Does Amulet of Faith add much to the game?

[danr]

As far as I can tell, the only thing amulets of faith do is prevent me use-IDing amulets after finding a God (actually, I'm not sure any amulets ID on wearing them anyway?)

If you don't have a god, the amulet is worthless. If you do have a God, even if you don't have any other amulets around, you can bet that you will eventually and that if you wear it, you'll eventually take a *** piety hit. To me, that makes it basically never worth it.

Has anyone had a game where they ended up making much use of the amulet of faith? The amulet slot is a pretty critical one esp. in the late game for quickly getting clarity or rMut etc., so it's just not viable to use an amulet that will hit your piety that hard every time you have to switch.

[mageykun]

Faith is useful if you have a god.

For instance, on gifting gods, you faith gets you more gifts, sooner.

For gods with useful abilities, you can use them much more frequently, since you recover piety costs quickly.

The eventual removal and piety hit is annoying, but not that bad (certainly not three pips). You certainly don't want to be swapping amulets, but you can get away with wearing faith for much of the main dungeon.

[dpeg]

In my opinion, this makes "Faith one of the better amulets: it has a meaningful drawback. (And the gain is very often worth making it at least a contender.) Also, the question when to change becomes suddenly a lot more interesting.

Should have more amulets like that.

[eeviac]

Faith is the best amulet in the game, if you're serving any of the gifting or piety intensive gods. Each of the other amulets are only useful under very specific circumstances. The only reasons people generally default to rmut instead of faith late game are one: the piety hit for swapping, and two: getting mutated is just that annoying.

[dd]

As far as I can tell, the only thing amulets of faith do is prevent me use-IDing amulets after finding a God

Well that's a purpose right there... Almost everything that's id:able carries some kind of risk for casual wield-id:ing, with pots you risk poison, degen, decay, mut, with scrolls it's curse x, torment, etc. Removing faith would remove that from amulets.

[TwilightPhoenix]

Faith is handy when Xom is in a good mood as he acts more often. Take it off when he's in a bad mood though as he'll act more often then too.

[KoboldLord]

Faith is the best possible amulet for the vast majority of characters in the early and middle game. Yeah, you take a piety hit eventually, but right now you're walking into Lair with two or three bone dragons in tow because you got into the piety range for good minion gifts way earlier than normal. Or you get the book of conjurations from Vehumet, a useful book from Sif Muna, or the pain brand from Kiku two levels before you find Lair, rather than two levels after you've already started clearing it. Or you get to Greater Healing faster, which lets you instakill anything that moves whenever you feel like it, and you actually gain piety in the process instead of losing it.

The nice thing about the piety hit you're eventually going to suffer is that you can place it whenever you happen to feel that you don't need all your divine powers anyway. Put off Swamp until it became trivial because it's a miserable slog with no loot to speak of? Take the piety hit just before, and by the time you've finished your romp through the trivial area it'll be topped off again. That's assuming you even notice the piety hit, of course; many deities are front-loaded enough that you'll keep all the powers you use routinely through the entire process anyway.

Early faith is almost always worth it, really. Divine powers now, when the game is young and you are weak, are much better than divine powers later, when you've already looted all the good equipment and you don't especially need the powers.

[danr]

Maybe the piety hit is not as much as I thought. I see the point about it being good early.

[crate]

The reason faith is good is twofold: one, it's really powerful, and two other amulets are generally pretty bad (the fact that conservation is the second best shows how weak amulets really are, since conservation does very little for your ability to survive any particular fight).

The piety hit for removal also generally takes you from 6* to 5*, which is almost inconsequential for most gods.

[bobross419]

I always wish for an Amulet of Faith when I'm playing melee. Oka+Faith -> TSO is awesome. You get plenty of extra gear before you do the switch and at that point its pretty safe to remove the amulet. Same with Veh if you're trying to get spell books, then remove it once you've gotten the ones you want. You really lose out on nothing. All in all I love Faith.

More amulet types would be the bee's knees though.

[dd]

If any amulet is totally useless it's guardian spirit.

If I'm playing a primary caster I'm going to need the mp, and if I'm playing a more melee-based fighter I'll probably have enough hp anyway and not enough mp to make it useful enough to use up the amulet slot.

