God: Qazlal Stormbringer

[dialectric]

I think the elemental god is a good addition to the existing set, and having played a few games with the god, I have some thoughts and suggestions.

The clouds are powerful at low levels, which could be ok if there were more conduct restrictions. The limitation to only using elemental brand weapons proposed above might work. A limitation to only using elemental magic would be extreme, but might be justified if the god is powerful.

A suggestion for Dislikes- poison and necromancy both are non-elemental ways of dealing damage, though treating both as disliked makes Qazlal seem more like a good god. An outside alternative possibility is that Qaz forbids equipping randart items, as he thinks the elements are more important than rare treasure.

For abilities, I think more protection makes sense, either granting rF and rC at one star, or having an invocation at *** that costs piety, grants temporary rF++, rC++, rElectric, but while active you can't heal or recover magic.

Another possible passive ability would be that evoking wands of frost, flame, fire, and cold sometimes generates clouds of fire/ice at random, chance depending on piety level.

Edit: on playing a game to the orb, I'd echo Bloax's point about disaster area's seriously limited usefulness because it hits far from the player. Even when surrounded by enemies, it only hits a few at the outside edge, and I'm guessing the damage is more easily resisted than TSO's blessed fire.

[archaeo]

Just splatted my Qaz minotaur in Swamp, but mostly because I was bored (and did a poor job of managing a slime pack). A few things:

1) The new clouds are way better, thanks Grunt.

2) I think there needs to be a better mention of Qaz's pray-at-an-altar-for-protection power, since I felt like I wasn't seeing it in ^. Maybe I just overlooked it. I was waiting to see what kind of resists I would need later, since I already had rElec and was waiting to see what kind of loot I could grab through the midgame. Probably should've just picked up rF to be safe.

3) Given that upheaval is so good and totally smite targeted, meaning I was feeling really inclined to hit things at the edge of LOS, it seems like disaster area could be better situated to strike closer to the player's position, like Bloax noted above.

Definitely a fun god. The crazy-power-and-defence-for-abyssmal-stealth tradeoff is a fun one, and it's fairly entertaining.

[khalil]

Noticed a kinda-bug with cloud displacement: if you have an ally standing in one of your clouds, and you swap places with that ally, the cloud stays in the same place and damages you.

[Fungus]

Does Cloud Immunity give you immunity to clouds generated by Mephitic/Freezing/Poisonous Cloud, Conjure Flame, Fire Storm, Glaciate, etc?

I played an Ice Elementalist recently and was annoyed with how much the ice clouds slowed me down. Cast Glaciate into a narrow area and then wait... wait... waiiiiit...

[Fungus]

Does Cloud Immunity give you immunity to clouds generated by Mephitic/Freezing/Poisonous Cloud, Conjure Flame, Fire Storm, Glaciate, etc?

I played an Ice Elementalist recently and was annoyed with how much the ice clouds slowed me down. Cast Glaciate into a narrow area and then wait... wait... waiiiiit...

Answering my own question, I tried it out in local wizmode and it looks like it does. Awesome!

Disaster area with 27 Invocations is hilarious (and takes a looooong time to animate)

[Speleothing]

Answering my own question, I tried it out in local wizmode and it looks like it does. Awesome!

Disaster area with 27 Invocations is hilarious (and takes a looooong time to animate)

It's pretty awesome with FEs, now you can freely step through your own conjured flames to escape whatever scary thing is chasing you around D:4

[dck]

Haven't really checked the rest of feedback so maybe this has been mentioned already but you aren't immune to clouds your friends make (particularly your fire elemental friends) and you probably should be.

e: yeah actually with further usage this looks like a bigger problem than I imagined because other than remembering it yourself, there's no way to know whether a cloud is friendly, hostile or neutral and the results of the elemental-summoning ability are a bit weird in these situations.
For example using the ability with friendly fire eles in sight creates neutral fire eles, and elucidating the "hostility" of clouds can be not very straightforward in situations like creating a patch of water with the phial and having a giant shoot a BoC over it.

[johlstei]

Would it really be all that broken if all elemental clouds turned into friendly elementals? It would make some monsters really easy but it costs piety anyway, are you worried about stashing monsters for elemental cloud generation on demand?

[and into]

{Edit: Actually with more invocations training upheaval is very strong, made this post before getting sufficient experience, so disregard my comments about that.}

Spoiler: show

To echo what others said: Upheaval seems like it could use more tweaking. Haven't tried it out at high invocations (plan to if I live that long), but even at level 10 it is underwhelming.

