Vehumet

Version 0.28: This article may not be up to date for the latest stable release of Crawl.

"Let it end in hellfire!"

Vehumet is a god of the destructive powers of magic. Followers will gain divine assistance in commanding the hermetic arts, and the most favoured stand to gain access to some of the fearsome spells in Vehumet's library. One's devotion to Vehumet can be proven by the causing of as much carnage and destruction as possible. Worshippers of Vehumet will quickly be able to recover their magical energy upon killing beings. As they gain favour, they will also gain enhancements to their destructive spells — first assistance in casting such spells and then increased range for conjurations. Vehumet will offer followers the knowledge of increasingly powerful destructive spells as they gain piety. Vehumet likes it when you kill living beings, you destroy the undead, you kill demons, you kill holy beings and you destroy nonliving beings.

Restrictions

Demigods may not worship Vehumet (or any other deity).

Djinn's unusual approach to magic renders them unable to worship Vehumet.

Appreciates

• You killing monsters (living, demonic, holy, nonliving, and undead).

Deprecates

• Inactivity: You lose 1 piety per 340 turns, on average (1/17 chance every 20 turns).
• Abandonment.

Given Abilities

Piety level -: "Sorcerer's Apprentice"

• No new abilities.

Piety level *: "Scholar of Destruction"

• Gain power from killing - When you kill a monster, you have a piety-based chance of gaining 1d(HD/2) in MP, where HD is the hit dice of the monster killed. This chance is (piety-30)/piety. At full piety, 85%. (Passive)

Piety level **: "Caster of Ruination"

• No new abilities.

Piety level ***: "Traumaturge"

• Aid to destructive magic - Your chance of miscasting destructive spells is reduced by 33%. (Passive)

Piety level ****: "Battlemage"

• Range increase for destructive magic - The range of destructive spells is increased by 1 tile. (Exceptions: Static Discharge, Sticky Flame, Freeze, and Frozen Ramparts.) (Passive)

Piety level *****: "Warlock"

• No new abilities.

Piety level ******: "Luminary of Lethal Lore"

• No new abilities.

What Vehumet considers Destructive magic

Vehumet's "Destructive spells" include all Conjurations spells, plus: Airstrike, Eringya's Noxious Bog, Freeze, Frozen Ramparts, Ignite Poison, Ignition, Inner Flame, Lee's Rapid Deconstruction, Maxwell's Capacitive Coupling, Olgreb's Toxic Radiance, Ozocubu's Refrigeration, Poisonous Vapours, Polar Vortex, Sandblast, Scorch, Shatter, and Yara's Violent Unravelling.

Gifts

Spells. If you are above the first piety breakpoint and eligible for a gift, there is chance that Vehumet will offer you the knowledge of a Destructive spell. Vehumet will offer up to 15 spells:

Gift	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13-15
Spell levels	1	1-2	2-3	3-4	3-5	4-7	4-7	5-7	5-7	5-7	5-7	6-8	8-9

The first gift will always happen at * piety. The last three spells, which are all level 8-9, are all offered at once, and will always be available so long as you continue to worship Vehumet.

Gifts will tend to correlate towards your existent skills. Investing more into specific elemental skills (Fire, Ice, Earth, Air) increases the chance of a spell of said skill. When an elemental skill is 10 or more levels higher than the others, you'll have a 1.9x chance of recieving that element's magic, and 0.1x chance of other elemental spells.

The gift timeout is 98+2d50 turns for the first four gifts, and 128+2d50+2d15 for the rest.

Punishments

Vehumet does not appreciate abandonment, and will call down fearful punishments upon disloyal followers! Those that anger Vehumet find destruction amply heaped upon them. Novices are struck by flame and frost; archmages by crystal spears and firestorms. Their own conjurations, too, are wont to misfire at the worst possible moments. Vehumet's wrath lasts for a relatively short duration.

Those who abandon Vehumet are periodically bombarded with a wide range of harmful Conjurations. Such spells increase in power as your XL increases.

Strategy

Vehumet offers a nearly guaranteed "engine" to victory. The god's abilities (or lack thereof) might not seem all that impressive at first glance; even Sif Muna offers some form of active ability. But Vehumet's curated spell gifts, starting from 1* piety, insure a way to kill those pesky orbs of fire and just about everything else. In a way, you aren't worshipping Vehumet; think of your spells as the actual god.

Two free ranks of wizardry help get powerful midgame spells (for example, Freezing Cloud) online faster, while making level 9 spells reasonable to cast in a 3-rune game. The +1 range also certainly helps with many spells. All this comes with zero Invocations investment. Combined with the wizardry, and worshippers can afford to invest more into defensive skills, or even hybridize.

Whether "having spells as a god" is a good thing is up to you, but it does come with a few downsides. Vehumet is one of the weaker gods in the earlier stages of the game. For spellcaster backgrounds, the first couple spell gifts generally aren't strong enough to compete with your own spells. Those new to spellcasting have to take time to train for their spells, which might not be all that competitive in the first place. And as you progress, Vehumet remains deceptively simple; strong magical play is still demanded to make up for a lack of active abilities.

Tips & Tricks

• The MP refund is fairly weak early on, but really shines with higher-level AOE spells that take out multiple enemies at once. This also makes Vehumet one of the stronger Ziggurat gods, as the sheer mass of enemies you'll be killing provides a massive amount of MP. Vehumet doesn't even require you to use spells; bashing them to death with a magical staff or firing a wand works just as well.
• Since Vehumet will try to gift spells which you haven't yet seen (picking up a book will mark all spells therein as "seen"), it may be worth buying early spell books from magic schools you don't want.
• Vehumet is one of the few gods you can abandon while keeping permanent benefits granted via worship (spells learned via direct gift).
  • Vehumet is a decent god for the extended game, thanks to the strong MP regen, but a god with useful active abilities may be preferred. For example, The Shining One provides active abilities and both HP and MP restoration when killing evil monsters (which make up most of the extended game monster lists).

History

• In 0.27, Poisonous Vapours and Polar Vortex gained support from Vehumet.
• In 0.26, Vehumet's spell gifts were widened in level range.
• In 0.25, spells were reworked. Vehumet used to support various conjurations that are now deleted.
• Vehumet underwent a complete overhaul in 0.12, dropping summoning support, MP cost reduction, and book gifts, instead gifting destructive spells directly.
  • For information about Vehumet prior to 0.12, see this revision.