The Tavern

The idea is that of a monster that has the ability to always see the player, as long as you are within a range the size of your LOS. This monster has a wall-crushing attack that destroys rock walls between you and it, perforating them and inflicting more damage the more rock tiles there are between you and the monster.

It would be a monster that is dangerous when accompanied by a pack, a bit like entropic weavers.

Possible additions: you also get to know the position of the monster, if you are visible to it. Might have some sort of special aura, that makes you faster when you go towards the monster, and slower when you run away from it (or just Leda's). Probably also needs a secondary ranged attack for when there are no walls in sight. The AI could be edited to use wall destruction more often, for example:



the sonar could shoot NE to create a path that gives access to a firing position on the player:



The idea is that of having a monster that can defeat corners and kill holes, and also that interacts with positioning in an unusual way. It could also get passwall to reach you beyond stone walls, or have a "mass passwall" spell.

We had boring beetles and they were removed, so I don't think this kind of monster will be added...

I assume this is supposed to be a replacement for monsters with Dig and deep elf elementalists?
Get rid of this part. Losing the wall tiles is punishment enough.

In general, I think that the player has too few occasions in which a killhole isn't the perfect solution, so this monster is meant to increase the number of such situations. So it's more of an addition than a substitution.

I don't necessarily hate the idea, but I'm curious as to what your ideal gamestate would look like, with this as a step in the right direction? Is the problem "The game is too easy, and killholes are part of the problem," and this monster is intended to fix that? If so, this seems fine, though the weird vision mechanic is somewhat (but not unsolvably) awkward. It's just a difficulty increase, though - some monsters will become this, and the likelihood of them being more dangerous than this is low.

Is the problem "Killholes are a degenerate and uninteresting strategy?" If that's the case, I'm not sure how this solves the problem. It doesn't give the player an alternative best strategy, just a wrinkle to be solved during optimal play. The player will still back into killholes, become exposed to this additional danger until they get away, fight the monsters in the way of the crusher, or die. The only time that isn't true is if you find it accompanied by a pack of monsters that aren't terribly dangerous, in which case you just focus it down before you retreat into a killhole, but that's not terribly strategically interesting.

I guess my biggest problem is with the lack of counterplay. It can hit you, you can't hit it back, so either you try to maneuver and stay safe from it, or you try to focus it first. If anything, it enhances smite- and bolt-targeted abilities, which are already very powerful.

Just wanna mention that there are very few situations where a killhole is better than going up stairs.

Also I think this enemy is pretty much deep troll casters with dig, unless they were removed idk