Fedhas Rework Suggestion Thread


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Post Thursday, 22nd June 2017, 05:33

Fedhas Rework Suggestion Thread

Fedhas is simultaneously a horrible design mess and stupidly overpowered. This makes Fedhas doubly bad. Inexperienced players don't pick it because the abilities are not intuitive to use and have bad interfaces. Experienced players pick it if they're willing to trade real-life sanity for a virtually free trip through Lair and beyond with even a shitty combo. Power versus tedium tradeoffs are not good. My goal with this post is to point out the flaws in the current Fedhas abilities and suggest some ideas for a rework. Complete removal is always an option, but I expect that discussion to be more hostile and less productive.

Passive stuff
You can walk and fire through plants, which means you are encouraged to lure things to plants. All plants are friendly, which means you get to loot some oklob vaults for free. Neither of these things is particularly good for gameplay.

I suggest removing these except for plants created by the player via Fedhas abilities.

Decomposition
A 0* ability with more complexity than Okawaru's entire kit. It's basically corpse sacrifice with a different interface. You can choose to avoid the tedium of pressing aa every time something leaves a corpse by waiting to get your piety until corpses rot naturally. Also produces toadstools so that you can turn them into mushrooms (can be used in combat but is dumb and usually not worth the effort). Also turns zombies into skeletons or kills them if they can't be turned into skeletons, giving you piety but not exp.

I suggest removing this and just letting Fedhas accept kills. If the toadstool thing is necessary then it should be completely automatic.

Evolution
A 1* ability with more complexity than Okawaru's entire kit. Turns toadstools and fungi into wandering mushrooms, which stomp everything pre-lair-branches and are sometimes useful after. The mushrooms have a movement gimmick that encourages you to tell them to wait and then lure stuff back into them. This part of the ability is why Fedhas is Trog tier overpowered. Turns plants and some other stuff into oklob plants. This costs fruit instead of piety, so you can only lure an entire floor back to a 20 oklob farm that deals 150+ acid damage per turn once or twice per game.

Suggested fix: give Fedhas a passive that lets you sometimes spore enemies when you end your turn adjacent to them (probably just extra damage with no chance to confuse, but you could maybe get away with a low, invocations dependent confuse chance). Keeps the plant theme but can be balanced more easily than permanent allies and avoids the mushroom gimmicks.
Another option: You spore enemies in retaliation like mino headbutt or spines.
Another option: If the allies really have to stay, remove the movement gimmicks and make them temporary summons. Summon an invocations-dependent number of mushrooms around a foe curse-toe style (but no deathcaps). Increase the piety cost. An oklob version of this one could work at high piety for a sanctuary-level cost.

Sunlight
A combat buff that you should cast all the time because it doesn't cost piety, but won't because it's way too annoying to use that way. It also evaporates water because every Fedhas ability needs to have multiple effects for some reason. The water evaporation can be used to cross deep water in a slow and very annoying way.

Suggested fix: remove it altogether.
Another option: make it some sort of passive backlight effect when you hit enemies. Heavily overlaps with TSO and Ru.
Another option: give it a piety cost and buff it somehow. Fedhas has a ton of actives though. I don't think this one is really worth saving.

Growth
Creates plants around you. This costs fruit as a sneaky way to make oklobs cost more fruit, also so that you can pay an inventory space tax and autoinscribe your fruit with !e. The interface is terrible. Sometimes you have to cancel the ability multiple times to get plants where you want them.

Suggested fix: just spawn the whole ring and make it cost piety instead. Make the plants temporary.

Reproduction
I don't really use this one. Seems like you're encouraged to lure stuff back to corpses before using it, which is not very good design. Ballistomycetes are a dumb monster and shouldn't exist.

Suggested fix: remove it.
Another option: Rename to conjure spores and make it cost piety. This is basically a conjure ball lightning variant as a god ability though.

Rain
You can drown stuff by using it on enemies already in shallow water. An easy way to handle TRJ, among other things. Really good at restricting enemy movement or just forcing monsters to take the shallow water penalty against you. Also spawns plants sometimes, good for getting an oklob for 1 fruit less if you don't care that much about the positioning.

Suggested fix: Only make shallow water, make the water temporary. Don't spawn plants.

Other stuff
  • You lose piety when your plants die, which leads to some pretty dumb stuff with wandering mushrooms and their HD gimmick that I don't care to explain and rarely bother with in practice. This would be much cleaner if it was rolled into the up-front piety cost, though of course I would prefer completely reworking wandering mushrooms.
  • Corpse violating spells are banned. This mostly does not matter, but I guess skeletons + mushrooms are even better than just mushrooms. I could take it or leave it.
  • Fedhas wrath is really weak. It probably needs to be buffed. Fedhas -> Jiyva is extremely good in the status quo.

This post took me a long time to write and is not as complete as I would like. I am still a little unsure what the intent behind Fedhas is. The theme/flavor is strong but the design space is not clear to me. If nothing else, I hope that this thread can spark some discussion about what Fedhas is intended to do and lead to an improved Fedhas that accomplishes that goal at a reasonable power level and is more enjoyable to play.

