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This is what I find annoying about Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup: the incredibly swingy damage formulas mean that a trash fight can become a captcha fight and even a challenge real quick, so the optimal way to play is to treat encounters that 99% of the time are trash as if they are about to kill you. The trash/challenge fights both work well (autofight is very quick, and the challenges are good), and it's often the case that multiple trash monsters create combinations that you have to take seriously, but imo the game would be much better if the RNG variance was toned down so that the types were more clearly distinguished.
Dunno. The thrill of permadeath makes trash fights captcha fights. Swingy damage only makes it more...exciting? Or its supposed to be like that at least.
Tab fighting in DCSS is great though. But I miss the old days of carrying rations and food, it gave the game more character.
There's no thrill of permadeath whatsoever in fighting a quokka, most derived undead, something you outlevel significantly, or whatever (a rule of thumb for me is "can I safely melee this as a caster? trash fight"). Though you always have to watch for anything walking onscreen while you're tabbing the quokka. What I don't like are the situations where, for instance, your character is at a point where you can mindlessly melee a komodo dragon or a troll one-on-one almost all the time, but suddenly a series of rolls go differently and now you're scrambling to escape this one scrub (early game is awful for this too but that's WAD I guess, early game is supposed to suck). Tying GDR to AC instead of body armour was a big improvement, and I suppose the converse is that characters can escape when they should absolutely die due to the enemy rolling low. My thinking on DCSS's design is that many enemies are meant to be unchallenging one-on-one, depending on your character, so that they can create interesting challenges when they show up in combination with each other, without those group fights being impossible to overcome without luring.
More generally, and I know I always bang this drum, I think a game which can accidentally double player damage without anyone noticing, during a tournament needs to take a long hard look at its philosophy around damage rolls. It also creates a pretty boring version of optimal play (and I say this as someone who can win pretty often, currently have an MDFW tearing up Zot), where you are focused on minimizing your exposure to 1% chances of death. Honestly I don't think you need to play like that to win regularly, just to play as well as the best players, but the devs seem obsessed with taking away boring tools for optimal play without ever asking "why does our design philosophy push players towards this path".
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