I have been playing this god a bit the last few days with a gargoyle EE and a OpTr(currently level 23).
First off I found a bug having to do with headbutt retaliation. I found a rod of shadows and ill advisedly did some slime pit (I haven't died yet, but I almost was dead right before this bug happened) and I found that summons will trigger your headbutt off a miss on the summon.
Question: The headbutt, I assume, is pretty much the same as the Minotaur headbutt but how does it work if we have no horns? Does horns mutation make it do more damage? Note: the reason I am swinging at nothing is I am statue form and waiting take 1.5 so swining is better (which is silly).
- Code:
The wall burns your meliai!
Your meliai hits the slime creature with a war axe!
Your meliai stings the slime creature!
Your meliai calls upon its god to heal your meliai.
_Your meliai is healed somewhat.
You swing at nothing. The wall burns your meliai!
Your meliai hits the slime creature with a war axe!
Your meliai stings the slime creature.
The slime creature barely misses your meliai.
You furiously retaliate! You headbutt the slime creature!
The wall burns your meliai!
Your meliai hits the slime creature with a hand axe.
The slime creature dies!
considering I am 4 square away that is a pretty awesome headbutt, although maybe octopodes can stretch real far.
My observations:
-any rank of spiny is really strong in the early game, and while always useful doesn't really compare to late game weapon even with spiny 3. Is spiny 3 worth losing a cloak Ego? Its probably worth the normal ones. if you melee a lot it might be worth an artifact but I kind of doubt it late game. This is quite variable losing a cloak on invis for a stabber could suck bad, but losing a cloak of poison res for a FoFi spiny wins.
-clarity is great and with it being quite rare now is maybe the best slot. I can get ! headbutts in statue form with low str. All in all I think this is fine. You would need to find a pretty good artifact to beat this one.
-feet is not really that bad, I think I prefer it on octopodes since they really need defense and actually have very good offense. But for species that can wear boots its very inferior to a pair of boots of running or to decent artifact boots. Its just a bad trade. Not terrible really, but not great.
-hands are terrible. Complete trash really. Now before people say poison is ok early game, this is true. But poison weapons are common early game and the first transmutation has a poison brand. So its extremely commonly replaced. Really there is no reason to take hands and due to the way the choosing works no one ever will. All three options are purely better and you can always take something. I took head and feet on the octopode. I kind of wanted head and cloak which is probably most people's goal, but for octopode I was kind of sanguine about feet. Octo have pretty good offense really and nothing duplicate 5% miss rate and I was a melee character. Not only are they super redundant and evenutally one of the worst brands in general, but there exist rather good non-artifact ego like Archery that you would be giving up. Picking hands, for most setups is actually detrimental in the long run and barely useful in the short run.
-The vines are ok early, but I don't really see them being very good at invo 9 in the midgame they mostly just die or I can't get them to the right area. The briar patch, when I remember to use it, is actually much more powerful for setups that need extra options to flee. There were a couple cases where the game threw multiple uniques at me (kirke and a surprise asterion around a corner) and a case where I forgot I was on swamp 4 and went into the lerny's vault by mistake and briar patch was just enough of a delay to get away (and would be great for a more ranged char). Seems like some people think the vines are great but I don't really see it, maybe its a melee vs ranged thing.
