The Tavern

I dislike current lichform: you have to keep recasting it, and its disadvantages (except confusion) are trivially fixed by canceling the form. I also think it trivializes some interesting threats, while being a newbie trap.
If it's made permanent, it becomes a lot more interesting, imo, giving that your making a significant sacrifice (no more potions, death's door, bjor's, SoB, etc) in order to get powerful benefits (rTorm, etc). You can cast it a lot earlier, if you're willing to endure some hefty necro miscasts. This will make it viable in a 3-runner (if you really think you want to. Why would you?). Furthermore, it makes a lot more sense flavor-wise.

As a side note, it occurred to me that making statue form permanent may also be an interesting nerf for similar reasons, and make it less tedious. The ac bonus could be dynamically dependent on your current spell power level.

please discuss

This doesn't seem significantly different from removing the spell altogether, since it would become literally never worth casting.

Also, why only those two transformations? (The same argument could be made for dragon and hydra forms arguably for blade hands, ice form and spider form as well)

Also it makes form interaction weird, does those form (s) being permanant prevent you from casting transformation spells at all? Can you cast ice form and negate lich form advantages/disadvantages? Do you create some kind of hybrid form? Can i become a dragon+statue+lich form?

(Presently, if you didnt already know this, casting one transformation cancels the old one)

Sure for statue form i admit it may be weird. It was mostly an afterthought.

As for lichform,
- Some people may find the sacrifice is worth the innate resistances. If the consensus is that it becomes too weak, then buff it a bit to compensate.
- Once cast, you'd become undead, therefore unable to mutate further.

pedritolo wrote:Sure for statue form i admit it may be weird. It was mostly an afterthought.

As for lichform,
- Some people may find the sacrifice is worth the innate resistances. If the consensus is that it becomes too weak, then buff it a bit to compensate.
- Once cast, you'd become undead, therefore unable to mutate further.

So you have to train a crap ton in a spell school to get access to a spell which negates most of that spell school? Ick.

Siegurt wrote:
pedritolo wrote:Sure for statue form i admit it may be weird. It was mostly an afterthought.

As for lichform,
- Some people may find the sacrifice is worth the innate resistances. If the consensus is that it becomes too weak, then buff it a bit to compensate.
- Once cast, you'd become undead, therefore unable to mutate further.

So you have to train a crap ton in a spell school to get access to a spell which negates most of that spell school? Ick.

And actually it already negates some of the best necromancy spells, so a spell which permantly breaks your access to most of the spells you would want to cast from the two schools you need to invest a ton in to cast it... double ick.

Siegurt wrote:
Siegurt wrote:
pedritolo wrote:Sure for statue form i admit it may be weird. It was mostly an afterthought.

As for lichform,
- Some people may find the sacrifice is worth the innate resistances. If the consensus is that it becomes too weak, then buff it a bit to compensate.
- Once cast, you'd become undead, therefore unable to mutate further.

So you have to train a crap ton in a spell school to get access to a spell which negates most of that spell school? Ick.

And actually it already negates some of the best necromancy spells, so a spell which permantly breaks your access to most of the spells you would want to cast from the two schools you need to invest a ton in to cast it... double ick.

Yeah I see your point. I suppose one could make it a necro-only school, but that would only solve half the problem.

For what it's worth, I would awfully like to see necromut changed somewhat to make it more useful; I also like the concept of it being a permanent thing. I made the (very widely-panned) suggestion to make this Yred's capstone ability/cost once, back in the day.

I still think there's potential there but it should probably only look a little bit like lichform (eg, probably doesn't block at top-tier necro lifesaver spells, and maybe not potions, and have some more useful benefits* than rTorment, rN+++, some AC, and drain UC**). Some kind of "you are some kind of hybrid undead/living thing" with vuln to holy and dispel but some good buffs might work. If I am feeling like typing more later I have some ideas that people will likely hate ;-)

My reading of Tavern over the years suggests it's best if proposals start out overpowered (it seems to be way easier for people to imagine something being weaker than imagining it being stronger) and to have relatively few, straightforward effects.

* yes I am aware of the hunger thing; mutation immunity is currently probably a net negative
** why does lichform only give {drain} to unarmed melee when wights get it for all melee? Or is the wiki lying to me?

Well yes, permanent lichform sounds like a good end gift by a god.

You could change voluntary form unravelling to take multiple turns, or you could change forms to be uncancellable.

Ok so here's something like what might be interesting to me as a God capstone:

Let's say we make this be Yred, because Yred is the god of permanent allies (which are all kinds of annoying) and "also you get a slightly better animate dead" which is weird because Animate Dead already exists.

