The Tavern

I've noticed that if you're playing a Demonspawn spell-caster, that the magic shield (formerly mana shield) mutation isn't so great, as it will grant the spirit shield intrinsic, which reduces your MP if you take damage. For a wizard, this could be a bad thing, even if the mutation does grant other abilities on later ranks.

It occurred to me that it might be useful to be able to toggle the spirit shield feature on and off, with the 'a' key, as a special ability.

That would mostly be a newbie trap, it would basically never be a good idea to turn it off.

Let me turn off my skin color too as a red Draconian Ice Elementalist.

Yes, it would be really weird to have an exception. We do not have a toggle to turn off being monstrous or ability to wear helmets.
Ds is all about adaptation to random mutations you get all game. If you don't want to adapt, play some other species instead.

As people have pointed out in the past, even if you could toggle it off, it would be a bad idea. Any hit big enough to deplete the large pool of MP you use as a primary spellcaster would devastate the (far smaller) pool of HP you use to keep your character alive.

Also, the next 2 levels of the mutation make your MP regen so fast that it's a huge bonus to spellcasters. Granted it might take many XP levels before you get those next levels of the mutation.

I wouldn't mind two flavors of demonspawn from the game start: monstrous demonspawn and demonspawn. Or, just better yet, turn monstrous demonspawn into it's own race: monster

There's an idea. Flavor it "druid" or something, expand the mutation list a bit.

I agree. They are pretty different experiences.

My issue with that mutation line is that you can die while autoexploring or hitting 5 with it. Pip 3 makes part of your HP regen apply to your mana pool instead; for most sources of damage that's fine because you have guardian spirit, and MP is just better than HP. But Poison ignores guardian spirit, and the 'am I lethally poisoned' check for autoexplore/autorest calculates based on your base HP regen. So if you have pip 3, you can be lethally poisoned without the game noticing, and just 5 yourself to death.