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Post Thursday, 22nd June 2017, 05:55

Re: Fedhas Rework Suggestion Thread

even ignoring everything else wandering mushrooms being allies you get at *..... which hit for 20(with upside) is just outrageous and I'm surprised it's not been nerfed into the ground
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Post Thursday, 22nd June 2017, 07:40

Re: Fedhas Rework Suggestion Thread

Decomposition
A 0* ability with more complexity than Okawaru's entire kit. It's basically corpse sacrifice with a different interface. You can choose to avoid the tedium of pressing aa every time something leaves a corpse by waiting to get your piety until corpses rot naturally. Also produces toadstools so that you can turn them into mushrooms (can be used in combat but is dumb and usually not worth the effort). Also turns zombies into skeletons or kills them if they can't be turned into skeletons, giving you piety but not exp.

I suggest removing this and just letting Fedhas accept kills. If the toadstool thing is necessary then it should be completely automatic.


I've macroed 'aa' to 'p' specifically for Fedhas. This has periodically screwed me over with Trog when I accidentally hit 'p.'

So I can get on board with either removing this or making the toadstools automatic.

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Post Thursday, 22nd June 2017, 13:34

Re: Fedhas Rework Suggestion Thread

Making Toadstools automatic would turn Fedhas into a food-conduct god. Let's not do that before food is removed.

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Post Thursday, 22nd June 2017, 15:04

Re: Fedhas Rework Suggestion Thread

I'd been thinking about making changes to Fedhas, especially regarding Sunlight and wandering mushrooms, which feel like the most intensely problematic abilities. I think your write-up is a strong analysis of the god as a full package and includes a lot of solid recommendations. I'm not entirely sure that after making the suggested changes we end up with a god that would interest anyone, but that's at least a platform for further changes that might add up to something interesting.

Though walking through plants is goofy and leads to some odd corner cases, I think that's a fairly charming/thematic ability, and I don't particularly mind giving oklob vault loot to worshippers for free, but I don't feel strongly about keeping them.

bel

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Post Thursday, 22nd June 2017, 15:07

Re: Fedhas Rework Suggestion Thread

Hellmonk wrote:This post took me a long time to write and is not as complete as I would like. I am still a little unsure what the intent behind Fedhas is. The theme/flavor is strong but the design space is not clear to me. If nothing else, I hope that this thread can spark some discussion about what Fedhas is intended to do and lead to an improved Fedhas that accomplishes that goal at a reasonable power level and is more enjoyable to play.

It's worth starting from the goal, and then see what abilities make sense.

To me, the main idea behind Fedhas which makes sense is: "active combat God, based on plants/fungi flavour". I will try to evaluate all the abilities based on this goal.

First category: Sunlight, Reproduction and Rain are all active abilities which follow the basic goal as outlined above. Sunlight should probably cost piety to avoid making it spammable, but otherwise it's fine (though it overlaps with TSO a bit).

Second category
: Evolution exists because plants make natural allies. It has a more passive flavour. I think it's a good theme, but unfortunately the gameplay considerations are very bad: plants are naturally immobile, and immobile monsters lead to extremely tedious luring (oklobs). Wandering mushrooms are a kludge because they're fixed as well as moving, and they also lead to tedious luring. Of course, wandering mushrooms at 1* is crazy and I cannot understand why they are still a thing. The fruit cost is also weird. I believe this concept is fundamentally incoherent.

In my own view of how the latter part could be fixed, I had the following idea. If Fedhas is to have allies, give the player a dryad/druid as a permanent ally, a la Hep. The dryad will summon (temporary) plants, animals, trees (with vines) and water as needed. Summon Forest is a cool and underused spell; the dryad could cast it sometimes. If required, one can also give dryads other "cool" abilities. For instance, if the dryad is killed, it could might all the allies it created a la spriggan druid.

One could also make the dryad/druid a temporary ally, costing piety.

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Post Thursday, 22nd June 2017, 15:23

Re: Fedhas Rework Suggestion Thread

Lasty wrote:Sunlight

Even if Sunlight cost like 1-2 piety with no buff, it would be better because it would be clear that you weren't supposed to spam it. It could also just not be a thing. Or the player and allied plants could get a passive 1-radius halo.
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Post Thursday, 22nd June 2017, 16:05

Re: Fedhas Rework Suggestion Thread

So, the core components of Fedhas are:

1. Active combat abilities.

2. Terrain modification.

3. Summons.

Arguable feature is also being bad at extended.

Suggested rework:


Passive: Treefriend
All plants are friendly towards you. (Passive)
You can walk through plants, though it takes 50% longer than normal to do so. (Passive)
You can fire through all allied plant-type creatures without harming them. (Passive)

*
Active: Sow
Plants seeds in a line out from you. Seeds die when stepped on or when they are more than two spaces out of sight.
Active: Mulch
All corpses in LoS disintegrate. Damages zombies and ghouls. Seeds on top of corpses turn to fungi.

**
Active: Tanglevine
Target seed grows into a bramble. Slows enemies next to it and deals 1 damage to them if they walk past (akin to Slime's acid walls). Takes one damage per turn, and can be attacked. Wilts outside of line of sight.

