The Tavern

Twisted Resurrection underwent a number of improvements quite a while back that made the spell a lot less problematic—abominations no longer regenerate, the interface for using the spell is a lot simpler—but there are still some issues with it. I am playing an ice elementalist offline who went with kiku and has been enjoying the spell, but there are a few further problems that remain to be addressed with the spell. Using the spell to its full potential (especially when you got Kiku's corpse delivery) involves cluttering up the screen with tons of abominations that tend to stick around a long time, which makes it easy to miss things, and which can make using autotravel a hassle (ctrl+e makes autoexplore alright for the most part). There's also an issue with game balance, obviously, as rolling around with 20 abominations (and another 40 in storage somewhere) is not a good thing to have in Crawl.

Here would be my recommendations:

1.) Limit number of abominations. Abominations can still travel between floors, however you can only maintain four (let's say) abominations at a time. Crawling corpses and macabre masses can still be generated and sustained for a couple of dozen turns beyond this limit, but will soon wither and waste away, and will not form into more abominations. If an abomination has been "lost"—i.e., it is outside you LOS for a long period of time—then you can create a new abomination, but the "lost" one will be destroyed. This also largely solves the problems with letting aboms wander around indefinitely, doing the killing for you off-screen, which is a bad feature of them. (Admittedly this applies to Yred, Beogh, and animate skeleton/dead, as well.)

2.) Buff the HP restoration that abominations get upon merging with lesser animated masses. This will help compensate for the above. Again, even at the four abom limit, you can create new c. corpses and m. masses which will stick around long enough to heal your big guys.

I think that numbers 1 and 2 together would accentuate what I feel to be different about twisted resurrection, which is that you use it to maintain a small clique of gross bodyguards permanently, rather than creating waves and waves of undead (which other spells already do). At the same time, in my experience it is difficult enough to build up four large abominations with corpses (and is easy but costs enough piety with Kiku), that abandoning the aboms in a tough fight with a teleport will still be a bad setback that you want to avoid. (In terms of design, this tension is IMO the major redeeming characteristic of the game effects that give you permanent allies, despite the hassles they create.)

3.) Autotravel should be smarter about characters with abominations. If there is some way to make it automatically wait at stairs so that any abominations that are currently following you will surround you before taking the stairs, that would eliminate a lot of the hassle of moving around with your elite undead entourage. Even better if autotravel could avoid stairs in narrow areas, when possible, to avoid having an abomination left behind. If those changes aren't possible, though, simply creating a (non-interrupting) message when an abomination is left behind, which notes the floor in which this happened and which you can view with CTRL+p once you have arrived at your destination, would be an improvement over current behavior. This could be generalized for Yred, Beogh, and mercenaries, or allies in general.

Obviously numbers can be tweaked somewhat and are up for discussion, but I think twisted res is a very fun, unique spell, and I'd love it if the final unfortunate issues with it were resolved. (Also note that solving 3 for aboms could be applied to lots of other cases.)

What makes Twisted Resurrection worth saving? Animate Dead exists, and in many branches it is the stronger of these two similar spells anyway. Permanent allies are otherwise confined to the divine ability design space, and maybe that should happen to Twisted Resurrection, too; I never feel the same way about my arbitrarily large mob of free zombies or abominations that I invested nothing in as I do about my adorable orc-friends under Beogh or my precious ghoul-friends under Yred. If Twisted Resurrection gets kicked over to a Yred divine ability, it could be adjusted to mostly be a support ability that speeds up healing the better undead minions after combat, rather than a fresh mob that is equal in size to the regular mob.

Because it's really satisfying (IMO) in a way that AD spamming every level isn't. Making your pet have more personality would be a huge improvement however. Maybe go a Frankenstein's Monster route and have it get smarter/able to use weapons as it lives longer, but you can only have one at a time.

Moving it over to a Yred ability would be nice. Lord knows he needs something else going for him.

