Ultimate Nemelex Fix

[snow]

1. Sacrificing items causes glow and can mutate you. Therefore all sacrifices require risk.
2. Different items give different amounts of piety and glow... so you wouldn't sacrifice everything you find since it's not worth the risk.
3. Amulets of faith and resist mutation can always be balanced later on.

The end result would be cause players to think before they sacrifice something. Even if it's only a bit of glow for low value items resting off the glow still has a food cost. Glow could also cause rot, stat loss, and such if mutations are too narrow of a cost. On a grand scale it would be nice if there was more to mutations than just curing them (at the moment +1 strength is seen as a bad mutation because it makes other mutations harder to cure) but that's another issue altogether.

For now I'd just like to address the fact that you sacrifice almost everything since it's mostly useless trash anyway. If you have any ideas on making "sacrifice everything you don't need" a bad idea please suggest them. I hope everyone understands why sacrificing the vast majority of floor trash shouldn't be optimal. Also it doesn't have to be just Nemelex. Suggestions for Trog and such are welcome also... just so "sacrifice every corpse you aren't going to eat" isn't the optimal play and you have to think long and hard about each sacrifice.

[Galefury]

Horrible idea. The only thing that is worse than mindless tedium is tedium you have to think about. This is the reason the food reform sounded good on paper but was later reverted.

[nago]

I can't wait to get teleportis 1 in exchange of a plain deck of summoning!

As it has already been said, this tedium is worse, because you had to wait glow to disappear, or move an artefact to sacrifice from a pile of loot only to avoid glow and so on: I may agree that sacrificing all the items in dungeons isn't a brilliant design solution, but forcing the player to choose what sacrifice for every pile of loot is ten millions worse!

Furthermore, mutations are quite permanent (unless you're a lucky char and get 10 cure muts pots in a single game), while Nemelex may gift a lot of weak decks - which are only useful to farm more piety and gifts: I believe balancing glowing with somewhat useful gift would be nearly impossible.

[pratamawirya]

I shall also mention that this proposal doesn't make sense flavor-wise.

[danr]

Hey guys, you don't like the idea, but you don't have to be nasty about it.

I just deleted a post that added absolutely nothing positive to the discussion.

[danr]

I don't think one should have to think long and hard about sacrifices. But I agree, hoovering the dungeon is not exactly fun gameplay. Some other options:

- limit the types or numbers of items that are worth sacrificing, e.g. only weapons, or only glowing / runed items, or something like that
- Some other totally new piety mechanic, like finding traps and doors or disarming traps.

Just spitballin' here.

[njvack]

Yup. Talking about the downsides of an idea is great. Simply being a jerk is not. If you haven't in a while, see the Really Short Forum Rules.

[Patashu]

If nemelex gets made less tedious to play he needs to be made less powerful too, imho. Like the planned ranged combat overhaul :p

[kefir645]

Tedium should be removed in any case. It's the worst possible balancing "tool".

[ebarrett]

I still think the idea is bad enough to warrant nonconstructive criticism - it is bad beyond the point of counterarguing. But since you are boring people who like boring things (and delete what is not up to your standards of boringness because NO FUN ALLOWED): it inspires tedious playing, it has no flavour, it further makes Nemelex good for good players and bad for bad players, and all of that should be blatantly obvious. I mean it, seriously, is there a "worst ideas" competition, and where do I sign up

[BlackSheep]

I don't know if there's history going on here, but saying that a bad idea is so bad that it's in competition for one of the worst suggestions made is far from the worst thing that gets said on this board.

[smock]

Hello nonmean people,

Perhaps Nemelex could only accept sacrifices of items that were generated after you started worshiping him.

[One-Eyed Jack]

Hello nonmean people,

Perhaps Nemelex could only accept sacrifices of items that were generated after you started worshiping him.

Nemelex is already very annoying even without running back up stairs after temple (which I doubt most players do in any case.)

I like sacrifices weighting Nemelex's gifts towards certain deck types, but I don't like them as piety gain (and it's very small too.) Potentially just give piety for walking over items for the first time, possibly for lower piety/item (although in my experience most of Nemelex's piety comes from using decks anyway)

[Tenaya]

I'm still hoping that one day auto-explore will (when set to do so) automatically take me over items so that I can sacrifice them without having to manually walk to them for sacrifice. My keystrokes: opopopopoo tabtabtabtab opopopopopopopo tabtabtabtab opopopopopo.

[XuaXua]

I'm still hoping that one day auto-explore will (when set to do so) automatically take me over items so that I can sacrifice them without having to manually walk to them for sacrifice. My keystrokes: opopopopoo tabtabtabtab opopopopopopopo tabtabtabtab opopopopopo.

The worst is corpse sacrifice when there are no items on the corpse.
If the corpse drops items, 'o' brings me and I can sacrifice the corpse (to whomever; say Okawaru).
If the corpse doesn't drop items, 'o' doesn't bring me to the corpse, so I have to pay some attention.

[BlackSheep]

It's being worked on.

[TwilightPhoenix]

Maybe Nemelex can get the Elyvilon "fix". General sacrifices only gets you so far in piety and then no longer gives you any. To get more, you'd have to use decks and sacrifice only specific things (like say, artefacts and valuable consumables). Sacrificing other stuff could still be used to mess with deck weightings, however.

[TwilightPhoenix]

Piety on kills is pretty boring and overused though. It'd be better to come up with an interesting mechanic that's not tedious.

Also, how would you determine deck weighting with piety on kills as the only piety-related mechanic?

[One-Eyed Jack]

Piety on kills is obviously not tedious because it's something you'd do otherwise and it requires no keystrokes. If we're going to reuse a piety mechanic I'd prefer to copy Ash's, though.

Nemelex deck weighting could be removed and I think he would still be a very strong God. Possibly just weight it based on what he's already gifted you (so you get a mix, with summoning escape and destruction being more common than the others)