Make Zot more boring

[Cheibrodos]

The orbrun/dig thread reminded me of a thought I had regarding the killhole strategy, which is where you dig a tunnel so that you can fight a large group of enemies one at a time. I use this strategy almost every time I deal with Zot:5, to the point where even if I won't need it I dig one anyway just in case I need to retreat into it later. Creating a killhole used to be my go-to strategy for the last floor of Elf as well, until Deep Elf Elementalists were added. These enemies break apart the walls you're hiding behind, disrupting the killhole strategy and in my opinion making the Elf:3 fight much more interesting and challenging. What if a similar idea was applied to Zot:5?

My off the cuff proposal is to make orb guardians break through walls in the same style of the now-axed boring beetle (only please without the message this time). This would reduce killholing on Zot:5 and make the climax of the game more varied. The reason I suggest boring instead of digging or some other kind of long-range wall destruction is because having a guardian trail you could potentially give you an guaranteed infinite source of digging if you're fast or tanky enough to kite it.

tldr: Killholes are boring, give a Zot:5 enemy a wall-destruction ability. Sorry for the clickbait title.

Alternative: Make every wall in Zot:5 undiggable.

[Wahaha]

I think that the killhole strategy is pretty bad compared to using stairs. Stairs guarantee having less enemies to fight consecutively, make it easier to rest after a fight, make it possible to walk away, make it safer to teleport.

I do dig a corner on Zot 5 to make ranged enemies approach me. If the corner were to get destroyed, I would dig another one. And if it gets too inconvenient to dig more corners I would use stairs, which is more tedious.

[Cheibrodos]

Usually it's a longer walk to the stairs than to whatever rock formation was generated right outside the vault, and that distance matters more when a lot of the dangerous things in Zot:5 are fast. Stairdancing will be an issue for the foreseeable future but I think this is a way to improve things now.

[tabstorm]

I don't think digging helps that much in Zot 5, except when I'm too lazy to split packs of summon spamming draconians.