(Speaking of, I just found two amulets of guardian spirit from a treasure trove... )

[Deimos]

Yea, guardian spirit is pretty useless except in very rare and specific situations (I.E DD with a lot of magic pots but no other way to heal).

[dpeg]

Those who think lowly of "GS: are you talking about the old version (where all incoming damage was taken from MP until power is depleted, then HP) or the more recent version (where incoming damage is shared among HP and MP)?

It is obviously possible to make "GS as strong as we like by tweaking the current version to just absorb a fraction of the damage. If that fraction was 1/2, we'd get a ridiculously overpowered amulet, I believe. Currently, it's 0 and considered underwhelming. So there could be a point in between (and that's just one easy modification attempt).

Regarding "Faith, it seems as if it could take a nerf, eh? Harder piety hit, or slower piety gain. Better ideas?

[Deimos]

The last time I've used GS was with the old version of it. I'll have to give the newer version a try, but don't expect it to be much better. You just don't have enough MP as a non-caster to make it useful, and having 0mp when you need it most (during a fight) is scary.

[evilmike]

One problem with faith is that most gods are overpowered (except for xom and chei, who make the game harder). The amulet just makes this more obvious. No one in this thread seems to have mentioned this. I don't think nerfing the amulet will help much, here.

The other problem with Faith is that most amulets in Crawl are very situational, and meant for swapping. Amulet of faith heavily discourages swapping... when you are using one, all the other amulets go from being situational to nearly worthless (you either use faith all the time, or not at all). Increasing the penalty for taking off an amulet of faith will just make this problem larger. 1/3 of your piety is already a very large chunk.

[edit: I had something about guardian spirit here, but I was dumb and had the old version in mind. What I said doesn't really apply to the new one, so forget what I wrote.]

Since we're on the topic of amulets, I'll just list the other ones:

Conservation: good, although it can be made obsolete by preservation (which is rare). This is one of the few amulets you might want to wear all the time.

Resist corrosion: carry one around, but only use it for swapping. Made obsolete by preservation.

Resist mutation: good, but again, situational. You hardly ever need to actually wear this, it's just something you put on for a few select enemies.

Gourmand: more of a convenience than anything. Can be good if you're doing a lot of hunger-intensive stuff, but even then it's usually not necessary. I use gourmand a lot because it makes the food system less tedious, not because it's powerful.

Stasis: extremely situational. Good to have for resisting paralysis, and a few smaller uses.

Clarity: Similar to stasis. Most useful for undead and users of items that confuse you.

Warding: nearly worthless. The rN+ is the most useful part, and that's the least useful resist in Crawl.

Rage: good if you train evocations a bit and don't mind failing sometimes before you berserk. It's usually good enough to swap to it. I like having one on melee characters if I don't have some other source of berserking. I think this amulet would be better if the fail rate on berserk decreased over time as you wear it (similar to how gourmand works).

Inacc: deliberately bad, so it doesn't count.

cFly: removed

Anyway, that's all of them. Aside from inacc, none of these amulets are *bad*. It's just that these effects are all fairly situational - you put these amulets on as needed, not wear them all the time. The amulet of faith is weird because it's powerful, it's benefitial to wear it all the time, and it *strongly* discourages you from using other amulets.


A few more thoughts:

I like the effect of amulets of faith, but I think they should be the only amulet with a penalty for unequipping it. This is similar to distortion weapons, in my mind.

I think it's a good thing for most amulets to be swappable, because they take fewer keystrokes to swap than rings do. Much simpler interface.

There are more highly-situational rings than there are amulets. Same goes with useless/negative rings. This is because there aren't very many amulet types compared to rings. Also, there aren't many rings that particularly stand out.

A lot of amulet effects are more convenient than powerful. Conservation, rCorr, rMut, gourmand, and warding make life easier, but they don't really make the game easier. They're good items for reducing annoyance (exception is rCorr in Slime, but that's one branch).

[ldierk]

If any amulet is totally useless it's guardian spirit.

If I'm playing a primary caster I'm going to need the mp, and if I'm playing a more melee-based fighter I'll probably have enough hp anyway and not enough mp to make it useful enough to use up the amulet slot.

