As I slowly but surely crawl through old megaprogress combos, it’s worth to share my experience with the Healer background, which was more surprising than I expected. For example, I didn’t expect Healer to be a better version of Cinder Acolyte.
The first char was a 0.12’s SEHe, then I did five chars in 0.13 and another five in 0.14, and the rest was done in 0.15, so there will be a bit about DCSS evolution too. Most of the chars switched to Oka and then to a “title” god at the end. Although, I tried the first iteration of Dith on a DE caster and it was pretty solid. I had fewer ranged chars than in 0.12 when I was playing Sludge Elves and Priests, but this build remains one of the fastest ways of winning the game. Even though you have to fiddle with ammo, the combo of a ranged weapon and a shield was too OP to ignore. Sadly, it was removed in 0.15, making ranged weapons “just OP” instead of “extremely OP”.
Healers feel unexpectedly modern: it’s a strong starting kit, but you need to adapt and specialize pretty fast. You start with two identified potions, curing and heal wounds, which is huge. But the biggest strength is Ely, 3 Invo skills, and two stars of piety. This gives you four (!) abilities: Lesser Healing / Pacification, Lesser Self-healing, Purification, and Divine Protection. At the same time, you have only 1 Fighting, a +1 robe, no weapon, and exactly 0 weapon skills. This means a half of your starting resources will be spent at XL 1-2, until you find a non-terrible weapon, which was not as easy in old versions as it is now. The number of cursed -2 daggers and maces on D:1 was ridiculously high.
Old Ely had two ways of getting piety: you could sacrifice any weapons and even ammo, with evil brands giving more piety. Also, you could pacify monsters through Lesser Healing, which had no piety cost, getting half of the experience and more importantly, some piety. Ely’s piety management is the only negative aspect of this background, but I had no idea it could be that bad.
While winning all the 22 chars, I don’t remember ever going above the 2 starting stars of piety! Piety from sacrificing weapons is minimal, and juicy evil weapons are extremely rare early on. Like you could find only one dagger of draining/pain before reaching Lair. Even when my FeHe sacrificed literally all weapons and ammo in the Dungeon, I couldn’t get to 3 stars.
Building piety through healing combines everything old DCSS is (in)famous for: it’s tedious, spoilery, and frustrating. I remember my felid kiting the first hobgoblin around a pillar a dozen times trying to pacify it. Even with 3 starting Invo skill you usually can’t pacify humanoid monsters before they poke you to death, unless you play a fast species. Also, old DCSS being old DCSS, the targeter doesn’t show the chance of pacifying a monster, so I had no idea how much Invo I needed at different stages of the game. All that was made worse by a fast piety decay combined with a slow regeneration speed, which is typical for old crawl.
But there was an easy and convenient solution to this: play it as a Cinder Acolyte. You could treat the starting piety as a finite resource, which you can’t replenish, and leave the Pacification for early ogres and similar threats. Two stars are enough for a dozen of Lesser Healings, which restore about the same number of HPs as a potion of curing. Plus you could use Purification a couple of times to cure early poison. This is enough for surviving until Temple, and you could switch to another god without much trouble, as Ely’s wrath is mostly flavour.
There are several parallels between Healers and Cinder Acolytes: a strong starting kit, which becomes less relevant over time, a limited supply of piety, and the need to switch to a “real” god eventually. And to be honest, I prefer He to CA, because Ignis’s wrath is a real “feel-bad” part of the latter background. You either switch around Lair, making your game harder for a while, spending extra consumables to survive, and risking a splat, OR you waste your god slot for having rF until the end of the game.
The final question is would it make sense to revive this background? On one hand, it’s not as flashy as other zealots. On the other, modern Ely is more convenient and less painful to play than the 0.15 version. Plus it could be an alternative to CA, providing a similar “extremely strong start, but you need to adapt quickly before your powers fizzle out” feel, but being less painful with respect to switching to other gods. And unlike CA, staying with Ely till the end is a more reasonable option. Also, the reintroduction of Healers could be a good time for dropping Ely’s racial restrictions. Mummies and Healers are made for each other!
Playing through 0.12 to 0.15, I’ve noticed that the performance of WebTiles got better in later versions. Although, the game still gets slower the longer you play. The difference between console speed and WebTiles speed is massive. I really miss use_animations, which will be added only in 0.16.
0.15 finally removed item destruction and item weight, but another welcome change is having more consumables and ammo, especially in the early and mid-game. 0.14 added some “ammo enemies”: satyrs and fauns in Shoals, naga sharpshooters and non-lava-only salamanders in Snake. Hand crossbows have returned in 0.15, and there are kobolds with them in the early Dungeon, providing you with bolts. In 0.15, you could enter Lair with a sling and 300 stones, which is a crazy amount for 0.12. If you use bows, it’s no longer necessary to dive into Elf while doing S-branches, just to replenish your arrow stockpile. Plus most species could finally eat only permafood, without constantly chopping corpses (unless you cast spells). The number of id scrolls is so high that I finally didn’t have to pick remove curse scrolls after Lair, and could just id anything potentially interesting.
The Dungeon is finally 15 floors deep, but the new Depths branch doesn’t have its own identity yet. It’s an eclectic mix of old D:20+, Crypt, and Lair/Forest. You get trolls, giants, and dragons, you get undead and vampires, and you get death yaks, emperor scorpions, dire elephants and a bunch of spriggans. The modern version is more refined, but still lacks a central theme, especially when you can get an encompas map with almost every flavour of monsters in it.
And finally, the changelogs for 0.13 and 0.14 are massive! It was the time of the first coming of DO, and that resulted in a massive content injection, bringing the game closer to its modern richness and variety.
