The Tavern

Working off wrath in Abyss 1 because you wanted to switch to a late game god is dumb and nobody likes it.

Instead, wrath should last forever until you offer a rune at the altar of the angry god, at which point it ends immediately. This makes 15 rune runs harder, and avoids something annoying for people who don't care about score.

I guess you mean god wrath lasts until you pick up a rune?

This would unfortunately be very gameable. You could clear a rune floor but not pick up the rune, for example.

No, you have to give a rune to the god. Then you don't have the rune anymore.

Ah.

I don't think it's good design to have god wrath last either 100 turns or forever.

So, the goal is to make late-game god switches less annoying... but also stop people from making a late game god switch if they want 15 runes, which is generally the only non-jiyva case where you should really be swapping gods?? Doesn't this suggestion invalidate it's own reason for existence?

This only makes sense in a context where you're playing for an amount of runes greater than 3 but less than all of them, which I don't think is terribly common. Don't people usually either stop at 3 or go for all 15?

Just save Elf for after you do the god swap. Most characters ready to drop their god for a late-game choice can handle Elf just fine. (Granted, some gods have really dangerous or long lasting wrath, but that's a different problem.)

Not me, because extended is a bit boring so it's fun to pick up some extra runes without having to commit yourself to getting all 15. For example, my current MuHu of Hep has aimed for 12 runes from the start.

Then again, I never switch gods anyway, so this does not concern me. So I guess I shouldn't have posted at all. But I guess I just like posting :)

People go for 15 runes because rune #15 isn't any harder than rune #6. I think there should be more difficulty levels as your rune count increases, and this proposal helps accomplish that.

How about wrath lasting until you get a rune from a branch you haven't entered before abandoning? Would probably require some sort of exclusion for Jiyva though

Abyss:1 aka "Easier than old Abyss" is a newer feature, so that should be scrutinized as the root cause of the issue before the much-iterated-upon wrath system.

Maybe being in the Abyss during wrath should make the Abyss harder? (Obviously I mean harder than Abyss+wrath is now.)

"Give up one thing you're supposed to bring to the surface as the price of changing gods" seems like a bad idea to me.

Don't have a wrath timer at all. Make wrath permanent.

An ideal solution would be to remove all grindable counters from infinite levels. Nobody would grind in Abyss or Pan if you didn't make progress toward some in-game goal by doing so. If you get a wrath counter that would have decremented your wrath in these locations, simply don't decrement your wrath. Also remove xp from monster kills in this location, which is actually an even more important fix than anything to do with god-switching or divine wrath, and also remove randomly generated loot. Problem solved, nobody grinds Abyss or Pan, and all character builds no longer converge to the same tiny subset of builds as the postgame stretches out.

I suppose it would make sense if godly wrath was unable to touch you in the Abyss, actually. Except for Lugonu, of course. I could support a change like that.

Then you can't scum Abyss:1 for wrath timeouts. Just include a message when you enter the abyss saying as much, so no one is hit unawares. "_____'s Wrath cannot reach you in the abyss, and will be waiting for when you depart."

I would be more on the field of offering runes as a way to save yourself. Like "sacrifice a rune to be teleported to D:1".

I'd be all for making working wrath off harder. I like the idea of making it permanent or requiring something that isn't infinitely farmable (killing corpse-leaving monsters?). But the proposal of "sacrifice a rune" means that either people never switch because it's not a "real" 15 rune game, or people always switch after rune... 2? 3? because there's effectively no cost and nobody switches gods before their first rune anyway.

Perma-wrath, I dig it. Simple. Maybe making activations somewhat less frequent on average to compensate?

You couldn't game this by, say, mucking about with trash mobs until you get a wrath action, before tackling a boss monster, to make it less likely you'll get one during that encounter -- right?

Under current wrath mechanics, switching gods is mostly a questionable tactic. With either of the suggested permanent penalties it would go to questionable to "never worthwhile", why not simply remove the option to switch gods at all? It would accomplish the same result.

