Hero spawn repeats if they beat you

[sankarul]

If you get beaten up by a hero spawn in a certain quest, I think it would be pretty fun if the chance to run into it again would be increased if you run the same quest again.
If they take my lunch money I want a chance to take it back!

could create some fun moments like "Ahh it's that creature again!" or so...

[Legebril]

yeah! and bring back the "Bat-Orc" !

[Tala]

So every time a hero spawn procs, simply take the union of the partys' deaths, indexed by location, inner join with list of areas included in that quest, then select killer column, and test each name for whether it is a hero name. Uniformly sample from this if it has size greater than one and assign that as name of the spawned hero else hit the usual hero name generator.

But wait, now you have heroes who come back even after they are killed. So now we need to remember the names of heroes who have been killed by character.

But wait, now we have the possibility of families of hero names getting assigned to wrong hero types ("Ah, its Slurps who Settles Between Cracks, that hero water elemental that killed me, but now he's an orc"). Okay so we need a new column which is hero race....

.... idk player, these things have like an average lifespan of like 24 seconds or something, seems pretty complicated for what, >98% of time wouldn't even apply. If there was a way to manage it that didn't involve lots of queries and comparisons, sorting, etc, then maybe... but how?

You make it too complex... Not everything has to be the smartest thing. It's not too hard to do in a dumb but still working way.
It's not a bad suggestion, let us worry about whether and how to implement it.