Crypt Cleanser
Posts: 689
Joined: Saturday, 12th December 2015, 23:54
Fedhas Rework Suggestion Thread
Passive stuff
You can walk and fire through plants, which means you are encouraged to lure things to plants. All plants are friendly, which means you get to loot some oklob vaults for free. Neither of these things is particularly good for gameplay.
I suggest removing these except for plants created by the player via Fedhas abilities.
Decomposition
A 0* ability with more complexity than Okawaru's entire kit. It's basically corpse sacrifice with a different interface. You can choose to avoid the tedium of pressing aa every time something leaves a corpse by waiting to get your piety until corpses rot naturally. Also produces toadstools so that you can turn them into mushrooms (can be used in combat but is dumb and usually not worth the effort). Also turns zombies into skeletons or kills them if they can't be turned into skeletons, giving you piety but not exp.
I suggest removing this and just letting Fedhas accept kills. If the toadstool thing is necessary then it should be completely automatic.
Evolution
A 1* ability with more complexity than Okawaru's entire kit. Turns toadstools and fungi into wandering mushrooms, which stomp everything pre-lair-branches and are sometimes useful after. The mushrooms have a movement gimmick that encourages you to tell them to wait and then lure stuff back into them. This part of the ability is why Fedhas is Trog tier overpowered. Turns plants and some other stuff into oklob plants. This costs fruit instead of piety, so you can only lure an entire floor back to a 20 oklob farm that deals 150+ acid damage per turn once or twice per game.
Suggested fix: give Fedhas a passive that lets you sometimes spore enemies when you end your turn adjacent to them (probably just extra damage with no chance to confuse, but you could maybe get away with a low, invocations dependent confuse chance). Keeps the plant theme but can be balanced more easily than permanent allies and avoids the mushroom gimmicks.
Another option: You spore enemies in retaliation like mino headbutt or spines.
Another option: If the allies really have to stay, remove the movement gimmicks and make them temporary summons. Summon an invocations-dependent number of mushrooms around a foe curse-toe style (but no deathcaps). Increase the piety cost. An oklob version of this one could work at high piety for a sanctuary-level cost.
Sunlight
A combat buff that you should cast all the time because it doesn't cost piety, but won't because it's way too annoying to use that way. It also evaporates water because every Fedhas ability needs to have multiple effects for some reason. The water evaporation can be used to cross deep water in a slow and very annoying way.
Suggested fix: remove it altogether.
Another option: make it some sort of passive backlight effect when you hit enemies. Heavily overlaps with TSO and Ru.
Another option: give it a piety cost and buff it somehow. Fedhas has a ton of actives though. I don't think this one is really worth saving.
Growth
Creates plants around you. This costs fruit as a sneaky way to make oklobs cost more fruit, also so that you can pay an inventory space tax and autoinscribe your fruit with !e. The interface is terrible. Sometimes you have to cancel the ability multiple times to get plants where you want them.
Suggested fix: just spawn the whole ring and make it cost piety instead. Make the plants temporary.
Reproduction
I don't really use this one. Seems like you're encouraged to lure stuff back to corpses before using it, which is not very good design. Ballistomycetes are a dumb monster and shouldn't exist.
Suggested fix: remove it.
Another option: Rename to conjure spores and make it cost piety. This is basically a conjure ball lightning variant as a god ability though.
Rain
You can drown stuff by using it on enemies already in shallow water. An easy way to handle TRJ, among other things. Really good at restricting enemy movement or just forcing monsters to take the shallow water penalty against you. Also spawns plants sometimes, good for getting an oklob for 1 fruit less if you don't care that much about the positioning.
Suggested fix: Only make shallow water, make the water temporary. Don't spawn plants.
Other stuff
- You lose piety when your plants die, which leads to some pretty dumb stuff with wandering mushrooms and their HD gimmick that I don't care to explain and rarely bother with in practice. This would be much cleaner if it was rolled into the up-front piety cost, though of course I would prefer completely reworking wandering mushrooms.
- Corpse violating spells are banned. This mostly does not matter, but I guess skeletons + mushrooms are even better than just mushrooms. I could take it or leave it.
- Fedhas wrath is really weak. It probably needs to be buffed. Fedhas -> Jiyva is extremely good in the status quo.
This post took me a long time to write and is not as complete as I would like. I am still a little unsure what the intent behind Fedhas is. The theme/flavor is strong but the design space is not clear to me. If nothing else, I hope that this thread can spark some discussion about what Fedhas is intended to do and lead to an improved Fedhas that accomplishes that goal at a reasonable power level and is more enjoyable to play.