Request for changes to "The Variant Maintainer" unique

[Chryana]

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.

[bigfoot]

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.

[Shoob]

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.

[overtrix]

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.