Invisibility nerf too steep?

It looks like all the balance tweaks in the last version were aimed at stopping a particular kind of invisibility-exploit, where people would grab lots of permanence potions and go through the entire dungeon invisible:

Quote :

-smart mobs now have a good chance to see through invis
-marginally smart mobs now have a small chance to see through invis
-logically eyeless mobs now have seeinvis naturally
-all mobs on boss levels now have seeinvis
-reduced duration that permanence potions extend buffs

Now, it's probably something that needed to be fixed, but maybe this was too much? I'm especially thinking the 'all mobs on boss levels now have seeinvis'. The thing is, yeah, on most other roguelikes it's typical for many many high-level or particularly important monsters to simply ignore invisibility -- but Mageguild isn't a typical roguelike. You get, at most, eight spells throughout the entire game (not counting inversion and so forth), and often less than that... having even one spell simply be useless sometimes is a big deal.

I haven't really had a chance to play around with it much, but what do other people think? While some more monsters that see invisible were clearly needed, this just sounds like too much to me.

...also, if people extending buffs like invisibility and using them all the time is a major problem, why not add a monster or two that can dispel them? A dispelling eye that can see invisibility, dispels buffs, and shows up on some of the lower levels could provide more dangers for people who depend on it too much, say, permanency + invisibility, without having to use the more absolute "invisibility doesn't work right now" you get from having so many seeinvis monsters.

Well, for starters, I think I need to clarify exactly what I did, here. I saw the problem as this: in 0.7, invisibility was a boolean state. Either monster X could see you, in which case invis was irrelevant, or it couldn't, in which case it had a basically zero chance to hurt you. Most of what I did was to adjust that so that very smart mobs get a spotty view of you. Now, invisibility makes it impossible for stupid mobs to see you (just as it was before), and difficult for smart mobs to see you. It should make their AI perform much worse, and thus provide you with tactical openings to exploit, instead of simply turning them off.

Mobs with seeinvis are still wholly immune to invis, but there are only about eight mobs that naturally have seeinvis, and of those, it only really matters for about four of them. The others are things like oozes, that don't move in an intelligent manner anyway.

As noted on the project status page, I'm not entirely satisfied with the fix for the invis issue; there's definitely room to tweak the details. I'm open to the suggestion that the boss levels shouldn't get a blanket seeinvis, in particular. And the degree to which invis impedes mobs of varying intellects will also probably need fine-tuned.

In general, I guess I'm saying...play with it, let me know what you think, and we'll see how things shake out.

(And I dig the idea of making more mobs use dispel- IIRC, there are a couple that do so now, but a couple more would be fun.)