Melee Ghouls

[Herman Gigglethorpe]

I started testing out a Ghoul Monk named named Harold (what else?). He was fun to play, but seemed a bit lacking in defenses compared to the sturdier races. He died to one of my Draconian ghosts because I wasn't really taking that playthrough seriously. Gladiator is a recommended background for Ghouls, so the second Harold went with that along with an Unarmed Combat specialty. Can't let those claws go to waste!


What is some good advice for melee Ghouls? I haven't played Crawl much in months, but I have the most recent stable version downloaded. Obviously they can't go with the "good aligned gods" because they're racist to undead. I don't want to start with the Berserker background, since that's such a huge advantage over other backgrounds for the first few floors that it's not good for teaching Crawl in my opinion. I may opt for Trog later if one of the Harolds finds his altar in the Ecumenical Temple or something. The wiki doesn't seem to be working at all.

Should I concentrate entirely on Unarmed Combat at first, or should I "major" in it and "minor" in Fighting, Armor, and Dodging?

[Nebukadnezar]

I have several ghouls (background differs) with 15 runes, you can check skilling in the morgue in the link to my games below.
Okawaru is very solid as always when it comes to melee. +5 from heroism counts a lot when you play a race which levels not that fast.
I played Uska a lot but I wouldn't advise it for a newer player.
Trog ? Ghouls cannot berserk, trogs hand works fine.

One of the biggest advantages of ghoul (besides resists): eating chunks to restore health. Treat chunks as miniature potions of healing

[duvessa]

The best gods for ghouls (of any background) are Kikubaaqudgha, Hepliaklqana, Nemelex Xobeh, and Uskayaw. These gods are overpowered in general, and you can even use Kikubaaqudgha's Receive Corpses ability to get extra chunks if your pile of chunks runs out (but this is unlikely).
Alternatively, Ru, Yredelemnul, Makhleb, and to a lesser extent Okawaru and Dithmenos are reasonable choices.
I do not actually recommend unarmed combat on ghouls, unless you take Ru (because of sacrifice hand). Ghouls only have one level of claws, and cannot use forms, so unarmed lags behind weapons in most cases.

As Nebukadnezar says, the only good thing Gh has is the chunk healing, but the chunk healing is really good. The HP you get from eating a chunk is on average 3.5+[XL]*0.5, where [XL] is your experience level.
The exact formula is (1dX+2d(X+1))/3, rounded down, where X is your experience level plus 5.