So, I’ve been wondering what binding a kraken for Yred would be like. A gargantuan flying spectre, crushing monsters left and right with its draining tentacles…
Turns out the bound kraken isn’t that impressive.
It does okay fighting monsters one on one, but the tentacles are a big target area for groups and AoE damage, so like most bound souls, it’s quite fragile in a real battle. Hilariously, it will squirt ink non-stop while slowly healing back up.
But most of all, and this is the sad part, even though it can fly, it’s useless out of deep water. Not sure if the flopping around does actual damage, but its poor mind definitely cannot handle flying over dry land.
So, the bound kraken can only be used situationally, wherever there’s a pool of deep water. I’ve opened an issue on github, in case this isn’t intentional: Bound kraken can fly but still flops around on dry land · Issue #3461 · crawl/crawl · GitHub
Overall, binding souls still feels more like a (fun) challenging minigame instead of a top tier god ability. Maybe if you could choose and recall any soul you bound previously, for a price (piety, heavy draining). It’s a bit frustrating to quickly and permanently lose those fragile companions, after all the trouble you went to in order to enslave them.