Deep Dwarfs (was: Elyvilon Reform)

[elmdor]

It seems to me like the changes to Elyvilon make it extremely difficult for Deep Dwarves to worship her effectively.

In my current game, I started out a DDEE and began worshipping Ely in Temple. I was doing OK at first and by mid-lair I was at *****. Never again would I see piety that high. As I began to run into more and more powerful monsters, I had to keep spamming Minor Healing after most fights, and made the mistake of pacifying a few of the ones I couldn't conveniently kill. My piety never recovered and steadily dropped lower and lower. Even wearing an amulet of faith, I remained stalled between ** and *** all through Spider, Shoals, Vaults,and Elf. Finally I gave up and converted to Makhleb so I could have a means of healing I could rely on.

Although I don't think the previous Ely situation was perfect, she was one of the few gods who worked really well with Deep Dwarves. Now, since DD can't regenerate, they're now always forced to spam Ely abilities, and piety is much harder to come by. The dwarves were already restricted enough in terms of feasible gods, so with Ely out of the running, only Trog and Makhleb are left.

I really feel that the piety balance for DD^Ely could use another look. Maybe DD could get a piety bonus to compensate for their lack of natural healing, or perhaps worshipping Ely could grant the regeneration effect while out of battle...?

[Lasty]

That seems like a problem with deep dwarves to me. Trying to balance things around deep dwarves will always be a problem.

[elmdor]

If Ely piety generates fast enough to sustain that all game, it's no longer meaningfully limited for characters who don't need to spam minor healing in/after most fights, unless minor healing is effectively free.

Yes, but you could say the same for old Ely. Under the previous rules, a Deep Dwarf who went for 3-5 runes might have needed to try to pacify with Lesser Healing 1000 times, and Greater Healing 500 times. A Hill Orc Healer might have been able to get away with half that number of pacification attempts to receive the same benefit. So in that way, Ely's piety was never really "meaningfully limited" except by hunger cost. As long as you didn't waste time or food, and remembered to pacify a certain fraction of monsters you met (a fraction which changed depending on your build), you could usually use old Ely's self-healing as much as you wanted to.

Not everyone enjoyed this style of gameplay, but at least the player enjoyed a measure of control over the rate of Ely piety gain. That's in strong contrast to the new system of exploration piety, where it's quite easy for Troll or VS to get to ****** with Ely, and very hard for DD to keep up the pace. I think exploration piety is well suited to a god like Ash with mostly passive benefits. But because different races need to use Ely's powers at widely varying rates, exploration piety alone is not the best mechanic. I would really like the option of supplementing it somehow.

I know it was never that much fun to pacify legions of popcorn monsters and sacrifice every weapon you found on the ground, but maybe there is a middle ground between that and the current situation.

[crate]

The change to make Ely piety costs actually matter is pretty much definitely an intended thing. I do think that if DD can realistically heal up all game long with Ely there is something wrong with Ely piety costs, since the individual healing is so much stronger than any other source of healing in crawl except Borg, to the point where it's actually really hard to die if you use your abilities. Thus it has to have an actual limiter, and hunger both didn't actually do this very well before, and additionally can't possibly do this well now (since you use so much less food over the course of the game). I think Ely piety costs are in a pretty good spot right now based on my new Ely game.

It's literally just DD that's the problem here, and that's because DD as an idea just flat does not work in crawl. If the devs want to change DD in some way to make DD of Ely "reasonable" then I don't really care, since it's not really any worse than the current situation (DD is irredeemably flawed anyway) but making Ely stronger to accommadate DD should not happen, because then you're making Ely too good for other races.

[archaeo]

It's literally just DD that's the problem here, and that's because DD as an idea just flat does not work in crawl. If the devs want to change DD in some way to make DD of Ely "reasonable" then I don't really care, since it's not really any worse than the current situation (DD is irredeemably flawed anyway) but making Ely stronger to accommadate DD should not happen, because then you're making Ely too good for other races.

I think there's an argument to be made that DD is a cool species that should remain in Crawl and that Ely represented one (not so fun) playstyle for DD, and that changing Ely in a way that makes it more fun should be done in a fashion that retains their use for DD.

But that said, I understand what you and Lasty are saying, and I don't really have a better idea. Oh well!

Edited to add: pivoting off elmdor's point above, why not give Ely some kind of non-necromancy regenerative passive?