AC AnalysisOne of the biggest draws for me was the AC which seems to be wildly advantageous for some setups (which may not be particularly bad since some are rather bad starts). Personally I think transmuter is an awful start. If Book of Changes had confusing touch then fine it'd be realy nice, but BA is one of the worst if not the worst spell in the game. Sticks to Snakes is actually surprisingly good, but requires arrows and is therefore quite inferior to Summon Imp. Spider Form can be made to be usable but if you get unlucky to an ogre you die so you should use your 2nd level spell not your 3rd. Ice form is fine and can be milked but is not even close to a powerhouse, 8 AC is not even close to enough against a Komodo Dragon for lair. Transmuter itself requires gigantic skill investments with multiple split spells and you need ALOT of unarmed combat to make it decent. Your best bet is a lvl 4 spell with split schools (for an octopode) or blade hands at level 5 single (many others). Not only do you have UA taking a lot of experience, you need quite a lot of XP to get to anything halfway decent that can reasonably do anything in lair. All in all in Tr is a start that is very very inferior to many other starts. Is it the worst? No but its bad. Again if they had confusing touch just that change would make them a pretty good start. CT is not as safe as killing an ogre from range with 3 stone arrows, but combine CT with high EV spider form and its pretty well in line with EE or IE in the early game. CT is pretty powerful really it might be OP in a starting book.
Anyway I am saying that as context to say that as someone else mentinoed the AC really helps Tr alot it is a somewhat similar game changer to starting a Tr with confusing touch or Ozo armor (but better). My initial plan was to get to Wudzu as soon as possible and pump poison and transmute as fast as possible to make spider form usable (which again sucks because Tr skilling are out of whack). This takes a number of tries on an octopode since spider form is a level 3 split schools and need UA to do much, the XP burden is too large to really be all that useful by level 4. You may be getting it online when you reach temple but not if you dive to temple and its nowhere near as good/safe as stone arrow would be, however the idea is that a spider form at EV 25 and AC 12 would be pretty usable. And that spiny can initially supplement your lack of AC and EV early on. This mostly worked out. I also eventually got lucky and found Book of Frost for Ozo armor on lair 1 or 2. Level 1 and 2 are generally pretty fine for Op because they kill starter guys fast. After that things get dicey with no AC and only normal EV. Spiny helps out alot here, IMO its as good as heroism for the early levels.
- There is a pretty big difference between spider form at AC 2 and spider form at AC 12-13. It takes some time to get piety up enough to have the 12, but even ac 6 with EV 20 is pretty nice. And it works very well with poison brand (for example poison an invisible skybeast and walk away is radically safer). But like I said my poison brand had nothing to do with Wudzu. I eventually got spider form to AC 20 and EV 30 (higher now but I don;t use it anymore) with Ozo armor and I used it in lair 6 to kill elephants (I wanted high EV for less trample).
- Even with Wudzu's AC I wound up very quickly moving to Ice Form instead of spider form, so my spider form-centric beginning plan was only partially useful. I still did what most people do as a Tr. The piety took too long to get to max AC for spider and I need SOOOO much xp in other areas that training dodge to get really good EV was just not gonna happen before I got ice form online and the high AC of ice form combined to with the significant damage increase just usually works better.
-Eventually by Lair 6 had Ice Form with Ozo armor at 26-29 AC (depending on whether I use my staff of ice) with 15 EV. This is sufficient to take on one death yak safely and two decently but since you have no GDR if you get unlucky on your rolls two death yaks can take you far down very fast and is unacceptably dangerous although winnable.
- Once I killed roxanne in the swamp and found statue form the other two forms are pretty much useless. Although I can't use Ozo armor with ice form statue still puts me at 37 AC with the 11AC from wudzu, this is actually only about 7 better than IF + OA but the 39% GDR makes a huge difference. But without wudzu I would have be about 26 AC, which is still nice but is considerably less strong.
-On this octopode I have found only one ring of protection which is +1 so I didn't buy it. This is pretty standard, finding a decent ring of prot is rare enough to never depend on even into mid or possibly late game. I have now found a good amount of EV rings, but that was solidly mid-game.
So for each form the +11AC, eventually, wound up, giving me the ability to take on something "one tier" higher. By that I mean a death yak would have been very dangerous without Wudzu but a komodo dragon would be ok. Without Ozo armor, things would have been rather bad probably. Even so, with both sources of extra armor clearing the standard cataboles + death yak vault required the rather tedious pull them one by one to the stairs strategy. The early and mid-game of an OpTr is by no means easy even with Wudzu and Ozo armor, its good but not amazing. OpTr itself is a very bad start IMO. Op itself is hard or at least delicate. OpCj is a much easier start than Tr. Wudzu makes the start MUCH better as a Tr, but not OP.
