QCF Design Community

So, seeing as deities are pretty much finalized (barring some major exploit that comes out of the woodworks or a couple very slight tweaks from the devs), I figured it's time for the final deity rankings. Feel free to post your own and any comments. These are my thoughts:

#1) Dracul
Do I really need to justify this? The sheer amount of health resources this unholy terror provides is amazing, and to top it off his primary piety source (blood pools) is something that is almost always completely untapped when you begin worship. He works extraordinarily well and almost any character can convert in and start rocking out. His only weaknesses are that he offers little to dedicated spellcasters and he's not quite as good for low-level characters, neither of which is enough to make people back away from this awesome deity.

#2) Tikki Tooki
A close second to Dracul, this god offers a wide variety of potent powers that really make life smooth for high-attack characters. Dodging, double-strike, extra popcorn experience, gold, and on top of that a general-purpose piety farm? Great deity overall, and now that he offers GETINDARE (the most powerful glyph in the game, IMO) on worship he can be reliably joined as early as level 1.

#3) Glowing Guardian
Absolution and Humility may have been nerfed (repeatedly...) but they're still some of the most powerful boons in the game. If you can get in the door at level 1, the Glowing Guardian is a kick-ass deity who will pay off many times over before you convert out to drink your potions. He's considerably weaker if you find his altar later, but he still works reasonably well if you convert in for some end-game post-potion protection.

#4) Pactmaker
Versatility and utility is the name of the game, and the Pactmaker allows you to really leverage unused piety. His ability to just improve the performance of other deities is really nice. Unfortunately, he doesn't work very well with Glowing Guardian or Jehora Jeheyu, but overall he's one of the more reliable altars to have on the field.

#5) Mystera Annur
Refreshment, and generally a piety farm. That is all.

#6) Binlor Ironshield
Magic resist, piety farming, and good old-fashioned knockback. Binlor is a very focused god that is great at what he does, but loses ground due to poor versatility. Overall he's a great altar to find early, but completely forgettable if found late.

#7) Earthmother
The only literal piety farm in the game, Earthmother is a master of low-cost/so-so boons. However, the clearance buff has really given her new life in terms of late-game potential. Converting into Earthmother in the end-game now gets you more than just a one-shot entanglement, which can be really useful. She works very well with conversion antics, and if found early enough is actually a very good option. She's much improved from her former status as the queen of consolation prizes.

#8) Jehora Jeheyu
I love Jehora, as my avatar should indicate, but let's face it: he gives little piety, he is horrible if the map is more than 1/4 revealed when you begin worship, he requires a huge amount of piety before you get your first boon, converting into his religion is only viable under very narrow conditions, and even in the best-case scenarios he can still screw you over by random chance. He's a very powerful deity when everything pans out, which is what keeps him off the bottom, but he's only a shadow of his former self when he was unambiguously the most powerful god in the game.

#9) Taurog
I fully recognize that big-T is useful for beginners, but once you move on to more advanced playstyles the fact that he hogs up your inventory and screws with your glyph combos is going to make him hurt as much as he helps. There are really only three cases where Taurog's boons are useful for high-end play: characters with lots of compression seals (ie, Tinkers), resist-stackers, and non-endurance dungeons where unstoppable fury makes for an easy win. Aside from those scenarios, he's a piety farm whose boons I never touch.


Interestingly Dracul and Glowing Guardian have nearly consistently held spots in the top three deities for the entire beta. Dracul went from being a mana-monger in the blood power era to a health-monger in the blood tithe era, and has been top-tier material the whole way except for the brief period where he didn't have either of these boons. Glowing Guardian has always been a reliable heavy-weight aside from the brief period where piety generation was nearly impossible (the fact that he was still useable with desecration or consensus alone during this period was testament to the raw underlying power). Other deities have had their time in the sun, with Mystera, Jehora Jeheyu and Binlor Ironshield each having a short period where they were the dominant deities, but those two have consistently been at the top.

