Re: Balance Tweaks Roundup
Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2012 8:10 pm
It could very well be that I'm just no good at playing Taurog (outside of easy scenarios - and by "easy" I mean everything but the vicious dungeons, two or three of the hard dungeons, and a handful of quests and challenges ). But for me, finding his altar in a difficult scenario is basically a waste of an altar; the only real exception is for a pure caster, for whom he is a so-so desecration option. His items fill up your inventory too fast, and his boons really aren't worth taking just for the meager bonus damage, considering their piety cost and the reduced max MP.
He's not a very good piety farm, either, except in the rare case where you want to immediately convert a bunch of glyphs then convert out, and have no plans to worship GG, JJ, or Mystera. Otherwise, the optimal strategy is to wait until I've converted to my preferred deity and then start killin' stuff, because that's going to get you piety with your 'real' god (TT, Dracul, and JJ all give piety for kills, GG for the piety on level-up). Binlor and Mystera are much, much better piety farms, and IMO in a vicious dungeon GG is the best counterpart to Pactmaker due to the ridiculous amounts of piety you'll eventually get from leveling up (unless you've prepped him).
Every other deity is either flexible by default (like JJ) or at least has something you can do with them apart from their speciality (like EM, who is primarily useful for her utterly broken Plantation+Clearance combo, but her other boons aren't terrible). And I do think the Taurog-worshipper is unique in being so completely inflexible: the Monk can in fact get magic resistance, and in fact his other class features (higher max res, double regen) make him very formidable once he does so; the Assassin has plenty of options even when poison isn't effective (mainly due to Swift Hands - now, if Swift Hands also didn't work against undead then you'd have a very good point), and TT has plenty of uses other than his poison boon. But worship Taurog in, say, the Slime Pit or Namtar's Lair, and it seems to me that you're deliberately crippling yourself.
I don't necessarily want Taurog to be stronger, but it would be much appreciated if something were done to make him more flexible, at least for high-end play. Otherwise we may as well put a veto slot at the church so that you can ban his altar as soon as it becomes more trouble than it's worth.
He's not a very good piety farm, either, except in the rare case where you want to immediately convert a bunch of glyphs then convert out, and have no plans to worship GG, JJ, or Mystera. Otherwise, the optimal strategy is to wait until I've converted to my preferred deity and then start killin' stuff, because that's going to get you piety with your 'real' god (TT, Dracul, and JJ all give piety for kills, GG for the piety on level-up). Binlor and Mystera are much, much better piety farms, and IMO in a vicious dungeon GG is the best counterpart to Pactmaker due to the ridiculous amounts of piety you'll eventually get from leveling up (unless you've prepped him).
Every other deity is either flexible by default (like JJ) or at least has something you can do with them apart from their speciality (like EM, who is primarily useful for her utterly broken Plantation+Clearance combo, but her other boons aren't terrible). And I do think the Taurog-worshipper is unique in being so completely inflexible: the Monk can in fact get magic resistance, and in fact his other class features (higher max res, double regen) make him very formidable once he does so; the Assassin has plenty of options even when poison isn't effective (mainly due to Swift Hands - now, if Swift Hands also didn't work against undead then you'd have a very good point), and TT has plenty of uses other than his poison boon. But worship Taurog in, say, the Slime Pit or Namtar's Lair, and it seems to me that you're deliberately crippling yourself.
I don't necessarily want Taurog to be stronger, but it would be much appreciated if something were done to make him more flexible, at least for high-end play. Otherwise we may as well put a veto slot at the church so that you can ban his altar as soon as it becomes more trouble than it's worth.