My 2 cents on new gods

[phloomp]

I've played a bunch with Hep (though I haven't won yet) and I like it a lot. Transfer is pretty interesting, and it is less annoying than summoning in my opinion. It's also great that joining Hep has an immediate effect (maybe even makes Hep better than Fedhas if you are one of the people who finds only the first few levels really challenging).

EDIT: On second thought I think this is probably overpowered; it's not like Hep is particularly lackluster later in the game. Maybe the ancestor should be a less effective meatshield early on, possibly by making it take longer to come back if it is destroyed?

Very minor point: iceblast does not work so well with the AI. I don't think it knows to target tiles adjacent to a monster? In any case, the ancestor hardly ever uses it if you are doing a lot of melee, presumably since it is programmed not to hurt you. It might be better to replace iceblast with a bolt of cold or a random bolt.

[Tiktacy]

In regards to all the iceblast complaints:

***...: Hep will protect you and your ancestor from friendly fire.

Sounds like a good solution to some of the issues.

[Wahaha]

Some Ukayaw feedback:

The main problem I experienced is bad piety gain mechanics.
Example #1: I never got the chance to use grand finale on something dangerous. For example I entered the bailey that is shaped like a hexagon with an orc warlord in the center room. There are many orcs there. I thought "I'll kill all the orcs in one go to build up piety and use grand finale on the warlord". But I don't think my piety went above 3* while slaying a whole army of orcs.

Example #2: Fighting against strong monsters doesn't give piety because they have high defenses. I was LOSING piety while fighting an orb of fire. I actually lost a * while attacking it non-stop (either from 3 to 2 or 2 to 1 I don't remember). For other strong monsters my piety just didn't move from 1-2*.

Suggestion for improving piety gain: raise (give?) piety gained from making an attack. This will fix the #2 issue.
----

Next problem is that the paralyze and pain-link discourage using active abilities, because active abilities use piety and delay the paralyze. I'm not even considering grand finale because I could never use it, but if grand finale was good and usable, it would make this an even bigger problem. With other gods you can use a weak ability a few times and then you can still use a strong 5* ability. Other gods' abilities are not competing with each other that much. Not with Ukayaw. If you want the strong ability you can't use anything else. Is this bad? Maybe not, but it doesn't feel pleasant to me. When I was playing with Ukayaw I was thinking "I wish I could use stomp or line pass sometimes but I can't".

Furthermore, line pass, stomp and paralyze have very similar uses. They are used for the same purpose of "making a generic fight easier". Usually god abilities have different purposes but in this case they're similar, so the choice isn't really there. For me paralyze seemed like the best one so I had no reason to use stomp and line pass.
It's true that these abilities are not exactly the same. Line pass has a niche use of repositioning in very rare specific situations. And stomp does something that paralyze can't do (reliably finish off a low health enemy). Unfortunately these are not common situations so in 99% of cases I did not use these abilities because I wanted piety for paralyze.

Suggestion: make stomp and line dash not use piety. Make Ukayaw grant the use of these abilities when the piety level is reached and give more uses over the course of the fight (same way paralyze is granted except not activated automatically). Preferably make the uses stack (so you can use stomp two turns in a row if you earned 2 uses). If uses can stack it would require some interface work to display the current amount of uses. If they can't stack then I don't think any interface changes are needed, just display a message when an ability use is gained.
----

Note: In my Ukayaw game I had high invocations so take that into account for the feedback.

Ukayaw is not that strong but is closer to the power level I would like Crawl gods to have. They are too strong right now imo.

[Laraso]

It also doesn't help that monsters have really weird scaling (the knight starts off strong but then it basically never improves in damage as the game goes on, so it becomes useless for damage after a certain point).

This is wrong, after a certain point (not sure what the exact point is) you get to upgrade the knight's equipment to either a demon trident or broad axe, both have flaming brand, and later on the knight learns haste and at XL 27 the weapon brand becomes speed. The problem of the knight is not the damage but that it can die fairly quickly to a lot of end game enemies, but this is entirely fixed with the Idealise ability.

In my most recent game I won, my ancestor knight took on two orb gaurdians, an orb of fire, and two dracs all at once with its broad axe of speed and killed them all fairly quickly without requiring my own character to even do anything except sit back and watch. I had to heal and buff it twice with Idealise but that's OK because if the god is giving you a free ally that's strong enough to basically trivlialize any (not-extended) content in the game then there should at least be a piety cost involved, even though at the moment the piety cost is so low that it's almost completely irrelevant.

I mean, balance wise I personally would rank Hepliak as top tier above every other god for a normal 3 rune game. The ally you get is ridiculously strong and I really don't think I should be able to clear the entirety of the ending elf:3 vault by just sitting back and watching my ally kill literally everything.

That being said I really like the concept of a permenant ally, especially one that you can customize so much, and I know I'm probably one of only a few people who actually feels that way. Hepliak feels like one of the most interesting and fun gods to me, although at the moment it can be kind of boring to pick Hepliak multiple times in a row just because it's so strong that it removes most of the challenge this game has to offer.

[crate]

The weapon improving is not really noticeable (in fact enemies improve defensively much much faster than your ally improves offensively, unless things changed since I played on experimental). Monster damage doesn't scale with HD or anything, so even giving it a brand isn't actually much of an improvement. You have to actually improve the monster's damage number.

It mightve changed but my knight when I played couldn't kill anything in V.

[Laraso]

It must have been changed then, because my ancestor knights have never had any problem killing things at any point in the game.

[Wahaha]

Yeah, my knight was fairly strong, I was not disappointed with the damage at any point in the game (not saying it was great, just that I didn't think it was bad). With idealize it could solo anything. But part of the strength of the knight is that it is harder to kill than the other ancestors. It trades damage for durability. The battlemage has higher melee damage and spells on top of that, at the expense of less durability.

I like Hep because it's allies (ally) done right. If there was anything I'd change is make all ancestors do less damage and have higher durability. Right now I don't like the glass cannon aspect, like I can send my ancestor into an early hill giant (or insert any strong monster) and it can solo it with some luck dodging. I think the ancestor should lose that fight almost 100% due to not doing enough damage before the giant gets his 2 hits in, but be more durable in general in exchange.