On joining, living species irrevocably become partially undead*. You gain:
* rHoly-
* vuln to dispel undead
* excommunication by good gods

This is all pretty unimportant in the early game. Because you're only partially undead:
* You can use potions normally
* You can mutate normally
* You hunger normally
* borg's and ddoor work normally

Piety gain remains the same.

Abilities:

* Draining Essence: Adds a {drain} branded aux attack to melee. Procs more often with increasing piety.
* Passive rN+
** Pain Mirror: As now
*** Call Undeads: Invocations-dependent summoning the stuff Yred gifts now. Abjurable. Long-ish (probably like TSO summons) timeout. Costs MP and piety.
*** Passive rN++
**** Drain Life: As now
***** Enslave Soul: Mostly as now (maybe cheaper piety?). However, instead of becoming a permanent ally, enslaved souls enter the pool of undeads that can show up with Call Undead. You're pretty likely to get one when you Call, if there's one to get. If an enslaved monster is killed / abjured, it's lost forever. There's a chance (50%? 25%?) that the monster is lost when it times out. You're supposed to enslave a lot. Capturing allies is fun, keeping them alive sucks.
***** Passive rN+++, torment immunity.
****** Nothing new

Other things:

Replaces necromutation.

Undead species can worship, their bonuses and restrictions don't change. Dunno about gargoyles.

On abandonment, characters do not lose the partially-undead status.

*: contrast with "all-undead" in which case all you can do is go through the clothes looking for loose gold pieces

EDIT: Made rN and torment immunity god passives, so you don't take and immediately drop the god for those things.

Lichform is semi-permanent and level 6 in hellcrawl, so I went ahead and used it in a recent game. But it was bad, so I turned it off.

I am mystified that people think it is important for this level 8 (!!) spell to have serious downsides such that it is a problem you can manage them by turning it off. The problem isn't that the downsides can be trivialized by additional tedious player interaction. It's that the downsides exist at all. Level 8 for two schools, one of which is otherwise useless for the vast majority of characters, is a pretty big drawback.

njvack wrote:Ok so here's something like what might be interesting to me as a God capstone:

Let's say we make this be Yred, because Yred is the god of permanent allies (which are all kinds of annoying) and "also you get a slightly better animate dead" which is weird because Animate Dead already exists.

On joining, living species irrevocably become partially undead*. You gain:
* Torment immunity
* rN+++
* rHoly-
* vuln to dispel undead
* excommunication by good gods

This is all pretty unimportant in the early game, so may as well give it straight-off so it feels like something happens. Because you're only partially undead:
* You can use potions normally
* You can mutate normally
* You hunger normally
* borg's and ddoor work normally

Piety gain remains the same.

Abilities:

* Draining Essence: Adds a {drain} branded aux attack to melee. Procs more often with increasing piety.
** Pain Mirror: As now
*** Call Undeads: Invocations-dependent summoning the stuff Yred gifts now. Abjurable. Long-ish (probably like TSO summons) timeout. Costs MP and piety.
**** Drain Life: As now
***** Enslave Soul: Mostly as now (maybe cheaper piety?). However, instead of becoming a permanent ally, enslaved souls enter the pool of undeads that can show up with Call Undead. You're pretty likely to get one when you Call, if there's one to get. If an enslaved monster is killed / abjured, it's lost forever. There's a chance (50%? 25%?) that the monster is lost when it times out. You're supposed to enslave a lot. Capturing allies is fun, keeping them alive sucks.
****** Nothing new

Other things:

Replaces necromutation.

Undead species can worship, their bonuses and restrictions don't change. Dunno about gargoyles.

On abandonment, characters do not lose the partially-undead status.

*: contrast with "all-undead" in which case all you can do is go through the clothes looking for loose gold pieces

I understand the idea of making it permanent springs from OP's proposal, but doesn't making it permanent kind of make it a bit powerful to just kinda... pick it up lategame and switch back to whatever god? Torment immunity and rN+++ seems to be worth being vulnerable to dispel undead as long as you don't get murderized by Bennu or tzitzimitl or holy pan (also, does Bennu's explosion heal you?), and Yred's wrath doesn't seem particularly onerous.

Option b: remove mummy, replace with lich (a strong undead caster with an innate necromancy bonus that cannot drink potions).

