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He makes me so mad. I get the impression that he works best when you find him early, so that's the only time I take him. I spam his glyph to rush petition. About a quarter of the time, I eat a bored poison, health drain, or mana burn that makes me burn a potion before level 3.

Once I do get to play without fear, I don't feel overwhelmed with the boons he does have.

Last chance fits the theme well and has saved me once or twice. I like this boon, but its not at all impressive. This is the potato one only enjoys when its next to a steak.

Boost Health is good, I guess. My problem is that increasing your max hp really increases the value of your potions. Makes giving one up seem like reverse synergy.

Boost Mana just feels ugly. If I want to stack mana, there are many much better options. I've never wanted this boon.

Chaos Avatar is freaking wonderful. I love this boon more than I love my daughter's hamster. (Its the cutest hamster I've ever seen too!) This is the only reason I ever consider JJ.

The point of this post is twofold.

1) For the pros. You know, you guys who use the viscous token on already viscous dungeons. When and why should I be using this guy? What makes him shine?

2) Since Chaos Avatar is already what I love, and since cosmetic changes are the focus now, I have a non-balance suggestion to make JJ more appealing. Chaos Avatar should change the way your character and his picture in the corner looks into a horrible chaos beast. That alone would make me play with him more. Think it over, and thanks for reading.

EDIT: I guess he's good for parched runs.

Sidestepper is right, the only problem is where he spawns. At least for GG you can join in late for some protections and cleansings, but with JJ you might not even be able to avoid petition if you join late game, and last chance is strictly inferior to other deific healing sources. Seriously, this is one of the few balance things that must be addressed before publication.

Also, love the chaos beast idea. That or just a random character sprite.

I've gt a strange relationship with JJ. On one hand I feel bad about posting nice things about him because every time Darvin complains about him I actually agree and secretly hope the devs touch him up a little. He doesn't need much, he's just the clunkiest deity - overflow issues, last chance never really being a good deal, chaos avatar whiping the XP overflow, timing issues, chaos avatar not working on below ground bosses etc...

On the other hand - I seem to use him quite a bit, and I always have ideas about unorthodox tier 2 fun crap you can do with him.

One thing he's really good for is Warlords. Gnome warlords to be precise - boost mana like there's no tommorrow, and try packing a Naga Cauldron (the early weakening and corrosion work nice with it). I had some nice Gnome Warlord + Cauldron + Rbs + Compression seal runs.

The other thing he's good for is halflings - the health boost is really good if you can make it work. Most of the debuffs don't affect spellcasters too bad in my expirience and if you're using Bloodtopowa (or are a bloodmage) it's pretty sweet. I suppose you can also go places with a Rogue.

Also, Bloodmages LOVE this guy. They generally don't have to melee stuff and still get a huge boost out of health increases. You have to find him early, though. Also, if Mysterea wasn't what she is (and that is way too good), JJ would be top choice for them.

Chaos avatar's biggest feature is knocking some resists off aboveground bosses, at least for me. If you're doing vicious runs of some sort and have to fight a resistant boss early, it's pretty good. Otherwise you run into timing and piety overflow problems. Getting rid of corrosion and weakenign in vast quantities is also a rather unique feature and works ok with Martyr wraps.

Guys who also like him are early regen fighters who manage to score a Byceps (or Byceps using wizards), since spamming Byceps like crazy increases your piety gain significantly. Spamming Wonnafyt is also fine (until everything is slowed), and combined with the health or mana increasing boons and CA (and balanced dagger ) should work for any ding! centric character (fighters, priests, whathaveyou).

Thing is, there's plenty of stuff that could work out, but he could use touching up.


I just remembered one more thing. If you plan on picking up Chaos Avatar and converting out using Pactmakers Consensus, you can probably pick a pact up. That alleviates any overflow issues and lets you get out right after you've picked the strongest boon up. I think Scholars pact (overheal and might on lvl up) might be fine if you pick CA with 90 piety, but what I generally go for these days is Spirit Pact - JJ rewards conversion, so you give it up as a source of piety but effective lower the cost of Spirit Pact. There might be other good stuff to be had with JJ + PM.