Frankly if I was really trying for extended with the OpTr now that i have statute form I would probably start Wudzu and then abandon him for Okawaru once i found statue or dragon form and since AC rings. I am not entirely sure on that one though. The AC still helps those alot but on those, but you can get statue to 30AC and it can use shields +10 AC from rings is probably enough. Now that haste is gone Finesse is incredibly strong. I mean incredibly. Dragon form at 0.25 attack speed? No way Spiny 3 competes with that.
So for STARTING an OpTr Wudzu is a top tier choice IMO, although Okawaru is actually top tier for starting as well but Wudzu feels a bit smoother to me. Starting Tr with Oka sometimes it just feel like you are running the razor's edge kill or be killed. However other species for example a draconian Tr Wudzu is perhaps just as good even later. An AC 30 dragon (16 dragon + 14 Dr) + the 13 AC for 43 AC at 34% GDR with spiny 3 is quite good for melee and they would need their two rings for resistances.
For the most part though the AC itself really does well when combined with something that gives GDR either being a gargoyle or using forms. When it doesn't it can be very marginal.
Problems I See-I am not sure about the AC as its wildly varying, it can help alot or not much. It takes away GDR entirely making it considerably less useful than it numbers indicate, but when combined with somethign gives GDR its quite useful. I would say its too varying, the only solution I can see to this is to have Wudzu give a minimum GDR like say 14% or 24%, and if you get GDR some other way then you just get that same GDR (i.e. a Gr is still 31%). GDR, of course, is not the be all end all. But without it staying in melee is much more sporadic and you need to have rather good options for running. Since a large number of the abilities are melee based (spiny and headbutt are purely melee) this is important.
-Commensurate with the AC issue is the slots themselves. Each slot gives enough AC to just barely make up for the AC lost for a normal enchanted item. So you get 3 AC for losing hands and +2 gloves give 3 AC that is a push. But gloves also can have an ego and you will VERY likely find some kind of ego gloves eventually. Similarly the body slot can give up to 14 AC but you can definitely get even a low EV penalty armor with better or same AC, for purpsoes of comparison +7 swamp dragon armor is ac 14 and branded with rPois and adds GDR 31% with only -7 EV. One of the big problems I see here is that none of these will ever have even a chance of replacing a decent artifact. The AC itself is actually fairly inferior when you are not running a build that would use these slots anyway (Tr background or species like Te or Op). This might be OK for a 3 rune run but even then you will probably simply wind up penalized for one of the slots you picked. Its probably nice for a caster to get 14 AC for no EV penalty early on when all they have is robes or leather armor, but beyond that it starts to get to be a worse and worse trade until its actually detremental. Keep in mind that its more than just AC spiny 1 is almost certainly not worth losing the Archmagi ego for a caster. Are you likely to find the Archmagi ego? Not really but you can fairly easily get armor that is close to or just as good as the 14AC and not run the risk of never using that ego. +5 steam dragon armor has no EV and had 24% GDR and is only 4 AC less. In the end I think this slot scheme is too hard to balance out for the god.
Suggestion
1) give a modest amount of base GDR to prevent things from wildly slanting to things that have GDR.
