Monk still ridiculous + a guide to playing this game

[Lujo]

True that. I do need him for Namtar I think. Would be awesome to be able to do him with only two gods though.

[The Avatar]

Namtar's quite easy as a monk if you were to unlock JJ. Just use Chaos Avatar after his second (corrosion/weakening) form.

[gjaustin]

Argh! Where are you Orc!

[gjaustin]

[Sidestepper]

Lujo, could you talk more about how you are using your deities? I've always thought GG to be the ideal starting god, and Tikki Tokki to be the ideal finishing god.

In the beginning, you want to:
1) Always fight monsters higher level than you
--Corollary: Never fight equal or lower leveled monsters. This wastes xp
2) Avoid using potions

In the end, you want to:
1) Get mid-fight level-ups by eating popcorn monsters (ideally, the only kind of monster left other than the boss(es)
2) Have unrestricted access to your potions

GG rewards the first set of behaviors and severely punishes the second. TT greatly rewards the second set and mildly punishes the first. The most straightforward approach seems to be:

1) Get GG at 1st level
2) Reach level 2 by smacking 2nd level monsters if at all possible
3) Use absolution to gain insane HP at minimal loss of potential xp
4) Use humility
5) Start working on high level monsters (Between Humility and Absolution, 5th level monsters are feasible targets for your 'first' level hero).
6) Convert glyphs and equipment as appropriate during 1-5
7) Convert to TT when you hit 50 piety
7a) Alternatively, wait to convert until there no remaining higher level monsters on the map. This gives you more piety at the expense of delaying TT's boons.
8) Use Tikki's edge to to make the remaining popcorn more 'nutritious'
9) Whatever, you should have tons of resources and piety now

Is this more or less what you are doing? TT can also be entered early if you are willing to spend gold. What situations make you start with TT?

You probably already know this, but some gods only become available after a certain other god has been unlocked first. This restricts what combinations are possible. I found this out the hard way when trying to create a GG, Dracul (w/Blood Power), Binlor triad for massive conversion antics. The prereqs are:

Dracul needs Glowing Guardian
JJ needs Mystera
Earthmother needs TT
Binlor needs Taurog

[Lujo]

Funny thing is - I'm not all that pro with gods, especially GG. I'll say what I do, but it might easily turn out that my routine is suboptimal I only "discovered" that GG can be quite a piety farm a coue of days ago, I've been purposfully avoiding him as "that guy that always screwed me over" up till then

What I do one the "only GG and TT" rofile is:

1) Find GG, join him, and convert conversion stone (if I have it).
2) Level up on lvl 2 monsters, which is easiy after a conversion or 2. Before the lvl up, i make sure to get posioned/mana burned if possible.
3) If I can kill a lvl 4 monster, I go to step 4, if not, i kill a lvl 3 monster to get myself to lvl up off another lvl 3 monster.
4) When I'm lvl 2 I get a lvl 3/4 monster ready to drop, refferably from a physical hit, take humillity, get myself poisoned and manaburned if my HP would still allow me to get the killing hit on a lvl 4, then kill the lvl 4.
5) Keep killing higher lvl enemies, and getting poisoned/manaburned before every lvl up, and if possible, I get posioned mulitple times just before lvl up if I can manage to do it with helpmeh, untill I get absolution or decide I can't and join TT. This has 2 apporaches, using xp catapults where aproriate:
5.1) The one where you kill 1-2 lvl higher enemies to squeeze a little piety and a lot of XP. That's to avoid making them untouchable once I lvl up, and get myself xp un dungeons with lots of debuff enemies. I sometimes even kill equal lvl enemies, esecially in vicious dungeons, and i ofeten kill lover lvl undead.
5.2) Just kill monsters as high lvl as possible.
6) After I got enlightment, I try to figure out a way to to switch. It ussually invoves milking the map for any GG piety. I'll even convert potions if necessary. And If I'm sure I won't need the glyph/item (and it's hard to be really sure for some of them), I do the conversions while rushing englihtment, as they help me with lvling. I buy out stuff to convert at this point, not worrying about money. If it takes converting gloves of midas before you eat up popcorn, I do it.
7) Swap to TT.

