More non-demonic Summonings - Lead the Holy Crusade

[RangerC]

I coded two new summoning spells, based on the summoning wiki page and the comments of evktalo and kilobyte. The idea is to allow good god worshipers (as well as those who don't want to consort with demons) to have somewhere to go on the summoning path (plus traditional summoners now have more flexibility). The summons are also singular instead of a swarm so there's more possible strategies than just summon a horde and retreat.

Here they are:
Summon Dragon - lvl 9 (Summoning now has a capstone spell, too)
Summons 1 Dragon/Ice Dragon (lowest tier), storm/iron/bone/shadow Dragon (tier 2), or golden/quicksilver dragon (tier 3), based on a combination of spell power and random chance. Good god worshipers won't get an evil dragon (neither will Fedhasites, TSOites can't get a golden dragon), but will have access to holy dragons once they are finished. Probably weaker than SHT, while being a lvl higher (though holy dragons seem like they will be STRONG in evil branches), but usable by all.

Summon Hydra - lvl 6
Summons a hydra (heads from 4 to 8, ranging on spell power/chance. Might be too good at lvl 6 - could be pushed to lvl 7 and have the ability to summon up to 10 headed hydrae. Has a duration of 2 (same as shadow creatures) so the duration might balance it.

Anyone have any comments/feedback before I make a patch and post it on Mantis?

[MrMisterMonkey]

Fedhas worshipers should be able to get shadow dragons, as Fedhas doesn't disapprove of evil or draining (just unnatural corpse foolery).

[Kate]

Strong, individual summons are pretty lacking at the moment (Greater Demon, Malign Gateway, ???) so these sound pretty cool. I'm not sure that summoning a single dragon (even golden/quicksilver/holy) is particularly comparable to Fire/Ice storm, Tornado and Shatter, though.

Then again, summoning spells seem to have an annoying habit of getting bonus downsides like irresistible int drain so maybe leaving it at level 9 and not having any of that extra silliness would be better.

[tromboneandrew]

IMHO, if you're going to add more summoning spells that give us more access to a greater variety of powerful monsters, those powerful summoning spells should become harder to find. Collecting all of the powerful summoning spells should be difficult, even with Sif Muna. Otherwise, that school could become unbalanced.

[KoboldLord]

IMHO, if you're going to add more summoning spells that give us more access to a greater variety of powerful monsters, those powerful summoning spells should become harder to find. Collecting all of the powerful summoning spells should be difficult, even with Sif Muna. Otherwise, that school could become unbalanced.

I don't think this is a major issue. Even if a hundred redundant high-level summon spells exist, you only have the spell slots to learn a couple of them, at least unless you're willing to give up critical spells in other schools like Haste or Controlled Blink. Furthermore, you can only spam so many of the things before you run out of mana, and there are not many situations where it matters whether you dogpile the target under a pack of one kind of monster or under a pack of all-different monsters.

The real problem with adding too many summoning spells is that non-summoners will have elevated chances of getting those books in place of useful books. Filling in summoning holes, like some sort of high-level non-demonic summons, is probably worth doing.

[RangerC]

Fedhas worshipers should be able to get shadow dragons, as Fedhas doesn't disapprove of evil or draining (just unnatural corpse foolery).

I changed this, and also took bone dragons out altogether (I think it would be better if they remained a Yred special ally; there's enough variety with the current dragons).

Strong, individual summons are pretty lacking at the moment (Greater Demon, Malign Gateway, ???) so these sound pretty cool. I'm not sure that summoning a single dragon (even golden/quicksilver/holy) is particularly comparable to Fire/Ice storm, Tornado and Shatter, though.

Then again, summoning spells seem to have an annoying habit of getting bonus downsides like irresistible int drain so maybe leaving it at level 9 and not having any of that extra silliness would be better.

The spell is probably weaker than all the other lvl 9's (and actually probably worse than SHT, because you can't swarm), but it's definitely viable (I tried it out in Zot:5, Hell ends, and Tomb:3 with a wizmode created extended-endgame capable character and was able to clear out all of them using Hydras and Dragons (hasted iron dragons are pretty sick, 2 of them basically killed Dispater solo, with TSO protecting them from Dis's abjuration). The regular dragons (ice/fire) aren't amazing but the other dragons are all very strong.

Anyway, based on feedback here and on the wiki (plus my own testing), I made the following changes:
- Summon Hydra now level 7 (too good for level 6, completely outclassed Summon Ugly Thing). Duration is now slightly longer (still short), and there is a rare chance of getting a 9-12 headed hydra at very high power).
- Summon Dragon changed as I mentioned above

[ryak]

I like this idea a lot. I have a hard time getting into playing a summoner because of the exp penalty and i think a larger variety of spells will give me something to get excited about and really try for a high skill summoner.

[evilmike]

Level 9 is probably appropriate for summon dragon if it somewhat reliably gets you things like golden dragons, quicksilver dragons, etc. I agree, it's not as powerful as say, firestorm, but consider that most of the level 9 nuke spells are multi-school, while summon dragon in this patch is single school. That makes it a bit easier to cast. Also, this spell doesn't drain your int like SHT does.

Dragons can be extremely powerful allies if used right. A couple of hasted bone dragons can clear zot:5 for you (I've done it with summoning decks).

[jackalKnight]

These spells seem more "neutral" than "holy" (at least I don't think gold/quicksilver dragons are "holy" in Crawl), but Summon Dragon is an AWESOME idea....

and, if done right, it could give draconians an additional usability gimmick at higher levels if they had some sort of bonus casting it like Merfolk get with Summon Ice Elemental.

[MrMisterMonkey]

it's not a holy spell; the holy crusade bit in the post title draws attention to the fact that all current highlevel summ spells are evil, and therefore not castable by worshipers of good gods