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Allow Vehumet spell gifts to stack

PostPosted: Wednesday, 18th May 2016, 08:53
by duvessa
Currently if you want to memorize a Vehumet spell but don't have the spell slots yet, and need to kill monsters to get more spell slots, you may need to go to Temple and press 5 a while so that your piety goes down enough that the gift doesn't get replaced. This is stupid; Vehumet's spell gifts shouldn't overwrite the previous one.

Re: Allow Vehumet spell gifts to stack

PostPosted: Wednesday, 18th May 2016, 11:35
by ion_frigate
An option to preserve the "choose it or lose it" aspect would be to make the spells after the first come on a fuzzed/randomized XP timer. Yes that would mean you could get spell gifts at a lower piety than before, but I don't think that's significant.

Re: Allow Vehumet spell gifts to stack

PostPosted: Wednesday, 18th May 2016, 13:09
by 4Hooves2Appendages
Another option could be:
- allow a spell gift to override a current spell (i.e. amnesia)
- grant special spell levels to at most one gift spell

Whenever Vehumet offers a new gift, an option comes up to memories the spell that is about to vanish. Now or never.

Also, putting the gifts on an XP timer would work to fix the ugly piety shuffling.

Re: Allow Vehumet spell gifts to stack

PostPosted: Wednesday, 18th May 2016, 21:12
by duvessa
ion_frigate wrote:An option to preserve the "choose it or lose it" aspect would be to make the spells after the first come on a fuzzed/randomized XP timer. Yes that would mean you could get spell gifts at a lower piety than before, but I don't think that's significant.
If you want to preserve that aspect it would be better to just allow memorizing Vehumet spells even if you don't have enough spell slots. I am pretty sure that aspect never actually matters, though. I can't imagine a situation where you'd decide you don't want a Vehumet spell and then change your mind later - the situation that actually happens is that someone decides they want a Vehumet spell and accidentally gains too much piety, so they lose it.

Re: Allow Vehumet spell gifts to stack

PostPosted: Wednesday, 18th May 2016, 22:18
by Speleothing
duvessa wrote:
ion_frigate wrote:An option to preserve the "choose it or lose it" aspect would be to make the spells after the first come on a fuzzed/randomized XP timer. Yes that would mean you could get spell gifts at a lower piety than before, but I don't think that's significant.
If you want to preserve that aspect it would be better to just allow memorizing Vehumet spells even if you don't have enough spell slots. I am pretty sure that aspect never actually matters, though. I can't imagine a situation where you'd decide you don't want a Vehumet spell and then change your mind later - the situation that actually happens is that someone decides they want a Vehumet spell and accidentally gains too much piety, so they lose it.


You're right in 75% of circumstances. But there are a lot of times it's not entirely clear if you want to invest in a skill or not. Most likely would be that Vehu offered you a spell in a side-school you don't have a reason to investment in, then you found a book for that school and decided it would be worth investing in. Bolt of Draining + Book of Unlife/Necronomicon would be a likely one. Most of the elements would also fit this example, but you're likely to see more gifts in those schools anyway. You could also be wary of picking up Poison gifts until you know what your Lair branches will be.

Though those are both just edge-cases compared to newbies just being indecisive. I think I've seen it proposed before that Vehu gifts (excepting the final three) be castable without memorizing, but you need to spend the slots in order to keep it when the next one arrives.

Re: Allow Vehumet spell gifts to stack

PostPosted: Wednesday, 18th May 2016, 22:25
by Moose
Yes. I find myself never using faith with Vehumet for this very reason. I also find myself over-training spellcasting to make room for gifts.

Re: Allow Vehumet spell gifts to stack

PostPosted: Wednesday, 18th May 2016, 22:55
by archaeo
Would Veh really be overpowered if you just "got" the spells, without even needing to memorize them? You could knock off one of the capstone spells, and I assume it would simplify this gift stuff without really being that big of a buff.

Re: Allow Vehumet spell gifts to stack

PostPosted: Wednesday, 18th May 2016, 23:08
by Speleothing
archaeo wrote:Would Veh really be overpowered if you just "got" the spells, without even needing to memorize them? You could knock off one of the capstone spells, and I assume it would simplify this gift stuff without really being that big of a buff.