Now, sometimes I get stuck without a way to kee the GG routine going, and swap to TT earlier to eat up popcorn, then swap back out, ussually with dodge and Tiki's Edge. I'll swap with to GG with poison only if I'll be only fighting undead untill the end. With lots of gold available you can jump between the gods, but this often means not getting Enlightenment.

For TT:

If I'm joining him early:

First Approach: Join him, buy Tiki's Edge with gold, kill a lvl 2, keep going from there.

Second Approach: Get to lvl 2, join him, have more ease in wether you need Tiki's edge.

Third approach: Join him at 50 piety with GG, or when you run out into a dead end with GG.

Otherwise, you do what I just said. Sometimes you can skip poison, but if possible, do take it for the gold, and random piety benefits. I'd only skip it if there is nothing left to poison (only undead left).

1) I sometimes avoid Tiki's Edge, but getting Poison and Dodge increses your piety gain, and decreeses your piety loss.
2) You kill popcorn, obbviously You can kill lower lvl fat stuff without piety loss if you can kill it in 2 hits with first strike on the last hit. You can allow yourself to get hit ONCE.
3) I ussually don't bother with using popcorn for XP catapults (and I should, I'm just sloppy around this time, it's a psych thing after being so carefull with GG).
4) With poison and dodge, and a good supply of piety, you can afford to lose some on being hit here and there. A doged poison hit give you 4 piety, getting hit ussualy only costy you 1 piety. Make sure you never go low with tribute, and if you get lucky you can actually stay level forever, or bleed piety so slowly that it doesn't matter.
5) If it's possible, especially against bosses that lower resists, I try to use his potion boon, at least once. It ussualy translates to getting 2 "free" hits in, so doing it early in the fight, esecially aganst debuff bosses, is what I do.
6) Sometimes, say against an undead boss, I sink all my gold into TT, and convert to GG after I've used all my potions, or all but 2 of my potions. The reason is that I can squeeze one healing from GG (15/25 depends) and one cleansing (5 if I haven't used one, 10 if I have), and still have 20 piety to be able to use my potions. If I have no potions, and i got to 100 piety with TT, i can get 2 heals of GG, but the boss has to be undead (because of the -10 using poison penalty).

That's about it, if anyone has any more tips, Id really love to hear them. Also, I'll try getting Absolution into my routine, as I don't ever use it (I save my popcorn for TT, maybe I could afford to "waste" the lvl 1 ones).

[Lujo]

Namtar went down. It was HARD! Seriously, i'm using only cheeze here, and Namtar was hard. It took me aroung 3-4 tries, and I had no halpmeh, I even used absolution this time, and it still took all my resources. This level needs looking at. It would've been significantly easier if I had the Pactmaker, but thats like saying fishing is easier with a stick of dynamite. And poison ward saved my ass this time (no halmeh, and no soul orb).

Orc Monk, preps: Conversions S&S, subdungeon, scout altars, HP to ATT, 50 gold, DMG badge, Shop scroll.

I managed to save lemisi for the boss, endiswall and pissedorff for the resist lowering form, and it saved my ass. Converting from GG to TT post enlightment, after missing out on those 15 piety (+5 from absolution) was a major pain. I even used endiswall to make holes for future regen while exploring (and you have to explore to find the correct enemies to kill for GG). Gratifying, but unreasonably difficult dungeon, or rather, as oposed to the rest of the game, a dungeon where I could actualy find some use for say 12% of game content, as opposed to the regular 5%. In other words, it's not on the same power curve as the rest of the game, even the vicious stuff.

Oh, and for anyone interested how I was able to convert out, well, the comversion stone orc, later in the game, can convert the fine sword and end up with more dmg than he had, bizzarely. I also converted burndayraz, as well as 2-3 potions. If it wasn't for the gold subdungeon, though, i'd be screwed. Oh, and I converted the tower shield. I eneded up wtih nothing but endiswall, pissedorff, +10% DMG badge, and 1 HP and 2 Mana potions before going down.

The west, the north, and the east are mostly cleaned out, except for:

- Magma mines (had no incentive for going in there)
- Slime pits (ditto)
- Berserker camp (ditto)

and, the next target:

-vicious halls of steel (need to unlock it first)

apart from that, i haven't done any Spike trouble, Grimm's Grotto or Doubledoom (I didn't even unlock it), runs. As for Naga City and Gaan'Telet, I'm leaving them for last.

