Feedback on Uskayaw

[Tiktacy]

First off, I want to say that I personally love the idea of uskayaw. Its unique, and I consider him to be a welcome addition to the crawl pantheon after having played him a few times.

However, there are a few things I have a problem with. First of all, I think uskayaw should give cleaving to all weapons(polarms don't get to stack reaching, either they cleave or they reach, and short swords/daggers should lose their stab bonus). It really doesn't make sense for a god to restrict the player to one specific weapon type, imagine if vehumet only gave extra mana for killing enemies with fire magic? Its just restrictive in a way that it shouldn't be, nobody in the right mind would follow Uskayaw without using an axe, at least that's the impression I've gotten. Besides, it seems appropriate to give all weapons cleaving for Usk, whenever I use Uskayaw I always imagine my character spinning in circles with his axe elegantly slicing through the enemies surrounding him, I can imagine them doing the same with a sword, glaive, or even a mace(although this might be harder to sell).

Second, his abilities need reworking:

Stomp is just fine, it is the one ability I don't think needs work, its an effective way to squeeze out some damage against an enemy you need to die ASAP and just isn't dying. I found myself using this ability often.

Line pass and Solo time are sort of mutually exclusive. Most of the time you are going to want to hold out on using line pass so you can get the solo time effect, and once you get it you are going to want to stay above ***... so you can get it again. As a result I almost never find myself using Line pass. On top of being outclassed by solo time, it also has the undesirable effect of impacting your positioning while giving you little benefit compared to using stomp for example. To fix this, I suggest adding an exhaustion timer for solo time, which would then give the player a reason to actually use line pass while they are waiting for exhaustion to ware off. Maybe higher invo can decrease the exhaustion timer. Line pass should also not just cause confusion, it should have a chance to cause other effects as well, I'd like to see it put monsters in a frenzy for example.

Grand finale is pretty much useless as it exists now. I've played several games with Uskayaw(although never won, admittedly) and never once managed to use it to my benefit. For the most part, paralyzing an enemy is going to mean you will kill it in only a few shots while also killing a number of other enemies in the process with cleaving(assuming you are using an axe, which you should be), so really its better to just save for solo time rather than use grand finale to kill one enemy. To fix this, I suggest changing the ability to instead of kill one enemy, target one enemy in LOS and kill all enemies(including the targetted monster, you are still exploding out of them) within a 2 square radius of that monsters. If you want to be fancy, cause butterflies to explode out of the enemies surrounding the one you fused with(I would absolutely love to see that). This change would of course require some changes to accommodate the huge boost in power, probably requiring significantly more invocation skill to use consistently as well as requiring higher piety. Although it would be rare to use, I get the feeling that this effect would turn what is pretty much just a "silly trick just for laughs" into a TRUE "Grand Finale!"

[Reptisaurus]

Uskayaw worked pretty well with short blades. You still get a lot of attacks (because your attack speed is so fast) and when solo hits you can pretty much stab an entire room. And iine pass confuses the line passees - again, great for stabbers. I grand finaled several times as a short blade user - although this was never a life-saver, or anything more than a funny trick. (Worth noting that having a lot of piety for Grand Finale makes up for low invocations skill - a six * Grant Finale is much easier to pull of than a 5 *.

[Lasty]

Thanks for the feedback, Tiktacy. I pushed out a few changes to the god last night that address some of your suggestions, but not others: I made the piety game a little more fault-tolerant to make missing less bad, I fixed a no-decay bug w/ pain bond, and I decreased line pass piety.

I'm considering whether (and in what way) it makes sense to let Usk give the cleave status, which would largely achieve one of your suggestions. I'm not actually sure it's needed, though: Uskayaw's design inherently rewards any form of AOE, so Usk does in fact reward using Fire Magic, Air Magic, and Poison Magic over Earth Magic to some degree. The reason Veh preferring one form of magic over another is silly in your example is that it's arbitrary, but it's not arbitrary here: the actual conduct is hitting lots of monsters, and there are many ways to achieve that. Those AOE attacks are more valuable than hitting one monster (unless you hit that monster really hard) and hitting one monster consistently is more valuable than hitting one monster inconsistently, etc.

The idea to grant uses of the various powers independently of piety is interesting, but at the moment I'm thinking it'll add more confusion than it's worth, and that tweaking the piety costs is probably a better approach. I think it's good to have to have some trade-off between a quick Line Pass or setting up a solo, and after you've landed a solo and a pain bond you still have the option to go back to Stomp and Line Pass. Setting up solo/pain bond, line-passing into a cluster of foes, and then landing a Stomp can be quite effective.

This is a little off-topic for your post, but one of the things I like about the god is that the god is powerful in very different situations than other gods. All other gods are strongest in the same situation as atheism: single foes dragged to good terrain. Uskayaw's power gives you the most options and the most power when there enemy density is at a certain point, and you get the most out of the situation when you can manipulate that group of enemies into the right shape for your purposes. The right sized group of enemies positioned correctly can be easier with Uskayaw than any of its members individually. Of course, there's an upper limit on how well that power scales with enemy density, so you have to make careful judgments about how to best build Usk piety and when to use its powers; judging that requires thinking about the situation differently than with other gods, and judging wrong can have severe consequences.

[VeryAngryFelid]

I was spectating an Uskayaw game and got weird feeling that the god can be used as Nemelex by some players in the sense that it encourages gambling, not sure if it is intended. Let me explain. The player was a heavy armoured melee only character (HO as far as I remember) with executioner's axe who found Saint Roka and a pack of draconians on Depths 5. The player charged right to them without even trying to split the pack or lure them to a more favorable terrain (it reminded me that Korean complaint about god being bad for new players and breaking rules), got surrounded, got to about 35 HP but instead of using a scroll of blinking just attacked one more time. And here we go, everyone got paralyzed.
The gambling is that the player couldn't be sure that they don't miss, and even if it is quite likely to hit at least some of those surrounding monsters, they couldn't be sure that they reach required piety level since you never know how close you are to next star of piety.

[Tiktacy]

Funny thing, I play tested uskayaw last night not knowing about the changes and almost immediately noticed a huge difference. I was finding myself making use of all abilities, even grand finale, effectively.

Very effective improvements. I think maybe line pass's confusion needs to last a little longer, but besides that uskayaw seems extremely close to being stable release worthy. Many thanks for your response as well.

[Tiktacy]

There is one other complaint that I think is worth mentioning. I don't know if you would even call it a complaint, it could be intentional but its worth mentioning anyway.

Uskayaw gives you all his abilities immediately. Unlike other gods there is no progression, even gozag takes time to get to use his abilities since the gold takes a while to accumulate. As a result of this, uskayaw sort of takes away the feeling of progression that a lot of other gods give, like sif muna or trog or ashenzari give. If this is intentional, I understand, however if it is not then I think maybe having piety gain based on invocations would have a large effect on that feeling of progression. Additionally, I think it would be cool if uskayaw eventually acknowledged continuous worship with something, perhaps he can very very rarely gift the player artifact boots?

I personally still like Uskayaw now after last nights improvements, but I just figured I should mention that since it might be something important that would come up later.

[Wahaha]

instead of using a scroll of blinking just attacked one more time. And here we go, everyone got paralyzed.
The gambling is that the player couldn't be sure that they don't miss,

Ukayaw tells you a few turns in advance before the paralysis happens. Something like "Uskayaw prepares for your solo".