I actually really like the concept of a stealth deity. It's true that most deities take a major "feature" of Crawl (physical combat, magical combat, overall magical mastery, decks, killing demons, etc.) and enhance it.
I just ran a quick search to see why a stealth diety doesn't exist already, and found a thread called, appropriately, "
Why are there no stealth gods?". Anyone who's interested should check it out.
However, regarding this proposal (Seth), I would expect more stealth-related abilities for a stealth deity, and I don't find the "shadow" theme (as it's realized) strategically compelling.
(*) Umbra is the only ability I see that actually interacts with the stealth mechanic, and because it's passive, players wouldn't utilize any distinct strategies in conjunction with it. The rest of the proposal is an assortment of "shadow"-themed translocations, summons, and enchantments. Not that there's no place for those in a shadow-themed diety, but... Well, the current proposal seems to me like the sort of deity proposal I've seen before in GDD, where someone takes a theme that they find cool and comes up with some abilities connected to that theme. To give specifics comments on the abilities, I would say that (***) Shadow action and (****) Become shadow don't seem to have any direct strategic connection to either stealth or stabbing.
Not to derail the thread from a discussion of this particular proposal, but I would imagine a stealth-oriented god having abilities like
- actively invoking dramatically heightened stealth in exchange for a piety cost
- active or passive ability to grants glow-less invisibility in certain situations
- extremely brief, or relatively brief and extremely costly, yet "perfect" stealth that not even Cerebov can detect
- brief yet perfect stealth in exchange for a massive stabbing penalty
- reducing the noise caused by actions such as casting spells
- maybe granting a "stab"-like damage enhancement for certain close-range magical or evocations-based attacks
On a side note, for a diety like this, since certain combos like SpEn already do extremely well on stealth alone, a major consideration needs to be that the power scales properly such that it's beneficial for other combos yet doesn't turn SpEn in easy mode. Not that a specific implementation has been put forward.
"Maturity: among other things, the unclouded happiness of the child at play, who takes it for granted that he is at one with his play-mates."
- Dag Hammarskjöld