Just wanted to see if devour could get a little bit more love.

My understanding of the spells are as follows

	Consume Flesh	Devour	Winner
Targeting	Can choose which wounds you do (and don't) want healed	Heals worst wounds first	CF
Effect	Appears to outright remove wounds without creating scars	Heals wounds (making scars), then heals those scars if you have power for it	CF
Range	Can only heal one "part" at a time	If you have a bunch of internal/external scars, Devour will reach up to four	Devour
Need	CF is penalized if the area you want to heal is too damaged on the corpse	Devour don't care	Devour
Difficulty / Ease to Cast	Basic	Esoteric	CF
Spite	Decimates the area you're healing on the target	Everything explodes	Devour

As it stands, I think CF is better in all cases except two:
1) When you're using herbs in tandem with consuming corpses so you need scar cleanup more than wound cleanup
2) When you're lazy and don't want to target specific parts and/or makes sure specific parts don't explode when you're killing what you want to eat

I think Devour's biggest weakness is that it creates scars that it then has to heal. This means that if your devour cast isn't strong enough, you'll be left with a [smaller] wound plus a [new/bigger] scar vs CF's just a smaller wound. Beyond that, the fact that it can heal multiple "targets" rarely sees the light of day because one body part is essentially four targets itself: the initial internal/external wound and the following internal/external scars.

What could give Devour some more "teeth":
1) Remove the scar creation aspect, so it can heal up to four "true" targets. In most cases this will be two body parts per heal, since there are generally still internal/external with every body part's injury.
2) Increase how many targets it can hit. Maybe raise the bar on how many spots it can target at once.

How to keep CF's own "teeth" and prevent it from being seen as the poor man's Devour:
1) Cap how much devour can heal per target in relation to expanding how many locations it can heal at once. Make devour the spell of choice when wanting to remove multiple cuts/bruises and CF the spell of choice when wanting to remove one specific big injury.

How Devour will be "different" than Heal, which also currently has a 4 target max cap:
1) Heal isn't capped in its power, so it could arguably still do heavy recovery to a specific wound (similar to CF!). Devour's strength would be reduced while its range gets expanded, which would help justify it being able to do what Heal isn't.

I would love to use CF when I have a notable wound or just one or two minor blemishes to clean up, and Devour when I'm beat up all over from a day of hunting but lack any notable wounds. In a perfect situation, if post-battle I have a bunch of minor dings and one or two bad spots, I'd use CF to quickly triage the bad spots and Devour to clean up the minor blemishes.

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Uzmam! The Chairman will NOT be pleased to know you're trying to build outside of approved zones. I'd hate for you to be charged the taxes needed to have this place re-zoned. Head for the manor if you're feeling creative.

>>Devour should not leave scars so it actually does the job of healing multiple body parts.

I very rarely had it heal more than one part because it would hit external wound, internal wound, external scar, and internal scar. Only exception would be against attacks which didn't cause internal (or external) wounds as well, or if I'm using it to supplement remedies.

I didn't feel it worked better than CF but to be fair it isn't like I was losing a limb and testing to see how much each would take to fully recover it.

>>Devour should not leave scars so it actually does the job of healing multiple body parts.

Did it change? Because when it was originally out it could leave scars if it wasn't strong enough to ping all four "parts".

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Uzmam! The Chairman will NOT be pleased to know you're trying to build outside of approved zones. I'd hate for you to be charged the taxes needed to have this place re-zoned. Head for the manor if you're feeling creative.

>>Buuut, I did some testing with the mana and it takes CF 3+ casts to heal the same severity of wound as it takes Devour at the same amount of mana. At that point, why not use Devour and not need to mess with avoiding damaging certain body parts and all that?

Admittedly, most of the time I'm just healing up to cuts/bruises at worst so it's very likely I didn't notice/appreciate the power difference since I was casting both rather low.

That said, I still would like to see devour get something to make it stand out a bit more from CF.

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Uzmam! The Chairman will NOT be pleased to know you're trying to build outside of approved zones. I'd hate for you to be charged the taxes needed to have this place re-zoned. Head for the manor if you're feeling creative.

Since being able to easily cast devour, I've almost entirely stopped using cf. Devour is to me hands down the better option, both in terms of convenience and in terms of amount of casts spent healing. I think some effort should be made to separate the functionality of the two, and here are my thoughts which are admittedly partially influenced by conversation with zamara about changes to Heal.

