Barkeep
Posts: 3890
Joined: Wednesday, 14th August 2013, 23:25
Location: USA
Elyvilon Reform
Elyvilon
Appreciates: Exploration of the dungeon ("Bringing the light of compassion to the unenlightened"), or something along those lines...
Lose the whole "destroy weapons" thing.
Hates all the same things as currently.
Passive abilities remain the same.
Active Abilities:
* Pacify: Smite-targeted. Attempts to pacify a hostile creature, turning it neutral. The creature will then disappear when outside of your LOS for a turn or two. You may only attempt to pacify a particular enemy once. 1-2 piety, hunger.
** Divine Protection: Works as currently implemented.
** Purification: Works as currently implemented, but I would extend its restorative effects to corrosion, drain, etc. if this has not already been done.
*** Healing: Heals self. Works the same as "Greater Self-Healing."
***** Divine Vigour: Works as currently implemented.
All abilities scale off of Invocations skill, as currently.
Pacify checks HD, with a reduced chance to work vs. demons and undead; the ability description can clarify this: "Demons and the undead are more difficult to pacify." In the manner of hexes and recite, I think it would then be fine to show the chance for pacify to work on the target (if it is changed to work off of HD, this does not leak information or run into problems with variable max HP). If you fail to pacify the creature, it becomes immune to further pacification. ("<foo> refuses to follow the path of peace," and gets an "unpacifiable" tag that appears in its description, or some such.)
I would also recommend removing the whole "you can pacify things with a wand of heal wounds," as well as the bonus to creatures of the same species (or genus, or whatever it is). I don't think this adds a lot to the game.
The benefits of these changes are, I hope, clear enough, but I'll try to outline them. No longer does it help to have a chart of some kind to figure out your pacification chances; this has all been made much clearer. No longer do you gain piety by pressing unnecessary keystrokes multiple times to kill a monster in the particular manner that gives you Ely piety. Instead you can just kill it. The small piety cost of pacify is there just so that you don't use it once on just about every enemy you encounter that you have even a small chance to pacify. In addition, the "one attempt per monster, only" thing helps differentiate pacify from other hexes and hex-like effects (Lugonu's banishment) that can effectively, if not literally, kill a target that fails a saving roll.
As for the other abilities, they are mostly the same, although they have been condensed somewhat. I think this is good, as Ely has tons of abilities already and the whole "lesser healing, lesser self-healing, greater healing, greater self-healing" thing was inelegant and a bit awkward.
Finally, "Destroy weapons" would become unnecessary for piety gain, as you don't need to pacify to gain piety in the first place. Ergo, no need to have a weird "this gains you piety up to *this* point" ability to help bootstrap you when you do not start as a **He.