Rat Monarch

[Tinker]

[sitnaltax]

I started attempts on this today.

One thing I noticed is that if I prep:

* 4 potions
* the Bear Mace
* the Translocation Seal
* the Draining Blade

the Bear Mace always starts on the ground (inaccessible until way too late), rather than the Translocation Seal. I tried picking my preps in a different order, but always got this result. Did you do anything special to get the Seal to start on the ground?

(My temporary workaround is to only take 3 potions; the 10 CP is not a big deal, but having a slot tied up a little longer than I would like is inconvenient.)

[Tinker]

[CoolBoy]

Amazing work Tinker. Here I am, trying to figure out how to win vanilla gaan-telet with the Rat Monarch, and you go ahead and take on the impossible. No doubt I'll refer to your strategies after several dozen hours of failure attempts on my own.

[Tinker]

[dislekcia]

[Tinker]

So in my new kingdom I deliberately toyed around with the building unlock order just to see how things pan out. I unlocked buildings in this order: 1. Guild (given, I had no choice); 2. Church, 3. Mage Tower, 4. Thief Den, 5. Bezaar; 6. Blacksmith; 7. Alchemist; 8. Witch.

Now, unlocking the Witch last doesn't seem to do anything. Potions still get added to the inventory first, probably because you have an Adventuring Kit even without the Witch, she just changes the number and type of potions you can have available.

You have to upgrade the Guild during the Tutorials, so again there's not much to do there.

The new order of items added to inventory for me is:
1. Potions
2. Guild locker prep
3. Alchemist scroll
4. Blacksmith prep
5. Fireball:Magnet
6. Shop Scroll
7. I assume Patches will be here...

So the only thing I could achieve versus the old kingdom is to somehow place Alchemist prep ahead of Blacksmith prep. Which is a bummer.

[Tinker]

Re-ratted VGT in my new kingdom. Not much to marvel at, I pretty much used the same process as in the old one:



I tried to do things differently this time, so I had a couple of alternate approaches tested a bit more than last time. Especially the GG+Yendor approach showed a lot of merit, made the early game much easier, and by the time things started to get rough, GG's piety gain picked up. Honestly, if GG wouldn't be so squeamish about Lifesteal, he'd make an awesome VGT Rat deity. Alas, it wasn't meant to be.

I did take Mystera for a couple of spins as well, but ran into a similar difficulty as with JJ before: her piety gain drops during the towers phase. Not so sharply as JJ's, so I could more or less break even with her, but I couldn't get the piety needed to join Dracul without desecrations... Which kind of made things harder than they should be.

So I went back to the tried & true Binlor+Draining Blade build and it worked like a charm, won on my 2nd try (not counting scumming runs).

I tried to "rig" the game in my favor in this new kingdom by paying close attention to what I unlock and in which order:
1) I tried to change building unlock order to somehow move potions down the initial inventory priority (I would have loved them to start lying on the ground next to me, for example... ). This kind of backfired, because the potions don't budge no matter what you do, but somehow my Alchemist prep moved up to be higher priority than my Blacksmith prep, so going in with full preps meant my Bear Mace got spirited away (instead of the scroll like in my old kingdom). Though not to worry, I simply did what Sitnaltax did, and left out one of the basic potions, they are anyway only conversion fodder that early on.
2) I tried to improve chances of good glyphs showing up (HALPMEH, WEYTWUT, etc.). So I only unlocked those Tier 3 classes that were absolutely necessary... Which meant, I unlocked Paladin (HALPMEH is very important), and I unlocked Bloodmage (BLUDTUPOWA is useless for this run, but I needed to go to the Demonic Library to unlock the Rat ).
3) I tried to improve the odds of good items showing up by selectively unlocking only the best quest items (as in, best for this run; normally, most of these items are in my veto slots... ). So I unlocked exactly four quest items: Vampiric Blade, Platemail, Soul Orb, and Stone Sigil. I figured that getting at least two of these is generally a good omen for this run. I got Platemail and Vampiric Blade this time, which was awesome; I also had Soul Orb in store, but put off buying it until I needed it, and well I never needed it (I only had to use a single Mana Potion to clear Mana Burn during the whole run, I could clear all other Mana Burns with level-ups). Come to think of it, it would've been a Parched run otherwise, because I left all other potions on the ground...

I had some hilarious moments, Tower 6 was fully revealed JJ with *every single monster in a corner* (and I didn't have WEYTWUT in this run). That was the tipping point, it made me join Dracul instantly, who was luckily just in the previous tower...

I must say that the amount of fun I had with this run confirmed to me that Rat Monarch on VGT is one of my favourite badges of all time (the only thing over-shadowing my joy is the need to scum for Pactmaker).

EDIT: I didn't make an in-game screenshot, but just noticed how H had 437 stacks on him. Looking back at my previous screenshot, I see that H had 437 stacks also in that one... Seems like a magic number...

Anyway, hope to see other folks Rat VGT soon!

[~'(^ + ^)'~]

[William]

@Tinker I like that the draining blade is obtained from the Tinker silver class challenge. Very appropriate.