[CF-Devel] [lembark@wrkhors.com: Re: [viksten_crossfire] Improvement to Devourers]

Mon Dec 24 04:34:51 CST 2001

The following is a reply to me from a person on the crossfire board.
It has some very interesting points, I am particularly interested in the spell mentioned at the end and the histroy of the CF gods. What do you guys think?

dnh

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     I am he who pasted the aforementioned reply.

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     I am also he who is in charge (mostly) of tweaking the gods. I am very

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     interested to hear any ideas regarding any of the gods and how they might

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     be better balanced/improved. My reply is somewhat abrupt in declining

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     your idea but in reality I am very interested to hear it. I have also

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     thought about this action but decided against it for the above reasons.

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     That said, I have massively reduced the negatives of devourers for a

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     while to see how powerful you can really get. Start a new char and begin

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     worshipping devourers, an easy way to see if the server is recently

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     updated is if you get only -5 resistance to fire instead of -30. If the

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     server is very current, you will even get an attack 'life stealing' which

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     allows you to take monsters hp and use it yourself. These changes are

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     solely to make devourers alittle easier to play =). Please try it out and

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     see how you go.

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     Darth_bob

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     ps. I am around alot on the irc channel, if you want to talk about this

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     feel free to go there (#crossfire on openprojects.net

I don't have IRC access. I'll be happy to play with this in email.

Devourers are quite powerful iff you can get up to the level
where prayers help you. At high POW & EXP the combination of
low food and seriuos godspells make them quite effective. Low-
level followers don't get much from the reduced food since they
don't spend enough time regenerating SP to care, they also don't
get much in the way of spells -- thought a weapon blessed to the
Dev. is a rather nice item.

Idea:

   I've played with a "history" that explains the gods several
   times. Origial legend had the whole universe starting out
   with Gaea, Sorig, Devourers, Ruggilli &  Sorig as classic
   elementals. They create the world: Ruggilli (fire) provides
   the spark of creation, Devourers (earth) provide the wholeness,
   Sorig (air) gives energy, only Gaea (shaper) can provide life
   itself, however. Problem is that after providing the spark Ruggilli
   continutes to burn, Devourers suck in life to animate their
   earthly existance, Sorig's energy proves too much for many
   living things and Gaea gets thoroughly pissed at the other
   three for burning/entombing/zapping so much of her creations.
   Problem is she can't be rid of the other three because
   without them all of her work would die in an instant for lack
   of the life force.

   Somewhere in the middle of this come various races, with
   super-heros that align themselves to various elemtal gods
   in order to get more power for themselves. This makes them
   gods but leaves them vulnerable to other elementals also
   (e.g., Mostrai gets his power to shape the earth from
   the fires of Ruggilli but earns the emnity of Devourers
   in the process).

   At some point the Devourers (pick an original name for them)
   give up trying to simply nurture the living artifacts of
   Gaea and want to be alive themselves. War ensues and the
   Devourers pledge to suck the life out of anyting that Gaea
   creates, giving thelves live in the process but requiring
   ever more life-energy to animate themselves in the process.
   Net result: Gaea and Devourers hate one another along with
   all aligned beings.

   Ruggilli also demands his share of the now-cooling universe.
   He provedes life energy rather than sucking it up; but at the
   cost of consuming whatever he touches to provide more life.
   Gaea understands the cycle of one thing eating another but
   the Devourers are envious and try to take Ruggilli as a
   permenant source of energy for their animation. Ruggilli gets
   pissed and promises to consume any of them that come close
   enough.
   Net result: Devourers cannot use flame because it will
   consume them; their attachment to the earth gives them
   control over cold however.

   Throughout all of this Sorig is far from the earth, making
   the winds. He could care less about the Devourers and they
   don't see any advantage to pissing him off.
   Net result: The only force that doesn't hate the Devourers
   is Air/Lightning; but they can't command it either.

   At some point a lifeform tries to steal fire from Rugglli
   while learning how to devour other's life energy from the
   Devourers. The yin-yang of it works but drives him crazy
   with power and he becomes Gorokh: Commanding fire but
   unable to take sustinence from it because the Devourers
   have their hooks in him.

   Another lifeform becomes Gaea's lover, learns all sorts
   of secrets but blows it trying to create life for
   himself. Result is angels: Some are nice, others aren't
   because he doesn't have enough power to controll them
   properly.

   Lythander, Mostrai, Gnarg come about the same basic way:
   Aligned with an elemental but in some way corrupted by
   their search for power. Result is some positive feedback
   with a loss of stat/ability from the other gods spurning
   them or their own greed.

All of this matters only because all life forms can then
be associated with an elemental god; all races with a
race-god. It also makes attaching types of spells to
various beliefs simpler in virtue of them having some
elemental god asssociated with them.

It also has the advantage of giving every god an enemy, so
that low-level char's have *something* to cast holy word
at and get points.

As a long-time Ruggilli and Devourers player -- normally with
Fireborn/Q's or Wraiths -- I've generally found them to work
rather nicely. The limitations of Ruggilli don't really effect
fire-races too much; increased food can be painful at POW == 30
but by then you can generally create food. Summoning baby dragons
can be a healthy point-builder around Cyclops or Galeotrolls :-)

Devourers weren't that much of a liability for Wraiths for a
long time. They can't use fire in the first place and there was
a map that delivered protection from fire. Fine: you can't burn
me but I can freeze your ass quicly. Decent balance. With Waiths'
high Dex they're hard to hit anyway so it tends to even things
out. Haivng a plus for destruction and wounding also allows
crit wounds & destruction to be effective at high levels anyway
(neat trick: Hit the dragon cave east of Scorn with some way of
being immune to fire, get to the lowest level w/ ancient fire
dragons, cast 6-8 bombs, dive upstairs, wait a few sec, dive
back down and kill an ancient dragon with wounding).

Recent changes have eliminated the fire-immune spell (or at least
I havn't run across it) so that Wraiths are in deep shit no matter
what they do. One fix would be to replace one of the D's prayers
with a "suck health out of" spell that cures you at the expense
of anything alive nearby. Takes a spell cycle, doesn't require
healing and provides some balance for partys :-)

Wraiths worshiping Lythander used to be a nice combination also
(high dex + stealth made them nearly invisible). Dunno if this
still works well enough or not.

Aside: Do you have any idea why I cannot access any of the
servers running the current (1.blah-0.7) version? Using the
cfclient or gcfclient available from the websites, recompiled
for the current kernel and everything, I get core dumps every
time trying to make the connection.

enjoi.

--
Steven Lembark                               2930 W. Palmer
Workhorse Computing                       Chicago, IL 60647
                                           +1 800 762 1582

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