Updating Jiyva to play nicely with .15 changes

[tasonir]

So Jiyva has always been one of my favorite gods, but I think some of the changes in .15 have impacted Jiyva in a negative way. Having played a Jiyva troll for the .15 tournament, here's the three main ones that bothered me:

1) Without item destruction, one of bigger effects of removing item destruction is now moot. She may need an additional effect to make up for the loss - none proposed now, but feel free to suggest ones if you want.

2) Separate from item destruction, Jiyva used to provide infallible (at max piety) protection from armor corrosion. Now that corrosion is tactical, the new effect seems to entirely bypass this protection, and you get the same temporary acid damage as everyone else. I believe Jiyva gives you the "wearing an amulet of resist corrosion" rate, but that's considerably more than "never corrode" which I was expecting.

Suggestion: Buff Jiyva's protection from acid, either to 100%, or perhaps doing something like taking the -3 per stack down to -1 per stack.

3) Stat shuffling. Jiyva removes too much strength. I was wearing storm dragon armor with an encumbrance of 15, but Jiyva would lower my strength below this threshold. This got compounded with getting a +2 strength mutation and then that mutation being taken away, putting me even further under my armor's encumbrance rating. Using unarmed while 3-5 points under a fairly bulky armor's requirement is fairly dangerous.

Suggestion: Jiyva never lowers your strength under your armor's requirement. You should "shuffle" in a region between the requirement and roughly requirement + 3; because your stats are always shuffling, they shouldn't just remain at the requirement always. It used to be possible to "fix" this by carrying more weight, but with the removal of inventory weight, Jiyva will now have to handle this herself. If your current strength is below the requirement when a shuffle is triggered, always move something into strength.

Optional: do not consider +stats from mutations while shuffling, as they will be lost eventually. Getting a +2 strength mutation just means jiyva will now take two more points out of your base strength. If moving points into strength whenever below your armor requirement is added, this may not be necessary as while you'd go down for a short while, it would be corrected fairly soon.

While I'm on the topic, I'll repeat my previous suggestion that a jiyva altar should be guaranteed at some place, to make it easier to play Jiyva characters. My suggestion would be guaranteed to show up at some point in the lair, with a heavy weighting towards the slime pit entrance. Aside from that vault, weight it towards the bottom of the lair so it shows up on lair 6-8 mostly. If you wanted to just make it at the slime pit entrance 100% that would be fine by me too.

If you have any suggestions on how to deal with #1, feel free to propose them. I think #2 and #3 are fairly easy to solve, though.

[duvessa]

ER has nothing to do with a strength "requirement", assigning a specific breakpoint to it is completely nonsensical, and using the ER value itself as that breakpoint is doubly nonsensical.

Optional: do not consider +stats from mutations while shuffling, as they will be lost eventually.

How would this be an improvement? +2 str is +2 str whether it came from a mutation or not, why should Jiyva treat it differently?

[johlstei]

It'd be cool to make a guaranteed jiyva altar on slime:1-5 or something, since early characters diving those is somewhat more reasonable than going to slime:6 while still being dangerous.

[tasonir]

ER has nothing to do with a strength "requirement", assigning a specific breakpoint to it is completely nonsensical, and using the ER value itself as that breakpoint is doubly nonsensical.

Optional: do not consider +stats from mutations while shuffling, as they will be lost eventually.

How would this be an improvement? +2 str is +2 str whether it came from a mutation or not, why should Jiyva treat it differently?

You might consider this less convincing if you don't feel that having strength >= ER is important, but the premise is that you are likely to lose your +2str mutation at any time, and thus your strength will be too low to wear your armor effectively. This can happen at any time including the middle of fights.

It'd be cool to make a guaranteed jiyva altar on slime:1-5 or something, since early characters diving those is somewhat more reasonable than going to slime:6 while still being dangerous.

I'd also consider that to be a good solution - I found my altar on slime:4 and while it meant I put off getting a god a while longer (I had picked up my first rune at this point) it's still considerably easier than slime:6. I'd still favor it being in lair than being in slime, but slime 1-5 is an improvement imho.

[crate]

On the other hand, one of the big benefits of Jiyva is that things like +2 str and +2 dex and +2 int are (after a bit of time) exactly equivalent, precisely because stat shuffling looks only at your final stats. One of my earliest Jiyva games actually ended up with negative "natural" str, which was a pretty sizable benefit to that character since I got more int and dex.

(For several reasons I think light-armour Jiyva is significantly better than heavy-armour Jiyva regardless, but if you have legitimate improvements to the stat shuffling formula (what is in the OP is not complete enough) you might be able to bring it up in ##crawl-dev or something)

[PleasingFungus]

You might consider this less convincing if you don't feel that having strength >= ER is important, but the premise is that you are likely to lose your +2str mutation at any time, and thus your strength will be too low to wear your armor effectively. This can happen at any time including the middle of fights.

there is no 'hard line' for 'required strength' for armour; complaining that jiyva may suddenly drop you below str=er is making the mistake of confusing a heuristic guideline for a hard-and-fast rule. it's possible that jiyva generally values str too low for heavy armour characters, but that's a different question.