[Sidestepper]

I decided to test the effects of unlocking the witch's hut on shop composition. I already have a 'Cheeselord' kingdom with minimal unlocks and a fully functional witch's hut, as well as a new profile with similar unlocks but no witch's hut. The two kingdoms have a few other differences (the non-witch kingdom has a lower level bazaar, so one less shop and no elites), so this isn't a strictly scientific comparison, but it should be good enough.

In both kingdoms, I made quick runs against Venture Cave and wrote down how many potions I found in stores. I noticed in both kingdoms that the number of shops randomly fluctuated, sometimes giving me one extra shop than I should have had. Don't know what that's all about.. Here are the data for the 'non-witch' kingdom:
2/5
1/6
1/6
1/6
1/5
2/5
0/5
1/5
0/6
1/6
1/5
2/5
1/6
0/5

That looks vaguely like a shallow gaussian spanning 0-2 and centered on 1.

For the 'Witchy' kingdom, I also noted what those potions were, and I also counted the number of elite items:
1/6 (fort, Ex1)
1/7 (mana, Ex2)
4/7 (schadenfreude, burn salve, mana, health, no E)
2/7 (mana, health, no E)
1/7 (mana, Ex2)
2/7 (Strength, mana, Ex1)
4/7 (schadenfreude, fort, health, mana, Ex1)

Probably need a little more data to draw conclusions from this, but the witch's hut seems to roughly increase the potion count by 1-2. I had been hoping to discover that the witch potions only compete with the normal potion slots, but that is not the case. Results like the 4/7 cases clearly show that witch potions can displace non-potion slots as well.

Elite items occupy 0-2 slots. There's not enough data to talk about the distribution.

I'm up in the air about whether unlocking the witch hut is worth it. You lose 1-2 shop slots, but gain 3 potion prep slots, and sometimes you get a buyable potion in the store (schadenfreude is a welcome alternative to a mana potion). If you're going for raw consistency, it's a hard call.

I think that the final upgrade of the Bazaar is definitely worth it. Yeah, you get random elites polluting your pool, but you also get an extra shop slot which usually offsets the loss (and sometimes even comes out as a net gain), and most of the elites are pretty good, anyway.

EDIT: It's worth noting that the 'witchy' kingdom had an extra shop slot, but we don't know if that extra slot is normally 'potion available,' so the impact of the witch's hut may be less than it appears. I'd have to make another profile to really be sure.

[The Avatar]

Hmm... I suppose that's true... And whupaz is a huge help against all bosses.

[Lujo]

Wow, love the analysis!

Now, if potions had decent conversion rates (well the two useless ones) I'd have no problems having them in the shops, but I've been aware of the fact (intuitively and by expirience) that they take up the space of regular items. And the dev's can't give them decent conversion rates, because if the conversion is below 65-75 we would still be better off without them, and if it's higher, everybody would be preparing them as a sheap alternative to conversion stone, which is broken even if it ups the cost of every run by a 100.

As for the elites, well, if their spawn rate is so low, and they give an extra shop, i have to say I am tempted, but again, theyre competing with stuff like troll heart and blood sigil, and surreal as this may seem, they don't cut it. For the simple reason that 65-75 conversion points items for no more than 15 gold, on an orc especially, give me piety, temporary benefits while they're in my inventory and a permanent base dmg bonus on top of a free slot once theyre out.

Without Bloodmage, Warlord and the Tri-Sword, and with no other possible potions but health and mana poitions spawning in shops, kegs aren't all the usefull, as I spend most of my game in GG, with poison always there I don't need Orb of Zot, I could get mileage out of the guitar, but it's conversion rate is horrible, etc. etc. And whatever I can buy chea and convert after a Conversion stone keeps giving me increesing benefits in the one stat the the game is sorely stingy about and that's base damage.

Still, i'll probably give it a sht at some point, as i need the quest items prep for Naga City and Gaan'Telet (or is Gaan'Telet a purist run only?).

Oh, and I have one more very important question - if the pactmaker doesn't show up, and I suspect he won't, I have to choose a third god from Mysteria, Dracul, Earthmother and Taurog. Anyone have any thoughts?

Oh, and, what quest unlocks heroe's helm, and what are it's actual stats? Conversion most impportant.