but I could never make any predictable use out of Uskayaw's powers. It was fun taking out whole rooms of paralyzed ogres in the vaults, but when I was fighting ancient liches and orbs of fire I figured I was gonna get killed before I could get to ***** piety.

My little dude uses shortblades too (HaFi).

Yeah, the bit about paralyzed ogres in vaults is how I find things too---but those are not the battles I want help with.

Thanks for the advice nago and Reptisaurus!

Does invocations actually help with this god?


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Yes. Literally all of the god's powers get more effective with higher Invo.