[crate]

The main problem with deep dwarves is that the non-healing isn't actually non-healing, it just means you use really tedious methods of restoring HP (vamp weapon, vamp draining, etc.)--or worship Makhleb and then choose not to do so because you're strong enough to not care (even though technically you probably should use some of those hp-restoration methods). Whether they end up being fun for players or not I don't really care (I think they're no fun at all) but they undeniably fail to achieve their design goals (no-healing except you can heal, reduce-resting except actually you just replace it with tedious things which are even worse). Personally I think if anything the number of ways DD can heal should be reduced (since that would actually help them achieve their design goal(s), though possibly at the cost of some clarity to the player) but idk. "Nonhealing except not actually" is just a really weird design concept and it would make more sense from a design standpoint to just be "no repeatable healing at all" imo (though then you probably run into the problem that, surprise, it doesn't work).

I don't think Ely should get a regeneration passive because that is mostly the point of lesser healing (you trade piety for faster resting ... except for very early on it's not a combat ability, same as you don't quaff curing for hp). If you want to replace lesser healing entirely with passive regeneration you can do that but then you're moving away from the whole active-healing-on-demand thing--this is the key difference between Ely healing and Makhleb healing, same as comparing Sif MP regen to Vehumet MP regen--and stepping on Trog's Hand a bit, for what that's worth, and furthermore you're making DD into a rest-to-heal species like every other race (if the player worships Ely), which defeats the purpose of DD.... I think it's a better idea to make Ely consistent and keep the heal-on-demand-only thing, but I will admit that I'm biased against DD as you can probably tell (but it's rooted in the fact that from a design perspective DD is a complete and utter failure and that is not really solvable because nonhealing race doesn't work in crawl, even if from a player-perspective DD is almost kind of enjoyable sometimes).

Honestly if you want to "fix" DD just give them innate heal-on-kills, and ban all healing that isn't that heal-on-kills (including god healing, heal wounds, etc.). Yes this is still abusable, but it's no worse than Makhleb DD anyway and it lets DD actually worship other gods. Sure Ely still wouldn't be very useful, but I'm basically positive the desire is to open up "DD of not-Makhleb" instead of specifically "DD of Ely", and this does that.

[dolphin]

So Deep Dwarves should be reflavored as ... Dementors!!

[Lasty]

I think there's an argument to be made that DD is a cool species [...]
Edited to add: pivoting off elmdor's point above, why not give Ely some kind of non-necromancy regenerative passive?

crate already mentioned this, but to hit it directly: if DD is a cool species, then having Ely give them passive regen would totally defeat the cool aspect of DD by removing their one distinguishing feature, making this a terrible solution to the problem of playing DD^Ely.

IMO, crate has hit the nail on the head about the only way to make DD a design-viable crawl species that still feels distinct from other species: remove all forms of healing from DD and then give them innate heal-on-kills (or, arguably, some sort of innate vampirism).

[tasonir]

Giving DD their own innate vamp effect and removing all other forms of healing that work on them does seem like a pretty interesting solution to their design problems. Imho makhleb is broken on just about any race, not just DD, but maybe that's just me.

For the record I have played a DD of Ely and found it both easy and fun, although I might have been something of an exception because I found the elemental staff on D:5 and there wasn't much concern about running out of piety at any point after that. If Ely's piety costs have been increased recently this would also have been before that, so maybe it's no longer a valid data point. Running out of piety is always a concern on DD's if your piety is a source of healing - I've had the same problem on Trog DD's. Makhleb doesn't cost piety for his passive heal, and so that doesn't apply to him of course.

[tabstorm]

I like the idea of giving DD innate healing from kills. Currently I think there are a few things that annoy people about DD:

1. They're too easy to be enjoyable, because of starting with a wand of heal wounds
2. Because they don't heal naturally, players are limited in god choice, or suffer disruptions in gameflow in the form of recharging wands repeatedly, swapping to vampiric weapons, repeatedly using god abilties, or repeatedly casting vampiric draining.

I think if you:
1. Removed device recharging from DD, and don't start them with any healing items
2. Blocked the following: Vampiric draining, vampiric weapons, Regen status (Trog's hand), Ely, Jiyva healing on eating items

You could allow some forms of healing outside of kills without disrupting gameflow too much. I think this covers all the abusable things that can lead to annoying gameplay.

