Hallucinatory Healing

It's always a pleasure reading about people playing your game - and one of the more enjoyable players is HallucinationMushroom. Hallucination is a melee specialist - that is, he doesn't play the game using any tactics other than melee, so it was especially gratifying seeing Orcly the Gladiator figuring out one important Unangband melee tactic (see the link for details). The Angband ladder at angband.oook.cz allows you to upload your character and make regular progress reports and my co-developers and I are always quick to respond with advice and encouragement should you upload an Unangband character.

One thing Hallucination has highlighted is that there is not enough healing items for a warrior player in Unangband - or at least the frequency of drops needs to be adjusted. Unfortunately, this could affect game balance, because Unangband mages are well-balanced by not having a healing spell which allows them to recover more than 300 hit points at a time, and too readily obtained healing items would render this disadvantage meaningless.

I've written about healing in Angband before and one of the items I suggested be made a more powerful healing item was potions of Berserk Strength. In Unangband, these heal 30% of your hit points when quaffed, but prevent you from casting spells or using ranged attacks for a limited duration afterwards (it also alters your combat stats in various ways).

It seems to me that the best way to balance the additional healing items would make them similarly constricting for mages.

One idea would be to reduce the player's mana in return for some reasonably powerful healing effect (there are items which do the reverse already). Perhaps a scroll of Contingency which drains all mana in return for a teleport effect and 50% hit point recovery. Often times you want to both heal and teleport in the same turn - but the drawback is significant enough that you'll only use this as a last resort (unless you're a warrior, of course).

Another would be a timed healing effect, with a drawback that prevents you from casting spells until you are fully healed. I was thinking of a silence effect, perhaps calling it Solemnity, but it's equally tempting to create a mixed effect mushroom of Hallucinatory Healing.

Or it might just go to his head. (Edit: As Nick points out, HM has dug himself out of trouble before).