In my view, every time there is a truly unavoidable death, Crawl has failed the player. The most enjoyable part of Crawl for me is trying for streaks/winrate. If the early dungeon is full of unavoidable deaths, magnificent streaks like elliptic's won't be possible anymore, unless you choose only strong combos.
Sandman25 wrote:The point was that TeEE is a challenge combo, you should have died to that hobgoblin
"should have"? There's no "challenge" in failing a few dice rolls and just dying. "Challenge" implies skill, not luck. If every TeEE rolled 1d6 and died on turn 1 if it didn't come up 3, would that be a "challenge"?
The challenge in TeEE and other hard combos shouldn't be that the RNG just randomly kills you sometimes. It should be that it requires skill and planning to stay alive, but with the correct decisions you can make it work almost all the time.
There is, anyway, skill in recognizing that the correct course of action is to pillar dance. A different player might have tried to melee the hobgoblin - likely to fail - or might have headed for the downstairs, a similarly dangerous plan. Then there's the planning of which pillar you will dance around, weighing the danger that more enemies will show up as you dance versus the ease of escape in case they do (will you get trapped?). Even before it's time to pillar dance, it adds an extra dimension to D:1 exploration. One of my highest priorities with initial D:1 exploration is finding a good pillar.
While I was pillar dancing the hobgoblin a bat showed up. I waited until the bat had gotten in front of the hobgoblin so they couldn't both hit me at once, then sandblasted it. That's another skill-based tactic a different player might have screwed up: how to handle being interrupted while you're dancing.
Sandman25 wrote:How about the following example - I am DE with 1 HP and Glaciate at 1%, I have 0 MP and am adjacent to wounded Hill Giant. I keep moving until I get 9 MP and then cast Glaciate. "Please keep pillar dancing, why should I die to Hill Giant"? Unavoidable deaths must happen, bad rolls must kill, not just increase real time and number of key presses.
The example is nonsense because, first of all, it's very unlikely to be an unavoidable death if you've made it to the part of the game where you can cast glaciate. You'll have plenty of other options such as blinking or heal wounds, or you made a mistake a few moves ago. Second, if you pillar dance a hill giant at 1 HP, he will get a hit on you due to energy randomization, and you are likely to die. Third, pillar dancing basically does not happen by the time anybody's casting Glaciate, because you're hardly ever in a clear area fighting just a single speed-10 melee enemy. Pillar dancing is mostly used on D:1 to prevent unavoidable deaths, with a handful of other less common uses.