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 living, demonic, holy and undead monsters.

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. As you continue to gain piety, further gifts will be offered (15 gifts can occur in a single game). The first gift will always happen at * piety and it will be a level one spell. The currently available gift can be seen via (M)emorize spell. When a new spell is offered, the previous one will no longer be available. The last three spells are always level 8 or 9 spells, will all be offered at once, and will never be made unavailable (unless you abandon Vehumet).

Your skills can affect the type of spells you get: e.g. if your Fire Magic skill is 10 levels higher than your Ice Magic skill, the chance of receiving fire spells is almost doubled (×1.9), and the chance for ice spells is divided by 10. This is applied only to elemental spells (e.g. not Poison Magic), and it can't go beyond the limits used in the previous example (×1.9 and ÷10, reached when the difference between the opposite skills is 10). In effect this means that you are likely to receive the high-end spells of the spell-schools you are training for, but there is no guarantee.

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

What Vehumet offers is 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 currated spell gifts, starting from 1* piety, insure a way to kill those pesky orbs of fire and just about everything else. In a way, Vehumet is not really a god; think of your spells as the actual god.

Two free ranks of wizardry help get powerful midgame spells (for example, Freezing Cloud) faster, while making level 9 spells reasonable to cast in a 3-4 rune game. The +1 range also certainly helps, at least 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.

The MP refund is fairly weak early on, but really shines with higher level, AOE spells that take multiple enemies at once. This also makes Vehumet one of the stronger Ziggurat gods, as the sheer mass of enemies provides a massive amount of MP. Vehumet doesn't even require you to use magic; bashing them to death with a magical staff or wand works just as well.

Vehumet is one of the few gods you can abandon while keeping permanent benefits granted via worship (spells learned via direct gift). Vehumet is an alright god for the extended game, thanks to the strong MP regen, but a god with useful active abilities may be prefered. For example, The Shining One provides abilities and both HP and MP when killing evil monsters.

Tips & Tricks

• 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.

History

• In 0.27, Poisonous Vapours and Polar Vortex gained support from Vehumet.
• 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.