It would typcally end up being close to or over 30 free spell levels over the course of a game, with 2 lvl 8s and a mix of the lower levels. I'd call that a pretty big buff.

Re: Allow Vehumet spell gifts to stack

PostPosted: Wednesday, 18th May 2016, 23:19
by archaeo
Meh. Even if you got "30 free spell levels," I don't think it'd break the game, honestly; it's just a pile of conjurations, which you'd still have to train to use. No worse, really, than Trog or Oka gifts. But if it's really a concern, cut some of the spells, then. Or let Veh give you only three of the spells at a time, or allow you to select only three spells out of what was gifted.

Re: Allow Vehumet spell gifts to stack

PostPosted: Wednesday, 18th May 2016, 23:30
by dpeg
There are two things I'd like to preserve from the current Vehumet design (disclaimer: which is to a large extent mine).

(1) Spell gifts rather than book gifts.
The functional difference is that you keep the spells from gift books forever as options. This allows for more longterm planning, which is absolutely okay (and befits Sif Muna, whereas Kikubaaqudgha only dishes out very few books, so it's okay too).

(2) Actual choices with those gifts.
For example, archaeo's proposal would not achieve that -- it'd remove choices (which for me is worse than the actual power increase).

Current Vehumet suffers from the issue that more piety is not always better (this is what the OP is about). I was always aware of the problem, but I didn't know players actually do this (so it's more urgent to address it). Here are some ways how I'd do it:
  1. When getting a spell gift offer, you can take it even if you don't have enough free spell slots. If you do this, then you have to select enough memorised spells to forget to make room for the gift. (In other words, Vehumet provides partial amnesia to make space for his spell gift.)
  2. When a new offer is about to override the previous one, you get to choose which one to keep.
  3. When your piety goes down, you can actually lose the current spell gift. (This avoids the Temple gambit of the OP.)

Re: Allow Vehumet spell gifts to stack

PostPosted: Wednesday, 18th May 2016, 23:42
by duvessa
dpeg wrote:The functional difference is that you keep the spells from gift books forever as options.
This function isn't meaningful. "I wish I hadn't passed up that Vehumet spell from earlier" does not happen in actual games with players who know what they are doing. There is no reason to preserve it.
I think you already know that I would prefer it if Vehumet gave the spells in books (and book amnesia were removed), but that is not the subject of this thread.
archaeo wrote:Would Veh really be overpowered if you just "got" the spells, without even needing to memorize them? You could knock off one of the capstone spells, and I assume it would simplify this gift stuff without really being that big of a buff.
It wouldn't be overpowered, but a big problem with that is that it fills up the spells screen (same reason there is a cap on the number of spells you can have memorized at once).
dpeg wrote:When your piety goes down, you can actually lose the current spell gift. (This avoids the Temple gambit of the OP.)
How would you make that actually work? It can't go away when piety dips below a threshold, since the player could just keep piety above that threshold but below the gift breakpoint. So it has to be a chance every time piety is lost, which means you could lose the gift even when playing quickly, because of piety decay. So this option offers nothing over just putting the gifts on a timer (if you don't memorize it within X turns it goes away) or a forced Y/N prompt, and is much more confusing than either one.

Re: Allow Vehumet spell gifts to stack

PostPosted: Thursday, 19th May 2016, 01:08
by Speleothing
archaeo wrote:Meh. Even if you got "30 free spell levels," I don't think it'd break the game, honestly; it's just a pile of conjurations, which you'd still have to train to use. No worse, really, than Trog or Oka gifts.
You're unlikely to carry more than about 5 Trog or 10 Oka gifts around with you at a time. Also, you only get 81 spell levels with 27 spellcasting & max level. You're suggesting a 20-45% increase for followers of one specific god. Duvessa also made a good point about the interface


duvessa wrote:This function isn't meaningful. "I wish I hadn't passed up that Vehumet spell from earlier" does not happen in actual games with players who know what they are doing.
Non-optimal players are still players. And there are a lot of new players who find spell selection intimidating.

dpeg wrote:When your piety goes down, you can actually lose the current spell gift.
How would you make that actually work? It can't go away when piety dips below a threshold, since the player could just keep piety above that threshold but below the gift breakpoint...
Not everybody is able to perfectly micromanage their piety levels. But it's still an odd idea.