[bananaken]

A great buff to Jiyva would be to improve paralyze jelly: make it so that it affects all jellies on the map and not the jellies in your LOS; in addition, improve the duration slightly (or make this scale with piety or invocations so it goes beyond 200 auts). As far as flavor, you pray to Jiyva, and in turn Jiyva himself calls for prayer to all jellies in a level. He can spawn jellies ("Divide and conquer!"), he can surely make them stop to worship him.

This is obviously much stronger, so the piety cost should be adjusted accordingly, I wouldn't mind if the cost were close to or on-par with remove bad mutation or even greater (currently piety cost is tied to the amount of jellies paralyzed, so maybe the cost can be capped at 30 or something). This way it gives you more chances to use your piety, as the few times I've used Jiyva the only thing that strains my piety are bad mutations provided by Jiyva himself.

As far uses go:

- If you find a vault in an unexplored level, paralyze jellies can give you a chance to quickly clear a vault before off-screen jellies consume everything. Something like elf:3 comes to mind, and even then it takes time to clear this vault so it's still not a completely reliable strategy, but it gives you a better chance at recovering items without being suicidal. This might be too cheesy for Slime:6 and an exception could be made. Paralyze jelly could behave like it currently does in this case ("Nearby slimes join you in your prayer. You feel other slimes are still consumed by hunger!").
- On a newly explored level, it gives you a little more time to scavenge items, but obviously with higher piety cost you can't just sustain this strategy for every floor.
- Overall just gives you more chances to burn your piety, which I feel I just save for curing bad mutations and the occasional slimify.. it's quite easy to stay at max piety with all the shit that gets eaten every floor

Edit: I wanted to add that it IS nice to not have to worry about weight limits anymore, since you can stash dozens of large rocks and such

[The Ferret]

Maybe your "stop the jellies" ability could be a status that you activate and then deactivate when done?

Jiyva calling for prayer doesn't make flavor sense (as jellies are mindless, they cannot worship Jiyva - hence why Jiyva ceases to exist when you kill The Royal Jelly, Jiyva's only sentient worshiper), but Jiyva could enthrall all jellies on the floor in a state of rapture or something like that.

Basically:

* Activate the ability. This has a piety cost.
* Once the ability is activated, you can de-activate it at any time from the abilities menu.
* The ability periodically and continuously drains your piety while active.
* If your piety falls below the breakpoint, the ability automatically deactivates.

You could handle the exact piety cost mechanics in a number of different ways:

* The initial piety cost "pre-pays" for some period of enthrallment; if it's theoretically 1 piety for 10 auts of enthrallment, perhaps the initial cost is 10 piety, which buys you 100 auts.
* The initial piety cost is separate from the continuing cost.
* There is no initial piety cost; however, the ability is guaranteed to have a minimum total piety cost - if you only enthrall jellies for 10 auts, you still are charged 10 piety. (This feels unnecessarily fiddly.)
* How to scale with Invocations? Should players with high Invocations be able to enthrall jellies essentially indefinitely as a reward for that skill investment (keeping in mind that enthralling jellies stops your piety gain, so there's still a secondary cost)? Or does the scaling need to be carefully calibrated so that the ability is useful at all Invocations levels, but still quite limited in duration at high Invocations?
* Is this system too "grindy"? At high piety and with decent Invocations, you don't want the player to have to activate Enthrall Jellies every time they enter a new level, clear the level, pick through the loot, and deactivate it. I guess at even 27 Invocations, that shouldn't be possible; your piety will be drained below the breakpoint after a couple of floors. (A better way to put it: it needs to be calibrated such that Enthrall Jellies -> clear floor -> take no loot -> allow jellies to consume items is not a net piety gain at any level of Invocations.)
* Random different idea: piety cost per aut is constant and not changed by Invocations/piety, so we can guarantee a maximum time Enthrall Jellies can be active for at 200 piety. You steadily accumulate glow while Enthrall Jellies is active; higher Invocations slows but never stops the glow. Kinda fits with Jiyva mechanics-wise and flavor-wise ("Jiyva's powerful presence infuses you with mutagenic energies!").

[bananaken]

Jiyva calling for prayer doesn't make flavor sense (as jellies are mindless, they cannot worship Jiyva - hence why Jiyva ceases to exist when you kill The Royal Jelly, Jiyva's only sentient worshiper), but Jiyva could enthrall all jellies on the floor in a state of rapture or something like that.

Hey, don't look at me, the game already says "nearby slimes join your prayer" or something to that effect. Though mindless jellies praying doesn't make much sense, yeah.

Carefully tuning the piety drain and gain with a piety-over-time skill does sound kinda finnicky, and its balance would be tied to the item/map/enemy generation algorithms and how these change from level to level (and branch). It seems like this would be difficult to reach a sweet spot on.

As far as "grindiness", you *do* have a grace period where you can scavenge for items freely.. just go wild until you get "Divide and conquer!" from Jiyva or "You hear a slurping noise". That's when you have to decide whether you should use your skill or not. Sometimes this is near the start of the level, other times you're almost done clearing the floor. Based on this you still need to weigh your options, the cost just needs to not be trivial.

Something like accumulating glow over time actually sounds pretty cool. This would probably make it easier for fine tuning against the piety gain from slimes eating everything when you have both glow accumulation and piety drain as costs.