I''m aware that we've probably had several topics like this already, but with the game balance constantly changing I'd think it's alright to renew certain topics of discussion every now and then. My mind has been on deities lately, so here we are.
I'd like to open with the question: how powerful do you think deities should be? I trust we can all agree that all deities should be roughly as powerful as each other, but where should the standard be set?
Myself, I find the current incarnations of Binlor, Dracul and Mystera to be pretty good guidelines of how powerful deities should be, also maybe TT, based on what I read on the forums, but I don't use him enough to be sure. Not that these deities couldn't use adjustments, but I still like where they're at right now.
As for the other deities, I'd say the Earthmother, Taurog and GG fall on the weaker side.
The Earthmother can actually be fairly useful, but she's still lacking something that has significant late-game usefulness.
Taurog is still a nice piety farm and a very nice deity for beginners, but he still suffers from his sword and shield only being useful early on dungeon runs, and the condition for getting his death protections is too limiting.
I can't really say I've played with GG a lot after his nerf, but the impression I'm left with is that he's a god that makes you jump through many hoops to get pretty measly rewards.
The Pactmaker is the pactmaker, I don't really have much to say about him, except that I find it hard to find situations where I can put the Alchemist's pact to good use.
And finally there's JJ. I think the Petition nerf made it even more apparent that JJ is too straightforward of a deity (get petition as soon as possible, reap the rewards with no more consequences), which really feels like it goes against his theme.
I have a suggestion in mind which I believe is at least interesting: Have JJ behave more like the other deities (reward certain actions with piety, punish others, preferably giving random punishments when the piety goes into negatives), but rather than having his likes and dislikes set into stone, make it so that in every dungeon run he has a different "mood."
So for instance, in a certain dungeon run he punishes the use of glyphs and rewards killing higher level enemies, while in a different dungeon run he actually rewards glyph usage, and punishes the killing of the undead. And of course, the only way to find out his current likes and dislikes is by experimenting. By randomizing his mood in every dungeon run, you'd really stick with his theme and make him much less straightforward to play with.
Petition could then mayhaps be changed into a boon that "shuffles" his mood into something else, making it less likely for him to ruin dungeon runs from the get go (like punishing glyph usage when you're playing a spellcaster).
And these are my current thoughts on deities. I really like how the deities have been evolving over time and overall getting clearly more balanced, but there's always room for improvement. Discuss away.