Fire Brand in 5.0.0 gained the ability to burn Elbereth in the floor, in one move, with no chance of failure, and without dulling. In prior versions, a reliable one-move Elbereth was a privilege restricted to wands (limited resources) and Magicbane (balanced somewhat by its poor damage, and the engraving will scuff eventually). Fire Brand deals top-tier damage -- even in Gehennom and the endgame, there are plenty of flammable monsters, and a long sword deals good damage even to the resistant ones. Ironically, Frost Brand requires a much higher sacrifice value, despite that Fire Brand is vastly more useful for the first half of the game, and not that much less for the second.
My suggestion is to slow Fire Brand down to four characters per move, so Elbereth takes two moves. This is still very fast by semi-permanent engraving standards, and is deterministic, whereas writing in the dust can fail an arbitrary number of times. But it also requires the player to plan a little bit ahead -- if you really can't survive one more round, you need to fall back to your wands or an escape item.
Fire Brand in 5.0.0 gained the ability to burn Elbereth in the floor, in one move, with no chance of failure, and without dulling. In prior versions, a reliable one-move Elbereth was a privilege restricted to wands (limited resources) and Magicbane (balanced somewhat by its poor damage, and the engraving will scuff eventually). Fire Brand deals top-tier damage -- even in Gehennom and the endgame, there are plenty of flammable monsters, and a long sword deals good damage even to the resistant ones. Ironically, Frost Brand requires a much higher sacrifice value, despite that Fire Brand is vastly more useful for the first half of the game, and not that much less for the second.
My suggestion is to slow Fire Brand down to four characters per move, so Elbereth takes two moves. This is still very fast by semi-permanent engraving standards, and is deterministic, whereas writing in the dust can fail an arbitrary number of times. But it also requires the player to plan a little bit ahead -- if you really can't survive one more round, you need to fall back to your wands or an escape item.