Thursday, 4th September 2014, 13:23 by Lasty
Some rods do cause considerable hunger (that's for you, XuaXua), but I've never found that it's a significant problem. Most of them you only need to use once or maybe twice per encounter, and at the end you can just eat all the corpses; hunger solved. You mention ending up Very Hungry at the end of fights, and I don't see any issue with that. If anything, I'd say that the hunger rods cause (XuaXua) does virtually nothing to moderate how great it is to use rods (XuaXua).
The real limitation on spamming rods is how many charges they have, and if you want to get a rod ready to use faster, you either need to work on your skills or else make use of a consumable to give it a little extra pep (XuaXua) as le_nerd mentioned above.
I don't think it makes much sense to compare rod hunger to staff of energy or demigod/chei stats, since those are exceptions rather than the rule, but even very high spell hunger doesn't actually limit spell-spamming. I spent from D:15 to Depths spamming Chain Lightning with full-bars hunger on a character recently and still had a significant stockpile of bread rations by mid-Depths after turning all other food sources off of auto-pickup and ignoring them; there's no way that any rod you're using causes more hunger than that, no matter how often you take it out for a spin (XuaXua).
So, overall, I don't think rod hunger actually has any meaningful impact on gameplay in the overwhelming majority of cases, and so I don't particularly think that it's an issue worth resolving or a mechanic worth keeping -- whether it goes or stays makes no difference to me. No matter how hungry it makes me, I'll always be excited to find and use a good rod (XuaXua).
Edit: I would probably never use staff of energy unless 1) I am using it for channeling, or 2) I have literally nothing else useful to wield.