And another thing - if you're having potion problems, I feel ba... Kidding What I mean is - try packing a keg. They're good with dwarves and elves anyway, and you can afford to blow a potion or two one the really cost-effective boosts. Another good (but circumstantial) thing is to pick the boosts when you score El Potion Loco or another subdungeon that loads you with potions. For manamonsters - Crystal Ball and Schadenfraude (and alchemist shop prep), and for healthmongers - Fire Heart (you'll be spamming for piety anyway).

Part of using JJ is knowing how health and mana scale with level.

At first level, a +20 health boost is huge. That's a +200% increase. That lets you do things way beyond what you should be able to do at that level. But at around level 8 or so, that same 20 health is probably only 15% or so your total health. Not only is it proportionately less valuable, but it is absolutely less valuable as well. When monster damage starts to get around 100, it's unlikely that there is any functional difference between having an extra 20 or not.

Boost Health does improve the value of future potions, but we're talking a meager +8 health per potion. Most of the time, that +8 will get lost in the noise.

Boost Mana is almost the opposite of Boost Health. Since you don't gain mana with level, and because spells scale with level, a +3 mana boost retains its value throughout the whole game. Each hit of boost mana improves future mana potions by 1.4 mana. Since spell costs don't go up with level, this improvement doesn't get bleached out the way that health potion improvements get bleached out by monster damage. If you have a deep enough pool of potions (either by being a gnome or having a keg) you actually gain more mana than you lose by sacrificing the potions, and that's before considering the effects of level ups.

So in summary

Boost Health: You only want one or two hits, and you want it early enough to leverage it. I've experimented with extreme JJ health stacking,and going beyond the second stack was just never worth the piety nor the potion, let alone both together.

Boost Mana: If you have a limited potion stock, get enough to reach a meaningful threshold and then stop. If you have a deep potion stock, go nuts.

A sidenote about Boost Health and Priests. I thought that this would be an awesome combo, and it's not bad, but while Priests gain more potion power per boost (+20 instead of +8), they also are giving up more healing since their potions are 2.5 times more powerful. Halflings can break even on three stacks (barely), but that piety could have been spent on Chaos Avatar and/or Last Chance (assuming no conversion antics). Each one of those is like getting a free health potion, so the third layer of Boost Health effectively costs two potions (one directly, another from the opportunity cost of getting the final boons). A Priest with two stacks already is getting about 150-170 health per potion, so this is a HUGE price.

You've made some good points. I'll be playing around with a gnome mana monster for a few days. Also:

One of the major gripes I always had with Jehora was Petition.
That a god of randomness forces you to take something random to make the randomness less random so you won't get randomly screwed over is both random-random and random-weird.

In all seriousness though: I do find Petition counter-productive to the concept. If you want to use Jehora for a while, you almost HAVE to take it - an ill-timed manaburn or healthdrain can end your game or at least cost you a lot.
Most of his punishments are rather tame in comparison, and it wouldn't really hurt much to get hit by them more often- but those 2 are a bit too heavy - they are the sole reason why I take petition.

However, I find being forced to take a boon so the god won't eventually screw me over to be a huge turnoff.
Especially if almost every other god either gives me more or is easier to play with, or even BOTH (I'm looking at you, Dracul).
Yes, its a risky, unpredictable element fitting the whole chaostheme, but balancewise it simply doesn't work in my eyes.
Not to mention its less chaos-y with petition.

I know, the change-and-balance-stuff is mostly done, but what do you think of these suggestions?
*Manaburn still happens, but JJ refills your mana after he burns you - This would mean he can't really screw you over in spiking scenarios, and for anything else it softens the blow somewhat, while still being a punishment that you can't just ignore for most of the game.
*Remove healthdrain, or at last let it be a percentage of your health that you loose.
*When poisoned by him, he gives you X% of your health back.
*Jehora gives you more punishments to still let him be a two-edged sword, albeit in a less severe manner.
*Petition has lower costs, but gives you pity-piety; you gain piety on punishments, though less than you'd do if he actually were rewarding you. This is to make him more two-edged and keep his piety-gain somewhat even; more punishments = less piety, cheaper petition + increased gain = old piety gain with a cheaper petition and a reason to take it.

These changes would make him more playable both without and with petition - and given the right situation, some of the punishments would turn into blessings - which seems to be fitting for a chaos god IMO.


Tl;DR: Change Petition. Make ignoring it less lethal, and perhaps reduce it costs.