Option c: Rename lichform to mummyform.

milski wrote:I understand the idea of making it permanent springs from OP's proposal, but doesn't making it permanent kind of make it a bit powerful to just kinda... pick it up lategame and switch back to whatever god? Torment immunity and rN+++ seems to be worth being vulnerable to dispel undead as long as you don't get murderized by Bennu or tzitzimitl or holy pan (also, does Bennu's explosion heal you?), and Yred's wrath doesn't seem particularly onerous.

Good call, those need to be god passives for this to work -- whether it's powerful or not, it's dumb. Editing.

njvack wrote:*** Call Undeads: Invocations-dependent summoning the stuff Yred gifts now. Abjurable. Long-ish (probably like TSO summons) timeout. Costs MP and piety.
***** Enslave Soul: Mostly as now (maybe cheaper piety?). However, instead of becoming a permanent ally, enslaved souls enter the pool of undeads that can show up with Call Undead. You're pretty likely to get one when you Call, if there's one to get. If an enslaved monster is killed / abjured, it's lost forever. There's a chance (50%? 25%?) that the monster is lost when it times out. You're supposed to enslave a lot. Capturing allies is fun, keeping them alive sucks.

I like the proposal, especially the above approach making the allies impermanent but the Call ability itself enhanceable. It fits the "undead lord" vibe much better to relish growing the army while not caring about the ultimate fate of individual minions.

Re: Necromutation -- this spell is why I won the game the first two times, many years ago. I never learned Bjorg's or DD anyway in a 3-rune game because I felt I needed the slots for attack spells, but I could get Necromut below severe-miscast level castable with 2xWizardry. That protected me from Torment which I didn't know how to handle back then, and let me organize my gear around providing benefits other than rN. As a relatively inexperienced player who was very rarely getting to Zot and then getting killed by things I hadn't developed a strategy for, it had a role.

mattlistener wrote:
njvack wrote:Re: Necromutation -- this spell is why I won the game the first two times, many years ago. I never learned Bjorg's or DD anyway in a 3-rune game because I felt I needed the slots for attack spells, but I could get Necromut below severe-miscast level castable with 2xWizardry. That protected me from Torment which I didn't know how to handle back then, and let me organize my gear around providing benefits other than rN. As a relatively inexperienced player who was very rarely getting to Zot and then getting killed by things I hadn't developed a strategy for, it had a role.

I also had my first win way back then with a lich form fire stormer. I was a total noob and read badwiki alot and even read the guides there. If the role of necromut is to be a newbie trap, its safe to say we could get rid of it. Even if we disregard the cost of training, the spell has harsher negative effects than its potential benefits.

Here's what I would do with Necromutate:

1) Make it permanently active like deflect missiles until the player decides to end the transformation. This ends recast annoyance.
2) Act like quaffing a potion of cancellation upon transformation into lichform to clear magical status effects so potions, etc. would be wasted used as buffs prior to transforming. This is a power creep offset since less mana would be used casting Necromutate overall, and enforces the design that liches don't seem to be supposed to be compatible with quaffing potions.

The problem with the spell that I don't have a solution for is that I absolutely hate transmutations as a spell school, and every time I want necromutate, it feels like I have this ball and chain of a spell school I have to train up that I don't intend to hardly ever use except for just one one spell. Sadly, it's one of three viable (without massive pain) solutions to cope with damage from mummy curses besides TSO and Makhleb life on kill. Torment is also too strong still imo. It very much so trivializes massive defenses of all types other than undead status and gods which recoop life quickly, and of course the all mighty gargoyles, but I digress.

svendre wrote:Sadly, it's one of three viable (without massive pain) solutions to cope with damage from mummy curses besides TSO and Makhleb life on kill. Torment is also too strong still imo.

I don't think Torment is too strong at all, there's just too much of it in Tomb.

Oops, I should have said four methods for mummy curses, I forgot to mention Kiku. The trouble with Kiku is that he works with necromancy, and grants necronomicon with necromutate... so he kind of deprecates the value of either his torment resistance if you use necromutate or are undead, or one of the primary uses of necromancy: necromutate. Since you don't get life on kill like TSO or Mak, in the updated tomb you now have more issues taking damage from bennu and dispel undead if you do go in as undead. So, really being undead with Mahkleb is possibly even better than anything unless you need a lot of incoming mana.

This is really for advice, but you basically always want Kiku's pain weapon blessing. I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest necromutation is the least useful necro spell. Having kiku means you care even less about torment immunity.

I think the feature of having all buffs and transmutations being a toggle that reduce your max MP while active is the best solution.

It is implemented in some crawl forks.

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Proposal : make lichform permanent

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