[Arrhythmia]

2. Blocked the following: Vampiric draining, vampiric weapons, Regen status (Trog's hand), Ely, Jiyva healing on eating items

Should Ru's healing go on/off this list?

e: fwiw I like the idea of giving DD heal on kills

[tabstorm]

2. Blocked the following: Vampiric draining, vampiric weapons, Regen status (Trog's hand), Ely, Jiyva healing on eating items

Should Ru's healing go on/off this list?

e: fwiw I like the idea of giving DD heal on kills

I don't know how abusable it is, I've never played Ru. It's easy enough to just block it if people use it for out of combat healing too much.

[crate]

Should really just block everything imo, nice and easy to communicate, no need for an arbitrary list of exceptions. Sure there are some things you could allow that aren't going to be problematic but I don't see a reason to adopt a less-simple solution here.

[tabstorm]

I think it's better to have a few exceptions than have awkward situations where people may try to leave monsters unkilled so that they can go back later and heal off them if their HP gets so low that they don't want to proceed. This might be useful to do currently with DD of makh, but people tend to just recharge the healing wand and continue onward. You could always say this is a problem with crawl having <, but it's not as if they're going anywhere, so I think it's reasonable to allow limited healing with devices, Makhleb or Ru. It'll still allow for a lot more varied play styles than current DD.

[crate]

If they have heal on kills at all that problem will still exist. You're doing absolutely nothing to reduce it. It's not fixable (except by making DD heal over time which is the same as removing the race entirely) and personally I think the clarity and simplicity of just blocking all healing except innate heal-on-kills outweighs other concerns. At the very least all god healing should be blocked, though. Heal wounds potions and wands I could accept (and curing I guess). But nothing else.

[Sprucery]

I support blocking all healing and give them heal-on-kills. I proposed (semi-seriously) a while ago blocking all healing and giving them a huge amount of hit points to compensate but obviously crate's idea would be more playable.

I'm a bit concerned about flavour, though. Why would a species called Deep Dwarves be naturally healed by killing? Should they be renamed and how?

[KoboldLord]

Maybe heal-on-exploration is a better model than heal-on-kill. One hit point for every twenty tiles, or something like that. It's easy to leave some yaks alive for free healing later, or farm respawns in Lair or other safe locations, but there's a limited number of tiles that can be uncovered and most of them contain monsters that can't easily be controlled to manage threat. You can refrain from exploring the Temple until you're hurt, I suppose, but that would probably turn out to be relatively irrelevant. Flavorwise, deep dwarves are so tightly bonded to elemental earth that they can only recover their life energy by passing near it, and once they've drawn energy from some particular location it takes time for the native soil and rock to recover.

[elmdor]

I can envision some awful situations coming up with a heal-on-exploration mechanic. Imagine you've cleared Lair, Orc, and up to D12, but the last fight on D12 has taken you down to 20% of your max HP. No way to heal without dropping down to D13 and exposing more tiles. You descend, and are one-shotted by a unique standing next to the stairs. Doesn't sound like fun to me.

[duvessa]

heal on experience gain

[crate]

My problem with heal-on-exploration is it very heavily incentivizes not using autoexplore, because it's really quite easy to figure out where the edges of the level are so you can save those tiles for later (you don't need to explore them). This doesn't matter for piety because the piety you "save" for later is cancelled out by piety decay; for HP, this is not the case. Autoexplore will always be worse than manual exploration but that doesn't mean that you should exacerbate the problem.

[KoboldLord]

My problem with heal-on-exploration is it very heavily incentivizes not using autoexplore, because it's really quite easy to figure out where the edges of the level are so you can save those tiles for later (you don't need to explore them). This doesn't matter for piety because the piety you "save" for later is cancelled out by piety decay; for HP, this is not the case. Autoexplore will always be worse than manual exploration but that doesn't mean that you should exacerbate the problem.

No credit for uncovering wall tiles, then? I actually don't know if exploration piety counts wall tiles now, or if it should. If you choose not to uncover a floor tile because you want to save it for healing, you then cannot get any loot that would have been uncovered on that tile, and if you save a bunch of tiles at once you're giving up whatever xp would've been there, too.

[and into]

My problem with heal-on-exploration is it very heavily incentivizes not using autoexplore, because it's really quite easy to figure out where the edges of the level are so you can save those tiles for later (you don't need to explore them). This doesn't matter for piety because the piety you "save" for later is cancelled out by piety decay; for HP, this is not the case. Autoexplore will always be worse than manual exploration but that doesn't mean that you should exacerbate the problem.

No credit for uncovering wall tiles, then? I actually don't know if exploration piety counts wall tiles now, or if it should. If you choose not to uncover a floor tile because you want to save it for healing, you then cannot get any loot that would have been uncovered on that tile, and if you save a bunch of tiles at once you're giving up whatever xp would've been there, too.

