Sprucery wrote:Yes please, remove rMut amulet and make neqoxec and cacodemon give temporary mutations. OoF can stay as it is.
Personally, I think OoFs are the worst mutator. The other mutators are all have the counterplay of careful positioning and killing them quickly, since they're squishy (besides Mnoleg, I guess). OoFs are tanky enough that there's basically nothing you can do to avoid getting malmuated by them. Obviously, this is somewhat balanced by that fact that by the time you fight them you're going to win soon anyway, but I hate the fact that, if you don't have a big stash of cure mutation potions or rMut, OoFs are basically just "hope you don't get any mutations that mess up your orb run." I once had a character who had no tools against mutation, and by the end of Zot 5 has Frail 3 and teleportitis, which felt kind of arbitrarily punishing and made the orb run quite difficult. Neqoxecs, Cacodemons, and Shining Eyes at least give you the option of killing them super fast, or just avoiding the areas they're in if you have no way to deal with them.
Anyway, overall, I'm in support of the proposals in this thread. Tone down the amount of permanent malmutation in the game, add more cure mutations, remove rMut.
Another possible option could be to make permanent mutations give you some sort of warning, kind of like Salamander Stormcallers or Entropy Weavers. Maybe not the exact mechanic, but I think a lot of the current frustration from malmutators is the whole "any given turn within LoF of a malmutator could semi-permanently lower my health by 10%" effect, which I think is the big source of frustration. It's really annoying when you it takes you two turns to kill a Shining Eye and get some significant malmutation during that period. If malmutation had some sort of windup like Stormcallers, so you have a turn or two to kill the enemy or block LoF before anything semi-permanent happens to you.