Vestibule Violator
Posts: 1591
Joined: Saturday, 3rd August 2013, 18:59
Feedback on Uskayaw
However, there are a few things I have a problem with. First of all, I think uskayaw should give cleaving to all weapons(polarms don't get to stack reaching, either they cleave or they reach, and short swords/daggers should lose their stab bonus). It really doesn't make sense for a god to restrict the player to one specific weapon type, imagine if vehumet only gave extra mana for killing enemies with fire magic? Its just restrictive in a way that it shouldn't be, nobody in the right mind would follow Uskayaw without using an axe, at least that's the impression I've gotten. Besides, it seems appropriate to give all weapons cleaving for Usk, whenever I use Uskayaw I always imagine my character spinning in circles with his axe elegantly slicing through the enemies surrounding him, I can imagine them doing the same with a sword, glaive, or even a mace(although this might be harder to sell).
Second, his abilities need reworking:
Stomp is just fine, it is the one ability I don't think needs work, its an effective way to squeeze out some damage against an enemy you need to die ASAP and just isn't dying. I found myself using this ability often.
Line pass and Solo time are sort of mutually exclusive. Most of the time you are going to want to hold out on using line pass so you can get the solo time effect, and once you get it you are going to want to stay above ***... so you can get it again. As a result I almost never find myself using Line pass. On top of being outclassed by solo time, it also has the undesirable effect of impacting your positioning while giving you little benefit compared to using stomp for example. To fix this, I suggest adding an exhaustion timer for solo time, which would then give the player a reason to actually use line pass while they are waiting for exhaustion to ware off. Maybe higher invo can decrease the exhaustion timer. Line pass should also not just cause confusion, it should have a chance to cause other effects as well, I'd like to see it put monsters in a frenzy for example.
Grand finale is pretty much useless as it exists now. I've played several games with Uskayaw(although never won, admittedly) and never once managed to use it to my benefit. For the most part, paralyzing an enemy is going to mean you will kill it in only a few shots while also killing a number of other enemies in the process with cleaving(assuming you are using an axe, which you should be), so really its better to just save for solo time rather than use grand finale to kill one enemy. To fix this, I suggest changing the ability to instead of kill one enemy, target one enemy in LOS and kill all enemies(including the targetted monster, you are still exploding out of them) within a 2 square radius of that monsters. If you want to be fancy, cause butterflies to explode out of the enemies surrounding the one you fused with(I would absolutely love to see that). This change would of course require some changes to accommodate the huge boost in power, probably requiring significantly more invocation skill to use consistently as well as requiring higher piety. Although it would be rare to use, I get the feeling that this effect would turn what is pretty much just a "silly trick just for laughs" into a TRUE "Grand Finale!"
crawl.akrasiac.org:8080 <- take this link to play online or spectate.