Wednesday, 8th August 2018, 04:31 by duvessa
I like when gods give you nothing at ...... piety and only small benefits at *..... piety. Gods that give you good benefits too soon after you worship them mean that if you find an altar to that god, you should use it, regardless of your character. Currently if you find a Gozag altar and don't immediately worship at it, that's an unambiguous mistake. So much for strategic choice. The introduction of more gods that give you useful powers at ...... is also a big instance of power creep. Back when I was a kid, Nemelex was the only god that gave you something useful within a few turns of joining them, now there's Nemelex plus Gozag plus Hep plus Jiyva plus Uskayaw.
With that said, in practice, what Vehumet gives you at *..... might as well be nothing. You get a level 1 or 2 spell that already became obsolete before you reached *, and you get a chance of a tiny amount of MP on kill. On-kill effects are usually not very good in the first place, and for this one, the chance depends on your piety and the MP regained depends on the monster's HD, so when you have low piety and monsters have low HD, it just does nothing. It actually manages to be worse than Divine Energy for a while, which is saying something. HP on kills has this issue too of course but Makhleb gives you Minor Destruction to make up for that, Vehumet gives you a useless spell.
Giving something that is effectively nothing, but looks like something, is bad. So either change Vehumet to actually give nothing at *....., or change Vehumet's *..... to something that isn't useless. IMO, move MP on kills to **.... (since Vehumet currently has nothing there), and either
1. Make Vehumet's initial spell gift level 3+. If you want to be fancy you can keep it as level 1/2 if the character has no books/spell skills and yet still chose Vehumet for some reason.
or 2. Give Vehumet some other *..... bonus. On reflection, I'm not sure I like the accuracy idea. First of all, it overlaps with TSO later in the game, and second of all, most spells have excellent accuracy already or don't use accuracy at all - Conjurer has four spells that use accuracy, the elementalists and VM have four each, and the rest of the backgrounds have one or none. And many of those spells are level 1 and are already obsolete by the time you reach *..... piety.
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- bel, nago