The Tavern

How should you play him? Should you just curse all of your stuff?

Yes.

Unless you need to frequently swap a slot, such as weapon or jewelry. It's fine to leave a slot uncursed if necessary. Just keep in mind that you won't get the skill buff for that slot.

spoiler: you don't need to frequently swap a slot.

I typically curse amulet and 1 ring to get magic boost while leaving a slot to swap resist rings.

What I meant was: in the midgame, you're probably getting your resists from rings/amulets. These should be at least slightly swappable without requiring use of a consumable.

Personally, I think Ash should provide free curses. He has plenty, right? ?oRC are still used to swap slots.

The answer is that generally you shouldn't go ash if you care about winning any particular game. If you just want to win some game, ash seems good because eventually you'll get such good early items that it won't matter that ash does nothing for the most difficult part of the game, so you get an easy early to mid game from start scumming followed by rolling over the rest of the game because you have 3 times as many skill points as you normally would.

A slightly more nuanced gloss on this general principle is that you don't really want to go ash unless you can see from the start you've got that you're not going to need any help for a long time. In practice, though, even then you're accepting a higher probability of dying because you can never really know.

But assuming you're going ash, you want to get a lot of curses going as early as possible or you're not going to reach ****** until your second lair branch.

I am going ash just to try him out. I sort of though he was a weak god, so I went with a extremely strong combo, GrFi.

If you are into distorsion but not into Lugonu, Ash is interesting.

This is Advice and not GDD, but the tactical aspect is monster detection. I guess it could come earlier. Myself, I like to play Ashenzari on stabbers.

Isn't Ashenzari good for hybridizing?

She's very good for that and lets you learn spells up to level 6 quite effortlessly but doesn't fit into the whole "mid and late game is meaningless" meme.

Ash is fun. Be wary though!

The return on your investment (i.e. not god slot) is highly dependent on getting piety quickly, so that you get help quickly. The skill boosts are decent and scrying, often underused, can be amazing.

Getting piety quickly depends on how many slots you can bind quickly. For that you need curse scrolls and filled slots. Without a good number of both, I wouldn't pick Ash if other gods are available.

I only take Ash if I have a buttload of remove curse scrolls.

Said it before, but Earth Elementalist of Ash is one of the most fun combos in the game. Kill things while they're still around the corner!

I almost always play her nowadays. Any other character feels weak without the skillboost, casually getting lvl5-6 spells online is OP.

Other people complain and ragequit about shafts, traps, abyss? Ash is your (wo)man. Rupert dropping a nice vamp battleaxe but you are commited to long blades? Switch now with a 90% reduced experience loss, and get decent skill in axes in a single level!

In many many ways Ashs is the God(ess) of convenience more than anything, and I imagine that - as happend with brand ID- much of her effortlessness will go into the normal game. (traps, ID minigame reduced, less swapping of stuff etc)

Ash is a great god and one of the best for extended.