The Tavern

I'm on fire today!

I heard several times from people that are considerably better at this game than me that certain types of enemies (Undead? Demons? I'm not sure) are fair game even when you are under the effect of Ely's divine protection.

I'm pretty sure being nigh-unkillable while still being able to attack is the textbook definition of broken.

Too bad to test this myself. We gotta take the dank and mysterious pro's words for it.

This is not an attempt to nerf Ely. I'm sincerely trying to reconcile with it. So out of genuine care for Ely and game health, I don't want this unthematic and exploitable cheese on Ely.

I just tested it by creating a character in 0.19.0, turning on Wizard mode, granting worship of El, granting max piety, activating Divine Protection, creating a hydra zombie, and meleeing it (entire process took less than a minute). I was able to fight it while protected, and I was killed by it while protected. Doesn't seem broken to me.

...you can still be killed when under Divine Protection? The wiki's wrong then. (Breaking news!)

Yeah, my current understanding is the chance of the protection status effect actually cancelling damage is proportional to your piety, and each time it actually cancels damage, you lose a good chunk of piety, so after the first cancel, you could be killed by a lucky hit. In my test, I died with ***** remaining.

So, against most enemies, by using this ability, you're trading a turn and the option to defend yourself for what amounts to an increase in the chance of proc'ing El's passive protection. Even against undead, it's unwise to rely on this ability while fighting them, because in Crawl, if you depend on favorable RNG to survive, sooner or later you're going to die.

That's a bad example because a hydra attacks a lot in a very short period of time. And hydra zombies aren't threatening by the time you run into them (Hell).

Still, the fact that you can be killed while under the effects of Divine Protection, even at high piety levels, is enough to make relying on it to keep you alive while fighting a risky proposition at best. Attempting to exploit this feature seems suicidal, so in my mind, it's not broken.

I suppose there are many situations in which you could potentially be hit 8 or 9 times in succession (torment->smites/hellfire/standard melee). I didn't actually think to use divine protection in the crypt, hell, or pan, but considering Ely's other abilities are fucking amazing, them in conjunction with this could be considered cheese.

Elyvilon doesn't actually give a shit if you break a zombie or a demon. They're not living things.

The solution here IMO would be to fix the description of divine protection rather than to change its effect. It really isn't broken at all; live-saving doesn't heal you, it just averts the killing blow and takes away 21-40(!!) piety. If you have less than 130 piety, there's a chance for attacks to get past protection and kill you.

I vote for a color-changing status light when protection is active, showing whether or not it's certain to save you (maybe green and yellow, or blue and cyan).