Honestly, I would welcome an active ability with piety cost becoming available at ** that simply increased the spawn rate of your clouds temporarily. The clouds are great but at least with this character, they don't really start becoming semi-reliably powerful in fights until around ****.

Bad interaction: Plants. You get spammed with rest-interrupting messages if you chill for a while near bushes.

Love friendly cloud immunity, great for a FE. (Running a HuFE, will try out a gladiator or hunter or something of Qazlal next.)

Overall like the god a lot, hope I can get far with the HuFE to see how it plays out longer term. Then I'll noodle around with some other buillds^Qazlal. Very promising though.

[Bloax]

Wouldn't a general immunity to clouds be less of a hassle? I can't imagine running around with a storm on your back wouldn't at least do something against clouds.

[Bart]

Yesterday I won MiMo of Qazlal. While I initially liked the proposal, I have doubts whether I'd choose the god again.

Minor complain: Clouds can (and should) be used for kiting. It terribly slows the game, but is optimal. It seriously solved few encounters in (pre)lair. Eventually, since I played minotaur, I could forget about this annoyance and just kill dudes, though distaste remains.

Minor complain: "friendly" and "hostile" clouds are difficult to recognize.

Major complain: loudness of the god changed my experience into playing point-defense game. With my ridiculous damage and good defenses I was able to deal with waves of monsters, but I was forced into killholes most of the time and I doubt it would be fun for weaker character. I had no stealth - would the skill do anything or is it overridden by god's effects? If stealth is still able to solve the issue, complain taken back, otherwise screw this god forever.

[crate]

Yeah I agree with Bart, my Qazlal game experience is basically that he's not fun at all since you have perma-gong. I understand that Q probably needs some sort of drawback, but making noise all the time is just plain not interesting. I ended up doing a lot of stairdancing (try taking Q into spider, for instance) because that's what the god encourages. It basically makes crawl not crawl at all and turns it into some other type of game (BerserkRL or zotdef or something).

[Tiktacy]

You should change the description of disaster area. Right now, it implies that the area directly around you will be what is effected, when in reality its the area farther away from you in what seems like a random pattern. It nearly cost me the game just now.

[Tiktacy]

Yeah I agree with Bart, my Qazlal game experience is basically that he's not fun at all since you have perma-gong. I understand that Q probably needs some sort of drawback, but making noise all the time is just plain not interesting. I ended up doing a lot of stairdancing (try taking Q into spider, for instance) because that's what the god encourages. It basically makes crawl not crawl at all and turns it into some other type of game (BerserkRL or zotdef or something).

My experience is identical to what you are describing, but I on the other hand find it interesting. He is a very unique god in his abilities and offers ways to assist in the constant noise-aggro. I have never found stair-dancing to be redundant. If anything, I felt like stair-dancing is one of the more interesting parts of the game: Do I go up now or do I stay and aggro more? Do I go to a different staircase since I have pulled too much? Should I stay and try to finish these guys off and let more come my way just to stay efficient?

I guess it just has to do with opinion, I find qazlal fun, but others are bound to find him uninteresting.

[Mulzaro]

I think the perma-gong effect is fine. Simply by the fact that it promotes different playstyle than other gods and I don't find it that tedious. This, however, makes the god a big no-no for some species and backgrounds, but I don't necessarily find that a bad thing.

[and into]

Overall I've had a more positive and enjoyable experience with Qazlal than Bart and crate, however on some tough levels (thus far, for me: notably on Orc 4 and Swamp 5) I did end up doing a lot of stair dancing with my HuFE. Far more than normal. There were some tense/interesting situations despite the stair dancing, but the stair dancing itself was not fun, especially since I ended up going up and down different staircases. I'm not sure how much of a problem that is, and I'm not sure how best to solve it, but it is definitely a point worth raising. It wasn't a problem on most levels, for me, but on fairly tough levels with wide open terrain, lots of stair dancing.

The other (more minor but nonetheless) kind of annoying thing is that the loud noises attracted randomly spawned enemies at my stash and during autotravel, or at least seemed to. (Maybe that was just in my head/confirmation bias?)

[khalil]

I think the perma-gong effect is fine. Simply by the fact that it promotes different playstyle than other gods and I don't find it that tedious. This, however, makes the god a big no-no for some species and backgrounds, but I don't necessarily find that a bad thing.

It's also a no-no for some branches. Spider is suddenly the hardest branch ever.

[Lacuenta]

Since this seems to be the official feedback thread, i'll post my findings with qazlal here.

1: He is incredibly fun to play with, really good new addition, brings a totally new different playstyle to the game and spawning clouds is awsome!