But having at least one or two definite healing reservoirs as back up would be better than whatever tiny amount of useful loot you might (most likely: will not) get from those tiles. I would definitely leave some spots for exploration until later. When you were relatively powerful for your depth (such as: after clearing most of Lair and have just returned to D9) it would make sense to dip down two levels; DD's passive mapping (and ?magic mapping) would enable this with minimal risk. You could argue this is just an adaptation to how the species plays, and is thus a good thing, but I don't expect it would be very fun. I don't like current DD but I expect this would be worse: You would have to autotravel back to these "pockets" and explore them, which would be similar to healing by rest, but much more annoying. That is in addition to possibly penalizing autoexplore use. Heal-on-kills could lend itself to some degree of scumming and annoying behavior, but I imagine exploration-based healing would be worse.

(Granted, any non-regenerative species is going to be annoying, since every possible source of damage can hurt your long-term viability. It is notable that the only times DD is even remotely fun is when you have strong enough workarounds that you can basically pretend they were a regenerative species that has some weird fetish for excessive vampiric draining, or something.)

[Siegurt]

What's more is you would be actively discouraged from revealing additional tiles while you were at full health (as it would be depriving you of possible healing) therefore it'd be optimal to wander through explored areas shouting to try to draw creatures out of unexplored areas, so you could fight them then explore to heal up.

At best that'd be fairly awkward.

[nago]

DD would stand for desktop dungeons! Can't you see it?

[galbolle]

What's more is you would be actively discouraged from revealing additional tiles while you were at full health (as it would be depriving you of possible healing) therefore it'd be optimal to wander through explored areas shouting to try to draw creatures out of unexplored areas, so you could fight them then explore to heal up.

If deep dwarfs cannot heal, they don't need max health either. Let the gain hps on exploration at a constant rate without a cap. That way, optimal behavior is uncovering as many tiles as fast as possible, which is fun.

[Sprucery]

If deep dwarfs cannot heal, they don't need max health either. Let the gain hps on exploration at a constant rate without a cap. That way, optimal behavior is uncovering as many tiles as fast as possible, which is fun.

That could be fun. I assume you wouldn't gain hit points by rediscovering forgotten areas in a Labyrinth. A powerful character could gain "infinite" hit points in Abyss:1, though (have a ring of teleportation).

[BobIsDead]

Whilst giving them a straight rip of Makhleb's healing sounds pretty good, it also feels pretty cheap. However, giving them health for killing enemies does seem pretty straightforward. Perhaps give them innate vampiric abilities, or maybe let them heal "naturally" based on an XP-timer (1 HP per 0.5% XP to next level, for example). Or maybe, to stop players from leaving behind troves of enemies to kill for HP, make it so that the healing only comes into play for killing stronger enemies. Though, if you're limiting alternative forms of healing, maybe that would make it possible to lock yourself into a no-win scenario.

In fact, thinking of it like that, limiting HP-recovery to killing and just killing seems incredibly constraining. After all, don't we aleady have a species that prevents wand and potion-based healing? Do we really need another one? Couldn't god-based healing simply be lessened, whilst potion and/or wand healing be improved?

[and into]

What's more is you would be actively discouraged from revealing additional tiles while you were at full health (as it would be depriving you of possible healing) therefore it'd be optimal to wander through explored areas shouting to try to draw creatures out of unexplored areas, so you could fight them then explore to heal up.

If deep dwarfs cannot heal, they don't need max health either. Let the gain hps on exploration at a constant rate without a cap. That way, optimal behavior is uncovering as many tiles as fast as possible, which is fun.

That... is an interesting idea! Some (very high) upper-bound based on level might be appropriate, or just needed for balance, and as Sprucery pointed out, you'd need some other way to deal with abyss/Pan. But the fundamental idea looks solid.

[Sandman25]

Unlimited HP DD would need to be resistant to torment, it's more like Mu. Or probably Vp who even can heal from melee (stabbing) attacks.

[Pereza0]

Whilst giving them a straight rip of Makhleb's healing sounds pretty good, it also feels pretty cheap. However, giving them health for killing enemies does seem pretty straightforward. Perhaps give them innate vampiric abilities, or maybe let them heal "naturally" based on an XP-timer (1 HP per 0.5% XP to next level, for example). Or maybe, to stop players from leaving behind troves of enemies to kill for HP, make it so that the healing only comes into play for killing stronger enemies. Though, if you're limiting alternative forms of healing, maybe that would make it possible to lock yourself into a no-win scenario.