(Speaking of, I just found two amulets of guardian spirit from a treasure trove... )

I just finished a Felid VM. He was wearing guardian spirit (trunk version) all the way to V:8. If he was taking enough damage that GS depleted my mana, it was time to flee anyway (low HP, no AC etc...), and GS helped a bit to absorb the damage while fleeing.
So it's not usable for everyone, but for high EV chars it definitively is.

[dpeg]

evilmike: Great analysis, thanks.

Would you suggest to nerf gods in general? That's a huge topic, so feel free to restrict an answer to yes/no. (A very simple approach would be to reduce piety gain.)

On "GS: Note that the absolutely best mechanic (for the player) would be if "GS made you use HP until you're left at 1 HP; from then on, use MP. The current version is much closer to this than the older one. And as I said, it could be easily strengthened. Thanks for "GS feedback, ldierk.

Interesting ideas for new amulets are welcome, I think. "Faith and "GS are both recentish additions.

[evilmike]

Would you suggest to nerf gods in general? That's a huge topic, so feel free to restrict an answer to yes/no. (A very simple approach would be to reduce piety gain.)

For Makhleb, Ely, Okawaru, Fedhas (maybe), Trog, TSO, Lugonu I'd drastically increase the piety cost of invocations. I don't think piety is gained too quickly for these gods: I think it is spent too slowly.

For Vehumet I'd slow the rate of piety gain, but speed up the rate of his gifting to compensate. Mainly, I think it should take longer to unlock all of his passive powers.

For Yred I'd completely get rid of his gifting and give him a summoning invocation, something like what TSO gets (right down to the "duration buff" TSO gives). In terms of what it summons, it would work more like Trog's Brothers in Arms - more piety means stronger allies.

For Nemelex I'd increase the chance of drawing from the deck of oddities, and also make the deck of oddities *much* larger.

The gods I haven't mentioned are ones I think are more balanced (except for Sif when mummies worship her).

[dd]

Personally I don't think Trog should be nerfed much. It's an easy god to play, sure, but I think it's beneficial to have one god that's very easy and straightforward, for the benefit of new players...

[Galefury]

I think an interesting way to nerf many gods would be to strongly increase piety decay. Of course this means bad players (who waste a lot of turns) will feel this nerf much more strongly than good players. On the other hand it would tighten the only completely non-lethal clock crawl has, which could make gameplay more interesting. Many problems with crawl's design can be traced back to the lack of a good clock (hunger and the ood timer usually don't do much, piety decay is not too bad for most gods), and the piety clock is really the only one that could be much tighter without hurting gameplay in other ways.

If this hurts slow players (turns, not realtime) too much, the dependency of piety gain on piety level could also be increased, so it becomes fairly easy to mitigate the decay at low piety levels, but staying at ****** or getting lots of gifts for an extended period would require one to waste very few turns.

Note that I think it is good that a few gods have no or almost no piety decay (mummies having no hunger makes them interesting). But in my opinion crawl could be a much better game if piety decayed much faster for most gods. This would be interesting by allowing really slow gameplay only for some gods, and also by making some gods much better for faster players than for slower players. This means as you get better at crawl also the relative power of the gods will change, and new playstyles will open up to you, keeping the game fresh for longer.

[onton]

I think an interesting way to nerf many gods would be to strongly increase piety decay. Of course this means bad players (who waste a lot of turns) will feel this nerf much more strongly than good players. On the other hand it would tighten the only completely non-lethal clock crawl has, which could make gameplay more interesting. Many problems with crawl's design can be traced back to the lack of a good clock (hunger and the ood timer usually don't do much, piety decay is not too bad for most gods), and the piety clock is really the only one that could be much tighter without hurting gameplay in other ways.

Yeah, but "common crawlers" or at least many of them are used to stashing stuff somewhere like Lair 1/2. I know better players don't stash at all, but most players do. The travel to the stash would kill one's piety completely, wouldn't it? Also some builds like MuSu of Sif rely heavily on slow piety decay, while berserkers and okawarites (?) already hack and slash so much they would hardly notice any piety decay at all, same for Nemelex followers - you just get way too many floor junk to bother about piety decay. Which gods' piety decay do you propose to accelerate?

[Galefury]

Note that this is really quite off topic, and maybe should be moved to a different thread. It really has nothing to do with the amulet of faith, just with piety in general.

