Hepliaklqana -> New Yredelemnul


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Blades Runner

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Post Sunday, 28th August 2016, 13:48

Hepliaklqana -> New Yredelemnul

The way Hepliaklqana plays is very nice in general. The idea of a single high quality permanent ally that automatically respawns if it dies is great. You get the power of ally play with less of the micromanagement and interface issues you get with gods, items, and magic that give you a lot of allies.

Another currently very strong general purpose god is Yredelemnul, which gives you many allies of lower, but still good, quality. In spite of the fact that Yred is the best way to win in a significant fraction of games, it's considered spammy, boring, and/or annoying by a lot of players. Permanent allies whose deaths theoretically matter are just not good gameplay. There's a point of comparison with Hepliaklqana in that Yred provides the Enslave Soul ability, which provides a single (potentially) high quality ally whose quality scales with player progression.

My proposal is this: Remove the permanent ally gifts of Yredelemnul and make the spectral thing allies produced by Enslave Soul respawn the way ancestors do. Make Enslave Soul available at ** instead of *****. Make the pain mirror and drain life abilities act as buffs for the spectral thing ally as well as the player character.

Some odds and ends: Whether this replaces Hepliaklqana or not is a separate issue. As it stands, ancestors are very powerful, much stronger than any single ally available via existing summoning spells other than possibly spellforged servitor on some characters and (lucky) zot shadow creatures. They're also stronger than almost any spectral thing one can make with Yredelemnul now. The fact that you get the ancestor immediately on joining makes Hep strictly better than Yred, the recent hp nerf notwithstanding. Under this rework of Yred, it would make sense to remove the zombie making abilities, which replicate effects available via necromancy. In this case, moving pain mirror to * would help keep Yred competitive in the very early game.
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Post Sunday, 28th August 2016, 15:03

Re: Hepliaklqana -> New Yredelemnul

I'm one of the few people who actually like Yred, but I kind of like this proposal. Making spectral copies of things (possibly with some buffs to make it competitive) sounds more varied and interesting than choosing from a pretty small pool of allies.

As long as you can still Drain Life...

Blades Runner

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Post Sunday, 28th August 2016, 15:24

Re: Hepliaklqana -> New Yredelemnul

i like yred too but this sounds like a better yred.

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Post Monday, 29th August 2016, 16:51

Re: Hepliaklqana -> New Yredelemnul

goodcoolguy wrote:it's considered spammy, boring, and/or annoying by a lot of players.


I have never heard Yred being spammy or boring.

Both Mak and Kiku IMO are far more spammy (you can unleash lessor demons continuously with out stop with an amulet of faith with Mak).

I agree Enslave Soul is pretty awful though. I just posted in GDD a simpler change to Yred could be to just to replace Enslave Soul with an uber powerful Control Undead.... ie Enslave Undead. Yes it is somewhat redundant since the god gives allies but I think it is ok to have a simple god. I also don't think it would be boring enslaving some Ancient Lichs. This would make Yred highly competitve for late game play (ie 15 rune).

Would it be overpowered and/or boring? ... maybe but it is a far easier change to implement, test and explore than changing yred completely.
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Post Monday, 29th August 2016, 17:19

Re: Hepliaklqana -> New Yredelemnul

Well, if you've seen late midgame Yred played carefully, you often have over a dozen permanent allies plus several derived undead. That's a lot of message spam and it's hard to match it without using a lot of summonings magic, but then you're not worried about your guys dying. I'll put it this way: If players only cared about winning, about 1 in 5 characters on webtiles would be Yred followers at any given time, but this isn't what happens.

On the power level issue, Hepliaklqana answers this for you: If Hepliaklqana is a reasonable crawl god, then this version of Yredelemnul is no problem. You just can't find something to use Enslave Soul on that would give you something comparable to an ancestor until pretty late in the game. Look at the late game hexer: Line of sight confusion spam, paralyze, antimagic branded melee, even OoFs can't kill them with reasonable tactics. Then look at the early game hexer: Drain branded melee, confusion, slow. Only difference is monsters sometimes kill it when you don't want that to happen.

The main exceptions are some uniques, but you can always say no enslaving uniques.
Last edited by goodcoolguy on Monday, 29th August 2016, 17:23, edited 1 time in total.
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Post Monday, 29th August 2016, 17:20

Re: Hepliaklqana -> New Yredelemnul

agentgt wrote:I agree Enslave Soul is pretty awful though.


Considering his entire proposal is to replace Yred with a version of Yred centered around Enslave Soul, I do not think he said that.
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Post Tuesday, 30th August 2016, 00:27

Re: Hepliaklqana -> New Yredelemnul

Arrhythmia wrote:
agentgt wrote:I agree Enslave Soul is pretty awful though.


Considering his entire proposal is to replace Yred with a version of Yred centered around Enslave Soul, I do not think he said that.


Whoops! :oops: I was doing too many things when I wrote that comment. I meant to say I disagree and that Enslave Soul is awful.

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Post Tuesday, 30th August 2016, 00:49

Re: Hepliaklqana -> New Yredelemnul

goodcoolguy wrote:Well, if you've seen late midgame Yred played carefully, you often have over a dozen permanent allies plus several derived undead. That's a lot of message spam and it's hard to match it without using a lot of summonings magic, but then you're not worried about your guys dying. I'll put it this way: If players only cared about winning, about 1 in 5 characters on webtiles would be Yred followers at any given time, but this isn't what happens.


That could be applied to five other gods in crawl. I'm not sure the message spam bothers that many players especially compared to Jiyva.
I find that I usually do not have allies late game with Yred that don't get obliterated. Which is fine though because that is there job... to kill and protect.
What typically happens in say anywhere dangerous is your running around by yourself and you get an oh shit moment and summon all your allies.
You then maybe try to get away and fetch what is left of your allies... or fight and loose most of them.

Otherwise it is pretty damn tedious to selectively manage your allies (ie stair dancing with "tell follow, tell wait, etc" and not really a good mechanic.

The reason it is not annoying is because you don't need to do this since yred just pumps out allies anyway.

goodcoolguy wrote:On the power level issue, Hepliaklqana answers this for you: If Hepliaklqana is a reasonable crawl god, then this version of Yredelemnul is no problem. You just can't find something to use Enslave Soul on that would give you something comparable to an ancestor until pretty late in the game. Look at the late game hexer: Line of sight confusion spam, paralyze, antimagic branded melee, even OoFs can't kill them with reasonable tactics. Then look at the early game hexer: Drain branded melee, confusion, slow. Only difference is monsters sometimes kill it when you don't want that to happen.

The main exceptions are some uniques, but you can always say no enslaving uniques.


I'm not saying it is a bad idea just that it is a lot of hard work and many people like how Yred currently works (with the exception of Enslave Soul).

A while back corpse picking up was removed from the game and for good reason. Corpse picking up sort of reminds me of the same mechanic of Enslave Soul except that Enslave Soul is fairly difficult to get working and not worth it.

I also think Hepliaklqana is a massively OP god but is on the same level of fun as Yred (I also liked Pakellas though. Switching back and forth with rods was interesting but I guess people that that was tedious).

On the other hand as for power "Control Undeading" some ancient lichs in Zot 5 would be fairly interesting albeit overpowered game play.

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