The Tavern

Gozag turns corpses into gold. Powered by Death gives x turns of regeneration when in LoS of corpses (stacks with number of corpses). These two ideas don't work well together. Right now, PbD does nothing for Gozagites, and I think it would be nice to change this. It's not very cool to start worshipping Gozag as a Ds only to later get a useless innate mutation. Your current options are:
a) don't worship gozag as Ds (not a bad idea given Gozag's current power!)
b) wait until you get all your tier 2 facets before worshipping Gozag
c) risk 1/5th of your facets being useless and worship Gozag ASAP

So, here are some ideas to deal with this conflict. I've coded some up, the ideas are mostly from myself and |amethyst:
1. Assume Gozagites are always in LoS of one corpse. Problem: a lot of PbD's power is that it stacks, and can restrict your positioning. Pro: simple to understand, definitely not more powerful than normal PbD.
2. Count gold stacks in LoS for Gozagites. Problem: gold never expires, so this would encourage degenerate behaviour of turning off autopickup and pulling every enemy back to a single point on the level. Also, gozag's "glittering gold" was removed for a variety of reasons that are relevant here. Pro: allows stacking bonus Gozagites, non-corpse gold is not common enough to cause major balance issues.
3. Change Ds to give PbD 1 mutation early (before most people find temple). Problems: not a perfect fix, some Ds will still be unlucky, changes Ds balance slightly. Pros: simple to understand, gives a 'natural' solution without adding in new special exceptions/rules.
4. Change nothing. Problem: Ds is discouraged from worshipping Gozag, similar to Green Drac & TSO. Pro: simple to understand.

Well, those are my ideas, anyone else have feedback?

This isn't as bad as Ignite Blood + Dithmenos. Jussayin'

chequers: A really good point, thanks for thought and code.

I think 2. does not work: if luring seems possible, however miniscule the gain, some people will do it. We cannot have that.

Then again, doesn't current Gozag give an innate effect (duration for monster distraction). Couldn't we use that timer to trigger PbD?

What if Gozag gold on the ground would expire like corpses? Would that be hard to code? Would it affect Gozag games in general? (I don't know because I've never played Gozag...)

i don't see the problem with "gold doesn't expire", the mutation only works for a certain amount of turns for each given corpse (increases with mutation rank).

You couldn't cheat the system by not picking up gold. The effect only lasts for a short time. It ends while the corpses are still on the ground.

Alternately, is there any reason PbD needs to use corpses at all? It seems like 'regen on kills' is just as interesting, and less likely to be prone to scummy tactics. If people don't want to buff the mutation, it could be confined to only work on natural monsters, with the regen granted prorated to the corpse drop rate for that particular monster (so on average you'd get the same regen as before).

Would be interesting, since you have to stay near the corpses to get the regen+, if it was just on killing, could do a bit more running while healing up.

Neither of you are quite right. The way PbD works is that when you kill an enemy, you get the PbD buff. The buff's strength depends on the number of visible corpses. So there's two seperate numbers here: the buff duration and the buff strength.

This is probably a good idea. I like the corpse LoS mechanic in that it's unique and an additional constraint, but even when using corpses rather than gold stacks, degenerate kiting behaviour is encouraged, since corpses don't expire that quickly.

That's interesting. Could you use Kiku's corpse acquirement to get regen in branches that don't normally have corpses?

Used to be no. I think it was patched to yes in trunk for a bit; not sure if it stayed...SUMMON DEV!

Im pretty sure no, unless its changed very recently. Tried it and also looked it up maybe 2-3 weeks ago.

OK, I've implemented the idea ion_frigate (and others) had: removing the dependence on corpses.

https://github.com/alexjurkiewicz/crawl ... pbd-reform

With this patch, PbD works like a poor man's stacking buff. On kill, you receive (or refresh the duration) of your Powered by Death buff. The initial strength is 1, increases sometimes on-kill up to 7 and decays naturally with time.

The numbers need tweaking, but what do you think of the approach?

Sounds great to me.

I'd suggest putting the patch up on Mantis. Even if it need some tweaking, that will get it on their radar if there are any devs that agree this is a good change.

What about the mutation's interaction with Animate Foo / Simulacrum? As it is now, you need to decide if you want the regen boost or necro allies.

That tension will be going away -- it is sad to take away a competing use of a scarce resource, but given the prevalence (or lack thereof) of DsNe builds I'm not really concerned.