In fact, thinking of it like that, limiting HP-recovery to killing and just killing seems incredibly constraining. After all, don't we aleady have a species that prevents wand and potion-based healing? Do we really need another one? Couldn't god-based healing simply be lessened, whilst potion and/or wand healing be improved?

I agree here.

I think the way it currently is is more interesting. I like having a race which has to rely on resource management like this for survival - healing from gods should be made less effective (but still possible, but subject to some sort of inverse damage shaving so even if they are there they are not something you can rely on exclusively, and they are even a bigger hit on piety than they are now if they are activable. Mahkleb's heal on kill should be minimal or not work at all) vampiric draining should not work. Vampiric weapons should also be ineffective.

Players should be getting most if not all of their healing from Heal Wounds, this opens up other gods for Deep Dwarves since now the ones that provide healing are not so obviously better than the alternatives.

Having the wand of HW as main and more often than not only source of healing is more interesting. People often point at the fact that they start with a wand of HW as the reason they are overpowered, but this has to do with the fact that DD gets most of its healing elsewhere than anything, and then has the wand as a bonus on top of it.

The penalty for recharging wands should probably be steeper too, scrolls of recharging are plentiful.

[Jeremiah]

Merge DD with Gh, and have them only able to heal by eating corpses (assuming corpses still exist in the future…)

Edit: Exclude Kiku gifts or it would be even more silly.

[crate]

healing from gods should be made less effective (but still possible)

How does this fix anything? The incentive here, remember, is to open up DD-of-not-Makhleb, in a way that's at least not more abusable than what you can do with current DD-of-Makhleb. (If you don't care about opening DD to other gods, then current DD is no worse than heal-on-kills DD or other suggestions in this thread; as I've said the design problems are pretty much unsalvageable so it's just a choice between different bad things in the end.) Unless you make god healing so bad that it's basically worthless (in which case--why not just go all the way and make it not happen at all?) DD of Makhleb will still have a really huge advantage if it gets healing so you're still strongly pushing DD into Makhleb.

--

The main reason I'd suggest DD getting heal on kills instead of other options is that, frankly, it's pretty much identical to the current situation, which is apparently acceptable to the devs since it's existed for close to ten versions now (and personally I really hate special-casing things, so I value consistent behaviour--nothing but innate heal-on-kills works--over other concerns like "but there's already a no-healing-consumables (except not really because potions of magic etc. exist)" race (yes it bothers me that VS can use !magic)). Other things like allowing DD to heal only from heal wounds are things I've considered in the past but I suspect they don't work very well in practice (especially if you want DD to appeal to anything resembling a variety of player skill levels), even if they're less abusable from a game design standpoint than heal-on-kills.

(I guess if you want to adjust item generation specifically for DD then you could actually do the heal-only-from-hw thing, by generating a lot more heal wounds potions, but then you're special-casing something and this is, I assume, a lot more work than just giving DD innate heal-on-kills.)

--

Removing maxhp entirely (and figuring out what to do with torment/flay) doesn't have any design problems that I can see but I suspect that in practice it will not prove very fun, since it's actually even more different from normal crawl than current DD is. It would be tremendously difficult to implement in a way that proves enjoyable and not abusable (you need to gain hp more rapidly for exploring in later areas than in earlier ones, but at what rate? how do you do this adjustment? (if it depends on XL or skills you're still potentially creating problems) how do you deal with fighting normally giving maxhp? is it even realistic to make this lead to games that are both challenging and winnable reliably? etc.). So the idea is good but I have pretty serious doubts that it's realistically doable in crawl. This sounds much more like something you would adopt as an idea when creating a game (it's pretty similar to desktop dungeons, as has been mentioned, and was clearly adopted as a design decision early on) instead of something you would attempt to shove into an existing game.

[duvessa]

Removing maxhp entirely (and figuring out what to do with torment/flay) doesn't have any design problems that I can see but I suspect that in practice it will not prove very fun, since it's actually even more different from normal crawl than current DD is.

I thought it was a joke

[Rumbleguts]

I have played DD of Ru and it provided enough healing to be viable through a three runer, played right. It was more difficult than Makhleb or old Ely. So if that experience contributes to this discussion, there you go. A functional non-Makhleb DD

[tasonir]

I think DD who can heal infinitely with no max hp would be really fun, because I like broken things and abusing systems like that. Wander in abyss 1, build up 100,000 hp, live forever. But seriously, it wouldn't work.

