The Tavern

Just an idea I had after numerous characters attrition down from lack of poison resist. What if there were some boss type creature that always spawned on level 10-12 that had a guaranteed drop of some sort of entry level poison resist item. It is a little frustrating to go through the entire early dungeon and have it turn in to a tedious routine of fight, wait out poison, run from bees or whatever, get poisoned and wait it out again over and over again. Maybe some sort of skin that would drop you could use an enchant armor on to make a poison resist cloak, hell it could be +0 I dunno. If I am doing it wrong just tell me and I will resign myself to being poisoned all the time but I have absolutely horrid luck at finding useful items in the early game besides a couple characters. The couple characters that did find an early source of poison resist have always been more fun as well, just for the fact there was one less thing to worry about.

You realise you can already do this with swamp dragon hides? They're not that common of course...

Nothing is guaranteed apart from runes, the orb and a few fixed uniques' items. This is on purpose, we don't intend to change it.

If you find that rPois is most crucial to your games, then play Venom Mages or one of the resistant species for a while.

This is the main problem with your proposal for me.

Right, it's a huge break in consistency from any unique in Crawl; a special case we don't really need.

Eh, I kinda regretted posting this after thinking about it for awhile. I was just venting after my third or 4th character in a row finding like 3 or 4 magic resist rings and not much else. If I was really worried about poison I would roll undead or venom mages. It's just my crappy luck I am frustrated with lol.

Orc 1-3 will usually have some armor drops that have rPois, if you feel it would be useful. It doesn't appear on robes, but leather armor on up can all spawn with it naturally. There aren't too many poisonous monsters in that branch, either.

I don't see what's wrong with having a unique always drop a certain something ala Erica, but I agree that the unique itself being guaranteed is a bad thing.

Tavern rule #14 - If you have just come up with a design change idea out of anger at losing, either post it on Yiuf or wait a week and see if it's still such a good idea.

Whenever I get angry at Poison I just Roll out the NagaVM and start trolling Hobgoblins and Gnolls until Sigmund comes along and gives me the Banhammer...

Hah I have been trying Nagas out, and they are fun. Had an early run in with sigmund in an open area but he hadn't noticed me yet so I popped a scroll of fog and crept the hell out of there.

I don't see the need for anything like that. It's not too hard to get through everything except Snake and Hive without rPois if you're careful (Swamp can be tricky, but clarity also works there and Swamp Drakes/Dragons aren't 100% deadly without either, just inconvenient), and you can postpone those two branches until after you find a source of rPois, wherever that may be.

In one ongoing game of mine, I didn't find rPois until I had cleared Lair, Swamp, Orc, and most of the main dungeon down to about D:18, finally finding a ring with rPois in Elf. It's inconvenient not to have the resistance, but not gamebreaking.