And you can't use poison to completely remove the level difference between a level 1 hero and a level 10 boss anymore? Shocking! ;P
I figured my little escapade was the inspiration for this. Your change goes far beyond what was necessary to deal with a niche approach and hits it pretty hard in other places, to the point at which it is completely unusable for 1st level characters. Seriously, I cannot think of a worse use of mana at level 1 (BURNDAYRAZ does the job of suppressing monster healing better, and that does damage of its own!)
The issue is that APHEELSIK allows you to funnel exploration resources into a single combat, so against a sufficiently easy boss with enough bonuses to damage efficiency and
an entire dungeon and two sub-dungeons worth of exploration resources you can eventually fell a giant. I actually feel this achievement is
much less impressive than Avatar's 45 second berserker speedrun.
If you feel that you need to prevent level 1 boss kills, then you didn't need a cap nearly this restrictive. Something like 50+20/level layers of poison would do the job. That may seem excessive, but my caster-assassin in that 1st-level boss kill game was recharging 20 MP between attack runs (20 tiles) so he'd have needed 200 layers of poison per casting to pull it off. Under a 50+20/level stack APHEELSIK, that would've required me to be level 8 to do that. Your 10/level numbers effectively kills the glyph for most conventional approaches.
Frankly, if I'm willing to sink half the dungeon in exploration to get a high-level kill, then that's my perogative as to how I use that resources; in the vast majority of practical situations anything greater than 6-level difference is unheardof, and anything above a 4-level difference is very rare (and often achieved with damage-spiking shenanigans, not APHEELSIK hit and run). I feel you're using a mostly academic scenario as justification for a sweeping change that vastly overnerfs the glyph in the vast majority of practical situations.
Well if it's not the infinte piety exploit, then I'm stumped
I've figured it out. The bonus CP is deducated from the glyphs in the wizard's inventory, and when they hit 0 they stop contributing. I'd noticed the CP going down, but hadn't mentioned it with regards to the infinite loop because 0 CP glyphs obtained from altars seem to contribute to this value, so I'd presumed glyphs continue to contribute even when depleted. This is not the case, and it seems that 0 CP glyphs are not supposed to provide benefit, thus terminating any infinite loop.
It's just that the numbers might need tweaking at some point. Or maybe even not, we just find it controversial and were spoiled by having a hack at our disposal for really long. Time will tell.
I support this change for the boon and the item, and feel that with the right tweaking this could work. For the glyph, it's been beaten silly with the nerf stick when it wasn't really a problem. Yes, you could do some unreal things with it
in easier dungeons. In most practical situations APHEELSIK caster antics are unheard of for low-level characters since they're so resource-inefficient, and melee-based approaches are limited by your ability to survive a single attack.