Tartarus Sorceror
Posts: 1762
Joined: Monday, 14th October 2013, 01:05
Thursday, 14th July 2016, 01:13
Merge Elyvilon into Zin
Ely and Zin are 2 invocations heavy gods that have a lot of redundancy between each other, and Ely has a lot more design issues than Zin does. I'll just make a list quick:
1: Redundancy between Zin's passive lifesaving and Elyvilon's Protection from Harm ability. These both serve the function of saving you from fatal damage based on piety, but the latter is much clunkier and more awkward to use. You have to activate it manually, and the failure chance for this ability starts at 0%... but the actual chance of success will still be very bad for a long time, and for an unspoiled player it's unclear when exactly it's worthwhile because you both don't know what the chances are most of the time, and you have to deal with the awkward "don't kill anything" conduct while it's active. I think this sort of ability functions much, much better as a passive.
2: Redundancy between Zin's Vitalisation and Elyvilion's Purification. These are again, two abilities which you are given at a similar time(*** and **, respectively), both functioning off invo and often serving the same purpose, but Ely gets the short end of the stick. Zin's Vitalisation boosts your stats based on invo and also gives you immunity to many negative status effects for its duration, meanwhile, Purification only clears negative status effects that you currently have. Also, they are subtly different in what status effects they deal with, which can be confusing... especially since these are two gods which you can switch between without penance and both are invocations heavy, meaning the same character might use both at different times in one game.
Purification removes: Poison, Sickness, Rot, Confusion, Petrify, Stat drain and slow.
Vitalisation gives immunity to: Poison, Sickness, Rot, Confusion, Petrify, Stat drain, and effects of curare+wasp/hornet stings.
Almost the same, but not quite!
Also, there's a flavor mismatch here: Zin is explicitly the god of purity, and even has vaults with Purification stations, but for some reason when both these gods have such same-y abilities Ely gets the one called Purification.
3: Heal other has a whole lot of issues. To start, it has strange flavor/use discrepancies: it is flavored as healing, and does indeed heal, but the actual use of this power is not for healing(allies or otherwise), but pacification, which does not care about whether the monster is actually capable of being "healed", and can thus be used on monsters which are at full HP. This is confusing, to say the least. More importantly, unlike basically all other targeted "affect monster" spells, it does not check either HD or MR-instead, it checks maximum HP. This has several problems, starting with how different monsters of the same species can have wildly varying max HP. This not only means that chances to affect the same species of monster can be hugely different, but also as a result, this ability does not show the player a percentage chance to affect the targeted monster like most other things that do now. If it did, the player could use this information to figure out which monsters of the same species have what amount of HP relative to each other, which is information that is purposefully hidden. People have proposed letting it instead show the player a chance based off that monster type's "average" HP, but that means the number shown could be hugely inaccurate in either direction, which would be confusing and misleading... so neither have happened, which means players are stuck with awkward, ambiguous failure messages, and the unspoiled player won't have a good idea what their chances to pacify are.
4: The changes to Elyvilon were done for good reason, but they left her in a weird spot playerbase-wise. Before, most people who worshipped Ely did so to play "pacifist" type games-pacify basically everything and try to kill nothing. With the changes to Ely's piety and Heal Other requiring spending piety each use, this is no longer really reasonable, which drove away basically the last niche of players who still played Ely often... and now she is a very unpopular god, because her abilities are boring/annoying and the interesting ones are done better by other gods(specifically, Zin). It also affects bits of her flavor, making her skill titles and some quotes like "Go forth and aid the weak!" very strange and unconnected to your gameplay when you're still spending most of your time just murdering everything.
5: Cheap self healing abilities are strong, but they are also very dull. I am in favor of none of these existing, as more 'proactive' damage prevention abilities like Zin's imprison are much more interesting.
