Maybe this is just me blowing off steam right now, and I'm certain the devs probably don't take this forum too seriously (I've seen my fair share of awful suggestions here), but this one seems pretty straightforward.
Some context: I've been playing this game since 0.2, and for me, one of the things that keeps me coming back, unlike all the other roguelikes I've played, is its
fairness. In all the thousands of deaths I've accrued, 99% of them, at the very
least, have been my own fault. I could look at it and go, "Oh, dang, I messed up. I'll have to do better next time." The other less-than-1-percent have been pure RNG: walk around a corner and get 1-shot by a hill giant before you can react kind of thing. Frustrating, but a necessary evil in any game with an RNG element.
Today, however, was the first time in all my years playing DCSS where I felt like I died due to unfair game design.
A few weeks ago I posted a YASD when I ran into a single Tarantella as a Mummy, missed 4 venom bolts in a row, and then it singlehandedly whittled me down from 100% to 0 over about 50 auts as I flailed around hopelessly.
And I was okay with that. That was due to a lack of caution on my part: I could've blinked away at any time, but I didn't.
So, today, I walked down to the Spider's Nest with a secret weapon under my belt: Olgreb's Toxic Radiance! If I run into any of those purple bastards, I'll just fire off one of those and it's dead before it ever gets to me. I just have to keep a decent reservoir of mana. Simple enough, right?
...Well, not when the place has the occasional [INDETERMINATE SEXUAL ORIENTATION] MANA VAMPIRE invisibly floating around. And when you're dealing with one of those and you're at 0 mana within a couple of turns, and a Tarantella walks around a corner. "lol looks like I'm already dead".
Granted, there is still potential counterplay here, but the fact that these ubiquitous, 15 speed enemies effectively 1-shot you if they ever get into melee range is just ludicrous. At best, you have to blow through a scroll of blinking every time you see one while you're in a sticky situation. At worst, your situation is so sticky that any reaction would also potentially lead to death.
TL;DR: Here are
10 ways that this interaction could be balanced:My Favorite: Change their effect to something other than Confusion. Crawl seems to have a precedent for affects that are idiosyncratic to individual monsters, so give it a "Dance" effect, not a "Confusion" effect, likely similar to "Otto's Irresistible Dance" from D&D, which seems to be what Tarantella are based off of to begin with (both in the dance and the irresistible part): the confusion only affects your lower body (as you dance around madly), so you move as though confused (or even rooted in place), and lose SH (or perhaps EV, or just a penalty to EV), but can still Ctrl+Attack, cast spells, wands, scrolls, etc. Tarantellas would likely have to be buffed in some other way. The best part of this is that it'd be highly appropriate to many other monsters: I can totally see enemies like Satyrs or The Enchantress casting this as a melee-range irresistible spell, and maybe even making it a level 8 Hex (a school which lacks lategame potential), just like the D&D spell.
2: Write in a special exception to make mummies immune to their confusing bite. Brute force, clunky, it'll never happen, but it'd work.
3: Make poison immunity give immunity to their bite, but not poison resistance. This'd potentially make Spider marginally easier for Gargoyles, but I think that's a small price to pay for a decent amount of fairness, especially when so many enemies are already pretty easy for gargoyles.
4: Partial immunity: increase the duration of their confusion a bit, make poison resistance reduce it to X% duration, make poison immunity reduce it to 1 turn. Tarantellas are still a threat to mummies and can potentially whack off lots of your HP if it gets into melee range, but it'll miss eventually and that'll give you a chance to escape/retaliate.
5: Give them one "charge" of confusion, and once they affect you with it once they can't do so again for [large] number of turns.
6: On second thought, make it like Death's door, where you can't be affected by the confusion for 1-3 turns after it's expired/affected you once.
7: Make it affected my magic resistance, but with a very high spellpower. Simple enough.
8: Confusion rework: since the main penalty of confusion seems to be "directional" it feels like it'd be thematically appropriate for confusion to not affect omnidirectional spells like Toxic Radiance and Refrigeration. The Crawl dev team seems to be moving away from thematic design and towards mechanical balance, though, so this'll never happen. (It's for the better, though, imo).
9: Reduce Tarantella's speed to 10, buffing something else. This would add the very simple counterplay of "walking back to an up staircase to reengage later", and would increase the effectiveness of counterplays like the Blink spell or scroll.
10: GET RID OF THE BASTARDS. For most characters their bite is just -1 potion of curing, anyways.
EDIT: I'd like to mention that the only reason this interaction stands out is that the game is so fair in almost every other way. In most other roguelikes this kind of shit wouldn't seem that out of the ordinary, but DCSS has a high standard of fairness.