2: He does seem really overpowered in the early/mid game for melee characters though, I didn't find an axe of flame so i proceded walking around hydra's to kill them, this didn't even take much time.
Tho the aggro drawing can be dangerous, you know somethings wrong when you can kill an entire pack of elephants on lair 2 by getting surrounded and just bashing to your hearts content, then whatch them go down in droves to axe damage and clouds.
He solves all resistance issues, i'm doing spider and have just killed nicola and arachne together, and i have neither relec or rpois then next floor spider3, both asterion and mara(normally i skip her) fell without much effort.
I haven't really tested any of his abbilities but the passive storm is just insane in melee.
And it's not like i have found very good equipment so it's basicly all Qazlal.
Counterpoint: another character of mine died in the abyss while worshipping Qazlal, where the overwhelming draw of enemies proved to be too much, even though that character should've easily survived the trip, so i'm withholding judgment until i reach the lategame were he might be a liabillity, but so far so good.

Really fun to play and awesome design imho

[TeshiAlair]

Qaz is definitely a more unpredictable god, but that's not a bad thing.

[XuaXua]

If you take Qaz, is it optimal to use the Shield of Gong and Singing Sword?

[TheArcanist]

If you take Qaz, is it optimal to use the Shield of Gong and Singing Sword?

I think the Sword's noise starts becoming negligible at high piety, but Shield of the Gong is loud. And I mean REALLY loud. Like, Firestorm on your position loud.

[sgrunt]

Shield of the Gong is loud. And I mean REALLY loud. Like, Firestorm on your position loud.

GONNNNG is one of the three loudest sounds in the game, being tied with alarm traps the collision of two orbs of destruction. Q's storm isn't even half as loud.

[Ghoul King]

This guy sounds like a lot of fun.

[XuaXua]

Shield of the Gong is loud. And I mean REALLY loud. Like, Firestorm on your position loud.

GONNNNG is one of the three loudest sounds in the game, being tied with alarm traps the collision of two orbs of destruction. Q's storm isn't even half as loud.

Well, thank you for clearing up a Spider Nest mystery for me.

[twelwe]

The most fun I've had in crawl is with a Ring of Flames casting DEFE wearing boots of running in Vaults. I was marked, summoned upon, teleported, and attacked by every creature imaginable there and there was nothing they could do about it. I was a fountain of flame, a mobile volcanic eruption! I died that way and neglected to try it again.

I am in the middle of my first Qazlal game, OgHu. Learned about this god when, immediately after leaving the level the temple was on and with 1 star piety, I found myself in a wide open vault with all three up staircases clustered together in a triangle. Everything came. Centaurs, goliath beetles, a water mocassin, and orcs soon surrounded me. Holy Friggin stripes. Here I was with perhaps a dozen points between all my defensive capibilities, drawing an entire level's worth of enemies at once. Lots of stair dancing followed, and I survived so that I could find a shield and drop into lair. I think I have 75 shields already.

Love it love it love it. Should probably be an ability to turn off the storm entirely, at a piety cost. This should also remove rmsl and, most importantly, the huge amount of sound generated. I don't see how I'll situate myself in certain branches people already pointed out (This game spawned Spider and Swamp).

My only complaints are that the activated abilities Upheaval and DIsaster Area seem very weak. I tried both while running from a huge pack of normal and death yaks with no real effect.

Anyway, it is fun to have Xom-style Ring of Flames on at all times.

[and into]

twelwe: how high is your invocations skill? I thought upheaval and even disaster area were underpowered, even when I had them at low failure, but then I trained more invocations and was very impressed/pleased with their damage output.

[twelwe]

Yeah my inv is less than 4 so I should shut up about that.

p.s.

[khalil]

One idea I got to help with spider and other places where Qaz borks you: an ability that at the cost of piety, concentrates cloud generation in a small area around you. Same amount of clouds , but now they all hit those melee enemies that came from everywhere in the level to devour your organs.

[archaeo]

Why not make those two abilities the same ability? For a medium-high piety cost, cloud generation and noise go way up, and after several turns go away entirely for awhile.

[Sar]

Upheaval is kind of silly, I had less than 10 Invo and was killing hydras, Nergalle, other Lair-depth troublesome stuff easily.

[dck]

Well with less than 10 invo makhleb's iron shots kill that stuff pretty well also.

[Sar]

Major Destroy is a **** ability and Upheaval is what, ** or ***? It also has AoE (which scales with Invo in a weird way).

[and into]

Some sort of "suppress storm" ability may be called for.

