n1000 wrote:Remove Trog as a starting god and give Be an amulet of rage and some evocations skill to compensate. (I'm hijacking your thread)
Berserker is a good starting role for beginners because it provides a powerful tool (berserk) and a simple pre-temple game. Berserker, however, is presently an unbalanced and inflexible starting background. Zealot roles have been pruned because they tend to destroy the flexibility of character development that is a hallmark of crawl design.
Trog is a good god, but the extra piety at the start and early part of the game skyrockets --Be characters into having way too powerful weapons as early as the first floors of lair. It's not good that the benefits of such an easy start are compounded by extra piety: an easy early game is followed by an extremely easy middle.
The biggest problem with Trog as a starting god isn't how easy it makes everything, though. It removes interesting choices. Your starting weapon type can (and probably will) be your main weapon skill for the rest of the game. By the time a normal character is looking to upgrade to a decent weapon (IME, sometime in Lair or Orc if it hasn't happened already this becomes a big priority) but with Trog from D:1, you have enough weapon skill that Trog is just gifting you exactly what you want.
By changing Berserker to have an amulet of rage and no Trog, you get characters who can destroy early D with berserk, but still have the flexibility to worship at D:2-3 altars. Trog is still a good choice for these characters! In short, this change would increase the flexibility of the Berserker start, and also will make the Trog-worshiper "power curve" match up better with the challenges in the middle-game.
First, let me talk about beginners: It seems to me "decreased flexibility" and "ahead of the curve compared to the dungeon" are features rather than bugs. The former is useful because it supplies a viable path without overwhelming them, and the latter is useful because beginners will make suboptimal choices.
For an experienced player, starting with an amulet of rage would still help a lot in the early game, with the added flexibility that they can take a god with doesn't hate magic (Makhleb or Okawaru, for instance). Against this, (assuming the player takes Trog) there is the disadvantage of not having more powerful berserk ability from the start and lower piety at a comparable stage. Loss of magic is a fairly serious disadvantage, and in my opinion, the result might well be a wash.
So I don't like this. Of course, Be is strong, probably better than all other classes, but it's not a big deal if one class is unbalanced. If one wants flexibility, one can simply play Fi or Gl.