I don't think I've ever switched a god in my entire time playing DCSS. That being said, I think this is a terrible idea. For one thing, Jivya. Removing the ability to swap gods will effectively remove Jivya from the pantheon, as you're exceedingly unlikely to find an altar early and even if you do, you'll probably die due to being starved of gear/XP. Jivya is explicitly a lategame god and removing the ability to swap gods means that you either have to just go without one of the strongest sources of power for any character for a large section of the game, or else you just never follow Jivya, ever.

Following Yred would mean that you just give up all hope of being able to clear extended, and this decision was made for you on, say, D:4.

Following Fedhas means you're gonna die because Fedhas isn't all that good and you don't have an option to pick someone else later. You'll just be feebly throwing oklobs and wandering mushrooms at Pan Lords.

The piety-sharing/non-hostility of the good pantheon becomes a moot point.

Following Trog permanently locks you out of learning any magic, ever, whatsoever.

You see where I'm going with this. Wrath is a good mechanic (but may be able to be tweaked in certain ways), forced fidelity isn't, IMO.

I think the comment was more of a hypothetical question, aka "doing this would make switching gods so terrible you may as well not even be allowed to swap anymore".

Because, yeah, even if Wrath was turned down, why would you ever swap gods if it was PERMANENT? If you wanted to go extended you'd be far better off just picking an extended-friendly god from the start instead of insisting on choosing Yred and dealing with his wrath -forever-. (and as someone just commented, it would result in other lame play, like making sure to trigger Wrath before doing a boss or something so it doesn't happen during. You can't just remove wrath timeouts, because that'd be awful.)

Wrath could use some tweaks, but it doesn't need a major overhaul. If you want to stop scumming wrath timeouts on Abyss then just make Abyss exclude god wrath until you leave.

Yes, that's what I meant.

I just wanted to address some isolated parts of the post,because I feel there are some mistaken views on extended and what gods truly provide to the player character:

Not really, you can just go godless until lair:5 or lair:6(and if the altar doesn't spawn there, then worship Jiyva after 2 runes, by finding his altar in the slime branch ending.) Playing with an atheist character isn't too hard, especially if it's just down to late lair or post-2 runes.

And, I don't think swapping to Jiyva lategame has ever been a relevant strategy. Swapping to TSO in the lategame to have an easy game in extended, sure, but Jiyva has never come up as a relevant god to swap to, for me anyway.

Most of time, I even forget that Jiyva exists, let alone considering abandoning my god for Jiyva.

If I swap gods, it's usually only on octopodes, and I usually go Yred -> Makhleb, because Yred forbids statue form,, and his wrath is pitiful anyway(otherwise, I would just stick with him.)

also this:


Not really, by extended I feel god choice really doesn't matter too much, unless you have a heal-on-kills gods. If you've survived to 3 runes, then you'll likely have built upon a ton of consumables, and a fairly strong character.

It's not like you even have to kill the Pan or Hell lords, you just need to get their rune, and then dash away.

I recommend trying to play an entirely atheist game(without being a demigod) to get a sense of how much god choice actually matters. I personally feel god choice gets less and less relevant the further you go into the game.

Yeah, no one has ever got 15 runes with Yred or Fedhas, sure.

Btw. I also have never switched gods but have won one Jiyva game (HuMo):

My only long Jivvy game was done as Vajrapani says: atheist Orc until the bottom of the Lair. It worked well, and I died in Zot:5 out of carelessness.

Fair enough, you make a good point, but if we start trying to balance Crawl around !greaterplayers then regular people aren't going to want to keep playing it.

I typed up a huge, essay-length reply, hit preview after it was all done, and lost it because I took so long writing it that I was auto-logged out

alright forget the careful explanations here were the problems I saw and my proposals



PROBLEM: Gold/exp/skills/consumables can be scummed infinitely in infinite areas. (zig is fine though since it's hard to scum by design) Once you can safely grind abyss you can be lv27 max skills and with an arbitrarily large stockpile of consumables, which functionally trivializes all areas that come after abyss:1 in difficulty. No one would probably sit there and grind up that far in a normal game, but even a half-hour of scumming can have noticeable benefits for a character.

