ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Hi. I've been playing tome 2 on and off for a few years now, and I would like to suggest a small change to the monsters list. I like to play with all the monsters enabled (I've actually made a small patch to the game to enable zangband and cthangband monsters), and I find The Variant Maintainer http://tome.dreamer.hu/monster_show.php?id=868 to be exceedingly annoying, because he's way overpowered at the depths I meet him. It's a 500ft deep monster, and I get pretty much instakilled by him because he moves so fast he gets a free turn and confuses me with his breath or his summons. I tend to play Rohanknight warriors, so my speed when I meet him is around +8 or +9, which is not exactly slow at those depths. The only ways I ever seem to beat him consistently is when I get lucky with the princess quests, and I get a piece of armor with confusion resistance. I suppose I could simply edit the monster files, but I thought this monster is hard enough to deserve to be weakened in the actual game. Anyways, my suggestions for a quick fix are either to reduce his speed or to send him 1000(!) feet deeper. Opinions on this topic are welcome.

It's been a while since I've seen him, but doesn't also summon little "RNG" minions? He's rather wimpy, cause all he's really got is confuse.

yeah, I think the last time I played with joke monsters on he was easy, you may have to use terrain to your advantage though.

Yes and no. He catches you unawares while you're making hay somewhere, and the stack of !CCW soon starts to look not enough - like a perennial version of the very first time you ran into an 'unhappy' dealer in speedy überspells and it came as a terminal surprise.