Help with delayed explosions?

I'm trying to get a monster to cast a delayed explosion on the player's tile that harmlessly ticks for a few turns then deals damage to anyone within a small radius. I've tried two methods so far without much success:

a) summon two harmless clouds (mine spells) on top of each, the first causing a 1-turn dummy buff and the second lasting longer and checking for the absence of that dummy buff to trigger the explosion damage. This sort-of worked sometimes but due to weird ordering of events within each turn and cloud triggers not always working when the player just sits in the mine, the results were far too inconsistent to use.
b) summon, kill, trigger a delayed explosion on a dummy monster. The dummy monster could be plonked on the same tile as the player, but no matter how I frigged around with targets (or even applied temp. resistance buffs to the player and attempted to nuke the tile), I could not get the casting monster to kill the dummy monster instead of damaging the player.

Any ideas?

Oh, and three unrelated questions: Is there any method to scale an attack using the targets stats? Is it possible to remove a monster's corpse on its death without CTDing? Can you set up a string of delayed triggers on a monster but then cancel them if the monster dies?

 

Couldn't you just delay an effect for a few rounds then trigger an AoE on the targetted tile?

 

... no. Only monsters (or the player) can store delayed triggers, not floor tiles.

 

So you summonhostile a mine-shaped monster, kill it, and drop an <effect type="trigger" amount="5" spell="Obvious Fireball"/> on it...and what happens?

 

The mine-shaped monster wasn't killed because any direct damage hit the player on the same tile instead, apparently regardless of amount="1" or type="targetmonster" etc. As I described in the OP.

 

Why not give the player that dot that drops a rune - that ridiculously annoying trap that does that - but only does it on the first turn?

 

Well, I never did get a delayed explosion working as I'd hoped for. But to answer my other three questions: No (triggered spells always remember the original caster and scale damage / check for buffs etc. off them), no (nor can a buff trigger directly its own removal, for that matter), and ... yes, if the triggers were cast by the monster itself (by giving a dummy buff onDeath and requiring it to not be active for each delayed trigger).