Rat Monarch

[Tinker]

I just played some games with the Rat Monarch. I kept in my mind dislekcia's comments about the class not being final and all. I will give a bit of thought but I would rather have more experienced players share their perspectives. Abilities are shows as they are fresh off the forge (3/23 test build).

BREEDING: Rats are nothing but not prolific. Each full experience bar becomes a new rat subject.
LOYALTY: Self-sacraficing rat subjects will hurl themselves in the way of danger. Lose a level and regenerate if you die with at least 1 rat subject.
AUSTERITY: All items are large, from a rat's perspective.
Rat Monarch gains 1 Level for every 40+15 conversion points.

My opinion:
1. The juxtaposition (XP does something else and Conversion level you up) is intriguing, although I'm still trying to wrap my mind fully around this. I guess, XP management is so engrained in my thinking after hundreds of DD runs that it's hard to even think about it right! It's new and fresh and out-of-the-box, though I don't fully get what's the benefit (other than, challenging the players' thinking).
2. I absolutely love the Austerity drawback! I mean, assuming that the class will be balanced in the end to make up for this hindrance. I really like how your "standard issue" potion kit suddenly takes up 2/3 of your inventory! Now that is a change in thinking (and challenge) that I find easy to wrap my mind around.
3. Something has been bugging me about the class. It's that emotionally I find the idea of: i) very limited leveling potential; and ii) permanent, irrevocable level penalty; a bit disappointing. I don't want to say that it's weak (I haven't done nearly enough testing to say anything like that), it's just that it doesn't feel very rewarding as a player to scrape everything together, to buy a level-up, and then lose it back (basically irrevocably) once the regeneration is triggered.

Thought Experiment
I don't intend to go anywhere with this. Just to create a mental anchor that serves to "bridge" what the Rat Monarch does, in a different, hypothetical class that is easier to understand for me, i.e. without the juxtaposition.
- level normally
- gain 1 Rat Subject for every 40+15 conversion points
- regenerate fully (and lose 1 level and 1 rat subject) if you have at least 1 rat subject and would die; reset XP bar to proportionally where you were in your bar, and reduce XP requirements to the requirements of your new (lower) level
- and of course AUSTERITY!!! (I love this )

Anyway. Thoughts? Experiences? Please share!

[Tinker]

[Darvin]

[Astral]

So far I really dislike the class. It feels unbalanced and too luck reliant if you play it 'normally', or cheezy and game-breaking if you try it with corrosion and base damage stacking.

My favorite part of it is AUSTERITY as well, for the same reasons you listed Tinker. If the class got a complete overhaul, I hope this is the part that stays unchanged.

Let's start with the biggest problem. This class is completely reliant on CP, because you can only level up by converting. Due to the fact that CP is spent most efficiently when you're at the highest level, it also means that the maximum CP you can gather also limits the maximum damage output you can achieve. There's no room for creativity, trying to trigger more rats at lower levels will give you less damage overall.
Big problem is that the CP you can get is an outside factor decided solely by RNG. It depends on your shop luck and sub luck, you can also influence it with preps, but once you're in the dungeon you have no control over it. You can only decrease it by faulty decisions, there's no way to increase it. It's completely different to other classes, who can influence their leveling by strategy and also decide whether they want to have lots of refills or a high level during the bossfight.
The rat lacks such an adaptability.

The thing that you spend CP the best by refilling at the highest level possible leads to more problems. Playing this way means you will use very little amount of rats, so few, that you can get that much by exploiting low level juicy kills. Even something as silly as walking around on an entangled map and bricking all your foes is viable too. I dislike it, makes the game very non-interactive.
To reach level 10 you would need 900CP. If you want to benefit out of you mana refills you also have to keep a glyph, most likely Bundayraz which bumps the CP cost by 100. You also need your potions, can't rely on those as CP fodder.
And this is for a guy with empty inventory, without any cool item or glyph interactions.
This reliance to convert heavily to reach high levels hurts the rat's compatibility with MA.

Have you fought about what happens when you face SMM? That boss is dealt the easiest by regenfighting, which depends primarily on your level. So if you get SMM on a dungeon where none of your subs give gold or CP, your shops have bad CP fodder too, then you are in great trouble.
On the bright side you can win without a brain cell against Bleaty.

In general if you have little CP that limits the highest level you can reach - so your regenfighting capabilities - and the total amount of refills you can get, your health spiking and spellcasting power as well.
This means you will have runs where you had enough CP to auto-win without strategy and also have others where you tried everything but it just wasn't enough because the lack of CP limited you.