Agree? Disagree? What's your thoughts.

I missed Binlor being super good. They really should make his resistance dropping boons hit unrevealed targets again.

Other than that, I agree with the assessment I guess.

I pretty much agree with this. However, I'll state that I was mostly through with the Hard dungeons before I really figured out how to use Tikki Tooki. He doesn't play well at all with the elementary strategy of using mixed regen fighting (melee plus fireballs/heal/PISORF) to kill monsters one or two levels higher. You either have to take him late (which relies on having a lot of experience with popcorn management) or have an expert grasp of GETINDARE abuse/using Strength potions for an early game catapult.

I use Earthmother a lot and take her as #3 or #4 if the dungeon is mostly open (not Halls of Steel or Ick Swamp!) Mystra is fine for the piety farm and 2 cheap Magic boons, but every time I see her I wish Flames didn't have such a giant downside.

I agree. It's a shame Jehora is so weak. He's a cool concept.

What I find funny is that both TT and Drac got nerfed to where they are. And it's at the top. Lol.

And the basic difference between them is that Drac is obviously and straightforwardly silly, and TT is convolutedly and deviously silly.

Otherwise it's a nice roundup, could use filling out on the "meh and don't like them lower tier deities" by peope who are more fornd of them.

The funny thing is despite being bad, I use Taurog more than MA, Binlor (maybe), JJ, and EM. Whenever you do PQI he is incredibly useful, and almost trivializes hard dungeons for experienced players.

The basic issue is that unstoppable fury is basically a free boss kill. If the level only has one difficult boss, then the effect is pretty straightforward. The moment you put in multiple difficult bosses, UF just doesn't have the staying power to take you through the whole conflict, and the sacrifices to your inventory space and max mana will stick to haunt you. What makes me put Taurog in the bottom tier regardless of this is that this phenomenon only occurs on easier dungeons that veterans shouldn't be losing anyways.

Well, the Taurog interaction with the strats he does interact with in meaningfull ways (conversion/Tinker, %res stacking) is actually pretty big, and that stuff is powerfull, so I don't mind, but most of the vets knows my stance on the issue.

Frankly, "not on par with Drac or TT power wise" doesn't mean something is useless, or even underpowered. Those guys are fundamentally too broken or too flexible respectively to be anywhere near any sensible baseline IMO. Come to think of it, so is Taurog, except he is actually held back by his constraints/penalty scheme quite well for the most part, as opposed to, as I think of them, "those two clowns".

And I don't remember whatever became of the long Pactmaker discussion which turned up quite an uproar a while back. There was quite a few people complaining about most pacts being useless and consensus being too usefull...

Oh, and as for the TT, once one learns to use the Monk with TT effectively, one can easily feel a bit strange about all the notions he might've had of balance and general unwritten "rules" or "laws" of the game before ^^ If you happen to figure it out before you figure the more obvious stuff out, learning the game, as it were, back-to-front, then you'll have a really strange expirience with DD

I tend to use GG a lot more than Dracul or TT, but that's mostly because I favor purist and Rogue runs, and GG is king of both. (The backstabbing holy warrior is a bit incongruous from a storytelling perspective, but whatever works!)

Class synergy is, I think, a fairly important consideration for deities, both at the low end and at the high end. TT Assassin, Dracul Bloodmage, GG Rogue, Mystera Wizard/Assassin, Taurog Berserker, all make relatively easy-to-learn strategies that teach the fundamentals of both the deity and the class, and still tend to be quite powerful even in the vicious dungeons. (Well, not so much Taurog Berserker, but TT/Mystera Assassin and GG Rogue are IMO the most potent combos in the game, excluding strategies that involve much shenanigans.)

Part of the reason that Earthmother and JJ aren't regarded as highly (at least among the forumites) is, IMO, that they lack that kind of symbiotic relationship with particular classes. They're very much generalist deities, perhaps too generalist; good at just about everything, but not great at anything.