Uskayaw Questions

[Floodkiller]

So I won a game with Uskayaw today, but I'm still not quite sure how some of the powers actually work...

Do the pain sharing and paralysis base their duration off of Invocations, or are they a set duration in length? Does Invocations also affect how long the cooldown is before they can reactivate in the same dance?
Do all enemies in LOS share pain when it is active, or only certain ones? If the former, why is there not some sort of indicator that informs you when it is active/inactive? If the latter, is there no tile marker available to indicate these enemies are currently affected?

Also, it seemed optimal during my game to stairdance encounters in order to repeatedly restart the dance and get the desired passive effects to re-occur, instead of sticking it out in the same encounter to wait for it to refresh on its own. I don't know if this was brought up before, but why not have piety gain rate tied to Invocations in order to prevent this?

[Lasty]

Pain Bond and Solo Time duration increases with Invocations. The duration, in AUTs, is:

  Code:

Solo time: min(max(10, 5 + max(1, roll_between_zero_and(1 + invo_skill * 2 + your_XL - monster_hit_dice)), 40)
Pain bond: 20 + average_of_two_rolls_between_zero_and(invo_skill * 7 + your_XL - monster_hit_dice)

Put another way assuming 10 AUT turns:

Paralysis lasts for between 1 and 4 turns based on your invo score, and each level of invo adds an average of .1 turns and monsters stronger than you tend to get paralyzed for less time while monsters weaker than you tend to get paralyzed for more time.

Pain Bond lasts at least 2 turns unless the monster is stronger than you and you either have no Invo or get very unlucky. Every level of Invo adds an average of 0.35 turns.

All enemies affected by Pain Bond share pain with all other enemies affected by Pain Bond within the visible area. If there's not a pain bond icon, that's because we haven't added one yet and also because I'm not used to the extra features of tiles. You should be able to see "sharing its pain" as a status effect on the monster in ctrl-X.

Stairdancing to reset a bad fight is always optimal in crawl, and nothing about how this god operates changes that fact. I'm not sure what you mean about piety gain being tied to Invocations changing stair dancing.

[Floodkiller]

Thank you for the answers! There could probably be better wording for the passive powers to indicate that they are affected by Invocations as well.

Stairdancing to reset a bad fight is always optimal in crawl, and nothing about how this god operates changes that fact. I'm not sure what you mean about piety gain being tied to Invocations changing stair dancing.

What I mean by this is that it was often quicker at low Invo to stairdance long-but-undangerous encounters to get multiple activations of the short paralyze/pain bond across the full set of enemies than to wait for it to refresh naturally throughout a single fight, solely because the effects are so short lived. This issue goes away at higher Invo levels (where the longer duration of the passives means an encounter will likely be finished after the first longer pain bond). The idea of tying piety gain to Invo would be to make it take longer to reach those passives the lower your Invo is, where zero Invo should not let you reach the passives until a stairdanced pack of enemies is almost dead anyway (while high Invo could reach those abilities quickly near the start of an encounter, where they would be more useful, as well as being able to use the actives more often). This could also support making the passives a static duration (Invo affecting how likely you are to reach them in the first place over a single encounter) as an alternative to trying to communicate how Invo affects their duration. If stairdancing to exploit passive activations isn't considered an issue, however, then the current system is fine.