Balance Kiku's Corpse Delivery

[Oroborous]

In the current state of crawl where depth level enemies appear in dungeon Kiku needs to be addressed ASAP with his corpse delivery. Ill submit two glaring examples that happened to me yesterday.

1) while fighting a 8 headed hydra and a rakshasa in D12 kiku thought it was funny to deliver to me one kobold corpse and I was at 5 piety.

2) while fighting on D15 I use corpse delivery and he gave me three shapeshifter corpses, what the hell do you suppose the god of death was doing? you cant raise those as zombies and you damn sure cant butcher them for chunks.

I need to ascend the necro background and so far its a complete let down because Kiku wasn't rebalanced when some "genius" thought the game should be harder and introduced depths level spawns to dungeon a while back.

If nothing else base corpse delivery on Necromancy skill instead of branches, because this just isn't acceptable.

[Hellmonk]

Kiku is like a top 6 god so imo if you were going to rebalance it you would have to make corpse delivery weaker (tho really the problem is not corpse drop so much as it is the skeleton/corpse rot spells). I don't know why shapeshifter corpses exist at all though.

[bel]

To OP:

Shapeshifters should just not leave corpses. It's not like we're playing nethack where your pet dragon eats a chameleon corpse and turns into a sewer rat.

The issue you outline with corpse delivery in Dungeon is due to the fact that Dungeon spawns have a hilariously wide range. Did you know that adders and quokkas can spawn on D:12 (see mon-pick-data.h)? Since Kiku corpse delivery works like shadow creatures, it can produce very amusing results.

Corpse delivery is still very strong, so I doubt that "balancing corpse delivery" would go in the direction of buffing it, as you seem to suggest.

[TheMeInTeam]

Yeah I'd put Kiku in top 5, not sure exactly where I'd rate between the best gods because they're all really good.

I do agree that the game generating consistently pointless corpses like shapeshifter is silly. At least with spiders you can raise dead, even though you can't animate their non-existent skeletons.

Games where you don't get raise dead vs games where you do with Kiku are pretty different though. Having to physically walk to each corpse is a significant downside.

[stormdragon]

If nothing else base corpse delivery on Necromancy skill instead of branches

I believe it is currently based on both.

[petercordia]

I think Corpse Delivery is strong enough atm.
I played a Ds^Kiku recently, where I skipped Lair, and was totally carried by kiku's level-appropriate allies. Corpse Delivery is so powerful it's ok that sometimes you need to use it multiple times to compensate a fluke. (Simulacrum can also fluke.) Ideally you need to use it a few turns before you're actually in danger. (Though I can't say I did that all the time. That just makes me a suboptimal player.)
Sadly I died to Khufu in Crypt:1 https://underhound.eu/crawl/morgue/pete ... 192535.txt

[Vaamat]

It does seem like you could reduce the variance and reduce the number of frustrating outcomes, without buffing it on average.

Also, how come the corpses are based on present location instead of simply HD or something?