QCF Design Community

After lurking around in the "hot" discussion threads for a while, lujos comment about pactmaker made me thinking.
I'm curious about your ways of using him - being an average player myself, I'm really using only 2-3 out of all the pacts he is offering and mostly the same. So I'll give my opinion of his pacts and you tell me were I'm wrong, so we can see if there may be any potential in changing some things? Either way, I will have learned something in the end so thats great

1) Scholar's Pact (10)
Overheal and Might on LVL up.
That one seems really odd to me. The might effect is not really hard to get and the overheal seems useless to me:
If I need it to survive a hit from an high-lvl monster, I'm propably not able to kill it in 1-2 strikes anyway. Additionaly, I can't trigger the effect when I want it to, so it makes things harder. I'm used to have overheal from playing the vamp, but it just seems odd to me.

2) Warrior's Pact (3)
+1 Max HP on enemy kill.
Although the effect is nice, you're killing monsters pretty often and it drains often similiar amounts of piety that you have gained from slaying the monster. So you're piety is more or less constant (GG, Drac, TT, Taurog). Compared to absolution, it kind of seems weak. I think it slows your piety gain down way too much.

3) Alchemist's pact (4)
+3 XP for using a potion.
I guess you use this one to gain a midfight level up against the boss / abuse it being gnome or halfling. I guess that's really powerful, and the cost looks right, too. Although I'm wondering why you would have such amounts of free piety in the end. 8 potions means 32 piety, thats almost always a boon that could replenish similar amounts of resssources, isn't it?

4) Body pact (4)
1% Phys/Mag Resistance on enemy kill.
That's the one I've been using the most when resist stacking. Another thread compared its cost to draculs resist boon, which baffled me quite a bit, as I haven't thought of that. Then again, as with the warriors pact, you have to commit almost all of your piety to this one, so I think this is either the way to go (stacking resists) or a total no go. As you'll have a hard time to convert out of the current diety.

5) Spirit Pact (5)
+10 CP on conversion.
I actually liked that one a lot when I used to play the vamp while he could still worship the gods. With stacking conversion abilities (Lifesteal / DR / stacking base attack) gone, I'd say its most useful with a gorgon worshipping binlor to increase the Deathgaze (which is the only nonlinear conversion now, isn't it? not counting the goblin). Then again, I think it's hardly worth the cost for the other races (a boon of taurog alone is way cheaper than getting bonus CP this way to acquire a free conversion for human).

6) Consensus (25 of your max piety)
+50 Piety.
Well, this is where pactmaker shines, I suppose. I'm almost exclusively using this boon when I get the chance to. As I don't like to convert in or out of dieties, this one really helps me as an average player to get the boons I want earlier, as well as a nice backup piety for the times I have to break the dieties rules because of my inexperience. I almost feel like this boon is cheap because I can time it in a way that I have taken the boons that exceed the 75 cap before I have to use this, so there really is no downside to it. Most of the time, it's just much more relaxed and straight forward this way, although I suspect that you could pull off more if you timed the other pacts better than I'm able to. But then again, there is not much incentive to try harder, as this boon mostly gets the job done.

So what do you think about it?

1) Scholar's Pact - I never used it. Having to account for 10 piety was always off putting. I just couldn't think of what deity to pair it with.

2) Warrior's Pact - I never used it because I was always generally underwhelmed with HP as a resource. If I was focusing on HP, I'd ussually fix any issues with preps or items, so this felt like another dicey piety sink. I'll rather sink some money into a Troll Heart, to be honest.

3) Alchemist Pact - I've used it with Trilings here and there, for some reason it made sense. Probably because it's one of the few sources of "instant XP" in the game, so it couldn't compare badly with other simmilar stuff.

4) Body Pact - to be honest, I never used it. When I did resistances, I mostly did them with monk, paladin, or in multi-altar dungeons where I could probably cap out or get close with assorted boons from other gods. It ussually turned out I could get the same effect with a consensus. I do believe I was missing out on stuff, though.

5) Spirit Pact - I never used it, not sure why. Probably because I had consensus plans.

6) Consensus - I've sort of stated my view on it in the other thread.

It's amazing how we all agreed on something being flat out too good. And how we all seem to have been casually using it all the time so we all KNOW it's too good. I guess we're all secretly hoping to see what the other pacts are actually like when we can justify "not taking the obvious cheeze" for once

The most amazing thing is how it came up out of what seemed to be a thread derailing. I can't honestly remember I'd seen a Pactmaker thread in ages, and he was rather busted all along

We have a consensus that consensus is too good.

Anyway, other than said boon, I use Scholar followed by Body the most. I mean, if you're catapulting bosses, Scholar gives you 50% more HP for only 10 Piety, potentially more if you can somehow gain more levels (Amulet of Yendor?) and it seems the simplest to control to me. You don't particularly need it at early levels.

What really interests me about pacts is - what gods do you take them with?

And I also figured out why the "take pact at bossfight" never occured to me - I rarely ever lvl-catapult bosses. I ussualy either regen fight them or spike them with a phys or mag string.