malmutate like what an orb of fire has is just not good, it gives you so many debuffs that unless you have enough mutation potions you just have to deal with it so I think it should be more temporary mutations like a wretched star instead
-sorry if this seems rant like
Obs of fire are end-of-game enemies that you’re forced to rush down with consumables before their permanent debuffs get too significant. You also can’t afford to reset the fight often, unless you reset it very early.
I kinda hate fighting them too, but I do think it’s nice game design, which makes the end of the game significantly different from the rest of the game.
TBH I wonder to what degree it counts as “design” when it’s just that almost everything else got Malmutate taken away (to the OP, it used to be much more common).
We went down Gooncrawl’s route of making everything give wretched star tempmuts as the OP suggests, but they’re way too easy to work off - sometimes killing the OOF or even a lousy shining eye clears them right away. They could be a bit less temporary.
I think it’s fine that OoFs malmutate both because they’re typically the last thing you’ll be fighting on a run, and also because, honestly, I tend to think that games without some degree of bullshit are more boring. It’s good to have some enemies that are just absolute bastards that you hate. (Also I’m quite attached to the flavor of orbs of primordial fire that mutate you with magical radiation.)
In 0.34, other orbs were added, and you’ll only face one orb type per game, so not every run will have to deal with OOFs and their malmutate. Each orb type does a different kind of strategic damage. Orbs of winter can ostracize, which temporarily reduces effective piety, while orbs of entropy can inflict doom, which gives you banes when reaching 100% doom. I’ve seen some players on Discord say entropy is the scariest because if you have to fight multiples of those, you can get a bunch of banes that make Zot:5 and the orb run harder. Meanwhile, ostracize locks you out of abilities that require high piety, but sometimes you have to spend a bunch of piety in Zot and lose access to those abilities anyway. Malmutate can be dealt with by drinking potions of mutation, though those aren’t guaranteed to give you a good mut set.