Yred Revamp Proposal -or- 99 Problems (But a Lich Ain't One)

[jackalKnight]

This is the best title for a thread I've ever seen in this forum.

[XuaXua]

...

[KoboldLord]

What I am trying to do is find out where expert players find it mechanically and thematically deficient. My gut feeling is that generally "this sucks" responses to ideas mean one or more of:

* It's underpowered
* It's overpowered
* It would reward scumming
* It hasn't been thought through well or expressed clearly
* (rarely) It doesn't fit thematically with Crawl

... and I think the "this would be like necromut except EVEN WORSE" comments translate to "necromutation is underpowered, the only good thing about it is that it ends" -- but I'm not sure, because I need to guess. So I'm literally asking "if this were more powerful, would it suck less or is it scummy or unthematic or unclear or was it actually OP to begin with?"

Probably a good way to think about the Yred lichform would be that you're proposing to make 'The New Chei'. Chei's abilities look totally awesome when a newbie looks at them on the wiki, but a more experienced player recognizes that missing out on Haste and getting extra movement delay are both enormously painful penalties. Chei gets lots of extremely powerful abilities to make up for her crippling conduct and her move penalty, and it is generally agreed that even those powerful abilities fall well short of making up for those drawbacks.

Similarly, your mandatory lichform Yred proposal would, on the balance, constitute a crippling penalty that a player must compensate for in order to have the Yredelemnul Experience and still win. This is certainly not impossible to balance, but even if balance is achieved it probably will not be easy for forum posters to recognize that just by looking at descriptions in a post.

Currently, Yredelemnul is a fairly newbie-accessible deity that gives a lot of useful options to weak characters and/or weak players. A character with a terrible race and background combination can go Yred and coast on zombies for a bit, eventually moving up to coasting on ghouls and bone dragons, and there are a couple useful emergency abilities in case the minions look like they might have some trouble. She's admittedly pretty bad in the post-endgame, but a character that reaches that point does have options available. Your proposal would change this dynamic to more of a gimmick deity like Chei, looking totally awesome to inexperienced players while actually being worse than atheism for most builds. While there is room in the game for the Chei Experience and play styles like it, you should probably expect some friction if you're going to propose changing an easy newbie-friendly deity to Teetotaller Chei. On the other hand, maybe Fedhas, Makhleb, and Trog are enough newbie-friendly deities to go around, and maybe the best thing to do with one of the surplus ones is to re-purpose her as you have proposed.

[njvack]

@KL: Thanks. If this would be a trap to inexperienced players (as current necromut is) it's totally wrong -- that was never my intent. This dog can die now.