The Tavern

Especially after the new mutation potions, Zin incentivizes behavior counter to the spirit of the god. Specifically:

--) it's smart to convert to Zin when you have a mutation set you want to preserve.
--) if you're paranoid about avoiding mutation, you often have reason not to spend piety with Zin, since you'll compromise your full mutation immunity.

To counter these, I propose the following modifications.

--) if you have any mutations while worshipping Zin, you cannot gain piety: you are too impure. Instead, Zin calls upon you to purify yourself through devotion. This works as follows: all piety you would gain is instead added to a special counter. When this counter passes a certain threshold, you lose a random mutation. This continues until all your mutations are gone.
--) Zin no longer provides the one-time ability to remove all mutations at high piety, since this is now unnecessary.

This seems like a good answer to the question I raised outthread. I like it better than my idea of making remove mutations repeatable, since you can't then cheese it by keeping a good mutation set locked in, as luckless points out.

Interesting idea; however, it might be better if this kicked in at something like 3*, and/or worked like a gift timeout (the "gift" being mutation removal). Getting no piety at all while mutated sounds a bit harsh.

If I understand this proposal correctly, Malmutate becomes for Zin-ites a piety time-out? What about already temporary malmutations from wretched stars?

I second the idea of using the gift timeout. It uses existing mechanics, and can easily be phrased in such a way as to make that clear ("Zin will gift his followers with purity of body" or something similar). IMO it's almost always preferable to use existing mechanics if possible, in order to decrease cognitive load.

Yes, using gift time-out is perfect

Yeah, curing mutations as god "gifts" sounds kind of like a "oh yeah, of course Zin should work this way" kind of situation. I particularly like that it makes Zin the god of "you don't have mutations" rather than the god of "you get to keep your beneficial mutation set."

I like the idea, but if I may bikeshed just a little:

Zin's mutation removal gift should prioritize Evolution first, bad muts second, and good muts last.

Zin doesn't like any mutations, so they should all be equally fair game.

My reasoning: He should hate the evolution mutation the most since it gives you more mutations on an ongoing basis.

After that, even though Zin's end goal is to remove all the player's muts, he's not random like Xom. He should do the player a solid by curing the most harmful muts first.

So wait, do you have to be free of mutations before you can gain Zin piety in this instance? And does he still provide rMut?
Zin is still probably one of the best gods with or without the change, so I can live with it.

I agree with "Evolution first", but other than that, surely at random (except logically also rMut should be last)? Zin hates all mutations, so would never admit that some of yours might be preferable to others.

As I imagined it, yes to both. But maybe the gift timeout version--where you do still get piety--is better; idk. Probably the only way to know for sure is to test one and see if it works in practice.

It may be worth noting that, with Zin's rMut still in place, the piety freeze will only kick in if (a) you begin worshipping Zin while mutated, (b) you get mutated via contamination (which Zin doesn't protect against), or (c) a malmutate effect gets through your Zin rMut.

Generally, (c) will only happen in Zot and extended, and then relatively rarely and innocously: since in these cases you'll presumably have high piety, your Zin rMut will be excellent and you'll probably be able to bear the effective piety cost of losing the mutation. On the other hand, (a) and (b) are more punitive, but perhaps appropriately. Players who would want to worship Zin while mutated would likely have a bunch of bad mutations they can't get rid of; it makes sense to make them pay. As for (b), Zin's mutation removal should not be a license to cast a lot of risky spells and let yourself get contaminated; a piety cost prevents this.

Another approach would be to no longer offer rMut, and clear mutations relatively quickly. Players can still have a "pure" character but do not get to completely ignore LoS positioning against malmutators.

I mean, it would heavily disfavor switching to Zin unless you were only doing it to clear mutations. Granted, I have never switched to Zin because I'm already pretty sure I'm cool with a Zin game as soon as I see the altar. But how would this affect piety sharing between the good gods? If I had 6* with Ely and swapped to Zin would I lose X mutations and start with 0* or what?

Your piety would be whatever it normally is after a switch. You wouldn't lose any mutations immediately. As you gain more piety, it would be applied to the gift timeout in the usual fashion.

Zin hates randomness, so instead of removing mutations randomly, they should be removed in alphabetical order or something.

Or, more sensible, mutations you've had for longest get removed first.

Yeah this is why you never know what Recite will do.

I think we should distinguish between chaos (xom) and simple randomness that is used constantly in crawl, especially combat. Otherwise we're at "Zin hates combat because its random how much damage you do each turn".

So Zin choosing randomly which mutation to remove isn't chaotic, but simply that Zin's decision about which mutation to remove first is inscrutable to the player. It's enough to know that Zin will reward his loyal followers by gradually purifying them of all mutations. Praise Zin!

Edit: I changed my mind about Zin removing bad mutations first. Because then the Zin optimal strategy in extended would be to, every time you have only good muts left, go play with a Neqoxec until it gives you a couple bad muts (and possibly some more good ones). Gradually you would build up a stack of only good muts. However, Zin should still remove Evolution first.

Also I think that, instead of disliking new potion of mutation, Zin should modify its effect to only do the mutation removal part.

That last bit makes sense. Otherwise it gets really awkward to deal with bad mutations under Zin.

Why? They are removed simply for gaining piety(IE basically doing anything) under this change.

Alternate idea: Zin suppresses all mutations on worship and prevents 100% of new ones.

Is having Zin be a drive-through mutation-wash for TSO worshippers a feature or a bug?

I'd prefer the gifting of cure mutation, requiring a time investment in the god, than moving the current one-time 6* ability to a repeatable 0* ability.

Re evolution, can't we just say that Zin automatically and silently suppresses it? Just add to the select-a-mutation function a line that rerolls if ^Zin and evolution is chosen. Zinites will never gain it, and Zin removes it if present when you begin to worship him. It's rare enough and the PC has no control over getting it, so that latter isn't broken.

... or just let evolution play out normally. At some point, Zin will cure it or it'll run out by itself and Zin would cure all the resulting mutations anyway.

To be more accurate, dealing with them in a timely fashion becomes awkward. Granted, most bad mutations you can just ignore, but there are a few of them that can get you killed if you're not careful. Although Zin abilities should help keep you alive as well, at the cost of taking longer to get the mutation removed.

Mutation removal on the gift timeout sounds awesome. I'd say the design should leave the player somewhat incentivized to avoid malmutation because a) they don't want to have to live with a bad mutation for, say, a couple dungeon levels (or more if they're not already pure), and b) it should have a noticeable (but not crippling) impact on their ability to spam piety spenders.

That'd be much more interesting than "we can now ignore the mutation part of the game". As a Zin worshipper you should *strive* for purity, not be all "do your worst, chaos, Zin will fix it."

Re: evolution, I'm with njvack, don't special-case it. A Zin worshipper with Evolution potentially has a serious piety problem. Totally flavorful. They can use Cure Mut

Cure Mut no longer exists, and is instead now a part of potions of mutation—which Zin still doesn't like. That's why people are talking about Zin mutation mechanics all of a sudden.

So, ah, does anyone know if anything is being done about this?

It would be good to get a fix in before 0.20 drops imo. I made a variation of the gift timeout version for hellcrawl that could probably be stolen and cleaned up a little if the devs want it; the implementation is not that complicated.