The Tavern

Players can worship Oka/Trog/Fedhas for easy early game and then switch to a better god for extended when wrath is going to do nothing. I suggest to give a choice after reaching 6 stars of piety for first god the player worships, it can be activated via new abilities:
a) "Promise to stay with the god forever"
b) "No promise to stay with the god forever".
Purpose of the second ability is to remove first ability from abilities menu if player is sure s/he is not going to abandon, it does nothing else.
If first option is selected, a description of provided power is displayed along with confirmation y/n.
I suggest the following powers:
All gods will have their upper piety limit changed from 200 to 250.
For Xom it means you are more likely to get into positive piety range (toy) than into negative one (plaything) when Xom changes "piety".
When piety is used to calculate power of effect (Chei stat boost, Ashenzari skill boost, Nemelex card power etc.) and you have 200+ piety, still 200 will be used as of now so the only advantage of the promise is that it will be easier to stay at 200+ piety and that you will be able to spam divine abilities sometimes provided you have high piety of course.

This is a problem with extended, not with god switching.

Well, we can try to use similar approach to punish god switching. For example, if TSO is second god, it cannot give more than 6 stars of piety. In this case the award from OP is not needed of course.

if god switching is bad for the game, why not just remove it?

I think it provides an interesting choice. Except the choice is not interesting when you are overpowered to survive god wrath so I suggest to add some permanent award/punishment.

The only reason to switch gods is because you want to take TSO for extended because everything uses negative energy attacks and is weak to Holy.

Or you want to ignore malmutate with Zin.

Or you are bored to hell with Fedhas and have no idea of how Zin works and so you go for Chei or Quez who may not be powerful or warrant your survival, but at least are fun and comprehensible.

Just make wrath more balanced (less outright suicidal at low XL, more suicidal at high XL)

Many god wraths are dangerous at all times. Oka and trog for example are always dangerous to abandon.

The problem with god switching is that there are some gods that become blatantly stronger (TSO, Zin, and to a lesser extent Kiku) or weaker (Beogh, Yred, Fedhas) for the last 10-12 runes, making switching gods after getting 3 runes a boring choice if you can survive their wrath and a suboptimal choice at pretty much all other points in the game.

I see four choices:

1. Keep the current situation.
   
2. Remove god switching. Struggling in extended becomes a downside to taking an early game god, and if you want Zin or TSO for extended you'll have to take them early. I strongly dislike this option, because I think god switching and wrath are fun mechanics.
   
3. Try to keep gods more balanced throughout the game. Nerf TSO and Zin's extended game and maybe buff their early game, do the opposite for Fedhas, Yred, and Beogh. I'm not convinced this is possible or desirable.
   
4. Adjust god wrath balance, as chequers suggested. Making wrath more dangerous in late game would make switching from early-game gods a more difficult decision, while making wrath less dangerous in early game could make switching gods before getting three runes a potentially interesting strategic decision instead of something you almost never want to do if not looking for extra challenge.

Personally, I think 1 or 4 are the best options.

The biggest god that I think needs a change is Oka. By far the #1 god in terms of switches away and Oka wrath kills only slightly more players than Trog wrath.

Ideas:
Anti-heroism: while wrath is active, reduce all heroism skills by 5
Anti-finesse: prevent haste improving attack speed, or make attacks take longer
Add dimensional anchor when summoning

why is god switching even a problem, it's fun

Two can play the out-of-context Sequell data game. Okawaru is by far the #1 god in terms of switches away because it's by far the #1 most popular god in the game to start worshipping in the first place:If you compare this to the god abandonment list you will see that Okawaru is not out of line on abandons per worship:Also, people buy into the Oka -> TSO meme even though it's a mediocre strategy in reality. Fedhas -> Jiyva/Zin/TSO/Lugonu/etc is much stronger, for example, and if you go by the actual strength of gods in extended, there's much more incentive to switch away from Veh/Chei/Sif/Trog/Beogh/Yred/Ely/Fedhas/Xom than there is to switch away from Okawaru. (although switching away from chei is kinda awkward because worshipping chei tends to create characters that stop functioning if they lose chei stats)
I'm also not at all convinced that wrath is a big deterrent to god switches after early game, or that it could plausibly become one without making outright character-ruining wraths like Jiyva's - and, indeed, Jiyva has one of the highest abandonment rates despite there pretty much never being a good reason to switch away from Jiyva, which suggests that player behaviour does not match optimal behaviour in the first place, meaning that trying to balance god switching based on player behaviour is a bad idea.



probably the most appropriate subject possible for my 6666th post tbh

I think there are two kinds of Cheib defectors who don't do it for another god: those who are about to get killed and dump Cheib in the hope of getting a speed boost, and those who dump him to perform better during the Orb Run.

Jiyva does not ruin your character when it's necromutated. Also slimify not working on demons greatly reduces JJ's effectiveness in extended, but I'm not sure I'd call this a good enough reason.

I kind of feel like there should fewer gods with wraths that boil down to "a bunch of somewhat annoying stuff, or I summon a pack of OOD monsters that could solo you."

If god switching is meant to be an interesting decision, I'd rather the wrath try to focus on effects that are difficult to deal with for any character (in-combat maluses, massive draining, buffing enemies), rather than simply tossing out extremely strong enemies. A pile of extremely strong enemies just means that god wrath is difficult to deal with until you have reliable escapes or you're simply too strong for the strongest summon on the table, and then it's trivial.

Having different wrath effects for every god was a bad idea in the first place. It's tons of cognitive load, currently spoilery, hard to maintain and balance, and just doesn't serve any purpose aside from theme. It would be better for abandonment to have the same penalty for every god.

Okawaru hits you with a wide-angle destruction beam, you resist, Okawaru booms out "I believe it not!"

wrath for all gods could be just getting okawaru bucklers gifted to you

Having different effects for every god was a bad idea in the first place. It's tons of cognitive load, currently spoilery, hard to maintain and balance, and just doesn't serve any purpose aside from theme. It would be better for the game to have the same mechanic for every god.

But I guess that would be too NetHacky?

yes it turns out that if you change the words in a sentence, the meaning of the sentence changes