Barkeep
Posts: 3890
Joined: Wednesday, 14th August 2013, 23:25
Location: USA
Replace *rage with *slow
You can suppress it by maintaining sufficiently low satiation. Duration of berserk can be influenced based on the actions that you took while berserked. One can also avoid berserkeritis by killing stuff with non-melee combat and, while it may create situations that require some innovative gameplay, it creates many more situations where you tediously kill weak enemies using methods that are less effective than melee combat, in order to avoid an untimely berserk.
There are, in short, very annoying and some spoiler-y ways to exert a great deal of control over the "random" berserks given by *rage. Some of this stems from how *rage triggers, but some of it comes from the choice of berserk as a status that can be applied to the player against his or her wishes. That is, one would have to change how berserk works in order to fix berserkeritis completely, which, it seems to me, puts the cart entirely before the horse.
I therefore suggest changing *rage into *slow, on the model of *confuse.
Under the effects of *slow, you have a chance to become slowed every time you take damage, with duration and chance scaling up with the "slowitis" mutation and number of *slow item properties currently equipped.
This would make the property matter to all characters, it would avoid problematic ways to work around the property, and how exactly chance/damage/duration/*slow mut and item stacking actually matter would give quite a few knobs to tweak in order to get balance right.