Instead, have the gifted spell be a 'free trial offer' and when the X-turn offer expires you get asked whether to pay the levels to keep the spell. Maybe there should be a warning so you have time to read amnesia, and definitely an option to 'pay now' so you don't have to worry about it. This also lets you evaluate how powerful the spell feels with your current build.

Re: Allow Vehumet spell gifts to stack

PostPosted: Thursday, 19th May 2016, 01:10
by Rast
All of these ideas are worse and more complicated than OP's suggestion.

Re: Allow Vehumet spell gifts to stack

PostPosted: Thursday, 19th May 2016, 01:33
by HardboiledGargoyle
Why did someone make each Vehumet gift over-ride the last one, in the first place? This decision seems out of nowhere, or a technical hack. Suggestions:

- Vehumet allows you to memorize his gifts, ignoring spell slot restrictions, no amnesia required. This makes you want to memorize as many non-Veh spells as you can before learning Veh spells, which would be yet another Veh minigame, but hopefully not as dumb.
- Vehumet offers 18 spells in 6 batches of 3 spells: levels 1, 2+3, 4, 5, 6+7, 8+9.
- You have to memorize one of Vehumet's gifts in order to be eligible for the next offer, like with Ru, and/or
- Each batch comes just a few piety points beyond a piety breakpoint, so you can know if you're about to get a new batch

Re: Allow Vehumet spell gifts to stack

PostPosted: Thursday, 19th May 2016, 03:01
by all before
"there are a lot of new players who find spell selection intimidating" seems like a good reason to let Veh spell gifts stack. Justified or not, many newer players worship Veh over Sif when playing conj, and those players should be encouraged to try out spells with little risk, as there are a ton of spells to familiarize oneself with.

Re: Allow Vehumet spell gifts to stack

PostPosted: Thursday, 19th May 2016, 04:20
by chequers
What would the interface look like for having all vehumet spells available to the player for memorisation?

One suggestion I have is turning the gift into an ability. "Memorise a gifted spell" is an ability, and when you activate it Veh gives you a list of gifted spells which you can choose to learn, like the current interface but without already-known spells.

Re: Allow Vehumet spell gifts to stack

PostPosted: Thursday, 19th May 2016, 07:35
by duvessa
chequers wrote:What would the interface look like for having all vehumet spells available to the player for memorisation?
How about exactly the same as it is now? It already shows the final three spells all at once...

Re: Allow Vehumet spell gifts to stack

PostPosted: Thursday, 19th May 2016, 12:33
by adozu
how about you simply lose the option to memorise the spell after an arbitrary number of turns passed? say 1000 turns to memorise it or it's gone. number can be tweaked to however length feels fair and if you get more gifts in the meantime they would all be available with their own individual timers.

pro: "get it or miss it" gameplay is preserved
cons: you could potentially still want to keep your piety low if you don't have a lot of slots but less so than before

Re: Allow Vehumet spell gifts to stack

PostPosted: Friday, 20th May 2016, 08:57
by ydeve
Putting the gifts on a timer once you get them doesn't do anything to eliminate the tedious temple behavior. All it means is that you need to keep your piety low before you get the gift if you don't have many spell slots. If anything, I see this increasing the number of trips to the temple, as now you need to do it whenever your spell slots are low-ish instead of just when there's a spell you want.

Re: Allow Vehumet spell gifts to stack

PostPosted: Saturday, 21st May 2016, 07:46
by genericpseudonym
Speleothing wrote:
archaeo wrote:Meh. Even if you got "30 free spell levels," I don't think it'd break the game, honestly; it's just a pile of conjurations, which you'd still have to train to use. No worse, really, than Trog or Oka gifts.
You're unlikely to carry more than about 5 Trog or 10 Oka gifts around with you at a time. Also, you only get 81 spell levels with 27 spellcasting & max level. You're suggesting a 20-45% increase for followers of one specific god. Duvessa also made a good point about the interface


But having more spell slots is strong because of the flexibility. Having iron shot and cblink is very strong but having iron shot and LCS is mostly redundant and not much stronger than just having one of the two, even though those two combinations both cost the same number of slots.

