by Lujo on Wed Mar 07, 2012 9:47 am
My thoughts:
EM - it may sound strange but I've never really had problems with EM. Her main problem was that the other piety farm deities had more usefull boons and almost equal piety farm potential. Since I've always used TT a lot, taking her first, racking up levels and piety and grabing cheap boons then slowing everything and converting to TT from a massive popcorn bowl bonanza always felt really good. I only stopped using her regularly when I discovered how good a piety farm the old GG was, but that turned out to be a dvelopment mistake. The strat's still great for fighters, mass slow + fighter XP bonuses + Tiki's Edge = massive level catapulting.
She could use work, but I feel like there having too many more usefull piety farms is her real problem. I've also never really tried out the corrosion+spellcaster combo enough, but that might need testing too.
Taurog - again, it's a perspective thing. He's deffinitely a good piety farm (excelent now that there are more spellcasting monsters around). The lack of +DMG items in general makes the sword a better choice for an item slot than it looks. Also, the possible string of death protections that work off piety instead of other resources is actually fundamentaly broken, and the "takes up your inventory" deal is either a harsh counterbalance to that or quite irrelevant when you consider that the "string of freebies" characters are very often conversion heavy.
I'd say his main problems are the complete prohibition of ANY glyph use. If there was an intuitive way to allow him to grant you at least BYCEPS, possibly a shrunken down variant upon joining that doesn't count as a spell, I'd say he'd be a lot more appealing. His second problem in my opinion is that the shield sticks in your inventory long after it has inevitably become somewhat useless. I'd say welding the sword and shield togather might be more appealing to me than the armor pieces. Or making his "gear" behave as physical glyphs, as in, being items that you can click on to cast predetermined spells, with carefull consideration of which glyphs exactly.
Say put BYCEPS on the shield, WONNAFYT on the sword, death protections are his final boons anyway so CYDSTEPP has been taken care of, and I'm not sure what the other ones would be...
I don't have the time to talk about the others, but those 2 seem to need work so I guess this is enough. I think the glyph-on-a-stick idea for taurog might be a good one if done right.
EDIT: thematicaly, Byceps could go on the Armour and Wonnafyt on the helm, which would leave pissorf to the shield as a shiled bash I guess though I'm loath to give dmg spells to Taurog. Still no clue as to what the sword would do then. Getindare? I'm not sure wether this would be impossible to balance but it would be hell'a fun and flavourfull :_D
I almost got pwned by Shifty Brickwork!