Yeah, in my opinion twisted resurrection would be easier to reform into a totally non-abusable and non-annoying spell, in a way that animate skele/dead poses more difficulties. With TR, all corpses go into making one thing instead of multiple different things, you don't have weird stuff going on with your minions picking up or not picking up weapons that the enemy died wielding (which in some cases are things you'd want to try out first but you hit z* first out of habit), lots of corpses --> fewer allies instead of a 1:1 ratio, you don't have the problem that a level 1 or level 4 spell remains extremely powerful/useful up to and including Zot, etc. It just seems like a better framework for a cool and, frankly, better designed (less finicky) necromancy spell, even if twisted res still has some problems (hence my suggestions). In other words I'd argue that removing animate dead, and either removing or keeping (but changing) animate skeleton, would make more sense than removing TR. Yred could keep animate remains/dead as his own special thing, since he is already the god of having tons of permanent allies, and probably having tons of permanent allies should be a god-thing rather than a spell-thing.

EDIT: Oh yeah, TR is also affected by spell power, unlike animate foo, which is a problem with the latter and a point in favor of the former.

It would be cool if you had just one abominable abomination who you kept swole with corpses. It would be even cooler if it took on the characteristics of all the stuff you smooshed into him, so if you feed it a kraken it emits a monster tentacle etc.

Leaving issues of power and balance aside, the really, really nice thing about Animate Dead is that I fire it off and I'm basically done managing it. A hydra zombie is strong, but it will probably get chipped apart by frogs and snakes and get used up that way, and even if it doesn't it absolutely 100% of the time will not follow me to the next level. I don't have to spend personal time managing it and coddling it around the level because it's going to be gone soon enough either way. There's no mechanical incentive to waste extra time managing this sort of pet, so I don't. No tears need be spilled over its untimely demise, because now I have some yak zombies instead. Animate Dead is really, stupidly, ridiculously strong, but it isn't annoying, and that's really most important.

With Twisted Resurrection, though, I've got to escort mission these stupid, fragile abominations all over the place so they don't randomly die off to stupid things and I still have them when I really kind of need them. Beogh and Yred have tools to make their permanent minions less of a miserable experience to babysit, but with Twisted Resurrection you're not guaranteed to have any useful tools at all to handle your suicidal abominations. Increasing the power of Twisted Resurrection to compensate for this drawback makes the problem worse, because that increases the reward for engaging with a fundamentally unpleasant escort mission mini-game.

If anyone has a replacement spell for Twisted Resurrection, I'd be glad to hear it. (Same for Sublimation for Kiku's first randbook but that's a different matter).

I've been sidetracked until recently, but on my todo list is to either remove Twisted Res or replace it with a "one buff abom" version which might also not be able to cross staircases. And I'm somewhat reluctant to shrink the list of Necro spells, so if I did remove it I'd like to also add something radical and awesome and such.

Here's what I'd do to reform TR. I'd love to code it up, but I have serious doubts as to my competency:
You'd only get the one abomination, to differentiate it from the other undead creation spells.
It would gain hit dice for every crawling corpse consumed, and it would have other stats (speed, damage done by attacks and so on) determined by how many HD it has.
If it takes a large amount of damage in one attack (the sort of thing that would display Ouch! if it happened to the player), it'd lose several HD, and spawn a number of crawling corpses equal to the number of HD it lost.
Now, to be honest, me not being competent enough to code this is only one problem. The other problem is I haven't the faintest idea as to how to balance it. Here's a few questions I don't have answers to, spoilered because it is long and kinda boring.

What of the Box of Beasts went away, and TR let you make a chimera? As you add corpses, it recovers HP, gains HD and heads (up to 3, with higher-HD heads replacing weaker ones). You only get one, and if you try to cast TR with your chimera out of LOS, it warns you that you'll lose your current chimera.

I have yet to discover the utility of a Box of Beasts.

I use it mainly to create distraction stab possibilities against non-popcorn foes.