You can get a demon whip to minimum delay with ~14 maces
(12 actually)
And another one noobie question - I've try a couple of Ghoul Monk of Nemelex - looks quite funny on the paper assuming it could use decks of destruction with his own resistances. Also all permafood found could be spend for aquering decks of wonder. Am I right, or such combination will have some serious troubles?
I want to use medium armour with unarmed combat - so the questions are
- should I raise Dex, or only Str for minimize armor EV penalty?
- what armour suites best for this, and what the order to get it?
(here and there was some clues about shields, that say you should get the skill first, than remove shield and train skill in background until some value so it will not kill you with penalties, are armour works so?).
- is Unarmed combat (with Ghoul's "claws 1") sufficient for the whole game, or it needs to be switch for one of the weapon skills later on (branded short swords or fast long ones for fast additional attacks with UC)?
- Looking on the quote, should I train skills like:
1) Unarmed combat to *?
2) Dodging to *?
3) Evocation to *?
4) Armour to *?
5) UC and/or Evocation again
- Should this character refuse backstabbing and stealth skills at all?
You should raise int you you can later cast spells in fire dragon or pearl dragon armour, or str for plate/crystal plate/GDA. I think the latter is easier for a new player because your defences are good before you get to fire dragon depth. So I would recommend that.
Fire dragon and pearl dragon armour, preferably the former, for casting. Plate armour/crystal plate armour/gold dragon armour for non-casters.
That doesn't work in Trunk and if it does in 0.9, just wear a buckler and train the skill to 5. A buckler doesn't have much penalties. Then you can proceed to higher values (I would probably start wearing a normal shield around 10-12 skill).
UC is one of the best ways to deal damage there is, even without forms, and definitely the best one-handed option. The thing with Gh is that though they start off well damage-wise (claws 1 and good apt) they lose out in the long run against many UC characters because they cannot use transmutations to boost their unarmed damage. But Gh unarmed is still very strong. You can stick with it for the whole game, no problem.
Train skills like this, in my opinion (probably, if some great find on the floor shows up it might vary):
1) UC to 10
2) Armour to 7
3) Evocations to 7
4) UC to 15
5) Evocations to 10
6) Armour till you feel comfortable with the penalties you have (ie, when you're not being spammed up by "Your plate armour causes you to miss the attack)
7) Fighting to 10
Now you either want more UC or more Evocations. Eventually you want Evocations 15, or 27 if you are doing extended so you can use the Staff of Dispater well - but 15 is great for Nemelex and rods. You want Unarmed Combat 27, Fighting 27, Traps&Doors 10, Armour 27, Evocations 15 by the end of the game, or values that are similar to that. If you find a gold dragon armour or crystal plate armour somewhere you can swap it for this.
The "spoilers" I am relying on is just knowledge what each skill does and what skill you need in which part of the game. I play most of my characters like this without looking at guides. The En advice I gave you was influenced by elliptic's guide though.
GhMo of Nemelex doesn't sound bad. Blind drawing from decks of wonder is very, very bad since it will shuffle your stats (very annoying with heavy armour). So if you had 18/4/12 STR/INT/DEX you might have 4/12/18 afterwards.
Yes, no Stealth or Stabbing on this, especially if you are going the heavy armour route (and I think a new player will have an easier time this way).
The new skill system is still very new and Crawl thought regarding optimal skill strategies has either not yet been documented, or not yet crystallized.
"train what your character is good at, what he needs now, and only what he needs now" - done. Not much has changed really. In the old system you could also just have 1 skill on and victory dance all your exp into that, and it was optimal play.