Desktop Dungeons Test Build

[The Tapir]

Well, I hadn't been on the test build for over a week, so I was pleasantly surprised that the Rat Monarch is now a playable class. I gotta admit, the devs did a very good job in changing how levelling works like they did with the goatperson - I had no idea that filling the experience bar didn't level you up until I tried fighting a higher levelled enemy over the course of a ding and nearly misclicked myself to death. Also, I'm liking the "all items are large" - changes how endgame inventories will look given the space constraints. Anyone done some of the vicious dungeons with this guy?

[Darvin]

[berpdreyfuss]

In todays daily I used consensus and it didn't give me any piety, I stayed at 0

[Lujo]

Darvin, there's a large chace that you're reading him wrong entirely. I'm pretty sure of it, in fact. The Goat can't ding, either, and his refills are bottlenecked by CP and he's actually bloody murderous on any dungeon with anything that solves his food game. I don't think you're supposed to get over lvl 3-4 with this guy, like, ever.

I'm just not fully sure the inventory penalties are warranted.

[lieronet]

Looks like there's new death quotes, I'm liking it.

[Lujo]

Anyway, one way to play this guy is to get a bunch of rats and just keep flipping between levels (lowish ones, like lvl 5 tops) - spend a rat to reffil, pop CP to get the level back up and just burn everything to the ground. That's a bit of a problem in the vicious places where you get cut off from your shops, and the CP scaling is a bit harsh for VGT, but I don't think the devs were worried about him being underpowered at all.

Maybe a "cornered rat" extra ability that lets him use stairs other people can't so he's never cut off from the topside? And which also lowers the CP scaling in vicious scenarios?

[Darvin]

[Lujo]

What? The CP cost decreses? I didn't even know that! Wohoh...

So anyway, you want the rats, which then makes killing higher level stuff more important and solves that whole non-interactivity conundrum, but otherwise he plays like a cross between a Goat and one of those cheezy low lvl boss killer dorks.

Except kinda better balanced because those guys don't actually have balancing measures like he does XD

[Astral]

Yay for the item changes, good news!

Glad to see the new class as well, but in it's current incarnation it's too luck reliant and not very interactive with the dungeon. The lack of refills on levelups makes it very inflexible too. The high reliance on CP combined with all items being big results in not being able to use item or glyph combos effectively.
I dislike how a lot of your play style choices are predetermined with this class:
- you should kill popcorn at the lowest level where it gives the the most experience relative to your xp bar
- once you've gained ~6-7 rat subjects there's no point in killing more monsters, you won't cross lvl 8 most of the time
and at lvl 1 you can't get any more refills
- you shouldn't use rats to kill high level foes midgame, there's no real bonus to it, and after the level down your xp bar won't reset, hurting you later
- you can't put off converting till late game, in fact you're forced to convert most of your stuff before the boss fight otherwise you will barely scratch your bosses. Trying to win hoarder? Impossible.

It's bad that your xp game is manipulated by outside factors, if you get little gold or bad CP fodders you will be stuck at lower levels and there's nothing you can do about it.

@Lujo
The goat is very different. He's able to create CP by kills and preserve food by cutting back on exploration/using B2P/yoyoing.
The Rat Monarch has ~0 control over his CP game and badly needs CP. If you rolled a dungeon with low gold/bad CP fodders you're destined to be weak. Do you face SMM? Enjoy not being able to regenfight it.
Goat can put off all his conversions till lvl 10 to get maximum benefit out of them, and he could get more refills as well.
The Rat will lose strength and will soon get to 1HKO territory where the 100% refills don't matter anymore.

Staying at lvl3-4 doesn't sound like a good plan. Your dmg output/CP needed for refill ratio keeps getting lower as you level down. You will have more refills, but will do even less damage than usual. Unless you try to exploit corrosion shenanigans.

If the Rat's CP reliance stays, he needs to get a way to control it. Increasing conversion% for kills, or simply having bigger CP on items as a counterbalance for not being able to carry much.
Or getting gold for kills, so you have a reason to kill more monsters and you can invest it into CP. Just something to reduce the RNG factor.

[Lujo]

What do you mean staying at lvls say 4 or 5 wouldn't give you enough power to scratch a boss? You guys overload on stuff all the time anyway, spellcasters kill bossess with way less stuff than you'd believe (both in terms of items, piety, levels or anything else). You've got a way to control your CP - there's 5 glyphs in a dungeon, 500 CP is about 4 refills just from that. Besides that there's potions, shops and gods.

The only difference between him and any other PoS/Fireball dork that doesn't go over the top into doing-it-for-the-art territory is that killing a boss or two at lvl 2 or 3 levels up the other spellcasters, so they, for example, go kill the Avatar at a higher level than he would. Otherwise not much. Very little difference in how I'd play any PoS guy and him on most runs, really...