The Tavern

Remove monster banishment.

Hear me out on this one, guys.

• While you can often (but not always as another thread has demonstrated) avoid banishment via good tactical positioning, the danger of the effect once you're hit with it is completely independent of your old positioning. Compare to slow, sleep, or paralysis where your position when the hex lands has a significant impact upon how dangerous the resulting situation is going to be. Banishment is less tactically interesting than these other hexes because there's a complete disconnect between your old and new positions.
• Banishment interrupts the situation the player was in. It is bad for gameflow to forcibly take the player out of a situation and have them dick around in a completely different level for potentially thousands of turns before popping them back in to that original situation. As I said above, most other hexes keep the player within roughly the same context; the only major exception I can think of is teleport other.
• The other half of the "fuck banishment" coin: banishment at high level is an annoying waste of time. Dropping players to deeper abyss levels from highlevel banishment was an attempt to fix this but imo it did not work. Banishment simply does not scale effectively as a threat throughout the game. When an orbrun ancient lich 2%s me to abyss:5 and forces me to screw around with large abominations and starcursed masses for 10 minutes before I can get back to winning the game, it's about the least dangerous thing that could have happened but also one of the most frustrating.

IMO replace banishment with slow or sleep in every spellbook and see how it turns out.

I think there are a few issues wrapped up in one here:
1. Banishment danger scales weirdly through the game (especially when you consider what parts of the game banishing monsters exist in)
2. Banishment kills context of the original unfinished fight because it takes too long to get out / you might decide to go get the abyssal rune while you're at it
(I disagree that banishment doesn't care about tactical positioning. If you are banished in a corridor you're less likely to be surrounded on return.)

EDIT: I opened a PR which touches Abyss/banishment: https://github.com/crawl/crawl/pull/704

Another solution to banishment being beneficial is:
1) change just floor you are on. So you still have Erolcha and whatever else in the same positions but now you are on Abyss:1 instead of d:9
2) keep orb spawns generate normally (as in all other branches) during orb run in Abyss unless it was changed already.
3) optionally add slow/noise/silence status as a side effect if first two points are not enough (maybe depending on pc xl)

I am not a fan of banishment, but the OP doesn't sound persuasive to me. Banish is a hex which forces you to play a minigame if it succeeds. Saying that it's different from slow or paralyse because your original position doesn't matter, seems to me beside the point. Yes, it doesn't matter, so what? Not every hex has to have a certain feature. Silence is different from Leda's is different from confuse.

The last point is ok, but I don't recall the last time I was banished at high level. Anyway, at deeper Abyss levels, exits spawn faster.

Banish is typically dangerous for lower-level players, and maybe higher-level Qaz worshippers. I think it's better than Paralyze, which to my mind isn't a very good hex, because you can be randomly killed.

What's the point of early banishment then? Or do you mean I should be lucky to choose duration which leads to exit and not be teleported away by Abyss?

Having the banishing monster follow you to the Abyss would be interesting. (Presuming adjustments were made to preserve game balance.)

What if Banish spell sent you to a deeper level or branch instead of always to the Abyss? Basically monster-castable shaft .

While I think a monster shafting spell would work a lot better than current banishment, it's worth noting that it doesn't improve the first two problems in the OP at all.

1) Positioning doesn't have to matter 100% of the time, both before and after banishment. It's enough that you can use positioning to reduce the chance of banishment.
2) Perhaps monsters should only try shaft-banish if you are winning the fight

It seems like monster-castable shaft would just encourage people to put travel exclusions on those monsters, then come back and deal with them once the next few levels are cleared out.

Also, Hellmonk's second point is well worth considering. Breaking game flow is unlikely to violate any lofty 'philosophy' documents, but like item theft, it annoys the hell out of many players. Case in point would be pit bloats in Brogue, suicidal monsters that shaft you one level on death. They're very rarely deadly*, given that Brogue's difficulty curve is fairly gentle and its levels relatively small, but they are easily one of the most annoying monsters in the game. Earlier in the thread, someone pointed out that banishment is a hex that forces you to play a minigame. Does the idea of an involuntary minigame interposed between you and the main game sound like any fun?

* When they appear early on. The groups of pit bloats that appear on later levels are genuinely dangerous, since on D:24 you might find yourself shafted next to a dragon/tentacle horror/lich, and the way the other pit bloats in the group can fly in after you means they can chain-shaft you. But nothing like that is going to happen with the individual pit bloats found on D:1-4.

How about making it so that getting the abyssal rune makes you immune to banishment? It is essentially "proof" that you can handle the Abyss for extended periods of time, including dangerous situations. It would also be a good way to ensure that early banishments, i.e. the ones that are actually dangerous (random orcs with distortion weapons, or elven mages/human wizards) are still there as a threat, but by the time a brief Abyss trip becomes near-trivial, such as with Zot liches, hell knights with distortion weapons, or just various extended monsters, the whole Banishment thing will no longer annoy the player. (In fact, a random banishment can actually be a boon to a player in a tough spot, just like it is when you intentionally choose to enter the Abyss with Lugonu to escape a near-death situation, so this will also make banishment-capable monsters a bit more dangerous in the endgame.) Lugonu self-banishment would still work, as would Nemelex cards since self-banishing via the Exile card, while potentially a threat to weak characters, is also a good escape mechanism, as the name of the deck you draw it from (Escape) implies. It would even be a thematic fit - you have the abyssal rune, surely that could convey some Abyss-related powers to you, like it already kind of does with letting you find an exit sooner?

It sucks to die from banishment; on the other hand, surviving banishment, especially on a lower-level character, feels awesome. For me at least it's worth the tradeoff.

Monster Banishment as a MTG card: