My experience with the new Mahkleb

Back Room Game Design Discussion
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I’ve been playing around with melee DemonSpawn ^ Mahkleb, and these are my thoughts based on that experience:

  1. Unleash Destruction is very strong in the early game, to the point that I can get away with not training my melee weapon skill at all until I’ve found an end-game weapon.
  2. But in the late game Unleash Destruction starts to suck, because fights last longer, and the hp cost scales with your health. It’s still useful, but becomes situational.
  3. The summons are strong all game, so long as you pump invo enough, but again stronger in the early game than the late game.
  4. The “upgraded destruction” is nice flavour, and tactically relevant.

As a result of all this combined, Mahkleb falls of pretty hard in the late game. The marks (from ****** piety) feel like they’re supposed to prevent that, but they’re a tad too weak to actually have that effect.

I have the impression that the marks that improve the summons are the strongest (for high invo characters), and the marks that scale of Unleash Destruction damage are weak. (And yes, there is one mark that fits both categories.)

It sometimes feels like having more hp isn’t actually good with Mahkleb.

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Personally, I’ve found that some of the marks that don’t involve activated abilities are good, like Execution, Haemoclasm, and Celebrant. Also, the mark of Atrocity is the only mark that scales off Unleash Destruction, and it does seem bad. Also, the HP on kill is still pretty relevant, even if it isn’t the only reason to pick Mak anymore. And I would still say more HP is always better, same number of casts from full, but you are harder to kill, and taking longer to regenerate the cost of a blast shouldn’t be that much of an issue unless you are completely relying on them

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Mark of Annihilation and Mark of Carnage both cause explosions that deal equal damage to Unleash Destruction, and it doesn’t scale enough for the explosions to remain relevant.

Yes hp on kill is nice, won’t deny that.

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Haemoclasm is really good, even late game.
With a single kill it can be triggered and clean entire rooms!

5

Ah, wasn’t sure exactly how those scaled. Annihilation seems bad, but Carnage seems decent, if not spectacular. Also, I would say that regardless of how good it is, you actually care about the abilities, and the majority of the marks are good, unlike before the rework, where it was pretty much HP on kill and no one used any other part of it.

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Honestly I liked the old Minor Destruction more in the late game than the current Unleash Destruction.
You could ping it forever, and every 4th shot you’d get an acid bolt that significant damage.
Now I’m like "I trained invo for my ranged option, and I have 4 turns to shoot at you, but it I shoot at you more than twice the health cost isn’t worth it, so I’ll just press ‘.’ " And that feels bad.
I also used to use Major Destruction in rare situations.

I feel like the new summons are stronger and are a smoother power transition, so that’s an improvement.

But I don’t think the marks are actually worth near as much as doubling the HP-on-kill, so in that sense it feels like Mahkleb got worse. (Because heal-on-kill got halved.)

Actually putting in a Mark that increases the health-on-kill would be in interesting way to benchmark how people perceive their strengths.

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I haven’t tried it yet so I don’t have an opinion but just curious: How much invocations did you end up in the late game when it felt lacking?

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I don’t think I’ve gotten the hang of new Mahk yet. Yred, yes. Dith, yes. But with Mahk, I keep asking myself “why didn’t I pick Nem instead?” What am I missing here?

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twenty-something.
Ds have +3 invo, and I was trying to run Mahkleb as a “high-invo” god. invo was on course to be the first skill to reach 27 on the demonspawn that got furthest. (Early Zot, got killed by a new trunk unique.)

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