Additional Lugonu gifts.

[Lawman 0]

I was thinking about how lackluster Abyssal Knights are for things other than speed running and came up with a possible solution.
Lugonu should gift the translocation spellbooks at ****** piety and appreciate the building of the skill.
What do you guys think of the idea?

[pratamawirya]

Not a bad idea.

[Kate]

Rather than tying Lugonu to translocations (it's not very thematic), I'd quite like to see the god get some of the shiny new things suggested here, in particular being rewarded for altar desecration (although it requires god wrath to be reworked first).

[dpeg]

To be honest, that's a pretty bad idea. First of all, gifts are not a good mechanic, they're bad. Temporary gifts can actually be okay (consumables, temporary allies) but permanent gifts (weapons, armour, books, permanent allies) are causing problems.
Also, I have no idea why you think that Lugonu is lackluster. You get early blink, you get piety-powered banishment, you get escape from the Abyss and escape into the Abyss (the latter is the safest and fastest life saving in all of Crawl, alone with Zin's sanctuary). Also, you get a weapon of distortion, which is very powerful if you know what you are doing. On top of all of that, there's Corruption -- an ability that can solve branch ends standalone.
Please try harder before telling us that a god (or in this case the background) is "lackluster".

[mageykun]

Translocation gifts sound like a bad idea to me. It's already tempting to trade in your blink ability for the spell- no pain cost, and ctele allows semi controlled blinks (it would be real nice if the ability did too, even if the flavor makes sense for it not). No need to outright encourage that.

I do understand the feeling that some kind of gift would be nice- once as a CK I hit ****** before the end of the lair, and then all the corpses you could offer do nothing for you. Corruption needs to be used with care, and banishment and self banishment are more emergency buttons. So you kinda end up with the feeling you have piety to burn, but not much to do with it. That said, when you do need Lucy's gifts, you're very glad to have them. She's kind of a weird, conditional god that way.

Gifts would be nice, but could be unbalancing considering all She does already. Also I'm really not sure on what an appropriate theme would be. Then there's the fact that if gifts started to eat piety it could make it frustrating or difficult to maintain the level needed to corrupt a distortion weapon- especially since that requires abyssal wandering or backtracking to the temple to corrupt it, ie times you're not building piety.

[Lawman 0]

Perhaps we just have her gift you the Book of the warp instead of both books?

[dpeg]

No books.
Luognu will work differently in the future, in that you (a) have to corrupt from time to time, (b) can (and probably have to) gain piety from desecrating other gods' altars and (c) gain less piety from killing (and not at all from corpses).
You see, Lugonu has oodles of theme and is different and powerful. By adding something like book gifts, you distort the theme, reduce the god's uniqueness and don't even help the original cause because two books later, it is just the same. (The books are absolutely out of the question: you can worship Lugonu just fine with a Minotaur who has no intention to cast whatsoever. She supports heavy armour fighters as well as fighters.)

[jackalKnight]

I always thought Lugonu was supposed to be a support god for classes who wanted some Translocation abilities without having to worry about magic stats anyway. I'd be loath to change the established gifter gods too much (unless if you gave them a bigger list of random gift choices, though).

[dpeg]

Don't know what Lugonu was supposed to be, but when I conceived her (ha!), the core was just to provide an option to leave the Abyss -- at a price. This is the case, in my opinion. If you do this, then abilities like escaping the Abyss and banishing monsters are a given; and banishing self fits the theme and is very strong. Note that the core concept indicates that the god should be as broad as possible: no matter what species you are and what's your current means of killing, Lugonu should somehow be commensurable with it.
When we then fleshed out Lugonu, Darshan invented and implemented Corruption, which is an awesome trademark power, of course. After that, I was convinced that Lugonu's place in the pantheon should be an antagonistic one (this does not show yet in the game, but hopefully will at some point [1]).
As you can see, I don't think anyone ever looked at it from the "translocations for the poor" point of view. With hindsight, this is true (although note that the Banishment spell was removed just yesterday) but it's never been the motivation.

Regarding gifting gods: your mileage may, and probably will, vary, but I don't think they work very well. The tedium of "just one more gift from Okaware, let's pray it's good for something" is universally known. Before Sif got randomised books, players would finetune their next gifts using spoilers (and this is nothing you want to explain in-game either); the same worked with acquirements, by the way. Permanent allies (gifts of TSO and Beogh) cause problems from time to time. On the other hand, one-off effects are much less of a problem.
I hope that the system changes completely at least for two gods: Okawaru should make you fight for your good item, and Sif should really have some kind of library.

