The Tavern

Recently a couple changes in early D monsters were comitted in Trunk. Now, Ufetubus and White Imps can spawn. I'm alright with the White Imps, since they have the hard hitting ranged attack, making retreats potentially dangerous. However Ufetubus are very popcorny even on D:4.

Please, let the trend be to removal of popcorn instead of adding even more.

(and can we finally get rid of hungry ghosts?)

The new monsters replace crimson imp weight, so total popcorn is at worst unchanged in their spawn range. Would love to see a more thorough overhaul of spawn tables though.

Anyway, they're certainly less (or at least no more) popcorny on D:4 than they are later on.

Crimson Imps were not just popcorn, they were annoying popcorn. Their blink also made them not a threat at all since they constantly give you free opportunities to disengage.


Basically, it was a grueling task to deal with them with characters that couldn't reliably out-DPS their regen. Especially for meh-damage melee characters


I often found myself just parking them on higher D levels so I didn't have to deal with them.

Crimson imp were absolutely worse popcorn than Ufetubus: they were an xp pinata which posed 0 threat - unless they had a strong wand or whatever - and were extremely easy to disengage.
Virtually every char should have spent tedious time to kill them for their huge xp gain.

Ufetubus are pretty much popcorn as imp but at least don't provide so much free experience and cheap disengage\tactics.

However I agree there was no big reason to had another popcorn monster instead of spreading their spawn rate on something else - or just white imp.

Is popcorn defined by maxhp or by risk-reward ratio? I think hydras, rats and bats are xp piñatas.

I've always interpreted popcorn as "something that poses no risk at all, and confers little to no benefit for killing, aka something that merely slows down gameplay, with no productive in-game impact"

I think most people just mean something that's trivial to kill, though XP is also part of it.

Shmup players call lots of little weak enemies popcorn, because of the constant popping noise from them all exploding as they fly onscreen into your bullets. I wonder if there's an etymological link between oldschool shmup vocabulary and oldschool RL vocabulary.