PROPOSAL: For abyss and pan implement an exp/item cap. The exp cap could have some message when reached, and should be calibrated to be near the regular amount of exp you'd get if just playing through the branch with no scumming. The counter for the item cap makes the most sense to be tied to items seen, and after it's hit no items or only terrible items spawn. Limit for this should also be around the usual amount of items you'd see if going through that area normally. This doesn't fully solve the problem since you could still scum a bit to hit the cap, but at least is heavily lessens the issue.



PROBLEM: God wrath is intended to be tied to progress so that x% of your overall dungeon adventure is harder because you decided to leave that god. Prior to 0.14 the progression metric that attempted to ensure this was turncount, which could obviously be gamed because as much as food would like to try to rectify this, turns do not necessitate progress currently. Then the progression metric changed to exp which is a lot better but you can still scum by saving pockets of exp or going to your current safest area until it's over like abyss. It's also obviously in your best interests to stay as safe as possible when under wrath because it can be very dangerous in the wrong situation.

PROPOSAL: Wrath has to be tied to a more apt progression metric. Both turncount and exp kind of fail to ensure that notable progress is being made - progress being advancement to the next area or next challenge instead of abusing older/easier parts of the dungeon. Unfortunately there isn't a way right now to easily determine if the player's making this forward progress or not in a way that can't be gamed, but I had two suggestions that might get closer than exp. I think a better solution is out there but it would be a larger redesign than the stuff I'm proposing here.
1) Strong Monsters - penance counter only decrements when a sufficiently tough monster is seen/killed, but not counting infinite area monsters.
2) Floor Tiles - assign some 'threat level' to each floor of the dungeon and its branches, commensurate with its actual intended difficulty. when triggering wrath, find the player's current highest threat among their floors visited. (to avoid players getting screwed by shafts or diving strategies, probably do some averaging among the top few floors seen and their %cleared). Anyway, once a relative threat is determined, the penance counter only decrements when seeing new floor tiles of a higher or equal threat level. Maybe remove the decrement in infinite areas too, depending on how it works out. This would probably be a pain to implement and pin down but it avoids creating a stash of unseen tiles in an easier area or something like that.

After this happened to me once I started to always copy the text to the clipboard before previewing...

If the actual intention is to tie the wrath timeout to dungeon progress (I am not sure it is), why not tie it to literal progression in the dungeon? So you'd get some wrath points removed for entering new levels for the first time. For these purposes I'd call each Abyssal "depth" 1 level (so a max of 5) and I'd call each unique pan level a "level" as well as the generic "regular" pan level (so a max of 7) Yes, it encourages dungeon diving, but diving for wrath removal sounds more interesting to me than "scum non-hard creatures, in a decently safe area, for wrath removal" or the older "Wait around in a safe area for wrath removal"

The problem there is that diving floors to remove wrath is unintuitive and also allows you to artificially remove wrath quite fast, compared to actually clearing floors.

You'd just dive a few branches and then come back up to return to normal play

As far as I understand, the perceived "gameable" wrath problem is that by the time you switch gods, your character is already endgame level, and there are sufficiently many less-risky places to get XP. I suppose the prototypical example is working off Oka->TSO wrath in Crypt.

There are a couple of ways to look at this argument.
(a) Oka wrath in Crypt is actually pretty dangerous -- last I checked, it was the top killer in Crypt.
(b) If you can survive God wrath on an endgame-level character, you can win the game anyway.

IMO, switching Gods exists to facilitate some kinds of players and/or challenges. If people want to play like that, let them do so. If some God's wrath is too weak, it can be buffed (I believe Fedhas -> Jiyva is rather tame, at least it was the last time I tried it).