A simple passive that heals you for something like monster HD/2 for each kill is the simplest way to go about it. I'd let curing/heal wounds still work for when you need burst heals, but disable any god healing. Then I can do DD's of Chei, and all will be right in the world.

Rumble- DD's of non-mak are viable, with ely, trog, now ru, etc. It's just not as strong as having passive heals, as you run the risk of running out of piety. But there have been some crazy people who actually pulled off DD of Chei, but even I wouldn't do that.

[galbolle]

I think DD who can heal infinitely with no max hp would be really fun, because I like broken things and abusing systems like that. Wander in abyss 1, build up 100,000 hp, live forever. But seriously, it wouldn't work.

Yes, there would be some special-casing to do, off the top of my head:
- exploration in abyss does not give hp at all;
- torment does not damage you, but gives you a cumulative "tormented" status which doubles incoming damage (after damage shaving) and goes away some time after the tormentor has left LOS. At higher XL, the multiplier decreases.

[Sandman25]

Too bad if the no HP cap was a joke. If you can safely farm HP in Abyss, it means you can win already so who cares. Torment might be replaced with "Dispel DD" and I don't think damage shaving must stay in the same OP way.

[bel]

I got this idea while trying some speedrunning. If the the design idea behind deep dwarfs was to eliminate regeneration on resting, why not just have regeneration while exploring new tiles?

My suggestion is to remove all healing (excluding Ely and potions, and perhaps wands), and make DD regen while exploring new tiles.

[Kismet]

You would just bank unexplored tiles and backtrack a zillion times to heal.

[bel]

You would just bank unexplored tiles and backtrack a zillion times to heal.

No, monsters would spawn while you are exploring/backtracking, fighting them would make the hp go down. Also, unexplored tiles by definition can contain more monsters, which will again make hp go down when fighting them.

If it indeed becomes an issue, (I don't think so), one could adjust the regeneration rate so as to give more hp regen at deeper dungeon levels.

[tasonir]

The respawns on early dungeon floors wouldn't be threatening to a mid/late game DD, and could be killed without losing much or any hp, so it'd still be a good idea to bank earlier floor space. You wouldn't lose much exp for this due to how monster exp ramps up quickly, but you would be giving up a decent amount of floor loot, so there's that at least.

[Leafsnail]

Heal on entering new floors IMO.

[Rast]

Downgrade Slow Healing to rank 2 -- no heal with monsters in LOS. (Why do ghouls have Slow Healing 1?)

Remove the wand of healing and the device recharge ability.

[basil]

Downgrade Slow Healing to rank 2 -- no heal with monsters in LOS.

If you did that, you might as well remove DD.

[triorph]

What about doing the opposite? Only healing with monsters in view, possibly scaling with their difficulty (to avoid just hanging around rats)

[basil]

Then you'd encourage "pillar" dancing a parked orc knight or something. If DD can be fixed, adding regeneration is not the way to go about it.

[bcadren]

DD are just irreparably broken. Remove them. No matter how you slice it, lack of regen goes against everything else in crawl so strongly that it HAS to result in scummy behavior to be optimal. [Keeping a weak creature alive to use Vampiric Weapons/Vampiric Draining on to heal is a common story and a stupid one.] There is literally no way around this I can think of; other than isn't 'remove all healing except potions and wands' (including the god healing); which would make the most incredibly cautious race ever. This thread is going nowhere. DD are bad.

[bel]

The respawns on early dungeon floors wouldn't be threatening to a mid/late game DD, and could be killed without losing much or any hp, so it'd still be a good idea to bank earlier floor space. You wouldn't lose much exp for this due to how monster exp ramps up quickly, but you would be giving up a decent amount of floor loot, so there's that at least.

This is why I said, if this is an issue, it can be fixed by making regen at deeper floors give much more hp than shallower floors.

[Lasty]

For tournament reasons, I have a DDFE^Ru in progress, and I am unexpectedly enjoying it. Using Draw Out Power turns damage into drain, which makes fights into a puzzle of how to minimize the drain I take during the fight; when things are going badly, I get drained significantly which makes it harder to struggle back into acceptable drain levels.

Of course, it's only fun because I'm ignoring the option of going back to easier areas to work off the drain, and it's pretty hard to die, so that's not great either.

[partial]

heal on kill + an ability that gives vamp buff on a breath timer (or gives surrounding enemies a heal-on-hit debuff)
no other healing

there needs to be something you can use in a pinch