You can make it a high cost ability at five stars, and your piety will drain more quickly while it is active (fast enough that you won't be able to keep net piety growth over any substantial length of time). This would stop your storm shield as well as your cloud generation. Having a lot of your god abilities cut off, with a substantial piety cost that puts you on a timer, would be fairly punishing. But it would let you break out of a "stair dance cycle" on levels where that is proving tedious, and would give Qazlal players at least a couple of different strategic options for handling places like V:5 and Spider. For the most part you'd still be a walking gong and the conduct/gameplay this imposes would still be distinctive and noteworthy.

The big problem is that on some levels stair dancing becomes too good/necessary, giving Qazlal players a way to work around that would be welcome.

[dck]

Well what I mean is makh's major dest kills them noticeably faster and makh's piety is gained very very fast.
Don't exactly know on what level piety gain for cutegal operates but sanity says it's likely slower than makh, and thus the cost is more noticeable.

[Sar]

I think it's kind of weird to have a high-rank ability to stop something that is your god's major thematic power, kinda like Chei giving you an ability to return to normal speed (and also taking his stats back for the time it is active).

@dck: I got the impression that it's a better power than MD but I might be just underusing MD.

[and into]

I think it's kind of weird to have a high-rank ability to stop something that is your god's major thematic power, kinda like Chei giving you an ability to return to normal speed (and also taking his stats back for the time it is active).

Chei gets temporal distortion and step from time. Instead of those Chei could have gotten an ability to "freeze time" or something, which lets you move much faster than all enemies for a limited period of time, at high piety cost. But he doesn't need such an ability because he has other abilities that let you work around the conduct. It is still a challenging conduct and notably changes game play.

Yes I agree that what I proposed doesn't fit thematically, but flavor can be rationalized in whatever way after the fact. I'm saying it would be nice if Qazlal offered a power that let you avoid having to stair dance so much on wide-open levels with tough enemy spawns. My dude is still going strong despite Swamp (without rpois or flight and a bladed weapon of not-flaming) and tough depths levels. But I had to abuse stairs quite a bit at a few points in the game, and it turned an otherwise interesting experience into an unfun one.

[Sar]

It's not (just) that it's thematically unfit, it's rather that this "power" is actually sort of like mini-renouncement, which is weird to say the least. Maybe the noise should just be minimized/removed (with the explanation that, I don't know, the noise is background-ish and doesn't give up your position? I mean a successful stabber of Q would raise my eyebrow but I'm not sure I like the alternative that much better.

[and into]

Yeah, I get what you are saying, Sar.

What you said inspired a different idea though: What about an ability that masked your position by invoking Qazlal to *increase* the background noise throughout the level? In other words, you wake up stuff on the level still—perhaps even more so than without this ability activated—but your storm noise no longer gives away your exact position? This keeps one aspect of the conduct in place (you are unstealthy and wake stuff up) but allows you to selectively (at piety cost) diminish, but not eliminate, the "suddenly this feels like Zotdef and I have to abuse stairs" effect?

[Sar]

Actually, since branches do have background noise, what about just making Q increase it, maybe even passively? Or is it another stated-for-removal obscure mechanic?

The ability can make sense, too.

[Galefury]

Actually, since branches do have background noise, what about just making Q increase it, maybe even passively? Or is it another stated-for-removal obscure mechanic?

I think the worst excesses of background noise have been toned down a bit at some point, but I'm not really sure. I'm not aware of any plans for actual removal.

On topic: passively reducing your noise while also passively increasing it does not sound like a very good idea. As an active ability it might be okay, as long as the description tells players wtf the point of the ability is.

[Megabass]

So I'm playing a HoFE of Qaz right now, and on a lark I try to conjure flame on myself. It gives the usual 'That would be overly suicidal' message that keeps you from doing it.

But it wouldn't be overly suicidal at all. I can stand in a conjured flame cloud all day with Qazlal and not even singe my hair.

[cruelio]

In my opinion cloud generation should be tied to tension so you aren't constantly spamming noise and attracting the whole level to you forever when there isn't anything going on but the larger the threats the more clouds you get.

[Siegurt]

I think Qazlal shouldn't destroy your battlesphere or spectral weapon with your clouds.

[Blomdor]

Seconding the opinion that Qazlal seems to demolish the early game. Last night's LoMo absolutely destroyed everything up to Orc:4 and even a bit beyond that without a second thought. I won't call for a nerf because I had far too much fun, but it's worth mentioning.

The message spam around plants is bothersome, and the noise generated is so great that places like Vaults:5 are even more hellish than is usual for them. Those are about my only complaints with Qazlal. He's one of the coolest of the recent additions IMO.

[twelwe]

I think Qazlal's shielding effect should still work when the player is webbed/confused etc

[Blomdor]

^

I noticed this in Spider and thought it very strange. This is divine protection we are talking about. A spider web should not interfere with it IMO.