[jackalKnight]

I can understand disliking the Oka system of just picking the god in hopes of striking it rich on the item lottery, but for some gods (Yred) the permanent allies are some of the best assets that the god can give you. I do agree that the Beogh method needs to be reworked somewhat (since you can easily find a vast amount of potential recruits in certain areas and come up completely dry in others), but I like Yred's mechanic of trying to fight with your zombies in hopes of getting a good pet, and the various intelligent undead offer many different assets and drawbacks in combat situation.

[dpeg]

Yes, that is true. There are still some interface issues with your permanent Yrdy gifts, but they can probably be sorted out.

[mageykun]

Personally, I'm a fan of Lucy. I'd put Her in my top there gods, for sure.

I don't actually find myself relying on Her for the free blink, aside from easily game emergencies, or occasionally to correct myself getting penned in a hallway due to distortion blade blinking. It mostly serves to train up invocations for banishment, which is your core god ability for a long time. The free level 2 translocation isn't core.

I feel if there's room for improvement, it could be with corruption. It's very cool and all- but it's incredibly dangerous to use for a long time, which is very disappointing given it's core to the god's theme, and you get it so early. I'd love it if the effects could scale with level in some way that corrupting would be a viable option in the early to mid game. Or maybe split it up into two versions- one a corruption light with milder effects. Or a meaner version where instead of bringing the abyss to the dungeon, you pull a part of the dungeon into the abyss (like the banished temple vault). The fact is that now the best use is usually to corrupt, apport, and run. Heck, even being able to swap places with the abyssal perma-summons would be nice- so you're not forced into learning apportion, or waiting off level for the monsters to disperse, in order to corrupt a into vault.

Although if She's intended to be a late game god the dangerous to use bit is less of a concern. Although, the fact that Lucy's Chaos Knights have been promoted to Abyssal Knights in trunk suggests otherwise.

Corpse piety is gonna go? So it'll all be killing, and the occasional altar corruption? Well, the temple will be a piety bonanza at least- gives one of the god-start roles a use for the place. If you are going to be required to do occasional corruption (either to earn piety, or to avoid a displeasure countdown- like Xom BORED) then I think I might be right about corruption needing safety tweaking. I know if current Lucy required corruption, I'd be ducking above the temple to corrupt the early levels so I wasn't at risk traveling between branches.

[dpeg]

mageykun: The plan is that (a) desecrating altars gets a lot of piety, but incurs some wrath of the offended god (not as much as if a follower of that god abandoned him), and (b) corruption will cost piety as now (so that you have to earn piety, probably including some altar desecration in order to corrupt some level). I don't think that you're better off corrupting places like D:1. Lugonu wouldn't care, but aren't you much better off corrupting a branch end?
It is true that there are some quirks with corruption. For one, it could be abused, by invoking it, and then bailing out. I am not too happy with being able to switch places with the summons: when Darshan did Corruption, one of the main ideas was that "neutrals" (this was a new concept then) are not as neutral as might be expected. In particular, they're not friendly. But I am confident we will find a way to have strong, thematic and unabusable corruptions.

[galehar]

Has it ever been considered to make stairs unusable for a few turns after corruption?

[dpeg]

Yes! B0rsuk suggested it once: "corruption seals all exits" or something like that. A good idea, if you ask me.

[pratamawirya]

I really like the idea that Lugonu turns into the antagonistic god, the god who is hated by the rest of the pantheon.

This means Lugonu should:
1. Be the strongest god (or one of the strongest), giving the player very powerful (borderline broken) abilities,
2. Make the player suffer a one-god fate the entire game, because once he decides to worship Lugonu, all other gods hate him and none of them will accept him as a follower.

[pratamawirya]

(can't edit my previous post)

Or the player can still follow another god after abandoning Lugonu, but it'll be much harder than after he abandons another god. So it can be like, "You kneel at the altar of Sif Muna. Sif Muna might accept you as a follower, but you have to do this and that first...."

[pratamawirya]

BTW, "Corruption seals all exits" isn't too thematic. Why shouldn't Lugonu allow the player to get away from the corruption nuke? What business does Lugonu have with locking the player in the horror of corruption?

I think a better approach is to make corruption mess with the items on the corrupted level. So the player can leave the corrupted level if he wants to, but when he returns to the level he might not find most of the valuable items at their prime conditions (most potions are destroyed, books are burned, etc).

