by sitnaltax on Wed Apr 08, 2015 4:01 am
To answer Tinker's question above: I beat HGT with the Rat Monarch. It's tough, definitely tougher than any other class, unless I'm just totally missing the best tricks. The Rat really relies on blackspace and that's of course in short supply relative to the number of difficult monsters.
Synopsis:
Preps: Dragon Shield, More Health, Drac, Transmutation Seal (used on a wall), Bear Mace, Black Market, Shop Scroll. I found both HALPMEH and GETINDARE, both of which are good, although not CYDSTEPP or PISORF. HGT provided some lucky breaks: the Binlor level showed, and the only misfortune was the relatively tame Retaliate:Fireball. I converted into Drac only late, sacced HALPMEH and desecrated EM, and went on to squeak out the victory. Not much resist stacking; no Taurog, no Pactmaker, no Blood Shield, although I did have a pair of Elven Boots.
The Rat is hard. Killing any tough monster requires, at a minimum, plenty of blackspace, and most levels don't exactly have an excess. (As one counterexample, I suspect if you can clear topside of Namtar's Lair, the underworld will be cake.) . Monsters with any kind of debuff, either poison/manaburn or stacking, are very dangerous. Not only do you basically have to regen fight, but the go-to mitigations--Viper Ward, Soul Orb, and debuff-clearing potions--are less available because of the size class feature. The shop refill feels good to use, and help mitigate the resource shortage; but because your bars are naturally short, they don't actually seem to go very far. And the size restriction means you can't benefit as much from shop items as anyone else; you're buying things and then immediately throwing them away.
The Rat's ace in the hole is the interaction of knockback and corrosion: powerful for the monster you're beating on, devastating when added to on the monster you're knocking it into. Currently if I were trying to do Vicious dungeons that's the route I would take, and there are forumites with better knockback-fu than mine. Knock a meat man into that troublesome Warlock, say. This might be used by expert players to squeak out wins on, say, NC, but it doesn't feel like the design the rest of the class is aiming towards.
I'd be happy to be proven wrong--there are better players than me out there, and I had assumed that VGT Goat was impossible--but with the Rat's current design I don't believe VGT is possible. If the Rat intended to be easier--in line with the other monster classes--I might look at a way to mitigate the extreme danger of debuffs and a way tomitigate the blackspace dependence on levels where it was already tight.
). I wanted to score both Ding!Max and Unstoppable, because my Mystera version had a bit of a difficulty mopping up after the boss kills. Well, melee version has no difficulty mopping up, I killed everything on the map and ended up at Prestige 1 (as I took an early Humility, that's 11 level-ups).
I mean, Rogue rocks in VGT because you consistently need one fewer hit (and the late tower monsters hit like a tank), Rat needs at least one *more* hit per monster, even with 20+ corrosion stacks. Interestingly though, I think that once you get to H., the Rat should be able to prevail, it's just those pesky Tower 7+ monsters that look killer, especially in light of the low amount of blackspace...
