Taurog
| Taurog | |
|---|---|
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| Initial worship |
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| Punishment |
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| Prep penalty |
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| Likes | |
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Kill an enemy: +4 Kill a Convert a glyph: +10 | |
| Dislikes | |
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Use a glyph: -2 Convert Taurog's Equipment: Instant punishment. | |
| Boons | |
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Taurog is a deity of warfare, battle, and savagery. He relishes combat and detests weak and spineless spellcasters. Taurog is one of the most generous deities in the game when it comes to piety, giving huge amounts of it to followers and barely punishing them at all for infractions. His simplicity and easy-going nature makes Taurog a favorite deity of beginner players or those looking to abuse Pactmaker.
Taurog's boons come with a trade-off, however; as items they occupy an inventory slot and reduce your maximum mana by 1. Although there are ways to deal with the loss of mana, the inventory space requirement is quite problematic as Taurog will punish you for destroying one of the items, even if you convert to another god beforehand.
Taurog is obtained in a sub-dungeon in the west. Inside a massive arena is Taurog's altar. Stepping on the altar will summon four guardians which you must battle to prove your worth to Taurog. Ironically, you are not prohibited from using spellcasting against these guardians, and in practice it's difficult to defeat them without casting spells due to the fact that they gain death protection. Taurog's subdungeon is by far the largest unexplored subdungeon in the game, but does not become unexplored until you step on the altar to trigger it.
Contents
Basic Strategy
Taurog's boons vary greatly in value depending on your class and how many preparations you used. As you progress further into Desktop Dungeons, you will unlock more powerful items to purchase from shops, more preparations that use inventory space, and encounter more dangerous dungeons... which will frequently contain gold rewards with which to purchase those powerful items you've unlocked! Taurog's items don't compare favourably to many of these items, and as a result filling your inventory with his gear will limit your ability to use these very powerful items. This can frequently be offset by spending gold on other things, such as potions or Tikki-Tooki piety, but sometimes it will just make you weaker in the long-run. For new players and Purist runs, however, this often isn't a big deal and Taurog works well for most combat-oriented classes and even the occasional magic-oriented class. You can also free up item space by preparing a 
Compression Seal: if necessary, this can be used on one of Taurog's items (Taurog doesn't mind if you make his items small).
The simplest and most common way to use Taurog is to gain piety with him to fuel a pact with 
The Pactmaker, or else convert to another deity to spend it. Very few deities can produce as much piety as effortlessly as Taurog does, enabling you to fuel some of the Pactmaker's most expensive boons. This will also allow you to completely sidestep Taurog's drawbacks, and your maximum MP and inventory space will be unaffected.
Suggested Classes
The best classes for Taurog are the 
Berserker, 
Monk, 
Paladin, 
Gorgon, and (perhaps surprisingly) the 
Sorcerer. The first four classes are strong simply because they can take the 
Gloat ( Berserker) or 
Wereward ( Monk, Paladin, Gorgon) to stack resists. In contrast, Taurog works well with the Sorcerer, due to the class's casting abilities being biased towards melee combat and having the extra mana to afford his boons.
Advanced Strategy
Get In and Get Out
Taurog works best as an early game deity, due to 
Skullpicker. At LV1/2, it's an absolutely massive boost to your attack power and can get you quite a lot of bonus experience. And since you won't have found many glyphs yet, you'll still have a lot of them available for conversion (+10 
) and not that many in your inventory for the penalty for using them (-2 ).
To take advantage of this, you can grab an early 
Taurog's Blade off of one kill, one glyph conversion, and six "sparkles". Then you slowly work your way up towards 75 , grab the more appropriate resist item while leveling for your dungeon, and convert out.
Excellent choices to convert to are 
Mystera Annur or 
Jehora Jeheyu to replace your lost mana or 
Dracul to stack resists with 
Blood Shield and take advantage of the blood pools you've created. 
Tikki Tooki and 
The Earthmother can also be strong choices to convert to due to their ability to get large amounts of late game piety, but they don't have the same synergy with Taurog's boons. 
Glowing Guardian and 
Binlor Ironshield are not recommended, as like Taurog they are better in the early game.
Body Pact from The Pactmaker is an amazing boon that provides +1% to both resists when a monster hits you for the first time. Since each trigger of Body Pact costs 4 and each monster kill with Taurog provides 4 , this matches up perfectly. If you use any extra piety (from converting glyphs or killing monsters with magical attack) to buy one or both of Taurog's resist items, you can easily get up to 50% resists. Throw in a 
Dragon Shield, 
Tower Shield, or 
Elven Boots, and you can easily hit the resist cap.
Resist Stacking
Dracul, Binlor Ironshield, and Glowing Guardian all have boons that boost your resists. And all have them have some nasty piety penalties for common actions like drinking potions or gaining a level. One Taurog strategy is to use him as a way to escape those restrictive deities while cranking your resists even higher. And then once you grab the appropriate resist boon(s), converting out to a third deity to get even more boons. n fact, if the deity you left was Dracul, you may even want to convert back once your drink all your potions!
This strategy is quite useful in 
Naga City, if you have the piety to spare in the arena, since you're guaranteed a Taurog altar and source of piety to convert in and out.
Converting Gears
Taurog's punishment is very harsh for melee characters or spellcasters without ability to erode magic resist. But converting his gear is not actually very critical. If you are playing human and are able to hit the conversion threshold with 60 CP, the punishment and race bonus exactly cancles out so you can freely convert one of his gears to empty up your inventory space, given mere magic resists are not important. Halfling can endure -10% bonus attack and make one health potion, and this potion can save your run in edge cases. Best target item is Gloat or 
Will depending on the boss' attack type. -10% bonus damage is not very harsh anyway, because you already got +5% damage bonus from purchasing his boon anyway. Generally -1 max mana is more serious problem here.
Unstoppable Fury
Taurog has one of the most incredibly powerful boons at his disposal: Unstoppable Fury. This allows you to chain multiple death protections at the end of a boss fight. Against high-damage bosses, this can be extremely powerful, if you can handle the requirement of having all of Taurog's items. This is a high opportunity cost for most characters, and keeps this boon from being used too often. But it's something to keep in mind if you're stuck and have access to a lot of piety. It's generally a bad idea to commit to this approach until you've unveiled any randomly generated boss; encountering something with high physical resistances after having crippled your magical abilities can be disastrous.
Preparation Penalty and Monster Behavior
Taurog's preparation penalty is giving all monsters in the main dungeon level 
cowardly trait. This makes a fight versus a monster at the edge of the sight harder, and may lead to waste of blackspace. Preparing 
Bear Mace is one way to counter the penalty. However, it's more like the preparation penalty is shadowed by the item's drawback and not completely gone. It may be useful to know what direction the monster will run away at some positions. This may not be very important knowledge, but it can save some blackspace.
The diagrams below shows the direction a monster runs. The yellow spaces indicates the player character and the grey spaces walls.
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