I haven't mentioned how dull the rats are at using glyphs. If you don't reach high enough levels, obviously Apheelsik remains useless. Halpme only helps while you still have enough health to avoid getting oneshot, below that it's useless. Gettindare will only be relevant near your last hits when you're underleveled and it doesn't make a difference.
Cyddstep is pointless if you don't have high enough damage to make it more mana efficient than Burndayraz.
Endiswall is only useful if it makes you soak 1 more hit during the bossfigth, that will be a very limited time period.
Pisorf works and Burndayraz too, but keeping both costs a lot of CP.

And all in all I think Rats are trying to fill an unneeded niche. They convert to get levels (something that's similar to what Goblins do), they get no refills on levelups but CP can be turned into refills (like in the case of Goats).
Goblins are a race who can be combined with classes and they don't have crippling drawabacks.
Goats can level unhindered and have very fun, strategic and unique god play.

For an analogue I could say we have Goblins who convert for xp and big enough xp chunks give them a full refill.
Goats are the 'superior goblins' who can stack all their refills and use them up at lvl 10 on top of being able to create CP out of kills and needing less CP for the refills.
Now we have the 'terrible goblins' as Rats, who can only level by converting and can only get refills on level downs, getting weaker and weaker each time.

[Tinker]

[Astral]

I'm sure it will be great once finalized too.

Overly simplified, the biggest issues are that CP is too limiting and can't be controlled. Rats are incredibly easy to stack up and are useless beyond a few which also defeats the point of engaging into fights with monsters. The CP problems eliminate your item/glyph combo potentials.

So to solve most of this I though why not make rat subjects into items that show up in your inventory, with CP value as well. If you need CP for levels you just kill more stuff and covert the rats.

To reduce the impact of shop luck the CP bar should be increased and the rats should give relatively high CP too. Something like 60 (+20) CP bar and rats giving 30 CP each.

A rat item would be like:

Rat Subject
Your highness, please don't eat me!
0g 30CP

Unfortunately if Rat Monarchs followed this road, they would be just like an alternative Goat without the unique god play.

[Darvin]

[Tinker]

Take 1 on Naga City bled out at boss #8.



What I did:
- I decided to go for a caster approach, just because I'm quite comfortable doing that!
- I geared all my preps and approach towards maximizing CP, and as an intemediary step, maximizing Gold.
- I prepped Transmutation Seal and Namtar's Ward to get both gold and CP.
- I picked TT as my deity. Not because of the Learning XP bonus (which is not very impactful), but to farm Piety and gain gold from his boons.
- The whole gold/cp farming angle paid out quite well. I bought every item topside, and killed all monsters L5 and below. I ascended with Learning 2 and 100 Piety, plus kept two cool caster items (Mage Plate and Mana Pendant).
- I switched to Mystera after I could afford her altar, to get Mystic Balance and a few shots of Magic / Weakening when needed. I planned to stay in her primarily, keeping an eye out for JJ/Earthmother.
- I killed first five bosses by using up my potions (1x whuppaz, 2x schadenfreude, 4+3x mana), which combined with my mana pool of 25 and fireball cost of 5 meant decent amount of firepower. I almost killed Frank as well but I had to take a death to kill him.
- Out of resources, I took another death to kill boss #7 (Jörgmundr). I had no way to tackle SMM without starting to trigger rats massively. I didn't have a lot because I didn't intend to use them, however after getting down to L6 or so I felt my attacks become less and less impactful anyway. Probably I could've killed SMM by having more rats, but I couldn't have tackled TIM or Kinissch in my weakened form.
- Having gotten so far on my first try, I do think that with a bit of tweaking, and getting wiser about the sweet spots, Naga City should be doable. If NC is doable, probably the other Vicious dungeons should also be doable (except probably VGT). EDIT: To be honest though, it did feel like playing a challenge class like the Goatperson, maybe even tougher. Because of Austerity there is no easy way to bring impactful amount of CP fodder into the arena, basically it's impossible to do what I did with the Goat (i.e. go down with Mystera fully beefed up and 4-5 glyphs to pop as needed).

Score screen to see all the Level ups & downs:

[Lujo]

The problem with it is that it's the same thing as the Goat, when you get down to it. Please don't respond with "Goat is more powerful, you can X and Y", that doesn't matter, they're way too similar. Most of what the Goat "can do" goes above and beyond what you actually need to do anywhere, indiscriminate killing and and CP based restores - if you tweak the Rat's abilities so the resident powergamer math guys stop making faces, you'd just get a goat clone.

Also, it doesn't have to match Goblin Assassin for power, nothing needs to. An average GG or JJ Goblin isn't even all that different than the Assassin, there are very few places where the difference between a goblin with the right preps and in the right god and the Assassin is even truly noticable.

[Darvin]