Wednesday, 27th June 2012, 08:04 by evilmike
One problem with faith is that most gods are overpowered (except for xom and chei, who make the game harder). The amulet just makes this more obvious. No one in this thread seems to have mentioned this. I don't think nerfing the amulet will help much, here.
The other problem with Faith is that most amulets in Crawl are very situational, and meant for swapping. Amulet of faith heavily discourages swapping... when you are using one, all the other amulets go from being situational to nearly worthless (you either use faith all the time, or not at all). Increasing the penalty for taking off an amulet of faith will just make this problem larger. 1/3 of your piety is already a very large chunk.
[edit: I had something about guardian spirit here, but I was dumb and had the old version in mind. What I said doesn't really apply to the new one, so forget what I wrote.]
Since we're on the topic of amulets, I'll just list the other ones:
Conservation: good, although it can be made obsolete by preservation (which is rare). This is one of the few amulets you might want to wear all the time.
Resist corrosion: carry one around, but only use it for swapping. Made obsolete by preservation.
Resist mutation: good, but again, situational. You hardly ever need to actually wear this, it's just something you put on for a few select enemies.
Gourmand: more of a convenience than anything. Can be good if you're doing a lot of hunger-intensive stuff, but even then it's usually not necessary. I use gourmand a lot because it makes the food system less tedious, not because it's powerful.
Stasis: extremely situational. Good to have for resisting paralysis, and a few smaller uses.
Clarity: Similar to stasis. Most useful for undead and users of items that confuse you.
Warding: nearly worthless. The rN+ is the most useful part, and that's the least useful resist in Crawl.
Rage: good if you train evocations a bit and don't mind failing sometimes before you berserk. It's usually good enough to swap to it. I like having one on melee characters if I don't have some other source of berserking. I think this amulet would be better if the fail rate on berserk decreased over time as you wear it (similar to how gourmand works).
Inacc: deliberately bad, so it doesn't count.
cFly: removed
Anyway, that's all of them. Aside from inacc, none of these amulets are *bad*. It's just that these effects are all fairly situational - you put these amulets on as needed, not wear them all the time. The amulet of faith is weird because it's powerful, it's benefitial to wear it all the time, and it *strongly* discourages you from using other amulets.
A few more thoughts:
I like the effect of amulets of faith, but I think they should be the only amulet with a penalty for unequipping it. This is similar to distortion weapons, in my mind.
I think it's a good thing for most amulets to be swappable, because they take fewer keystrokes to swap than rings do. Much simpler interface.
There are more highly-situational rings than there are amulets. Same goes with useless/negative rings. This is because there aren't very many amulet types compared to rings. Also, there aren't many rings that particularly stand out.
A lot of amulet effects are more convenient than powerful. Conservation, rCorr, rMut, gourmand, and warding make life easier, but they don't really make the game easier. They're good items for reducing annoyance (exception is rCorr in Slime, but that's one branch).
Last edited by
evilmike on Wednesday, 27th June 2012, 08:31, edited 2 times in total.