Debuffs for Monsters

[Estie]

An excellent buff-line is the tempoary resist one. I always use the spells if I have them or hold onto items with resist activation.
They often turn a dangerous 1-hit monster (dragon etc) into a managable damage fight and are invaluable against high elemental damage uniques who take long to kill.
The various debuffs - even if they would affect all monsters without chance of failure - cant keep up with that. Slowing a dragon also reduces its average damage, but not the peaks. I dont know wether confusion disables breath weapons, but Id only consider it if the duration was known to me as the debuff ending prematurely has high chances to end the journey.
Sleep might be useful to park a dangerous monster but doesnt enable fighting one. It is not a debuff in this sense.

If you can think of interesting debuffs that change the status of some monsters from "it can 1-hit me" to "it cant", those would likely see use.

[debo]

imo sneeze powder could give a large chance for a monster to sneeze instead of breathing

[danaris]

imo sneeze powder could give a large chance for a monster to sneeze instead of breathing

Heh, but wouldn't that just cause its breath attack to be a ball centered on the monster itself?

[danaris]

An excellent buff-line is the tempoary resist one. I always use the spells if I have them or hold onto items with resist activation.

Yep. My last arcane-casting character had a tendency to just walk around with all resists, haste, and heroism active if I thought there was any chance of running into any monsters (though for haste, it helped that I'd found a Rod of Speed relatively early, and later on, 2 or 3 more...).

If you can think of interesting debuffs that change the status of some monsters from "it can 1-hit me" to "it cant", those would likely see use.

That's a very good metric to use. I will keep it in mind.

[AnonymousHero]

One possibility that I've been turning over in my head is creating more possibilities for friendly fire—and if that happens, the possibility of the monster that got hit actually turning on the monster that hit it. That would go some way toward decreasing the otherwise absolute calculus that the more monsters there are nearby, the worse the danger to you.

Yes, however, this has to be balanced extremely carefully. In e.g. Entroband enabling monster in-fighting was (it seemed to me) actually more dangerous than just having all the monsters chasing you. The major reason was probably that huge numbers of (mutually aggravated) monsters had LoS on each other (even if @ was nowhere near) and would summon like crazy. Add to this the fact(?) that uniques couldn't actually be killed by each other and you'd just end up with levels almost filled with summons. (Well, it wasn't quite that bad, but it was ridiculous.)

Anyway, good luck with your endeavours!