The Tavern

Obviously, evo is a given.

But other than that, I have zero idea.
Stats/class/skills... does any build really work? I've been thinking of going for an KOAS (kobold assassin) but it seems like a bit too much skill juggling.
On the other hand, I wouldn't mind trying a troll monk.

Do cards get affect in any way by armour? If not, just how viable would a melee build with some summoning decks/decks of destruction as ranged and backup attacks?

I love the idea of a melee fighter and I like the fact I don't need to worry about food as much (compared with a spell user) in the first say hour of the game or so.

Evocations and the ability to forgive the loss of equipment is what you need with Nemelex.

In my opinion, that makes the Felid race to be the best candidate, as they can sacrifice everything, even with a poor Evocations rating.
They can get away with this by applying their first (and part of a subsequent) Experience Card pull to Evocations directly and always leaving Evocations on.
Make sure your trunk-built felids always carry one accessible evokable jewellery item.

Armour-less Octopodes work too, but they suffer from too many decks of escape.
Spriggans and Kobolds do without meat and veggies respectively.
Mummies don't need potions.

Nemelex works with literally any build. In fact, it shines for builds in which you don't really know what your greater plan is - I remember playing on a VpIE and dropping conjurations (-3!) and simply focusing on melee from turn 1, which magic to support. When it came time to choose a god, I really couldn't decide, so I just went for Nemelex and it turned out very well. I mourn my damage output because I was using a short sword of electrocution through the Vaults and Lair runes and never found a staff of cold, and that caused my death. But regardless, Nemelex is great for just anybody.



I think you're putting far too much emphasis on the item weightings. Sure, octopodes don't need armour, but any usual character isn't going to be picking up too much armour anyways - at most maybe 1 piece every 2-3 floors. Octopodes won't get any more decks of escape than a Human. Sacrificing food is nice but hardly gives you very many Decks of Wonder at all because of their light weight, especially because you need to still sacrifice corpses (very heavy) to get decks of summoning. Potions are also extremely light in weighting unless you're sacrificing !curemut or something, which nobody in their right mind would do. Mummies I guess can sacrifice it but I've found that unidentified potions are worth virtually nothing, even at 0 piety.

Carrying decks is enough to train evoc.

You can always use up your decks and not have any and then you can't train Evoc. It's happened to me several times as an early Nemelex worshiper.

Running out of decks with Nemelex takes serious effort, I'm interested in knowing how you do it.

It's not hard to not have a deck after you use up the first one he gives you. I find that getting a second or third deck from Nemelex takes an annoyingly long time but after that it's not a problem.

It's those first 5 decks or so. I tend to not have a lot early on, ESPECIALLY if I gained a deck(or decks) of Wonder and use Draw Three to nuke my piety and get cards of Experience.

I found Nemelex works better for melee/hybrid. For pure casters, training Evocs on top of magic skills with half of the decks overlapping your spells was almost useless. And I was lacking strength to carry all those decks that i was gaining.
On a side note: With amulet of faith, you can use only evoc skill to kill everything once the decks start rolling in. Just be ready if you pull three crusade cards in a row while a dragon races towards you

If you pull 3 crusade cards in a row with high evo skill you will enslave the dragon, so that's not a problem (unless you are pulling from plain summoning, but once you get a few decks you should just burn through plain decks as soon as Nemelex gifts them). The only high-power offensive card that is actually dangerous is legendary pain, unless you don't look at what card you pull and hit yourself with spark or flame.

Well I guess it's possible to end up in a bad spot with foxfire card also but that is very rare at high evo.