Alright, bug fixed
It's been a while since I last updated this post, and the god has been changing a lot lately. I've made some surface, obvious changes but also some subtle, back-end-y ones that impact how the god plays a lot. Let's summarise and discuss!
Major change 1: New ultimate ability.The dev team made me realize that I had been clinging to Heavenly Blade (to the point of twisting it into absurd, edge case filled monstrosities) out of fear of changing the old design. In the end I realized it had to go, and reworked it into a new ultimate ability that I like much, much more.
- Heaven on Earth (15-20 piety, active): Summons a storm of heavenly clouds around you, which inspire you to increase your combat abilities. The storm constantly generates noise and clouds around you, similar to a constant barrage of fog scrolls. The clouds don't do anything, but they block LOS, allowing you to fight against groups with ranged enemies more easily, and attracts more enemies to the edge of the storm. Meanwhile, you get a Slay modifier that decreases rapidly (by 1 per turn, or faster if the value is higher). However, every martial attack that you attempt on a monster increases that value by 2.
- Somewhat similar to Song of Slaying but with completely different dynamics. It lasts indefinitely as long as you keep fighting, but runs out quickly if you stop. Requires you to move because only martial attacks power it back up, and rewards multiple strikes at once.
- Synergy with Serpent's Lash because, since it ticks down per turn, Serpent's Lash affords you two extra turns to build up without Slay loss.
Major change 2: Removal of Divine Weapons, salvaging three of them.Divine weapons are out. Well, they mostly are. The three most popular remain, as normally obtainable unrands with an interesting twist:
- Divine deerhorn knife: +7 quick blade of electrocution. Allows the wielder to lunge regardless of god choice (and explains lunge in the text description).
- Divine monk's spade: +7 laj of speed. Allows the wielder to whirlwind.
- Divine guan dao: +7 bardiche of flaming. Allows the wielder to wall jump.
In addition, all three weapons are especially powerful when wielded by an IJC follower, as they make their particular attack be boosted by momentum at all times.
These weapons are intended to offer non-worshippers a way to play around with martial attacks, and to entice the player to make a mid game switch to IJC when found. It also connects the god to the world of DCSS a bit more, providing some background + lore in the description, which I still need to work on.
Major change 3: Rework of martial attack damage scaling.As many of you may know, previous versions of the god involved a damage modifier that attempted to balance weapons of different sizes, given that you attack once per move regardless of the weapon's move delay. Your weapon damage was imposed a multiplicative factor of (move delay / attack delay). This was a rather poor balance measure and caused untold trouble, from light weapons being incredibly powerful against AC thanks to insane damage modifiers, to "!!!!!!!!!!!!!" stabs, to a complete shift in brand choices. All of that was bad.
Instead, the current iteration of the god works as follows: When attempting a martial attack, you strike a number of times that averages out to the same amount of attacks you would've done by tabbing. So if your attack speed is exactly double than your move speed, you would deal two whirlwind attacks per move, and non-integer relationships are dealt with with weighted rounding (so moving at 90% the speed you normally attack would mean you fail 1 out of 10 whirlwind strikes, before any other checks are made). This not only normalizes DPS over a large period of time, but takes care of stabbing balance, since only the first attack made catches the enemy unaware.