[Won't change] Actors instantly NULL'd on death if they lack a Death state

[Marisa the Magician]

This is something that has caused me endless grief for years on end during my modding career, and I don't understand why do I have to be the one who has to constantly add null checks after every single call to DamageMobj in any piece of code.

The fact here is that the default actor class lacks a Death state, and thus any other actor that doesn't define one is erased instantly inside DamageMobj and all pointers to it are immediately invalid afterwards. THIS is a problem, especially if we're dealing with code that, for example, spawns blood effects or whatever after the damage has been dealt and needs to check certain flags on the actor such as NOBLOOD and whatnot. It's a serious problem, and if this is intentional, I cannot understand why.

[Graf Zahl]

You can still access the actor, but you have to keep its address in a local non-gc'd variable before calling anything that may destroy it.
Despite being nulled, you have a guarantee that nothing will ever get collected unlike control returns to the thinker ticking loop.

Even ensuring that the actor still runs one more state won't give you any guarantee whatsoever that calling DamageMobj won't result in its destruction due to the multitude of code that can be run recursively from there.