1. Both spells have their place (I just dobt really care about cfs).
2. Devour needs to either hit more locations, allow for more healing overflow, or be a cyclic that functions like regen while still checking for corpses.
3. New changes to Heal as a heal over time (hot) could be added as a toggleable ala alkahest edge metaspell that lets devour act like a buildable regen, I.e., each cast adds to the power or duration or whatever, and every 15s it pulses a cast worth of healing.
4. Something something the new reflect damage barrier synergy.

> think some effort should be made to separate the functionality of the two, and here are my thoughts which are admittedly partially influenced by conversation with zamara about changes to Heal.

GM Melete said at Simucon* that there's proposed changes to the Empath HEAL spell, and that DEVOUR would receive similar changes. So I expect Devour is already slated to be improved at some point in the future.

As far as what the changes were, it was going to work more like a "heal over time" spell. So you cast it, it pulses a few times to clear up wounds, before being needed to be recast. This would allow it to heal more total areas and damage than it does now. I think it would also be castable without wounds, and would activate once wounded as well.

*(From a discussion on Radiofree Simucon. My memory may not be 100% accurate, largely in part to GM Salty giving me tequila.)

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Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

No, this is with clean body parts. And I tested with stumps.

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Thayet
Twitter: @thayelf
Tumblr: thayette.tumblr.com

>>Basically, no changes are going to happen unless another GM gets involved.

This is really not an accurate statement. I'm not even addressing this solely for this particular case, but I'd like for everyone to keep in mind a few things when you start thinking this way:

1) A GM who posts or otherwise communicates something might not be the one making that decision at all, and in general we will not be telling you that when we post, because we work as a team. This is especially true when a GM is talking about things over which they are the general point of contact for players. You may not even always know when a particular GM is acting in that capacity, either. Sometimes they're even the one who made the thing they're talking about, and yet still are not the one who made the particular decision. See point two.

2) Pretty much any significant development for the game goes through a huge proposal process, and the results of that process include input, changes, restrictions, requirements, and all sorts of things from various other sources. If you're told that something isn't changing, it is much more correct to state "this is due to some aspect of current design requirements or guidelines that are not being reviewed for changes at this time nor likely in the near future" than anything else. The only real exception is when the answer is instead "this is due to a system limitation".

-Persida

>>This is really not an accurate statement

Perhaps not viewed internally. But external appearances over the years make this a safe assumption. Changes to long existing systems do not generally happen unless another GM is involved. Either the original creator moves on or someone top level makes a decision to allow the original creator to make a change.

This shouldn't be construed as a negative opinion or an attack, just something I've observed over the past, for good or bad.

>> Eh, along with what Persida said, even if it was one particular GM saying no, opinions change. Some of the recent Necro tweaks show that

True. I've seen Armifer and Raesh make a surprising number of changes that I thought were never going to happen because of their stance on it in the past. Of course we don't know if Armifer/Raesh's opinion has been shifting or if he was held back by a higher power that either changed their stance or moved on. I personally think Armifer's opinions have been shifting as he's seen the systems play out. We haven't heard much from Abasha and since it was her creation I imagine Armifer would respect any decisions she made or wants to make.

It has also come to my attention that certain posters think I was somehow attacking Abasha. This is simply NOT the case. I was only pointing out her earlier decision and my view on how DR development typically goes with long-standing systems. (2 years now for devour?). I never actually gave any negative or positive feedback with my original post. Any "attacks" on Abasha are simply not true.

I personally agree with her earlier decision that devour shouldn't be changed because healing should be "difficult" and shouldn't be as efficient as an empath. Plus, if it's any more efficient then Consume Flesh will be completely replaced.

It could probably use a slot cost adjustment though. But then again, I also disagree with the current slot system because it favors dropping spells that are mechanically inferior, even if they are cool or have interest flavor. (e.g. Riftal Summons, Mind Shout, Relevation, Spite of Dergati, etc.)

>> I understand that this may at times be the assumptions players make due to external appearances. That's actually the entire reason that I posted. What I am saying is that it is, in fact, not at all a safe assumption to make, because it is frequently not true in the slightest.

Cool. Thanks for the insight! I'll keep that in mind for the future and try not to make such sweeping assumptions re: development.