Strategy question- ignoring UC on Monks


Ask fellow adventurers how to stay alive in the deep, dark, dangerous dungeon below, or share your own accumulated wisdom.

Abyss Ambulator

Posts: 1217

Joined: Sunday, 14th April 2013, 04:01

Post Wednesday, 13th August 2014, 17:59

Strategy question- ignoring UC on Monks

Lately, I've been playing Monks just to get a decent start for hybrid characters: you get good fighting and dodging right off the bat, while keeping decent int. Starting level of UC is enough to get you pretty far without leveling it much, and it's not that expensive to just level up a weapon once you find a decent one.

I usually use this with gods that scale very strongly with piety such as Ashenzari (who also is worse in general for UC characters).

My question is that I'm wondering if it is worth the two piety stars to pick Monk even if I'm fully intending to use a weapon.
Three wins: Gargoyle Earth Elementalist of Ash, Ogre Fighter of Ru, Deep Dwarf Fighter of Makhleb (0.16 bugbuild :( )

Ziggurat Zagger

Posts: 5382

Joined: Friday, 25th November 2011, 07:36

Post Wednesday, 13th August 2014, 18:13

Re: Strategy question- ignoring UC on Monks

I've done it in reverse many times - for example starting a fighter to get a shield, and then training unarmed. It's harder to reach temple, but after temple depth it ends up making more or less no difference. I don't have enough ash experience to really say how powerful ** is, but it seems reasonable that it'd be worth it.

Ziggurat Zagger

Posts: 3037

Joined: Sunday, 2nd January 2011, 02:06

Post Wednesday, 13th August 2014, 18:43

Re: Strategy question- ignoring UC on Monks

If you want an early hybrid, you should probably start with a book background, because otherwise there's no guarantee you're going to get a book at all much less a relevant one.

I would rate the ** piety as being less valuable than either the fighter's potion of might or the gladiator's throwing nets. ** piety saves you a little bit of trouble when you first find an altar you want, but the emergency consumables available on most other backgrounds will save your character's life or kill off something that is both profitable and genuinely dangerous. The fact that you have loads of starting xp in something useless rather than something useful is less important, but not irrelevant.

Ashenzari is a particularly odd choice for this idea, because you get piety with her just for walking around. You don't even have to fight things. Your piety is more likely to be stalled if you simply can't bind any slots due to availability, and starting with ** isn't going to help with that.

Abyss Ambulator

Posts: 1217

Joined: Sunday, 14th April 2013, 04:01

Post Wednesday, 13th August 2014, 18:56

Re: Strategy question- ignoring UC on Monks

It's pretty much a guarantee that I'll get a book of SOME kind, and it is rare that it won't have anything I can use.

Problem with fighter and gladiator is the abysmal int.

Ash piety gain is really slow though, and doesn't do much at first. ** gets you right to the first tier of skill buffing which is really nice. I won't take her if I don't have at least two bind targets admittedly, but that's fairly uncommon unless it is a super early altar.
Three wins: Gargoyle Earth Elementalist of Ash, Ogre Fighter of Ru, Deep Dwarf Fighter of Makhleb (0.16 bugbuild :( )

Barkeep

Posts: 3890

Joined: Wednesday, 14th August 2013, 23:25

Location: USA

Post Wednesday, 13th August 2014, 20:56

Re: Strategy question- ignoring UC on Monks

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.

Lair Larrikin

Posts: 15

Joined: Tuesday, 12th August 2014, 22:23

Post Thursday, 14th August 2014, 00:30

Re: Strategy question- ignoring UC on Monks

For what it's worth, my best hybrids have been assassins. They just seem to be a decent start that allows enough survivability to get your spells online.
Wins: TrMo^Oka, GrBe, MiBe

Return to Dungeon Crawling Advice

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 18 guests

cron
Powered by phpBB © 2000, 2002, 2005, 2007 phpBB Group.
Designed by ST Software for PTF.