Brawling

One would think that it is much more efficient to only fight one monster at a time, devoting all your mana and health bars to the fight. But Desktop Dungeons is a dark an murky place. Simalar to messy bar brawl, it would often be way more efficient to fight multiple monsters at once, hurling them to each to other. In a word : brawling.

There are different motivations for brawling :

• Effect triggering : Using weak monster to earn a bonus for a more difficult fight
• Ressource efficiency : Hurling monsters at each other and other technics might be more efficent in terms of damages per ressource used
• Monster softening : Patiently erode or stack devuffs on a tough monster while exploring the dungeon and wreaking avoc on easier monsters.

Effect triggering

• Popcorn : The most obvious and frequent one ! You fight a tough monster, and munch popcorn for xp (mid fight level-up) and other bonuses
• Bloodcow, for lifestealers.
• Activating effects and buffs : For exemple, attacking a somewhat high damage foe to go below 50% health with a Warlord, to get the damage boost against a 1HKOing target. Or activate Schadenfreude, hurl a monster at wall to get might from Binlor...
• Piety farming : Hitting low damage high health targets with Gettindare/Bysseps to farm JJ piety, or knocking monsters into walls under Binlor. It usually could have been done before the fight, but can still be executed during a fight if you did not prepare correctly without too much detrimental effects

Ressource efficiency

• Spare mana and health use before a level up : next blow will kill the monster you are fighting, but you still have enough mana or health to soften your next target. It can also be used when fighting a monster with high physical resistance, and another with high magic resistance to make the best use of the level up.
• Burning effect triggering : The burning effect will kill or remove a death protection from a monster, but you don't have enough health to survive a blow. Killing some popcorn or low damages monster will helping finishing the job
• Dodge prediction : Attack a lower level monster if you have dodge prediction to get the dodge on a higher level monster. (though, it will use the dodge prediction...)

Monster softening

• Knockback, Pissorf, selfcanon (!)... : You can use a low damages monster to soften a bit a tougher one, or prepare next fight (it works only if you have some health/mana left once you have finished with the first monster.
• Resistance and death protection stripping or debuff stacking : You start hitting a tough monster once in a while, to stack corrosion, erode its resistance or remove its death protection. You don't really mind if it fully heals between 2 hits, as the main purpose is the debuff stacking or DP/resistance stripping. It is usefull when you have some spare health before a level up, or when you need to refill mana.

Monster softening is a kind of battle of attrition