I would probably base the speed of piety decay mostly on flavor, then adjust piety gain or the piety levels at which powers become available. Gods having strong and coherent theme is very important.

Chei and Sif should probably be left alone, I think they would be fine with people going through the dungeon slowly. The good gods should also be quite forgiving. Sometimes pretty harsh conducts that you have to adhere to, but in turn you don't need to constantly do stuff to please them. Going through the dungeon the way they want you to is enough, how fast you do it doesn't really matter to them. I think for Ashenzari not penalizing slow play too much would also be quite appropriate. Ash has been watching and waiting for a long time. Ash can wait a little longer. Also Fedhas and maybe one of the death gods could have slow piety decay. The cycle of nature goes on, no matter what you do. And death comes for all eventually, so time might well be irrelevant to a death god. Xom is exempt from this anyway.

For the more destructive and evil gods it seems quite flavorful that the god would want worshipers to constantly do stuff in their service. Using their powers to accomplish their goals is good, idle waiting and strolling through the dungeon is bad. If you are not useful to the god, the god will not be useful to you. Simply an exchange of services, of course only as long as it is convenient for the god. Makhleb, Trog, Lugonu, Vehumet, Beogh, and the remaining death god (or both) would fall into this category. It might be interesting for Kiku, because after you get to 6* piety becomes much less important. So with fast decay you would have to really prove yourself to Kiku to get your final gift, but after that you could switch to a more ponderous playstyle and just get slightly weaker passive enhancements.

I'm not sure about Nemelex and Okawaru. I really have no idea how Jiyva plays, so no idea what to do there.

I always think of Nemelex as a god of fate, not of games. I also think he doesn't care much about the fate of the mortals, he just wants to be entertained. A bit like Xom, but not insane, and adhering to some rules. Probably just to make things more interesting for himself. By drawing cards you take a chance, and give fate (and thus Nemelex) an easy way to directly influence you and your surroundings. Nemelex likes that. By sacrificing stuff you (and your surroundings) become limited in their actions (cant use the sacrificed stuff anymore) and the power of fate over them grows. Nemelex likes that. Also Nemelex gets cool stuff this way. I don't know if other people see Nemelex like that. Both slow and fast piety gain fit with this: slow would give Nemelex an attitude of "you cant escape fate, so there's no need to hurry". Fast would imply Nemelex wanting you to constantly tempt fate, going through the dungeon as fast as you can. Much more interesting to watch. Nemelex is pretty scummable, so I'm leaning towards fast decay.

Okawaru already has pretty strong flavor after the recent piety gain change. Find something strong, then fight it and kill it in single combat. Slightly faster decay might be good (because I think it would be very good for crawl in general), but definitely not extremely fast: if there simply are no interesting fights to be had for a while, Okawaru should still help you in your next "real battle".


Piety decay could also be exponential (Lose x% of current piety per y turns instead of flat z piety per y turns). This would penalize slow play more at high piety levels. Without some minimum decay value you couldn't be excommunicated by waiting, which might be inappropriate for some gods.

[danr]

A couple things here:

- Gods are too powerful? Yes they have big benefits but let's remember that this is a game that many players win less than 1% of the time. It's not too easy. I do think that Demigods need a bigger perk in exchange for not being able to follow gods

- Guardian Spirit - I think the new version is pretty good. If you don't otherwise use MP, it can give you something like 5%-10% extra effective HP which is worth something, and can create another use for rings or other artefacts that boost MP. Even as a caster, because GS now drains MP proportionally with HP, by the time you are low on MP you are also low on HP and it really is time to skedaddle.

- I guess "Faith is good early to get piety up faster, but once I'm at max piety, I tend to be able to stay there because I don't draw on the high-piety abilities that often, I see them as panic buttons mostly to deal with exceptionally tough situations. They are too costly to rely on all the time, so I conserve them and end up staying at ****** pretty much all the time. Making high-level piety decay faster would make "Faith more useful, but it would disproportionately punish newer players who are not as efficient with their turns.

- I agree that Warding is a truly useless amulet - I don't really need anything to make Ufetubi flinch away from attacking my XL23 Minotaur. If rN+ was better against those unresistable attacks like smite and torment then it would be more attractive. If warding had a chance of abjuring summons that hit you, that might be something too.

