The Tavern

So I just started playing as a gnoll, I was wondering if you could suggest me a god to worship.
Ashenzari: boosts your skills once you are bound, but how how much? invisible and Clarity are always nice to have but Transfer Knowledge seems the most useful ability since gnolls have no control on skill development.
Cheibriados: that would be interesting, but I let him to more skilled players

Nemelex Xobeh: getting stacked decks

it would take a while before getting them

Okawaru: useful gifts and cheap ( in terms of piety) and powerful abilities
Sif Muna and Kiku: I'd leave them to pure spellcasters

Black Demon wrote:Okawaru: useful gifts

Lol

Gnolls work with just about any god, so it's just a question of which gods you like. I play too much Chei, but it sounds like you're fairly new, so popular gods for new players are usually Trog, Okawaru, or Kiku (for necromancer type builds - allies are strong). If you want your god to create your allies for you automatically there's Yred, who makes the early game easy but can be a bit weaker in Zot where monsters are strong enough to start killing off your gifted allies. I'm ignoring sif/vuhemut since you said you don't play pure casters, but kiku isn't really a pure caster kind of god.

Edit: forgot Mahkleb - free healing on kills is really strong.

I'm personally a fan of Gozag, you can use just about any awesome loot that shows up in shops and is a generically good god. Won a 15 runer Gnoll Wizard recently with Gozag, and cleared a Zig with it.

I also had good experiences with Gozag--though in my case I converted to Gozag specifically because I saw Zephyr (a fantastic artifact bow) for sale and wanted divine help raising the cash. In general Gozag is a flexible and powerful pick as long as you don't want to liberally high hunger spells. Gozag can get you out of trouble with potion petition, keep you out of trouble with the distraction effect, and bribing branches is great.

I would save Ash for after you play a gnoll of something else--embrace the weird and powerful gnoll skill system! Don't fight it! Having medium ranks in every single spell school is pretty neat.

Okawaru is decent and that skill boost is pretty nice. Personally I found the endless shower of random weapons to be kinda overwhelming, but that's simply because I have pack rat tendencies. If you're ruthless about dropping the extras, you'll be fine. One nice thing about Okawaru for a gnoll is you can get a lot out of a little bit of invocation skill.

I haven't tried it with a gnoll, but in general I find Heplianlqana to be a great pick that works with many play styles as long as you're ok with having an ally. I like the hexer ancestor a lot.

I took Gozag, I had the luck of finding two scrolls of aquirement and picked gold

Just one more thing, I found a manual of fighting, is it useful? since gnolls already have +8 aptitude, do I get a bonus?

Manuals still help. The EXP necessary to level Fighting will still be halved, the effect is not weaker due to having high apt. You'll be lugging it around for quite awhile, though.

Overconfidence killed this gnoll

I died with plenty of escaping and healing options

Started a new one with Okawaru, I'm using an amulet of faith but I can't reach the last piety level, I have *****.

Black Demon wrote:Started a new one with Okawaru, I'm using an amulet of faith but I can't reach the last piety level, I have *****.

You don't need the last piety level. Oka + amulet of faith means you can and should use Heroism in every non-trivial fight and Finesse in every slightly scary fight.

Thanks for the reply, I made this question because I had an ogre of sif Muna and it took me a lot of kills and magic training to reach the last level of piety, I reached qickly *****. but for ****** it took really a lot of experience

Gifts drop your piety, IIRC, so you're just not seeing the time at 6*. Like fingolfin said, it doesn't matter at all.

I see, I didn't know that gifts drop piety

Black Demon wrote:I see, I didn't know that gifts drop piety

Strictly speaking gifts don't actually *drop* piety, you get a gift *instead* of gaining piety (Your piety doesn't literally drop as a direct result of getting a gift), however since piety decays over time, not gaining piety is sufficiently similar to losing it that the difference is all but academic.

Oka sometimes gives amazing gifts. But personally, I find Oka useful for weapon gnolls mainly for Heroism. It makes you able to take advantage of so many different weapons that drop around mid-game, which otherwise you're much still much less capable with. It's the difference between being able to practically (if not perfectly min delay) use broad/battle axes or larger polearms early, or not really reliably -- when you want them and your overall defenses are still probably not that great.

Right now Iìm playing a gnoll with Oka, heroism really helps

Siegurt wrote:
Black Demon wrote:I see, I didn't know that gifts drop piety

Strictly speaking gifts don't actually *drop* piety, you get a gift *instead* of gaining piety (Your piety doesn't literally drop as a direct result of getting a gift), however since piety decays over time, not gaining piety is sufficiently similar to losing it that the difference is all but academic.

I see this statement a lot, and I consider it deceit by omission because it doesn't mention how piety taper interacts with gifts.
When you get a god gift, you get some amount of "gift timeout", which is often thought of as negating a certain amount of future piety gain. But it's not quite that simple. With all gods except Ru, when you would gain a point of piety:
1. If you have gift timeout, it is decremented, and 75% of the time with non-Nemelex and non-Jiyva gods, this results in the point of piety not being gained.
2. After that, if your piety is already at the maximum, or is above 160 and passes a 1/3 chance, or is above 100 and passes a 1/3 chance, the game will try to give you a god gift. The gift will fail if you have gift timeout, are above water or lava, or just aren't with a gifting god, but whether the gift succeeds or not, this results in the point of piety not being gained.

So let's say you get an Okawaru gift and get a gift timeout of 40. Ultimately, you'll effectively lose 30 piety as a result, right? No. If you stay above 160 piety, you will only effectively lose 13.33 piety. This is because 55.56% of the time, your piety gain would have been negated anyway by step 2, whereas the gift timeout always gets decremented.
If you stayed above 100 piety but below 160, you would effectively lose 20 piety.

