Crown of Glory is a bit of a funny duckling. It really wants almost every stat (except sometimes, Magic.) It usually ends up best to pick one or two elements to ignore and acknowledge those will be weak points, or try to compensate with abilities. It still ends up being solid though: even if the damage from buff/debuff/heal attacks ends up low due to neglected Strength, they still tend to be excellent bargains SP and turn count wise. My main two ploys with Crown are either ignore Strength/Magic and live with the lower damage, or ignore Agility and hope Intent and demons with EVD Down and Chill can cover the gap for me. Of course, if you decide you don't want debuff cuts, it can get easier because Cunning becomes a dump stat... but then, the debuff ones tend to be amazingly powerful and far easier to spam SP-cost/cooldown wise than the ranged equivalents.
Punish vs. Snuff Out, the AI is likely to prefer Punish in many cases: Punish is 10 SP cheaper and can't "fizzle". The only time Snuff Out would win would be if Snuff Out was a near-certain or certain kill and Punish was deemed to have no chance of killing... which would happen sometimes, but not super often (ignoring obvious cases like elemental weakness/resistance interference.) And yeah, any breath weapon on a Chindi seems to be a winner, as you noted before, Haunt seems to solve much of the positioning problem the AI (and players) sometimes have with breath weapon aiming.
I'm currently working on a bit of a tweak to how the AI regards healing. I don't have it developed enough to implement right this second, but the basic idea of it is that all demons will be a little less spazzy on healing, and demons with a mix of healing and offensive powers will tend to hold off a bit on healing rather than jumping on every tiny injury. Granted, there won't be a huge amount of holding off going on... basically what I'd like to see is "healer only" demons waiting until at high yellow or low green health and mixed demons waiting until high orange or low yellow. Right now everyone pretty much jumps on healing as soon as the AI says it wouldn't be wasteful (i.e.: If it projects 11 HP will be healed, it pretty much wants to heal the instant 11 HP are missing and it takes something major to make it decide to do otherwise), which I'm getting a fair amount of feedback/personal experience suggesting may be a bit overkill even for a game as deadly as Demon. Still want to do some more thinking and a lot of testing before I release a change like this into the wild though.
Hehe. Poison Veil doesn't have an off switch. In theory, the AI could be taught to wake up sleeping allies in this way too, but... there could definitely be issues with that. Letting the AI do anything that damages the player/player units opens the door to situations where, however good the intention, that damage contributes to a death.
Don't worry, Turdak's Sanctum nerf forecast is riding at 0% at the moment. I'm pretty open about the fact I designed Demon to be brutally hard, pretty much from the opening gate, and only getting nastier as you go. As long as it remains a fair hard... and, so far, I think it does... the nerf bat isn't going to show up often just because there's a high volume of deaths.
I'm finally getting back into a content development phase (after adding only one floor in the last year, :'( ), so before too much longer, the game will start growing in terms of length again. I know better than to promise content development will keep pace with players playing through it, but hopefully it'll come online at a good clip regardless.
Dash is pretty amazing. Pounce and Bull Rush used to not require enemy targets, but that was ridiculously broken, it made them basically into Controlled Blink. I liked having leap attacks, but I didn't want controlled blink, so I forced them to target enemies. Then I made Dash, gave it the SP/cooldown an actual Controlled Blink should have (and a small range too), and that seems to have made everything happy: Pounce/Bull Rush are great charge attacks, Dash is a great all-purpose maneuvering skill, and all of them have appropriate pricing.
Demon comments!
Centaur: Melee tank centaur. Not sure I've used one as a tank before, but the difference stat-wise between a Centaur and a solid tank is fairly minimal, so with those abilities, it'd definitely work.
Chindi: Light and Dark abilities definitely get in each other's way a bit... well, the ones with Light and Dark cooldowns do, anyway. It can still be useful to have both anyway: resistance/immunity to one is often found with weakness to the other.
Solid Carbuncle: These guys don't usually see a lot of use, I think their low HP scares people away from them. Of course, a Solid one will have a lot more HP than normal, and good defenses too. This one was probably really hard to hit.