A Different Take On Pakellas

[Tiktacy]

Overview:

Its no secret that I greatly dislike of pakellas as a god. In fact, I dislike him even more than I dislike Beogh as he currently exists(which based on my past beogh threads, says quite a lot).

While I acknowledge that the creation of an "evocations god" to fill the niche is perhaps a noble one, I strongly believe his implementation into version .18 was a huge mistake. I am going to try to do my best to explain why exactly that is, and I will also try to acknowledge some of the positive qualities about him as to not take away the credit from the work that obviously went into making him a reality.

Pakellas was most likely created with the intention of fulfilling the demand for an evocations god. People have been suggesting and pushing for this for as long as I can remember. Well, not quite an evocations god, as nemelex has existed for a long time(RIP), but rather a wands/rods god, a "spellcasting without spellcasting" god. When I first heard about Pakellas, I thought he would actually be pretty fun to play, I went in with the same positive attitude I had when I first tried Ru and Qazlal. Unfortunately, I was actually quite disappointed.

Feedback On Pakellas:

Wands are just re-flavored spells in consumable form, and unlike nemelex and his deck system, most of the wands don't offer any unique effects(polymorph and heal wounds are the only truly unique wands). Under Pakellas, you have a system in which you are constantly required to recharge your wands(rather than just pressing 5 to regenerate mana). The majority of these interactions involving wand recharging are complete no brainers, except you are not only required to rest for your HP like normal(unless your a DD), but you are also required to constantly "aa~search for wand~Select wand" as needed which becomes very tedious VERY quickly(in only a matter of minutes I was already sick of it).

It also breaks the flow of combat, I just want to kill my enemies, not worry about recharging my consumables in the middle of combat to avoid the weird power potions thing. Its not like recharging wands is going to negatively effect you, you are already going to be a decent melee fighter(since you can't cast magic reliably) so your going to be gaining a lot of piety from ordinary popcorn monsters, and the ones that DO require wands(the really dangerous enemies) aren't going to take a whole lot of charges, definitely not more than 2-4 pieties worth. So, as a result of all this, wands basically go from a consumable that can be used often as needed, to a "consumable" that can be used basically all the time against anything thats not popcorn. Thats his entire gimmick, thats him as a god, thats not just a small part of his worship, its his DEFINING feature(arguably his ONLY feature).

Device surge also seems strange and out of place to me, its instantaneous so whats the point of making it an ability? It just adds yet another step to the already tedious gameplay caused by the constantly wand recharging. Instead, it would make more sense to simply make the enhancement passive. Just for a comparison, imagine if vehumet required you to use "magic surge" to get the wizardry bonus.

TL;DR: Pakellas' device recharging, arguably his defining feature as a god, is tedious and doesn't offer anything interesting to the game. Wands are basically reflavored spells except without the interesting decisions involved in choosing what spell schools to train and what armor to wear. Device surge should be passive, not an ability.

A Different Take On Pakellas:

As I have already explained, Pakellas' defining feature has a lot of problems with it. It has restrictions attached to it that negatively effect the enjoyment of the game and creates tedious gameplay on top of adding virtually no new effects to the game(just making other effects more common). So, I propose a totally different take on Pakellas:

• Remove Pakellas' -casting/-MP Regen conduct entirely. If this sort of restriction MUST exist on some level, make it so using evocation gives a temporary -cast effect, possibly even silence if you want to get fancy. EDIT: Incase it wasn't implied, power potion rewards would also be removed.
• Remove device surge
• Super charge effect is probably fine to keep. Not really needed, but its probably fine.
• Keep evocable gifts, probably use a different method of decided when the gift is rewarded rather than piety stars.
• Remove quick charge and replace it with:
• New Passive: Pakellas will occasionally recharge a rod/wand after use. Alternatively, he could simply prevent them from using charges occasionally, either is fine. *.....
• New Ability: Quickdraw. You can use this ability to evoke an item of your choice instantaneously. This will give you a very short period of exhaustion however(only 3-4 turns). Costs piety and mana. **....
• New Passive: You have a boost to evocations spellpower, increases with piety. ****..
• New Ability: Overload. At the cost of destroying 1 wand in your inventory of your choice, you gain a powerful effect based on the wand type that is destroyed. For example, if you have a confusion wand with 25 charges, using it with overload will cast confusion on all enemies in LoS with extremely high spellpower(far above what is normally possible) since the wand had so many charges. Costs a lot of piety and mana.*****.
• Along with these changes would come the much needed wand reform to fix the constant inventory clutter problem associated with them.

These changes would remove the frustration involved in the constant recharging, in addition to removing restrictions on him as a god that really don't need to be there. On top of that, overload would offer something unique to the game that I think pakellas desperately needs. Each god offers something really special: Vehumet gives MP regen for killing enemies, trog gifts weapons, Okuwaru gifts armour, Kiku gives the torment and corpses, ashenari allows reskilling. The list goes on, and pakellas really feels like he is missing that piece.

