(Nearly) Forgotten History of the Gods

[Darvin]

[chandl34]

[dislekcia]

Okay, now compare the gods from the alpha too

FYI: Petition is there to balance out JJ's lack of piety-decreasing actions. The cost to worshipping JJ is you have to be flexible to deal with the things that get thrown at you. Other gods all have negative piety hits that they lob at you, yes, you can avoid them by playing within their rules - just like you can mitigate the impact of the afflictions that JJ sends your way. Put it this was: JJ's piety tax is explicit in a boon, the other gods have implicit taxes on your actions.

Tikki's poison is considered too. It's there if you want to convert out later OR if you know that you're going to have to handle multiple hit enemies or are forced to regen-fight. It'll help you take less hits AND give you piety to help mitigate the piety tax.

[Blovski]

Flames isn't super-popular but with Chemists, Rats, Assassins etc. it definitely has a niche. The MR crusher is similarly set up. They both kinda benefit from Mystera being a non-judgy god.

Re: Petition, I think JJ is a great slightly-more-advanced-user god. The way he's set up does tend to mean a late JJ find is just one less altar on the map but as a prepped god he's fantastic imo. I was so stumped by him at first, and it takes a lot of confidence with the game to make the calls at the beginning with him and it takes a little more confidence about bosses, popcorn bowling and so on to be willing to give up the spike of the potions. Not even to mention the boost you get from peekaboo antics and knowing which glyphs generate piety on him.

Poison - pays for itself in piety, adds a little early game stuff and utility to TT who's otherwise just got a decent glyph to go with. There's definitely a strategy of switching in with a ton of cash, taking poison, mauling some popcorn and moving to someone who won't punish you. I think Lujo used it to maul VGT to death back in the day.

[Lujo]

[Darvin]

[Lujo]

[Darvin]

[Lujo]

That's the funny thing, I think he's better, it's just that the other gods are infinitely more reliable, less potentially dangerous and more generally useful than they used to be so the discrepancy is lower. In fact, current JJ is much more of a general pupose engine of doom (as opposed to the guy who just doesn't punish you), to me he feels like alpha PM++. He's pretty much the same guy, except he's still brutal even in a game with other usable gods...

This may sound insulting and I'm very bad at saying things like this without them sounding offensive and I mean 0 harm with it - but I get the feeling that JJ was tweaked and buffed a lot based on your feedback with the rest of us taking your opinion on him for granted. Except once I finally went and played with him a bunch after regarding him as the "Darvin deity" for a long time it turned out so many things you were complaining about concerning him are just... not there. He's really overbuffed and overly reliable, IMO. It seemed to me for a longish while that you were never really even using him to his full potential at all.

[Darvin]

No need for to baby it, it's a fair assessment that I wasn't using JJ to his full potential. I think part of the issue was I was so enraptured with spamming WEYTWUT that I never stopped to explore the piety-generation potential of spamming the cheaper glyphs - BYSSEPS, GETINDARE, and PISORF (peek-a-boo) in too much detail. And really, why would I need to? He really was servicable even at that level.

I still stand by my comments that he's very dependent on early worship for best results, and is a wasted altar if he's found later. I most certainly didn't think his best case scenario needed buffing, and noted repeatedly how JJ had perhaps the greatest power difference of any deity between being prepared and being found naturally later in the run.