by q 3 on Wed Mar 28, 2012 12:22 am
Dunno how workable it would be, but I could see Animated Armors being reasonably well balanced with a 'deteriorate' effect wherein every time they lose a death protection they also lose some of their stats. Lower damage, lower max HP, maybe negative resistances. You're basically tearing the armor apart, so there's less of it left with each blow. That first death protection is still a challenge, but they'd be somewhat less ridiculous after that. (I could also see Zombies with a similar effect. They could stand to have at least a slight nerf.)
BLUDTOPOWA, I'd either have it with no penalty but it only works when you're at full HP (i.e. Exhaustion) or no penalty or restriction but Mystera and Binlor are grumpy when you use it. Binlor gets mad just like GG, Mystera gives reduced piety when you have it.
The main hurdle for BLUDTOPOWA solutions is BURNDAYRAZ, and more specifically Burning. My suggestion would be some combination of having Burning be more reliant on items/boons (e.g. initially you can only apply +1 burning per monster level; Mystera's Flames boon adds +1 per level to the cap each time it's used and can be repeated; the Battlemage Ring adds another +1/level to the cap) or giving Burning a penalty (e.g. every time a monster takes Burning damage, the player also takes a proportional amount of damage, for playing with fire).
My main suggestion for subdungeons is to make them more consistent in terms of the number of tiles available - if some subdungeons start fully explored, then maybe they all should. Otherwise, they should all have roughly the same dark area available. Maybe all classes should have the Tinker's stair sense, or at least a roguelike "level feeling" that hints at what kind of subdungeon(s) are present in a level. (And then the Tinker can have shop sense! Everyone wins!)