Sif Muna Brainstorm

Premise: It may be worth considering an adjustment/rework of Sif Muna. Sif's current form has high points, but could stand to be slightly stronger and more mechanically distinct from the laser-focused and all-passive Vehumet.

In particular, Sif's piety gain needs further work. Reaching 6* is perceived as a challenge and several 0.22 tournament players reported that without a particular effort to get 6* piety it did not happen in a 3-rune game. However, Sequell data indicates that 80% of Sif games reach 6* piety at XL<=20, so the problem might be perceptual.

Goals

• Identify existing aspects that are good but could potentially improve with adjustments

  • E.g. The in/out rate of piety and tiers that abilities unlock.

• Mechanically distance Sif Muna from Vehumet

  • E.g. Add a new combat-related active ability, or introduce a more novel solution.

Scratchpad - ideas to consider

• Reevaluate piety gains and piety costs

  • Presumably gains would be slightly increased and cost of Channel Magic slightly decreased

• Remove Divine Energy and move Channel Magic to 1* in its place

  • Redundant. Both have the same output (grant MP) and Channel Magic is the more well-rounded ability and can be positioned to provide a similar early game power spike while remaining compelling and useful throughout.

• Remove Amnesia

  • Could keep since it can be useful, but it is low impact in most games and would not be tragic to cut if needed.

• Move threshold where book gifts begin to 4* or 3*

  • This may be unnecessary depending on the outcome of piety adjustments, but influencing a character's build decisions sooner than current could be desirable

• Adjust miscast protection to more strongly encourage rolling the dice with it, hopefully making it a sharper decision point

  • Pitch: instead of 'nothing happens', you still get miscast effects but Sif refunds the MP of a miscast spell (piety-based chance to refund).
  • This adjustment presumes players would rather risk miscast effects than lose the MP, and would only be successful if that proves true with this as a compelling enough bonus to influence behaviour more often than the current version.
  • Counterpoint (ebering): Miscast effects are very complicated, hard to reason about, and can be very severe (banishment, hostile greater demons, even at low XL). (Refactoring the miscast code and making miscasts sane is its own issue. Addressing it might make this workable but that's a big mountain to climb.) If you really want to encourage rolling the dice, grant both the MP refund and the miscast protection.

• Spell school crosstraining

  • Already all but discarded this idea, but including it for completeness.
  • Intention was to encourage branching out if it was made easier to do, but training a few points of many skills is already good so this just turns into an uninteresting raw power increase that treads on Ashenzari's skill boost. This may be better achieved already by the above miscast protection adjustment.

• New Ability (pitches)

  • Divine Focus (Instant) - Sif Muna temporarily grants you incredible focus, allowing you to cast spells just by thinking their incantations. The next 3 spells you cast are instant, but after losing focus you temporarily lose access to magic. (This is the same minusCast timeout that was on Divine Energy, moved here. Can adjust timeout dur if needed)
  • Power Squat (working name) - possibly similar flavor to the above suggestion. Grants Archmagi but prevents movement for 3-5 turns. Followed by -Squat or -Cast. The idea here is to help a generalist caster (using many schools at lower skill levels) reach higher spellpower levels. 5* active. Annoying interaction with out of combat spells but that's a problem with out of combat spells.

WIP Sketch - what might this look like?

*..... - Channel Magic - (adjust piety cost and invo scaling values as necessary)

**.... - MP Refund for Spell Miscasts - (as described above, adjust piety-based refund chance as necessary)

***... - Book Gifts - (start here, and adjust gift timer as necessary to account for any changes to overall rate)

****.. - Amnesia - (no change for now, but this might be expendable if the space is needed for something)

*****. - Divine Focus [New Ability] - (as described above)