Eru

FOR: Slow, but easy piety gain at doing almost anything. Beginner's favorite for that! As long as you aren't praying or resting your piety will increase by 1 every 1 to 10 normal speed turns, depending on your wisdom. 70% chance of ressurection if you die with a very very high piety, and also deflects blows from evil monsters. If you improve your prayer skill you will get access to magic school divination and Eru's own spells, which include the excellent Lay of Protection. High piety will increase your mana up to 35%.

AGAINST: weapon restrictions. Not too bad with the late game where mace of disruption for 2h and blessed weapons make it much less trouble. No combat-enhancing spells. The penalty for destroying blessed weapons occurs so rarely than you can usually not think about it or just drop and ignore those pesky blessed broken daggers and clubs (-;. You get a huge piety penalty for killing good monsters.

Yavanna

FOR: Water bite! Before 2.3 this spell had a wrong damage formula that made it useless, but now it adds 41 damage to each blow at 50 prayer (or more if you have Spell-power skill or equipment which boosts spell levels). This makes it the second best sword aura, after Demon blade. Yavanna may have the best spell school support of the gods (Stone Prison, Ent's Potion, Tidal Wave, Healing, etc.). You gain piety by charming natural creatures, so with an area charm spell and a pack of leveled animals you can gain easy piety IF the animals are low level enough to charm. End-game piety is not a problem because you gain piety for killing demons and undead.

AGAINST: Is hard to please in the early game because you lose piety as time passes. You also lose piety whenever you kill a creature while praying, even more if the killed creature is an animal - including animal packs that are hunting you for food! But at least it's level-related so killing a rabbit isn't that bad. This can be avoided by not praying in combat situations. But fire and other area-effects that burn forests are BAD for piety!! This is usually why Yavanna is hardest deity to please. You must spend more time in undead-only dungeons or in the lost temples than you usually would to gain piety until you are able to kill many high-level non-livings (undead, living swords, balls of light, etc) regularly.

The fate that makes you immune to mortals is a piety-saver with Yavanna; the majority of animals should be mortals and can then be ignored. There is no reliable way to gain this fate but LOTS of time and lots of luck (the luck stat or just being lucky - don't know).

It is exceedingly difficult to reach positive piety before the mid-game even for most experienced players. You'd have to design your early game strategy specifically for that purpose. Usually it's just not worth the effort.

You really want to do the Spider quest as a Yavanna worshipper, since you gain 6000 piety points. This will help compensate for all the forest the spell-casting spiders will burn.

Melkor

FOR: Drain, which gives effectively unlimited mana, Genocide to get rid of mobs, Wraithform to pass through walls, fire resistance/immunity and strength and constitution boosts. Melkor may also summon greater undead and demons to help you should your hp fall too low. The biggest advantage is probably Curse, since it is auto-cast in melee, and very powerful at high prayer. Hp sacrafice for damage might be very nice for a high hp char who has several attacks/round. For 10 hp you get 1-4 bonus based on your wisdom. The bonus is updated when your wisdom changes, so you do not have to worry about sacrifices early in the game being a waste compared to those later. Melkor is the only god who permits you to wear the one ring.

AGAINST: Melkor will abandon you if you destroy the one ring. Melkor is hard to please in the early game, and you should expect to have negative piety for a long time: Piety goes down with time (except when resting or when on dlvl 0), and even faster when praying. He will reduce your intelligence and wisdom as you gain piety. He hates elves (even higher piety loss).

Manwe Sulimo

FOR: Additional intrinsic Speed rocks! Manwe's Blessing Rocks! Intrinsic Free Action Rocks! Manwe is a good general-purpose God. Few players or player types will LOSE utility by worshipping Manwe. Wind shield and Avatar are also good, solid spells. The secondary spell schools are handy, especially Air (for Noxious Cloud) and Conveyance (for Phase Door, Disarm and Teleport).

AGAINST: Very hard to gain piety with and very easy to lose it with. Expect to go very low before you start to rise again (with better Prayer Skill --> less piety loss / as well as bigger and more piety-reaping evil monsters). Manwe Lost Temple Quests are also a PAIN.

Tulkas

FOR: Melee spells are Warrior's paradise! Woo-hoo! Divine Aim is an excellent combat booster spell, roughly doubling your damage output for the duration. Str, Con increasing with piety can be nice, and piety is easy to gain with Tulkas. You just have to pay attention to stop praying when you are not in a fight, and even that becomes unimportant later in the game. On the other hand melee chars would often have their con/str maxed anyhow, by late-mid game so it becomes less useful (unless you play a yeek warrioress of course).

AGAINST: you get only one spell school opened by your prayer skill, and it's earth (at 80% of the prayer level, but still...). Earth may just be the warrior's best friend, though - never underestimate Stone Prison. Unfortunately, getting it requires a serious investment in Prayer for non-priests.

External link

The (Not Yet) Comprehensive ToME 2.2.x God Spoiler

Chatter

MayLith: Q @ sacrificing hitpoints to Melkor for damage: is it figured from base Wisdom, or if, say, you found yourself an Amulet of Wisdom or whatever, would that boost your damage bonus higher? Or is the damage bonus assumed on whatever your current Wis is? Any other suggestions on doing this?

ZizzoTheInfinite: The damage bonus from Melkor hit-point sacrifice is based on current WIS, and recomputed retroactively as your WIS changes. I've tried to clarify the description of that in the spoiler.

MayLith: Thank you. I'm still trying to figure all this out. More damage as you sacrifice HP, but that will go down as WIS decreases, and WIS decreases as piety increases... oooof.

Anonymous Are there any ways to take up worship or forsake a god besides Morgoth's altars and burning/wearing The One Ring after play has begun? I wanna take a point of Udun and tell Morgoth to take a hike then take up Eru with a sorceror. :)

HarryErwin: Is there any reason not to pray continuously to Manwe (as long as you don't lose speed for doing that?)

Anonymous If Melkor deserts you, do you keep the damage bonus, and does the damage bonus apply to unarmed?

GhostBuster: For possessors, the Melkor HP loss only applies to your original body. As it accounts for 1/3 in the final HP count (and that high level possessors can easily have at least 2000-3000 HP), sacrificing health is **very** interesting!!

Spoilers/Gods (last edited 2007-10-06 18:10:35 by c-67-160-122-107)