Wednesday, 13th August 2014, 20:56 by and into
It is pretty rare to find a book that is good for your character in the first 8 floors or so.
The ** piety is neat but doesn't help at all until you find an altar, and even then, the degree to which that directly helps you will vary. On a character without claws, UC does pretty close to the same damage as one of the "bad" starting weapons (spear, falchion, etc.) except that with those weapons you can almost always upgrade to something better in the first few floors, at which point your damage output would be significantly better than UC (assuming no claws/forms). And lots of backgrounds start with stuff that is better than the lowest tier starting weapons, anyway.
So yeah, you would be better off starting as a book background, as KL suggested. If you really don't want to do that for some reason, then I'd recommend starting as a Hunter or Assassin. For most species you'll end up with well balanced stats and you'll have some kind of ranged weapon that can pretty reliably carry you until you get an altar you want and an okay melee weapon with the skill to use it. Then you can do whatever.