Re: Allow Vehumet spell gifts to stack

PostPosted: Sunday, 22nd May 2016, 01:33
by dpeg
HardboiledGargoyle wrote:Why did someone make each Vehumet gift over-ride the last one, in the first place? This decision seems out of nowhere, or a technical hack.
That was me. I did it because I like decisions.

Re: Allow Vehumet spell gifts to stack

PostPosted: Sunday, 22nd May 2016, 06:20
by HardboiledGargoyle
I'm not sure whose decisions you're referring to so maybe I'm missing something but if Veh offers you e.g. bolt of cold and freezing cloud, you can take them both, you don't have to choose between them. And Veh doesn't strike me as the sort of god that would go "Yoink! Too slow, amigo!"

Re: Allow Vehumet spell gifts to stack

PostPosted: Sunday, 22nd May 2016, 06:26
by ydeve
dpeg wrote:
HardboiledGargoyle wrote:Why did someone make each Vehumet gift over-ride the last one, in the first place? This decision seems out of nowhere, or a technical hack.
That was me. I did it because I like decisions.

The whole point is you can avoid the decision by killing piety in Temple.

Re: Allow Vehumet spell gifts to stack

PostPosted: Sunday, 22nd May 2016, 22:01
by dracos369
duvessa wrote: I can't imagine a situation where you'd decide you don't want a Vehumet spell and then change your mind later

Let me tell you a story of a High Elf Air Elementalist of Veh who has entered a Volcano with only his starting book spels memorised and no real weapon. It was a molten gargoyle volcano, and gargoyles have rElect. Veh gift, unil then ignored, was Irradiate. Suddenly, those gargolyles didn't stand a chance.

Re: Allow Vehumet spell gifts to stack

PostPosted: Monday, 23rd May 2016, 15:55
by TeshiAlair
Make Veh gifts like other gifts- once you hit a certain piety, you get a certain quality of gift, with the difference of there being a max number of gifts per game.

You only have the option of accepting each gift once. A gift remains until you explicitly memorize it or reject it. Rejecting a gift resets the gift timer and makes it greater than if you had accepted it.

You still need to make the decision, you avoid stupid issues with losing gifts/piety, and more piety is still rewarded.

Re: Allow Vehumet spell gifts to stack

PostPosted: Tuesday, 24th May 2016, 01:49
by yesno
veh gifts single-use pamphlets. done. pamphlet of fireball. tract of tempests. screed of summoning.

Re: Allow Vehumet spell gifts to stack

PostPosted: Tuesday, 24th May 2016, 08:04
by Quazifuji
TeshiAlair wrote:Make Veh gifts like other gifts- once you hit a certain piety, you get a certain quality of gift, with the difference of there being a max number of gifts per game.

You only have the option of accepting each gift once. A gift remains until you explicitly memorize it or reject it. Rejecting a gift resets the gift timer and makes it greater than if you had accepted it.

You still need to make the decision, you avoid stupid issues with losing gifts/piety, and more piety is still rewarded.


This seems like the best solution if we want to preserve the "you have to decide whether you want this spell or not before seeing what your future offers will be" element while removing the problems discussed in this thread. If nothing more drastic gets implemented, I'd at least be strongly in favor of this solution.

Re: Allow Vehumet spell gifts to stack

PostPosted: Wednesday, 25th May 2016, 20:29
by Xion350
Frankly Veh is already too powerful and doesn't need any more buffs. So any changes shouldn't make him any stronger than he already is such as letting people memorize all the spells he offered.

Re: Allow Vehumet spell gifts to stack

PostPosted: Wednesday, 25th May 2016, 22:00
by crate
Veh is one of the weaker gods. He only seems strong because the alternatives for "caster" gods are actually worse, somehow.

Re: Allow Vehumet spell gifts to stack

PostPosted: Wednesday, 25th May 2016, 22:09
by amaril
Huh, Kiku and Sif (just for her channeling) seem decently more powerful than Veh IME. I even prefer Dith as a conjurer, unless I am using fire.

Re: Allow Vehumet spell gifts to stack

PostPosted: Monday, 30th May 2016, 15:28
by VeryAngryFelid
If you want to preserve choices, you can fix resting in Temple by removing piety decay like for Fedhas and Chei. Veh does not have any active abilities anyway and I don't remember losing even a single piety star with her ever.