[danr]

One other thing: if piety degrades faster, this will result in having to save mundane parts of the dungeon for piety farming for those times when you need to boost piety for a tough branch-end. Piety and gods are fun and interesting, but not so much that I want to really start planning my overall game strategy around it.

[Galefury]

I would expect "GS to be very good for rod-using berserkers now that evocations increases MP. Builds that use mostly buff spells instead of using magic for most of their damage dealing and escape needs might also do well with the new "GS, so it could be very nice on transmuters. That being said, I have never used it.

Re "One other thing": the beauty of having a working clock in a roguelike is that behavior that involves backtracking or resting a lot is punished. The harsher the clock, the harsher the punishment, and the current clocks are nearly irrelevant. So stashing, backtracking and scumming can thrive. If you do the branch end directly after the branch you wont have to farm piety for it. The effects of having a working clock on gameplay are much more important to me than the effect of faster piety decay on the gods themselves. Many of the discussions about backtracking, rune locks, stashing and some other stuff in the recent months would be irrelevant if crawl had a working clock.

[danr]

Okay. Well, I guess this topic can be wrapped up to say that most people feel the Amulet of Faith is useful. There are some other issues around piety and other clocks that should have their own thread.

[dpeg]

I agree with both evilmike's and galefury's proposals.

To recap:
evilmike suggests that piety costs of invocations should increase for certain gods.
galefury suggests that piety should decay much faster for certain gods (essentially the same set).

Just like branch shortening, there is no problem with doing this in a continuous fashion: increase a piety cost a bit here, speed decay a bit there.
This has my full support.

[danr]

If we're going to continue here anyway:

I would like if piety were displayed explicitly. I really like how e.g. spell failure chance is explicitly spelled out now - "21%" is much better information than "Very Good" or whatever that would have been.

Piety is very important, so it seems odd that one can easily see how much MP or hunger an action will cost, but when it comes to piety, the game only tells you whether it will cost piety or not.

Whether or not piety costs are changed, I as a player would appreciate if the piety cost were spelled out explicitly, as well as my current piety level. I think it would make players more receptive to changes if they know exactly what the piety cost is, rather than imagining that it's been doubled.

I'd also call it "Divine Favour" instead of piety, because really it's a measure of how your god feels about you, not your attitude toward your god.

[evilmike]

dpeg: I wasn't talking of a gradual change. I meant drastic when I said it: increasing the piety cost by a factor of 2 or more in some cases. Some powerful abilities are just too inexpensive for small tweaks to be worth it.

Here's some quick examples:

Greater servant: you get this ability pretty early. It's safe to use as long as you can teleport, and can kill *anything* up until the late-game. It costs 5 piety! (Remember, the cap is 200)

Brothers in arms costs 5 or 6 piety, and is similar. The only thing that makes it better is that trog piety is slightly harder to come by (his gifts slow things down a lot).

Divine warrior costs 6 (and TSO piety comes fast).

I could keep going on. The point is, these extremely strong abilities cost almost nothing. Using a strong invocation more than once should cost enough piety that the player actually notices. I think there are a couple of good ones in Crawl:

Transfer knowledge costs 20. Self banish costs 35 (still a bargain considering what you get from this). Yred's mirror damage costs damage^0.5 (which is huge). These sorts of numbers are what powerful invocations should use.

[dpeg]

evilmike: I understand, and I support it. However, there is nothing wrong with getting to double cost by increasing the piety by 40% in three versions If you're confident, and you sound like it, then lobby for the drastic change. I'll chime in, if needed and if it helps your cause.

The main difference is that "let's double piety costs A, B and C" will cause a lot more hostile reactions from players and therefore may demand more explanations to other developers. If you keep it slow, then it becomes "adjust piety costs A, B and C" and everyone is happy. To give a completely unrelated example: gradually increasing the temperature while you take a bath is painless. Suddenly going from 25 °C to 40 °C hurts.

But on the topic itself, you're absolutely right. I am just suggesting another way to get there, possibly with less resistance. (If it would have been possible, I'd have cut MD in three steps, really!)

