Friday, 16th October 2015, 00:39 by milski
Crawl strives to avoid monsters that are too spoilery, or have a chance to punish you without you reacting. Ghost moths seem to go completely against this concept. They are the only permanently invisible monster with a ranged attack, and one that is irresistable and near instantly gimps spellcasting classes. In addition to that they are a credible melee threat with stat drain, speed, and strong poison. If you do not already know that Spider is filled with fast, invisible monsters that will empty your mana pool within four turns of getting into vision range, you can make massive judgment errors in fights that don't occur with monsters that spellcast invis or are melee-only permanent invis (except that one vault that's like 16 tiles of Unseen Horrors, but I think that was removed). Additionally, ghost moths add a lot of tedium to Spider if you know they exist and don't have sInv, since you need to keep a much closer eye on your mana pool even in popcorn fights.
I have two possible suggestions:
1. Ghost Moths get spell-invis instead of permanent invis. That way, new players can see them and examine them before they go invis, or have potential to melee them between casts.
2. Ghost moths keep permanent invis but lose their mana drain. Moths of suppression are re-added to the game as extremely fast monsters with mana drain and modest melee attacks.
I think I prefer #2, because it still provides Spider with a highly dangerous, permanently invisible monster.