duvessa wrote:I don't understand why any of the uniques exist, Rupert doesn't seem any worse than the rest.
They exist to make game more interesting. They are allowed to be much stronger than other monsters and often require a consumable or two, also you can avoid them if you don't have those consumables.
Examples: Nikola is deadly without rElec so you either quaff a potion of resistance or carefully avoid it. You would not be able to do it if there were multiple "Nikolas" on every floor. Mennas requires haste potion and arguably something like sack of spiders. Again unacceptable to have several "Menasses" on every floor. Jorgrun requires potion of invisibility and/or flight etc. Rupert/Erolcha require a scroll of blinking and skipping the level etc.
There are two good hostile status effects in the game and they are paralysis and slow. Petrify, fear, mesm, weak, sap, corr, flay, poison, sticky flame, constrict, etc. are all too weak to be impactful and their only effect is to annoy you and force you to either play slower or die (and make the game harder to learn). Some of them like sleep, confuse, flash freeze, roots, and petrify are direct variants of paralysis or slow with inferior design.
What is so good about slow? You still keep your defenses, you still can miss 5 turns in a row without being slow, assuming 0.7 weapon attack that's basically a 3.5 turns "paralysis" or 7.5 turns "slow".
Let's have a typical fight - you are fighting in a corridor and there are other monsters behind the one you are fighting. What are good effects here?
Flayed Ghost? Great, you need invisibility or fog. Even after teleportation you will have your HP reduced.
Tormentor? Great, again you need invisibility or fog.
Mesm? I don't remember if it requires line of fire, but assuming it's not it is a good effect because you cannot just run away if you overestimated your defense and are standing adjacent to a heavy melee monster.
Now compare to current paralysis. You still ignore that monster as long as it does not have LoF, you have all the time in the world to kill it with wands of fire/acid, bolt spells, javelins of penetration, lamp of fire, airstrike or even cheap summons like sack of spider or lightning bolt. And even if it is adjacent to you, you still keep your AC so most likely it does not kill you.
The main problems with paralysis (and slow for that matter) are that autoexplore handles corners and doors wrong, and that it is resistible by MR. The latter is trivially fixable. The former is a little harder to fix, but it's certainly possible.
Multi-book monsters are also bad but that's not the fault of paralysis. If ogre magi all had the paralysis book and didn't come with harmless spam packs, they wouldn't be so annoying. I do think paralyse - like any other status effect - is pointless on monsters that are easy to avoid, like uniques or great orbs of eyes or floating eyes, or can't back it up with significant damage, like great orbs of eyes or floating eyes.
Later ITT you wrote that the spell is great because it is proactive. How are you suggesting to make it ignore MR then??? So it will depend on LoF only? LoF management is boring and repetitive, you do it all the game vs those yaktaur captains, stone giants and alike. Also it is boring to check every turn if a specific monster with paralyse has a line of fire at you (it is not obvious for some players like me).
Also later you suggested to keep EV/SH? Why? Currently heavy armour characters laugh at paralysis (I provided an example in another paralysis thread recently), being paralysed 7+ times means nothing when you have huge AC. Either keep it the way it is (so players can choose to switch to heavy armour to proactively react to branches with many paralyzers) or reduce AC to 0 too. With your suggestion many Sp's and Fe's will laugh at paralysis too.