List of "good" Xom effects that are actually bad

[duvessa]

This seems like it belongs here.

"Good polymorph"
"Good teleport"

Many spells:
Spider Form
Leda's Liquefaction, most of the time (becaues you're running or meleeing)
Ice Form
Statue Form
Hydra Form
Conjure Ball Lightning, often
Dragon Form, often
Necromutation

If good Xom acts are meant to actually be good a majority of the time, these shouldn't be included.

[and into]

If Xom conjure ball lightning were combined with temporary insulation, it would be mostly good and could be kept on the list. The rest should just be removed from good effects list, I agree.

[Rast]

What Xom considers good is not the same as what the player considers good.

[Shard1697]

What Xom considers good is not the same as what the player considers good.

Why does the game even differentiate between "good" and "bad" Xom effects, then?

[njvack]

"good" and "bad" are not very good terms here, "intended to help" and "intended to harm" are more accurate.

There should maybe be a "just because" list for these. Then again, the road to Xom is paved with good intentions...

[Implojin]

What Xom considers good is not the same as what the player considers good.

Why does the game even differentiate between "good" and "bad" Xom effects, then?

xom.cc dates back to at least the svn days and diving its history forces you to roll sanity checks the further back you go

Some work has been done recently to clean it up, so there's that

But if my self-taught skills aren't failing me, those chains of x_chance_in_y could probably still stand to be refactored to use random-pick distributions? Man that looks ugly. (Less so than before, granted.)

[stickyfingers]

xom.cc is an act of Xom itself.

[duvessa]

So I want to talk about this a little more because I've been trying to enjoy Xom characters lately.

After the early game, if you are not undead and are not an unarmed-based character, Xom spider/ice form when you don't have a cancellation potion are the worst actions he can possibly take. They remove all sources of damage from your character except misc items and spells, because you can't use weapons or throw or use rods or wands, and you also can't heal or haste or teleport with a wand, and they kill your AC at the same time. Xom confusion feels like it happens 5 times on every level, sure, but if you are not a mummy you basically nullify the danger from it if you just resign yourself to never using curing potions for convenience reasons (poison, confusion in trivial fights, etc). You do not have this option to counter Xom spider/ice form, because games can go a very long time without generating any potions of cancellation or scrolls of blinking at all. So to win Xom games with living species you have to either
1. be a conjurer/summoner (completely impractical for CK to do every game, since you would need to find books)
2. play really carefully around the fact that you sometimes randomly lose all damage, defenses, (extremely tedious to do)
3. make sure Xom is bored/unhappy during all dangerous fights (as far as I understand it, this defeats the intended point of Xom)
4. just accept the chance of randomly dying to a form (this is what everyone does right now)
There is no Xom action that is this bad throughout the game. Xom summons/miscasts become harmless around Lair, banishment becomes safe soon after that (and is WAY rarer). Polymorphs to spark wasps are awful in Lair but stop being scary shortly after. Rearranges/swaps are the only other act that comes close, but the worst (and vanishingly rare) case is that one demands a scroll of blinking if you were fighting dangerous monsters and badly positioned at the same time. Xom forms, on the other hand, can turn a trivial fight into an impossible one and take away most or all of your escape options at the same time.
Is it too much to ask that Xom forms let you use "End transformation"? Getting hit by porkalator is generally considered a bad thing, and that's what this Xom act is, except you can't resist Xom porkalator with MR or block Xom's line of fire.

(also forms being unable to use wands in the first place is silly)

[Airwolf]

5. Unarmed!