Quickdraw was just an extra effect as sort of filler. Its pretty unique(aside from fireball) and I can't imagine any other god or effect this could be effectively attached to. A special thanks to everyone who took the time to read this enormous wall of text.

[Shard1697]

I really like the idea of destroying a rod for a more powerful version of that wand's effect. Should scale with number of charges, which I think is what you meant.
Bonus points if the message is something like "You snap the wand in half, releasing powerful magical energy!" ala snapping rods in FFV.

[CanOfWorms]

Overload is really problematic. First of all you haven't actually put any thought into it, all you've written is "Overload gets an effect... that's stronger than the wand!!!" but this is completely vague and undefined. If you're actually serious about this concept at the very least you should put the minimum amount of thought into it and actually figure out an effect for each wand.

This brings up a second problem with Overload: Now you have effects from wands that will more than likely be inconsistent across wands (Confusion > Mass Confusion, but Flame will probably not be Mass Flame, whatever that would be.)

Overload also incentivizes inventory problems because if it's actually powerful and useful, the player will want to carry duplicates of a wand if they want repeated uses.

[Tiktacy]

This brings up a second problem with Overload: Now you have effects from wands that will more than likely be inconsistent across wands (Confusion > Mass Confusion, but Flame will probably not be Mass Flame, whatever that would be.

Confusion creates mass confusion
ice blast creates flaciate
flame creates a fiery explosion around the player(new effect)
Random effects blasts chaotic clouds(like chaos crabs)
Paralysis does mass paralysis
Heal wounds basically just uses heal wounds on yourself equal to the amount of charges, in one turn.
Haste IDK, maybe give a crap load of buffs like might, agility, brilliance, etc?
Disintigrate does shatter
Lightning could cast chain lightning a number of times maybe but make the player immune? Not sure on this one.
Enslavement could do discord or just mass enslavement like crusade card(at least I think thats what it does, could be wrong)
Polymorph could just do mass polymorph
Teleportation could be a controlled teleport(I miss those)
Slowing could do mass slowing

Those are just a few examples of effects they can have. Really, instead overload could just destroy wands to give the player a bunch of buffs instead, based on the charges and value of the wand. This was just one idea, pak just needs something to set him apart, thats all.

Also, about the wand clutter, I covered that in the last bullet point.

[Quazifuji]

I tried out Pakellas for the first time during the 0.18 tournament, and was really enjoying the character. Then I realized that I was mostly enjoying being an early-game character with two rods (found a rod of lightning, got gifted a rod of iron) and was barely actually using wands. So in the end, the parts of Pakellas I was really enjoying were just the guaranteed rod gift and super charge (which I used on one of the rods), which I'm pretty sure aren't meant to be the interesting parts of the god (since a very similar playstyle can exist if you just get lucky and find two early rods). (Admittedly, my character was also a Demonspawn with Guardian Spirit, which inhibited the use of Pakella's abilities significantly, but I still had some mana left over after most fights and rarely even bothered using it to recharge my wands)

So I think I agree that Pakellas could use some improvements. At the very least, I agree very heavily with wand recharging being tedious, and that replacing it with something automatic, or at least something that doesn't regularly add a half-dozen button presses between fights, would be nice. I'm not sure if your solution of reduced wand charge usage and wands gifts being unlimited is the right one or not, but it might be, and some sort of solution is definitely needed.

I'm kind of confused by Quickdraw: You spent a small paragraph explaining how annoying Device Surge is to use because of how many button presses it adds, and then add a new ability that would be just as annoying to use as Device Surge. I mean, sure, the idea of instant wand uses is interesting, although possibly overpowered with a wand of heal wounds, but it just seems like all of your complaints about Device Surge apply to Quickdraw too.

Overload is a neat idea, but I agree with CanOfWorms - it would increase Pakellas' already high level of inventory management and almost certainly end up being confusing and spoilery.

TL;DR: I'm not a huge fan of your proposed revamp, but I completely agree that the current implementation of device recharging is really tedious and could use an overhaul.

[Tiktacy]

Thank you, very good input!

I was thinking the same thing about quickdraw at first too, but I sort of figured the exhaustion and higher piety cost would prevent it from being used the same way device surge is.

Fair point about overload, but like I said thats a problem with wands that needs to be fixed in general, not a problem with pakellas or my revamped version of pakellas.

[Quazifuji]

One possibility for Overload: for non-haste/heal wounds wands, maybe it could do something like fire the wand at every enemy in sight (or maybe a number of random targets base on number of remaining charges), with a spellpower bonus based on number of remaining charges. That could even work for teleportation wands. It would still have the same basic "sacrifice a wand for a strong effect based on the number of charges" without the large amount of fiddliness and development work that would be involved with creating a separate overload effect for every single wand type.