[danr]

I think Trog's BiA is also not as powerful as Greater Servant and Divine Warrior, I'm surprised the cost is so similar esp. as you point out Trog's piety is harder to recover.

[dpeg]

danr: I wouldn't be surprised if that statement is as correct as your assessment of "Faith

But I cannot compare the three powers. Someone else will be able to, soon enough.

[dd]

(If it would have been possible, I'd have cut MD in three steps, really!)

What, like one body part at a time?

[evktalo]

Mirror Damage is indeed quite good example: it is very useful, but also noticeably costly. That all adds up to a feeling of divine intervention!

FWIW I also like the idea of dropping permanent allies from Yred and replacing them with summons. My current game is taking months because of getting tired of the constant herding. (And I really like Yred.)

--Eino

[nago]

About Yred: I've played only few DK, but I'd really dislike the dropping of permanent allies. Flavor and gameplay-wise, I fear he would became really similar to Makheleb and loose much of his content.
The great part about Yred is that you have the change to build a powerful army that effectively help you until Zot:5 - which is very different from having an hand occasionally when a powerful unique or a OoD monster appears.
Furthermore, his servants are quite different, and isn't so banal to exploit their strengths: for example, plain ghouls are quite squishy but can equip armors - with a plate mail they become really good.

Surely, managing permanent allies in DCSS is a big,royal, atrocious, pain. But I don't think removing them is the best solution - a new interface designed for this purpose and some more advanced commands could be.

[rebthor]

The last time I've used GS was with the old version of it. I'll have to give the newer version a try, but don't expect it to be much better. You just don't have enough MP as a non-caster to make it useful, and having 0mp when you need it most (during a fight) is scary.

GS can be useful on a front-loading hybrid where you can cast your buffs before the fight and still have an extra 10 or 20 HP in a fight. Still not a great amulet but at least it has some purpose. It's OK on a Troglodyte too if you have some MP but it's probably not worth training up MP for it.

[crate]

Guardian spirit is one of the better amulets for most characters for most of the game as it is now.

[bobross419]

I would rather address faith by making the other amulets suck less. Usually you don't even carry warding, spirit, rCorr, or clarity, and stasis' uses are extremely narrow. Gourmand and conservation are mostly sought after because people hate the mechanics they soften.

Guardian spirit is one of the better amulets for most characters for most of the game as it is now.

Ruh roh... now what do we do?!?!

Can either of you provide some supportive evidence relating the usefulness/uselessness of GS for the rest of us?

I generally shy away from GS because I'm concerned that it will take up some of the mana that I might need for various things.

[crate]

Guardian spirit does things to actually help you win individual fights by giving you more hp. Most other amulets do absolutely nothing for winning individual fights. Obviously if you kill everything with conjurations it is probably not very good, but otherwise guardian spirit is probably a good thing.

[Tenaya]

I also like very much that Yred gives permanent allies. They are what sets Yred apart from summoners, necromancers, and Makhlebites. Really the only other source of non-late game permanent allies is Beogh (and Fedhas, I suppose), who _is_ quite tedious to manage.
However, unlike the so-called permanent allies of Beogh (who get destroyed amazingly easy), Yred's allies are quite effective. The weaker ones not so much, but Profane Servitors are fun and not so difficult to tote around. With Beogh, on the other hand, I spend a great deal of effort training up to orc sorcerors only to have them melee hydras.
In fact, I found that Yred was so _not_ tedious that I did a HuDK-HuDK streak!

[absolutego]

i also like yred's permanent allies, but unlike some of you i do find them a pain to manage (which doesn't stop me playing yred games every so often). but i agree that he currently plays very differently than the gods that give you summoning invocations, in that you have to care at least a bit for them (particularly in zot) and they're not an emergency plan for when you're overmatched but an integral part of your play. it'd be sad to see that go (beogh plays similarly but not quite, and is only available to orcs). i think that if he were to lose permanent allies in favour of invocations he'd play so differently that he'd probably need a significant overhaul. inter-level ally auto-travel would be the ideal solution, but that's a nightmare to implement, i guess.

note that there are problems with yred. the recall/telefrag mechanic is too strong if you know what you're doing, and maybe there could be a cap on the number of summons (and he may swap them for higher-level undead, and be more generous about gifting if necessary).