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[BDR]

Do people ever use them, and how useful on average are they?

I sorta came over from Crawl - a much longer and substantially harder game.  Teleports there are a risk, too, but the level maps are much bigger than DoomRL's maps; big enough that the chance of being 'ported into a worse spot from a bad spot is acceptably low.  Not super-low, but low enough that it's generally safer than trying to tough out the current situation.  It also helps that in Crawl, good healing is not usually available in big enough quantities to allow damage soaking for any serious length of time; you *need* ways to fix your enemy woes reliably and/or quickly.

DoomRL sort of gets this reversed; full healing is carried around easy enough, armor soaks damage as well and you're generally either carrying the most reliable means of foe death available or you're already pushing up daisies.  Maps are much smaller, meaning you've got a better chance of running into bad guys.  Totally fits Doom, sure, but the risks of random porting tend to far outweigh the rewards as a result; it's not likely that you'll do better to use a phase device than to heal or even to reload.  The problem is that because of that the phase device is left by the side of the road when something better comes along; full kits, armor, even ammo and mods, which spurs one of two questions: why is an item that is significantly less valuable than all others in this game, or is there a way to make this more worthwhile to the average player?

[DaEezT]

I never ever use them myself. I'd rather carry around more meds or armors than wasting inventory slots on phase devices.

The last time I used them was back in 0.9.8.5 when AoMr used to be super hard and I used two of them during my Cybie fight. One ported me just 6 or 7 steps to the other side of Cybie and the other just ~10, barely enough to reload before the rocket bombardment continued. Needless to say I lost.

[007bistromath]

I thought about this a bit a few days ago, and it occurred to me that making phase devices more useful is pretty easy. Just make it so they have a much higher probability of teleporting you to a part of the map you've already been to. This way, they take on the role of giving you some breathing room and time to plan. You can go back to that room where Door #1 turned out to be the wrong one and try Door #2 instead, or if you'd rather, stick a barrel in front of Door #2 and wait for some of the nasty to come through Door #1 so you can stick your shotty in its face.

[maso]

Well today on I took on an early wall (level 7) with two phase devices in my inventory. Barons were about to kill me so I phased landed near the goodies, phased again landed the exit. All luck.

[Zeb]

I always try to carry around one phase device. They've bailed me out of several sticky situations where spamming health pack either wouldn't have cut it or would have required burning through 5 or 6 large medpacks or even. (Usually being surrounded by Arachnotrons.)

[Chamber]

In my experience, phase devices have it in for me.  They tend to only compound my problems at a time when I need said complication least. 

So I generally ignore them, reasoning that at least ammunition doesn't explode in my face, healing kits don't poison me, and armor doesn't weigh me down.