Barkeep
Posts: 3890
Joined: Wednesday, 14th August 2013, 23:25
Location: USA
Suggestions for Twisted Resurrection
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.)