Rat Monarch

[Blovski]

Ohhhh Mage Plate. I never have that lockered these days. Would certainly work with that.

[MTaur]

The more I play Rat Monarch, the more I rely on billiards to do any dungeon with more than one boss. It involves using knockback mechanics that aren't intuitive and that 95% of the players don't know about. Getting around phyiscal resistances using a cue ball is one thing, but being able to PISORF Super Meat Man into Frank or Bleaty is a whole other class of exploit.

[Blovski]

Much as Binlor + billiards is the easier, generally safe (that said, you get unfortunate corner bosses, you're in trouble) route once you know about it I've had reasonable success on non-vicious two boss dungeons without it (using JJ and EM, mostly).

[Tinker]

You only need PISORF to pull stunts like L1 no-CYDSTEPP bosskill or similar. If you just want to win a map, fireball's ample. Post 2 on page 3 of this very topic shows my Naga City clear with the Rat, no PISORF, straight-up Mystera. I would advise against relying too strongly on a single tactic, because it can limit your thinking and should you face a map or challenge where the tactic is not applicable, you'll have considerably more difficulty than someone who is more flexible in approach.

[MTaur]

It's just that I struggled with fireballs so much, and then the PISORF exploit was insta-win. I hardly ever do PISORF billiards with anyone else because it interferes with regen fighting too much, but that's not the case at all with the rat. It's really hard making myself go back to the hard way now...

[Lynzkar]

THERE IS NO NEED TO POST THINGS HERE, THE RAT IS THE KING, THAT IS ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW. IT'S GOOD TO BE THE KING!

[MTaur]

To some extent, I cleaned up the mess I made on the wiki for this class. It's still a mess, but half as much of a mess now. I'm no expert at the class, but I kept most of what other people said and included only new things I was fairly sure of.

[Blovski]

Nice job -

Main notes I have on the article as is are that base damage increases (e.g. Skullpicker) and damage decreases (e.g. Flames) do actually make a lot of difference to your ability to use popcorn if you've not had the opportunity to corrode them all up early game for whatever reason.

Matters of debate:
Tikki's fantastic for rats assuming you manage to get yourself set up right for him (loads of sufficiently corroded popcorn lying around) as you're using your first god. I accept it's pretty niche, though.

[Tinker]

[MTaur]

Ok, the Health Booster probably deserves a mention. (Fewer Glyphs would be nice too, but the stat penalty might be too harsh to go for it)

I've had pretty decent luck with HALPMEH when it drops - building Corrosion stacks more often is nice. I think I wasn't super-optimistic about most of the others. Maybe I would go so far as to say that many of them are only worth it if you haven't found the others yet. APHEELSIK probably deserves a demotion from what I said earlier, but it does alright when you have WHURRGARBL and you're fighting a Meat Man or similar, but eventually you do switch to fireballs at the end.

I did talk about shop timing being important here and there, but I didn't exactly highlight it as its own main point.

I think I'm leaving the page alone for now. It could use some of these changes, but it would take a while to organize and write up. (Can't believe I forgot about Mage Plate, the one time the penalty literally doesn't matter...)