In other words, gifts are "cheaper" once you reach **** and are even cheaper at ******. And Nemelex/Jiyva gifts are completely free.

duvessa wrote:When you get a god gift, you get some amount of "gift timeout", which is often thought of as negating a certain amount of future piety gain. But it's not quite that simple. With all gods except Ru, when you would gain a point of piety:
1. If you have gift timeout, it is decremented, and 75% of the time with non-Nemelex and non-Jiyva gods, this results in the point of piety not being gained.
2. After that, if your piety is already at the maximum, or is above 160 and passes a 1/3 chance, or is above 100 and passes a 1/3 chance, the game will try to give you a god gift. The gift will fail if you have gift timeout, are above water or lava, or just aren't with a gifting god, but whether the gift succeeds or not, this results in the point of piety not being gained.

crawlcode.wav

And Nemelex/Jiyva gifts are completely free

I see and if I wear an amulet of faith do I get those gifts more often?

Hah. Today I learned one of my longtime fears about Oka/Trog dumping gifts into lava won't ever happen!

Hellmonk wrote:
duvessa wrote:When you get a god gift, you get some amount of "gift timeout", which is often thought of as negating a certain amount of future piety gain. But it's not quite that simple. With all gods except Ru, when you would gain a point of piety:
1. If you have gift timeout, it is decremented, and 75% of the time with non-Nemelex and non-Jiyva gods, this results in the point of piety not being gained.
2. After that, if your piety is already at the maximum, or is above 160 and passes a 1/3 chance, or is above 100 and passes a 1/3 chance, the game will try to give you a god gift. The gift will fail if you have gift timeout, are above water or lava, or just aren't with a gifting god, but whether the gift succeeds or not, this results in the point of piety not being gained.

crawlcode.wav

I'm hearing this as that horn that makes the kind of "waaaahhh-waaahhhh" sound.

Here's an interesting one that I don't see listed elsewhere: Ru

Ru allows you something no other God allows except Ash; it allows Gnolls to somewhat focus their XP. By sacrificing a skill you do not intend to use; you can then lock it off from having further XP invested into it. Since there would also have been some training into these skills; Ru piety goes up faster.

Sacrifice Arcana on schools of magic you don't use. Sacrifice Armour if you plan to wear light; and sacrifice Nimbleness if you plan to wear heavy. You can even sacrifice Evocations if you're really up for it. Sacrifice Hand locks out Shields and Bows [You still have Hand Crossbows; Slings; Throwing and magic for ranged options]

Theoretically; a Gnoll of Ru could reduce the pool of skills they are training from 31 down to [-3 Arcana; -2 Hand; -1 Evocables; -1 Armour/Dodge; losing both is suicide; -1 Stealth] 23. And all that XP going to skills you do not use would be redirected into the other skills; causing them to raise significantly faster.

You also get access to Ru's panic buttons; and can always choose to not take certain sacrifices like Hand.

You don't see that listed elsewhere because it's wrong. Gnolls are special-cased to receive no extra piety for sacrificing skills, and experience doesn't get redirected away from untrainable skills, it just gets wasted.

My ultimate gnoll god trip would be to start with Kiku, get the early spellbooks (you want draining).. then switch to Gozag while you're still fairly low level, fish for good items in orc, and up to D:15 and a bit beyond. If you don't get anything good in the shops, take a few cheap shopkeepers and look for loot again. Stop before the shopkeepers become too expensive to summon and leave yourself with a wad of cash. Then switch to Oka about the time you are killing dragons so you can get the hides. If you see dragons prior to switching to Oka, you can lock them in a room somewhere with closed doors. Finally, if doing extended switch to Zin for all the mutation areas and finish with TSO.

Fingolfin wrote:
Black Demon wrote:Okawaru: useful gifts

Lol

You get all the ammo you could ever need for that random +9 fustibalus or Sonja's +6 blow gun. Don't knock it.

Gnolls are probably the least bad candidates to use the actual gear too, though this isn't why players should pick Oka.

Gnoll can use magic easily, so they're not unreasonable...but Oka or Trog are stronger. Heroism in particular will let you swing otherwise slow weapons in non-trivial fights at or near base delay pretty early in the game.

Black Demon wrote:Ashenzari: boosts your skills once you are bound, but how how much? invisible and Clarity are always nice to have but Transfer Knowledge seems the most useful ability since gnolls have no control on skill development.

This ability isn't available for Gnolls

or at least it wasn't with my last Gn^Ash in 0.21

I'm a bit crazy about this, but Gnolls allow you to get Invocations title with any god, as their Invoc aptitude is the highest, on the long run, they end with it being their highest skill !

Fingolfin wrote:
Black Demon wrote:Okawaru: useful gifts

Lol

My first Gnoll win was with the obsidian axe from Okawaru. So what if it mesmerizes to every single enemy that you encounter. Brutal stats and friendly demon summoning. I only swapped it when I was banished, and that was for Arga (the axe of speed, another Oka gift). Do you want to know how I fought on Vault:5? I quaffed a potion of Agility, a potion of Might, descended, and stayed there, right in the middle. I don't think I even cast Mephitic Cloud once.

You can use anything Okawaru gives you, and sooner or later he gives a few great weapons.

* * *

I also tried Chei, but failed. Lack of skill, but I think it's a great choice. You just need to make more use of your magic, and I didn't want to spam Mephitic Cloud and Fulminant Prism two games in a row.

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