Just won this game! I would have probably gone for more runes, but a funny bug nuked my max HP while I was in Tomb:1. Thanks PleasingFungus for the quick fix!
Right from Turn 1, Beast Form trivializes the game. I o-tabbed my way to Lair as a Felid without really any stress. Having banged my head against various flavours of melee felids in the past, this was a completely different experience.
I found Maw Form and Serpent Form very early, before Lair! Serpent Form proved to be very strong in melee, and the constriction melee attacks really squeezes out extra damage when it is most needed. However, losing the Felid speed in the early game is not something I could bring myself to accept. The moment something hit hard, it made it very difficult to run away, especially with how many turns it took to untransform.
I tried Maw Form next, but it proved to be quite disappointing. The healing was almost imperceptible. Maybe completely imperceptible… is it bugged? At least the speed is preserved… I ended up swapping back to Beast Form to clear the rest of Lair. Maybe if the healing was on-hit and not on-death, Makhleb style?
After spamming some Gozag shops in Lair as I always do, I lucked out on a Granite Talisman in a jewelry shop. Honestly, losing max HP as the penalty for not having enough skill is laughable. Even with a 50% penalty, this is such a titanic improvement over regular melee Felid there’s little reason not to upgrade to it immediately (and hard-focus the Shapeshifting skill).
This carried me brainlessly all the way to deep Vaults, at which point I found Dragon Form. This, with Vhi’s Electric Charge, made me repeatedly one-shot iron dragons and titans. I also had Manifold Assault for those occasional spicy creatures you don’t want to hang around with for too long.
At this point, it was basically a regular Transmutations run, with the added bonus of not having to constantly recast (love this so much) and also being immune to purple draconians’ quicksilver breath (which dispel forms in the current stable branch).
I found Storm Form in the Elven Halls:3 mega-vault, which is just as insane as it was before. I went into Crypt under Gozag wrath, blinkbolted in an open space, held down TAB and saw Mennas flash for a single frame on my monitor before he got expunged out of reality.
I also tried Lich Form for a little bit… and when it comes to Felids, this just isn’t the one. The melee debuffs are interesting but simply cannot compete with Dragon and Storm. The active ability is amusing, but the range on it is very small for its ludicrous 20 MP cost (and this range should be indicated in the ability description). I also very much miss the Necromancy spell enhancer on it - why was it removed? Honestly, I see no real purpose to this form aside from the anti-torment extended characters love. I would not imagine most players using any of Lich Form’s passives and active aside from being able to clear Tomb/Hells/Pandemonium without worry. It’s also kind of sad to see Kiku lose a bit of their identity as a side effect. I wonder if Lich Form could be Kiku’s capstone, with another late-game form to replace the talisman.
I wonder if Wereblood is still in the game, I struggled so hard to find it and simply could not. It would have made this whole thing even crazier.
Overall, Transmuter’s early game went from mediocre to berserker-tier. Transmuter’s end game went from amazing to unstoppable. The skill penalty causing a loss in max HP is mostly laughable.
To really drive that last point home, after the bug hit me and caused me to have 0 skill levels for any of my forms, I still finished clearing the entirety of Tomb:1 (except the death inner corridors) as a 35 max HP Storm Form Felid. Everything dies so fast to Manifold Assault that there is no real risk besides an unlucky triple-smite.
Love the way this rework is going. The talisman spawn rate seems just right - I found everything about at the point where it should be found, and had all possible talismans by Elf:3. Maybe they are a little on the “too common” side. If I rewrote my FeSu meme guide with this branch, it would be completely doable to suggest a completely different god since milking Gozag for Forms is no longer really a necessity.