passify Sif Muna

[HardboiledGargoyle]

Sif Muna is currently being reworked to grant active abilities, largely to solve issues with Channel Energy. This can be done alternatively, in an interesting way, with passive benefits that are stereotypically desired by mages and not available elsewhere. Followers ought to strongly feel the exact difference these benefits make, without the need to use abilities, nor even hope/monitor for the god's intervention as with Vehumet.

I change the god's name to Sim Nufa in the grand Crawl tradition of renaming gods to anagrams of their old name. The new name suggests a combination of aggression and patience, to reflect new piety gain mechanic, while still hinting at great intellect.

Piety: likes killing monsters that could but do not know spells.
(Make an exception for mindless creatures? I like that this would be mostly irrelevant for gameplay but would promote awareness of the monster intelligence mechanic.)

Benefits:

[*....]
Gifts: Followers are eligible to start receiving book gifts on a gift timeout system.

[**...]
Miscast protection (Passive): Sim Nufa protects you from miscast effects min(100,piety-50) % of the time, providing full protection when piety>150.

Max MP Bonus (Passive): Sim Nufa grants you a bonus of X*min(100,piety-50)/100 to your max MP, where X is the amount of MP you get from having trained Spellcasting - in essence, doubling that amount when piety>150.

MP Protection (Passive): any source of MP drain has a X*min(100,piety-50) % chance of having no effect on you, unless it is the explicit cost of a spell or activated ability. Protects from: anti-magic, miscast effects, Zot traps, CBoE*, draining gaze, etc. Exception: guardian spirit works as normal.

* - CBoE ought to be rebalanced

[******]
Amnesia (Active): Forget a spell; costs some piety. By making this available at 160 piety, invoking Amnesia would not reduce effectiveness of the passives, thus encouraging spell-set rotation.

Alternatively, the 5 benefits all become available with 100% effectiveness at each piety breakpoint from * to *****, rather than have 3 of them scale with piety. This would be simpler, clearer to communicate, more consistent with other gods, and change the way the player experiences the piety accumulation curve, thanks to a greater number of milestones. If that's better, in what order should these benefits become available?

[and into]

it's ground floor, what are you talking about; if you think something is bad, just say, but I don't see anything funny

The misspelling of Sif Muna may have caused people to think you were joking around.

Anyway, I like the flavor of the piety gain, but it would mean almost no piety throughout Lair, which is pretty harsh, though not in itself a deal-breaker.

Overall, I think the gist of the changes here are in the wrong direction. If anything, I think it would make more sense for Sif's benefits to be more active rather than passive, in order to better differentiate from Vehumet....

[genericpseudonym]

it's ground floor, what are you talking about; if you think something is bad, just say, but I don't see anything funny

The misspelling of Sif Muna may have caused people to think you were joking around.

Anyway, I like the flavor of the piety gain, but it would mean almost no piety throughout Lair, which is pretty harsh, though not in itself a deal-breaker.

Overall, I think the gist of the changes here are in the wrong direction. If anything, I think it would make more sense for Sif's benefits to be more active rather than passive, in order to better differentiate from Vehumet....

I feel like flavorwise it would make more sense for the bookish loremaster god to be more passive while Mr. offense-focused "let it end in hellfire!" gives active abilities.

But on the other hand mostly-passive benefits are boring and neither of them should be like that.

[HardboiledGargoyle]

naw man, you got it all wrong
it's not boring; passive benefits change the rules of the game, your progression, your priorities, without interfering with the basics of how you play, so the game plays out differently in spite of you sticking to the same-old.
When Dith got introduced it got a lot of praise for its pile of passives, for not needing to be "turned all" frequently, without regard for whether active abilities would translate into better flavor/balance/mechanics (thread) because the passivity was a breath of freshness

[and into]

"Passives" can be exciting, and active abilities can be boring, sure. It doesn't break down neatly either way.

Smoke bleed is great because it has a dynamic effect on your game play, despite being a passively activated ability.

However I do think that constant buffs that do not greatly impact your strategic or tactical decisions tend not to be very exciting (e.g. repel missiles spell). I think there is room to have some gods who are a bit "boring" in this way — ones that do not require much active input, or even active reactions to passive abilities, but which nonetheless provide significant help. But I don't think Crawl needs two such gods devoted to magic. Even as it stands I think Sif and Vehumet could benefit from being better distinguished from each other.

[HardboiledGargoyle]

OK, I fleshed out the OP and incorporated some of the feedback. This thread looks good enough for GDD now, so I'd like any mod reading this to move it there please.

[archaeo]

Done. I didn't want to bring over all the silly stuff, so I split it off and left it in CYC.

[swoonis]

It would be better to just remove Sif tbqh

[PleasingFungus]

that doesn't seem like very constructive feedback to me. not even going to give a reason?

[Hurkyl]

Another option is to play up the miscast protection and additionally reduce in time and/or MP cost of a miscast.

[HardboiledGargoyle]

Faster miscasts that cost less MP would be very similar to wizardry in effect.