***
Active: Sunlight
3x3 smite targeted. Grows all nearby seeds into generic plants. Heals plants in the area. Gives corona to enemies.

****
Active: Cultivate
3x3 smite targeted. Turns mushrooms into wandering mushrooms, tanglevines spread to 3x3, plants turn into oklobs, corpses into giant spores.

*****
Passive: Planter
Walking on seeds no longer destroys them. Randomly sows seeds around you.

******
Active: Force of Nature
Treeform, ++hp regen, seeds will instantly grow, randomly cultivates nearby plants every turn.


This rework allows for the zoning effects, but the seeds and plants dying when out of sight reduces luring. It makes use of fedhas abilities more tactical
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Post Thursday, 22nd June 2017, 18:10

Re: Fedhas Rework Suggestion Thread

To provide a different perspective: my perception was always that at least some Crawl gods are intended to shift the game feel and priorities away from the basic Crawl tabber/caster/stabber/thrower roguelike experience, including shifting the genre somewhat: i. e. Beogh "you can play a turn-based tactics game with your Crawl interface", Qazlal "you can play Zot Defence with your Crawl interface", Yredelemnul "you can play a minionmancer, Diablo II-style, with your Crawl interface", Elyvilon "you could kinda play a pacifist run with your Crawl interface before it became clear that this doesn't work at all and we gave up trying", Xom "you can play ADOM with your Crawl interface. Suddenly, a stone block falls on your head! You die", Hepliqaqa has shades of this too.

The intent behind Fedhas, for me, always felt like "You can play Tower Defence with your Crawl interface". Could we salvage that side of his?

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Post Friday, 23rd June 2017, 15:50

Re: Fedhas Rework Suggestion Thread

Could give lignification as an active ability, make all other actives available only when lignified, make all fedhas allies immobile and make them disappear when lignification ends.

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Post Friday, 23rd June 2017, 19:16

Re: Fedhas Rework Suggestion Thread

phloomp wrote:Could give lignification as an active ability, make all other actives available only when lignified, make all fedhas allies immobile and make them disappear when lignification ends.


i like it. maybe have fedhas buff lignification somehow too, like with trog and berserk? though not sure if that's needed.

another idea for an ability (perhaps in tree form only) is to give them dith's old "shadow step to plant" functionality, for some situational mobility. could be an interesting interaction with being able to spawn new plants. probably with some cost (exhaustion?) to prevent spamming it.

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Post Friday, 23rd June 2017, 20:35

Re: Fedhas Rework Suggestion Thread

So far in this thread i really like the lignification idea, the dryad ally idea, and the idea that fedhas is Crawl's "tower defense" god... But in tower defense games, balance is all about creating levels that force the player to focus on carefully deploying the right defenses at the right time, and it is possible for your defenses to be overwhelmed. Fedhas' Tower Defense would probably be too easy a TD game. Looking at Fedhas as god of tower defense seems like a good paradigm for redesign, because the genre is well-defined, so it is possible to look at tower defense games and at Crawl and to see where there is possibility for workable overlap, in a way that would actually be fun to play.

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Post Friday, 23rd June 2017, 21:37

Re: Fedhas Rework Suggestion Thread

To me it still feels like it would be cause for a whole lot of luring. Maybe if the 'turrets' had a timer... but then would you have time to set up any sort of clever pattern?

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Post Saturday, 24th June 2017, 11:56

Re: Fedhas Rework Suggestion Thread

Shard1697 wrote:To me it still feels like it would be cause for a whole lot of luring. Maybe if the 'turrets' had a timer... but then would you have time to set up any sort of clever pattern?


A radical proposition that i don't support myself: merge Fedhas and Qazlal. You have monsters constantly coming to your location (due to the noise), and varied ways to manipulate terrain into a deathtrap (okhlob turrets, clouds, shallow water, toadstools) with a piety-costly elemental summon as a desperation "nuke".
Won't fly until someone fleshes this out into a fully working design proposal, though. And while it might improve Fedhas, for many (including me) it would detract from Qazlal.

Or find a way to make monsters come to Fedhasite without luring and without stealing from Qazlal. And make it impossible to dance around terrain features, too.

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Post Saturday, 24th June 2017, 12:09

Re: Fedhas Rework Suggestion Thread

Lord Haart wrote:Or find a way to make monsters come to Fedhasite without luring and without stealing from Qazlal.


Maybe summon allied howler monkeys while in treeform, and let them walk through plants too (** or *** piety ?) also while in treeform have plants sprout from the floor with high piety giving moar plants.
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Post Sunday, 25th June 2017, 16:45

Re: Fedhas Rework Suggestion Thread

Mushrooms and Oklobs should probably be temporary. Alternatively, make them 'age' faster when out of LOS, say a withering speed similar to Toadstools.

I really like the tree form idea and making the shrooms/klobs wither shortly after tree form fades seems fine.
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Post Sunday, 25th June 2017, 18:23

Re: Fedhas Rework Suggestion Thread

A simple way to handle lignification could be "all abilities always trigger lignification; as long as they are active, you remain lignified."
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