I would say it is pretty rare that a player will learn of this feature of his/her own accord. So, if he/she does, good for him/her and he/she deserved to use this feature then. We should not build the game around what spoiled players know.

The player should be rewarded for his/her ingenuity and experiencing the game as intended, not for being able to browse webpages, etc.

But the duration of the stun is simply absurd.

Disabling duration seems to scale with poison strength, making the strongest monsters extremely vulnerable. You could clear half a level with Snake from Beyond stunned, and still come back in time and finish it.

Even if Creator decides to keep current behavior, the duration is way too long.

I think rewarding clever use of resources is much better than rewarding raw strength. I didn't like the nerfs to disablers in general and I wouldn't like this to be nerfed much either (reducing duration somewhat is OK).

As Stingray says, for unspoiled players it's a nice puzzle to solve. And for spoiler players it isn't that game-breaking that the first orb boss is easy to defeat with this technique. It's not like there aren't harder bosses later.

I agree. The SfB is the first orb guardian most people will encounter. And (if memory serves me well) there's nothing in the game hinting that you can throw any potion at monsters to induce these effects. Let's cut unspoiled players some slack.

You mean spoiled players, surely? Unspoiled players don't know about this trick. For spoiled players it makes an already easy encounter laughably trivial. Not that it's not easy for unspoiled players. Personally, I never lost a char to SfB. Even the very first time I encountered it in 1.0.0 and being completely unspoiled. At first I assumed that purple s was a corrupted form of a snake, just like a rat can turn into a chaos rat. I remebered being quite surprised about how hard that snake was hitting :P. But it died anyway.

Yeah, I played this game for years before discovering that thrown potions were useful. I think that the cure poison trick in particular has only been known publicly for a couple years.

No-one benefits from this. Inexperienced/unspoiled players will likely never find out about it. Spoiled players are 'rewarded' with a complete lack of challenge every time. The snake is not exactly hard to beat without this trick either; I didn't know about it, and I've never lost to the snake since my first couple of encounters with him many, many years ago.

Duration should be limited to a small number of rounds IMO.

Agreed, for exactly these reasons.

But wouldn't reducing the duration just cause them to throw potions repeatedly?

Adjusted. The might of the monster now also is taken into account as a random modifier to the duration.

Sure, but that requires more supplies. It becomes more difficult to sustain.

I still like the idea of having an easy disable for the first orb guardian. It's not like the SFB is a challenge anyway! Nor, do I feel, should it be if a player is willing to use disablers on it.

first try in pre23 - Snake from Beyond staggered for ~50 turns
second try in pre23 - after 50 turns of staggering it "seems to be very confused", staggering ended after 65 turns
third try in pre23 - Snake died somewhere in the middle of 3rd potion, ~30 turns later

So this is relatively weak character (barely able to penetrate snake's 22 pv PV with his 31 avg damage), which had problems even with grues (16pv) and elementals (25pv). This character needed ~140 turns to finish up Snake from Beyond in melee with occasional wand of fireballs help - all for cost of 1 holy water and 3 blessed potions of cure poison?

I expected duration of ~10 turns at most for blessed potions of cure poison, but it looks like nothing had changed (or, maybe, it changed from 100-150 turns to 50-65 turns, i have no idea about duration of the disable before, other then that was "really long time"). I do not oppose disabling Snake from Beyond as it is, but duration of disabling still makes it easier to kill then normal temple guardians (water grues/elementals/demons).

You mean that killing the SoB spending a resource (and in a way that many spoiler players won't even know) is easier than killing the normal creatures without spending anything and in the standard way.

I still don't see that much of a problem.

Do you really think that disabling one of the most powerful monsters in the game with one of the most common potions in the game for one of the longest duration disables in the game is okay? Its 50+ turns. Who/what can disable your PC for 50+ turns other then IBM guild manual?

I think it should be. It's one of the five "boss" creatures the player absolutely needs to kill, all others are optional. I hate to see it as a complete pushover. Disablers, sure, but not 50 turns! In p20 I just stunned it and threw hammer of the gods at it (just for kicks, it didn't do any good :P). What good is a dreaded orb guardian if it's not dreaded at all? :P If anything I'd like to see SfB buffed a bit. Maybe a speed boost?

I like the idea of the SfB being easy if you have the right disabler, and use it after luring the snake out. I've said in another thread, I prefer the idea of beating bosses through exploiting their weaknesses than grinding enough to toe-to-toe them.
Besides, we'll only fire demon slaying ammo at him if we can't disable him anyway! ;)