My impression was that the extra corruptions were a tradeoff for the fact that getting (and maintaining) a C- alignment is much easier than N= or certainly L+.

Never thought of it this way. I just figured that getting some corruptions when crowning as chaotic, and accelerating further corruption, was fine in a thematic/"makes sense" kind of way. But I would agree.

That's why C is the best alignment. You never have to worry about straying from it - every grave dug, every monster pickpocketed and every NPC murdered only make you an even better paragon of your morality :)

That's a pretty big tradeoff in my opinion. I agree that it is more tedious (not really hard) to get L+ but you don't need to maintain extreme alignments once you are a champion and maintaining alignment is easy enough with amulet of order/chaos you get from being crowned.

CK gets stat boosts to physical stats as either ceil or floor of #corruptions/2, so I am of the opinion that this has already been taken into account.

.....aaaaand I accidentally voted for the issue instead of against. ah well.

Sirtheta, he is talking about being crowned C, not about chaos knights. ;)

I agree that this is how it should be, although I'm not sure it's working that well. Maybe if robbing shops (especially with the more subtle methods) and killing shopkeepers actually had any effect on your alignment it might work better.

I think there is an RFE for fixing alignment issues relating to shoppies.

Wow, now that is embarrassing. Talk about not being able to read. Certainly makes a lot more sense now...but I still disagree. Life is meant to be pretty difficult for Chaos Champions (though it isn't that bad, really, imo. The only real bad part is the corruptions you get on crowning).

Why would you expect a reward from an inherently *chaotic* being to be positive? :P

Chaotic doesn't mean evil.

Doesn't chaos champions gain corruptions faster? That's at least what the guidebook says.

Why wouldn't you? He's chaotic, he should give both beneficial and bad things which is exactly what he is already doing. Most, if not all, corruptions have a postive side and a negative side. What I'm saying is make the positive side slightly (not much) more positive for the chaos champion, or the negative side slightly less negative. Why? As a chaos champion you kind of embrace the chaotic side and corruptions and should in my opinion harness it's power a little better than for instance a lawful character. Also, It's not like a chaos champion's god doesn't care about him. He will heal you just as much as a lawful or neutral god if the character in question should pray (assuming enough piety e.t.c.).

Alternatively make the corruptions more extreme for the chaos champion, this mean increase both the beneficial and negative side of all corruptions. The only problem with this is that Chaos Champions would have it even harder since most corruptions are more negative than positive (which they should be).

I find most corruptions to be more positive than negative, so I don't see the problem. Corruptions are generally good to have, it's just the end state of too many of them that can become an issue.

I agree with this, especially thanks to the newer corruptions, most of which are, if not beneficial, at least not terribly harmful. You're less likely to get really screwed by corruption than you used to be.

What if items with the Essence of Chaos and Corruption corrupted chaotic champions slower? It seems reasonable to me that a chaotic champion would desire to use chaotic items.

Actually most corruptions are still pretty terrible. Maybe I just got the worst possible set [I didn't], but I traded: 6 St, 15 To, 16 Pe and 5 PV for 14 Le and 4 Wi in a recent game. (This takes out of consideration the bonuses from being a Mist Elf and having 16 corruptions: +5 St, +5 To, -5 Wi for the stats above, so the 'real' difference [only on a Mist Elf] is -1 St, -10 To, +1 Wi between 16 corruptions and 0 corruptions. That's still very bad). For any character, that's absolutely excruciating. Considering I didn't even have some really bad ones, it could have been much worse (I also find it bizarre that people think the new corruptions are less harmful. There used to be only two [sometimes three] corruptions you absolutely had to get rid of, and that has more than doubled). In general, I find that your To takes quite the hit, and there are very few corruptions that positively affect melee/melee stats. As for whether that is a reason to change the current system; well, probably not.

Citronvand: You get 30% faster corruption at C-, but this only matter for very corrupting levels and getting hit by corrupting attacks. It is usually not that noticeable.

Well, I'd say that there were four corruptions in 1.1.1 that were in the "remove always" or "remove almost always" category: Stiff muscles, mana battery, poison hands, unholy aura (except very late game).

In 1.2.0, I'd probably say always remove would include body decay and tentacles for casters. The others are all tolerable, though the penalties on maggots is sufficiently bad that I'd try to remove if I can. And some of the new corruptions are very beneficial.

I would say there are only two: stiff muscles & mana battery. Poison hands you have to remove if you don't have thick gauntlets, but unholy aura is only bad in the very early game (since you shouldn't start picking up corruptions until after Water Temple, this doesn't matter). I almost never remove the last two.

Now there are quite a few: Tentacles if a Wizard. Decaying flesh. Disease-ridden maggots (-6 To is killer and unlike very light, doesn't help you out at all). Sure, some are beneficial (more so than in the past), or neutral, but that's always been the case to some extent. With the introduction of subsets of corruptions, you can get really screwed pretty easily, since there are enough quite bad ones compared to really good ones.

I almost always remove poison hands. I've had too many occasions where I have to remove the gauntlets for some reason (Air Temple, say), and then when I pick up my gear, I end up with 165 potions of poison and a pile of cursed food. Yes, it's tolerable if you're careful, but then, you can work around Mana Battery without too much trouble either. OTOH, I don't use wands all that much...

Now that we're discussing cons and benefits of specific corruptions, having both the worms corruption and unholy aura is just hilarious.

I voted against for flavour reasons: I've always thought that the aim of the currently rampaging chaotic forces in Ancardia was to convert everything into chaos beings. Naturally their servants would be first. Chaos is a harsh master, sort of reminds me of the Cthulhu mythos, where the reward of the faithful is to be devoured first and relatively fast.

Speaking of corruptions, I have a Chaos Knight who started with the fantastic four: stiff muscles, maggots, unholy aura and decayed flesh. The next to come along was poison hands and a few others before I got hands on the HMV SoCR. This character would be a keeper (I love underdogs) if I could figure out how to deal with Eternal Guardian. Stiff muscles makes a mockery of evasion tactics.