So, here is what I propose to merge Ely into Zin:
1: Redundancy between Zin's passive lifesaving and Elyvilon's Protection from Harm ability. These both serve the function of saving you from fatal damage based on piety, but the latter is much clunkier and more awkward to use. You have to activate it manually, and the failure chance for this ability starts at 0%... but the actual chance of success will still be very bad for a long time, and for an unspoiled player it's unclear when exactly it's worthwhile because you both don't know what the chances are most of the time, and you have to deal with the awkward "don't kill anything" conduct while it's active. I think this sort of ability functions much, much better as a passive.
2: Redundancy between Zin's Vitalisation and Elyvilion's Purification. These are again, two abilities which you are given at a similar time(*** and **, respectively), both functioning off invo and often serving the same purpose, but Ely gets the short end of the stick. Zin's Vitalisation boosts your stats based on invo and also gives you immunity to many negative status effects for its duration, meanwhile, Purification only clears negative status effects that you currently have. Also, they are subtly different in what status effects they deal with, which can be confusing... especially since these are two gods which you can switch between without penance and both are invocations heavy, meaning the same character might use both at different times in one game.
Purification removes: Poison, Sickness, Rot, Confusion, Petrify, Stat drain and slow.
Vitalisation gives immunity to: Poison, Sickness, Rot, Confusion, Petrify, Stat drain, and effects of curare+wasp/hornet stings.
Almost the same, but not quite!
Also, there's a flavor mismatch here: Zin is explicitly the god of purity, and even has vaults with Purification stations, but for some reason when both these gods have such same-y abilities Ely gets the one called Purification.
3: Heal other has a whole lot of issues. To start, it has strange flavor/use discrepancies: it is flavored as healing, and does indeed heal, but the actual use of this power is not for healing(allies or otherwise), but pacification, which does not care about whether the monster is actually capable of being "healed", and can thus be used on monsters which are at full HP. This is confusing, to say the least. More importantly, unlike basically all other targeted "affect monster" spells, it does not check either HD or MR-instead, it checks maximum HP. This has several problems, starting with how different monsters of the same species can have wildly varying max HP. This not only means that chances to affect the same species of monster can be hugely different, but also as a result, this ability does not show the player a percentage chance to affect the targeted monster like most other things that do now. If it did, the player could use this information to figure out which monsters of the same species have what amount of HP relative to each other, which is information that is purposefully hidden. People have proposed letting it instead show the player a chance based off that monster type's "average" HP, but that means the number shown could be hugely inaccurate in either direction, which would be confusing and misleading... so neither have happened, which means players are stuck with awkward, ambiguous failure messages, and the unspoiled player won't have a good idea what their chances to pacify are.
4: The changes to Elyvilon were done for good reason, but they left her in a weird spot playerbase-wise. Before, most people who worshipped Ely did so to play "pacifist" type games-pacify basically everything and try to kill nothing. With the changes to Ely's piety and Heal Other requiring spending piety each use, this is no longer really reasonable, which drove away basically the last niche of players who still played Ely often... and now she is a very unpopular god, because her abilities are boring/annoying and the interesting ones are done better by other gods(specifically, Zin). It also affects bits of her flavor, making her skill titles and some quotes like "Go forth and aid the weak!" very strange and unconnected to your gameplay when you're still spending most of your time just murdering everything.
5: Cheap self healing abilities are strong, but they are also very dull. I am in favor of none of these existing, as more 'proactive' damage prevention abilities like Zin's imprison are much more interesting.
So, here is what I propose to merge Ely into Zin:
- Combine Pacification of non-evil monsters with Recite. Recite now affects all monsters: monsters which are not chaotic/undead/demons/heretics have a chance to be pacified, based on invocations, and checking HD, not max HP. Monsters which are chaotic/undead/demons/heretics receive the same negative effects as before.
- Drop the boring self-heal abilities.
- Drop Ely's Protection from Harm, in favor of the similar but better passive Zin already has.
- Rename Vitalisation to Purification in line with Zin's theming, include immunity to slow alongside the other statuses, and merge the HP/MP increase of Ely's Divine Vigor into it. To compensate, move it from **.... to ****.. piety.
- For this message the author Shard1697 has received thanks: 7
- and into, dynast, ololoev, PowerOfKaishin, removeelyvilon, VeryAngryFelid, yesno