[Roderic]

Mere curiosity: which is the color set for the Qazlal's altar in console? Was it created ex professo?

[tedric]

Seconding the opinion that Qazlal seems to demolish the early game. Last night's LoMo absolutely destroyed everything up to Orc:4 and even a bit beyond that without a second thought. I won't call for a nerf because I had far too much fun, but it's worth mentioning.

The message spam around plants is bothersome, and the noise generated is so great that places like Vaults:5 are even more hellish than is usual for them. Those are about my only complaints with Qazlal. He's one of the coolest of the recent additions IMO.

I had a similar experience with a MiGl just now (http://crawl.berotato.org/crawl/morgue//tedric/morgue-tedric-20140515-175221.txt), only I found the easy-breeziness carried through well beyond Orc. With the exception of branch-end vaults or certain uniques (Mara), I was o-tab cruising through Elf, Snake, Shoals, Depths, Vaults, even Abyss with very little trouble. Some of that might also have been the highly-enchanted whip of elec, the unrand longbow Piercer, and lots of good artefact gear...but still.

The clouds really encouraged me to play fast and sloppy, and rarely penalized me for it -- they're best in open space, but you still don't get surrounded most of the time because approaching enemies will usually wait for clouds to dissipate, giving you time to smack the one or two that are adjacent. And being able to smite-target Upheaval is pretty swell. But I didn't make much use of the abilities because the passive boosts were already carrying me so well. It felt like very strong support for tank-y melee.

I splatted in Slime:6 trying to take out TRJ and whoops didn't notice that eyeball, got paralyzed and swarmed. Can't wait to roll up another Qazlalite, use a little more caution, and see what it feels like when I'm trying to keep turncount low.

[twelwe]

just splatted a oghu of qazlal with 4 runes in a zig: http://dobrazupa.org/morgue/twelwe/morg ... 211517.txt

Ranged combat (throwing for me here) is ideal with qaz because many types of common enemies spend extra turns getting around them while closing in on you, and those extra turns mean more ranged attacks. I wish I tested this god with a character good in polearms or axes, especially at the end. The cloud numbers seem to be a factor of how many walls are adjacent to the player, and they stop spawning entirely at 6 (one tile corridors)



Disaster Area might as well be called Xom's Conjurations Fartspray. It can put on a big show doing spectacularly huge explosions away from enemies. I could not figure what the ideal conditions for using the ability were because it always seemed to miss. It seems to be totally random. It felt like a watered down version of Xom got locked into a favorite toy piety level, and I don`t mean this in a bad way: running around hurling gigantic rocks while bathed in elemental randomonstrosity stormclouds, like the Xom cloud trail effect mated with the Ring of Flames spell. Had a blast

[cjo]

I tried Qazlal recently.

-Qazlal is loads of fun to play! I realize that's not exactly the type of feedback that's useful for game development, but it still bears mentioning. I especially loved seeing the random clouds come and go.

-The impact of being permanently noisy varied drastically based on the level layout. Closed layouts were far less punishing than open ones. Of course, the same is true for other gods, but the effect gets sharply exaggerated with Qazlal.

-I did not find Spider to be disproportionally difficult, probably because I got reasonably twisty layouts. Similarly, I was able to lure out orcs in a reasonable fashion in Orc 4. I could see some layouts being nasty, though. I definitely think Q has a random element concerning how much you get affected by noise.

-Entering a new branch (and therefore having only one stair) can really be awful. Again, this is luck-based. This was actually the only thing I really didn't like. Entering a new branch and having to immediately decide on whether to play tele-roulette, go toe to toe in a bad situation, or retreat and then be unable to return was not very fun. Maybe that's just something to take into account when picking Q; any time you enter a new branch you need to be prepped with consumables because you're much more likely to get swarmed than usual.

-Q's missile defense was really useful, especially since noise means it's harder to avoid archers. I got lucky on early resistances, so I don't have a good sense for how useful Q's protection would be early on. I know later on, it was good to have, but I sometimes regretted not

-I converted on impulse despite being an ice elementalist. I killed off SO many of my own ice beasts! I don't think that's a bad thing, though.

-I underused most of the active abilities, so can't comment much on those.

I see Q as being loosely related to Chei, in that like Chei, Q makes you more powerful but can actively hamper you at the worst possible moments. I'm guessing some skilled players won't touch Q with a ten-foot pole, because they don't need extra power and thus have no reason to put up with Q's downside. I think I would only pick Q once in a while for a change of pace, but would have a blast when I was in the right mood.