2) change the slots in the following ways:
i) This is the more radical but possibly more important suggestion, however this may or may not be prohibitively hard to implement. Rather than inactivating the slot I would suggest when a slot is chosen the piece of equipment there is completely inactivated and the effects that you get are directly related to the item. This could be something as simple as doing it based on enchantment level and presences of brand and giving something special for an artifact. For example cloak slot only gives spiny 3 at +2 cloak other wise it gives spiny 2 (even with no cloak). It gives rPois if the cloak is branded (any brand). It gives complete poison immunity if it was an artifact. That is not meant to even vaguely resemble something that works well. Its just an example. This of course could be made much more complex because artifacts have have all sorts of things like stat bonuses. Or not so complex but more fancy. For example you could simply take the total amount of strength given by chosen slots (and only the two chosen slots) and apply some sort of bonus based on that, like adding Horns mutation ranks based on Str (probably not a good idea but w/e). Anyway the main point here I think its actually flat out impossible for you to balance the slots because of the way equipment
and especially finding equipment works. So I think you should convert found equipment into your theme rather than simply banning the slot. And for species that cannot use the slot you can work off of what you currently have as the sort of default unused slot thing. Having this work off piety is either going to be too weak later or too strong early. But even worse its actually going to fuck up some people's lucky finds as well. If I find some +10 boots with rElec and -cast on a melee type on D4 (which I did a few weeks ago) then sure its fine to unlock the super excellent boot slot power. Now coming up with a scheme that makes the tradeoff worthwhile or at least interesting is tricky. But 3AC and 5% melee miss is not even close to 10AC and rElec. Now if you turned those into the 3ac/5% + boots of running(as the artifact unlock) I dunno which I would take, but its at least interesting as a choice.
As a software developer myself I know this sounds like it might be a lot of work and doing something really fancy certainly could be. But doing something tiered on a few equipment tags would be fairly simple. Of course its more complex than just banning a slot in exchange for one ego/mutation since you would probably have , I dunno, in its simplest forms 3 effects per slot. But at the same I actually think its WAY easier to balance it out into something that feels good as the game is played because its power is directly tied to something that already is a major power determinant. So if you line up the ego/mutation to existing effects in a way that is reasonable the rest takes care of itself, in the end its much less fiddly.
ii) The choice is changeable (either with a long time limit, piety limit (renews as you get piety like a god gift) or no limit at all). Lore wise these are plants not rocks so they can grow wherever they need to. It actually makes more sense. You activate an ability and choose two slots. This is key for the interaction with the first suggestion as your equipment changes you need to be able to alter the slot. You find an amazing glove artifact you have the choice or not only losing, say, the Wudzu head effects but also losing the artifact gloves effects for whatever the top end Wudzu gloves effects are. This is necessary to make the first suggestion work but also is, in general, a much more agonizing and therefore interesting choice. The limit would probably mostly be if you do not want to people swap effects in and out for different situations the way people use rings. I am agnostic on that versatility vs interesting choices both have their draws for me, I sorta lean toward the god gift style. Either way, but you need to allow people to change choices as equipment is too random and too important.
Edit: I wanted to add that going by current species and mutation design, that slot loss is not realistically accounted for or somethings are just radically punished for reason I don't grasp. Case in point is Monsterous Demonspawn. They lose alot of slots because of all the body slot mutations. Gaining the auxiliary attacks in exchange for the loss of the those slots is horribly disadvantageous. Perhaps this is an intentional challenge or just something to make thing interesting. But really think about it for a second Rank 3 horns is WORSE than rank 2 horns, you do almost as much damage and can get 3 more AC and an ok ego like +MR or SINVS. The Auxilary Attacks themselves are quite poor in the later game without significant slaying. The notable exception is Antennae (as long as you don't go ashenzari) the ESP effect in incredibly strong and duplicated by no ego. Losing a pair of artifact boots for talons is awful, these mutations are not "good" at rank 3. And basically all players of Demonspawn mostly acknowledge that monsterous Ds are objectively considerably worse that the other 90% of Ds. So if this god is following that logic/weighting of things like monsterous demonspawn or the auxilliary attack mutations then its goign to have problems. I am not sure if that is the case I just wanted to say that this follows some similar trends but many things in the game that go down this path don't weight the loss of a slot appropriately at all, IMO. Some species do it ok some don't, Naga isn't too bad really, Centaur Speed 2 makes it hard to really say but its not bad with barding. Tengu though I think is hit way to hard with talons and beak.