[mageykun]

@pratamawirya: Corruption doesn't equal destruction. Doesn't really make sense to me for Lucy to eat with loot. Leave toying with floor trash to Jiyva and Nemelex.

@dpeg: I only suggested corrupting early floors as an option if Lugonu starts demanding corruptions of you (ie, if She penalizes you if you don't use the ability). Yes, tactically, corrupting branch ends is where corruption is most useful. But if clean floors become a scarce resource you need to consume to keep your corruption counter high, I'd start with the out of the way floors. And once cleared, you ignore pre-temple floors till the orb run, so it'd be a relativity safe place to dump hostile demons during the mid game.

Of course, this is a hypothetical based on assumptions. If Lucy isn't just counting your uses of the ability, this makes less sense. If She instead cares about you corrupting something significant (ie, altars, branch ends, or even just scaling with depth) then this strategy wouldn't be practical.

@galehar: stair sealing would prevent just running off floor and waiting for the demons to rip apart vault guardians and disperse, but there's no reason one couldn't just run or tele after corrupting and wait for the diaspora on floor. It is interesting though. ...it would also make corrupting the temple a lot more dangerous. You'd be stuck alone with the monsters in a very small level.

As altar corruption becomes important, is it going to be done solely through the existing ability, or will there be a new one, exclusively to safely desecrate an altar? (Heck, maybe even by praying, if Lucy loses her taste for corpses.)

[pratamawirya]

And so I have been thinking about Lugonu.

The "Bend Space" ability should be changed so that it:
1. blinks the player and every monster in the player's LOS,
2. doesn't do any damage (because just blinking every monster in LOS is powerful enough).

The Banish ability should be changed so that it:
1. does NOT cost piety, but instead rewards the player with piety when it succeeds (because Lugonu appreciates when the player sends something to his home, Abyss),
2. can be used to banish just about everything, not just monsters (it will not fail in banishing items),
3. has a much worse chance in banishing a monster, BUT if the monster is in near-death state, the chance will be greatly increased.

When I have a more interesting idea on Corruption, I will post it.

[pratamawirya]

Here's an idea for a new ability.

Army of Abyss

1. Open a dimensional gate where monsters are sent out from Abyss.
2. Does not cost piety.
3. The monsters sent out are usually neutral, but with higher piety the player may get friendly ones.
4. Monsters banished by the player may get sent out, but they will seek revenge on the player (especially the intelligent ones, and some may even be berserking). Imagine an angry Saint Roka coming out of the gate, shouting at the player, "You cannot get rid of the chosen one of Beogh that easily!"
5. The gate lasts for a long time, sending out monster one by one. The player can open only one gate per level.
6. The player may use the gate to enter Abyss.

[pratamawirya]

I'll elaborate some more on Army of Abyss.

1. The monsters sent out are neutral or even friendly, because they are happy that the player opens a gate for them to escape from the Abyss.
2. To prevent the player from using the gate as a "piety farm" (by banishing monsters that come out of it, since under my proposal, Banishment gives piety), a new flag can be invented: "from Abyss". Monster sent out from the gate will have that flag, and they don't yield piety when banished.
3. Naturally, the more monsters the player have banished, the higher the chance that a hostile monster comes out of the gate (who wants to seek revenge on the player).

[pratamawirya]

Because I can't edit my previous post....

1. The monsters sent out are neutral or even friendly, because they are happy that the player opens a gate for them to escape from the Abyss.

Except the ones who got banished by the player, which will be hostile.

[dpeg]

Why should Lugonu be the strongest god? Just because she's fallen, she will not be stronger than the others.
The proposal on the wiki (please read stuff when someone links to the wiki -- this is content people thought about and which may be close to our plans) mentions that gods won't accept worship from someone who has corrupted one of their altars. Other gods will, however. This also fits the vanity which I see in our gods.
The gates (portals, staircases) non-functioning during Corruption makes a lot of sense: transplanting a piece of the Abyss into the overworld is a major rupture. You can argue that the process itself shuts off all connections to other places, or also that Lugonu has to disable in order to be able to corrupt a spot undisturbed.
And while future Lugonu will demand Corruption, it'd still be a rare thing. I imagine that you rush to be able to time the next Corruption for a branch end. (If you happily corrupt at your leisure, you won't be reminded by Lugonu, of course.) In particular, the idea is not to corrupt the whole dungeon. But rather to (a) add a Lugonu-only clock, and (b) add flavour. Please refer to the wiki page.