Crawl Cosplay Academy

Listen to the advice of Cheibriados and take your time with this one. As a barachi you will start with slow movement speed, and then as you gain piety this will only get worse. Each time you take a step, every enemy on screen will be taking multiple actions. Making one wrong move in the middle of combat can cause you to immediately die, this is not a forgiving challenge.

To compensate for this, Barachi have exceptional aptitudes and cheibriados will increase all of your attributes to extremely high values. This will allow you to basically do it all: wear heavy armor, cast powerful spells, wield deadly weaponry, and maintain high evasion. You just need to stand still most of the time. Also keep in mind that Hop is not a slow action, use it to reposition during combat instead of walking.

Which is where your summons come in. While you are rooted in place you can play the role of battlefield commander. You should look to have all of your available summons in play as much as possible. To start, you can have two mammals, followed by a single imp, and then a single canine familiar. While the summons march into the fray, you can stand behind them and make reach attacks with your polearm. Do note that half of your attacks will fail when reaching over an ally, but this is still very worthwhile.

Later on you will learn two key spells. The first of these, Eringya's Surprising Crocodile, is very simple with a consistent payoff. You will spawn a moderately strong crocodile summon, but the major benefit is that it spawns directly between yourself and an enemy. As a result, you can only cast it when an enemy is adjacent to you. This bodyguard is invaluable especially as a Chei worshipper since it only takes 1 decaaut to reposition. Just beware that you will actually end up two spaces away from where you start, in the direction away from the chosen adjacent foe.

The second spell, Summon Seismosaurus Egg, is more controversial and difficult to use. When you cast it an egg will spawn somewhere nearby you (not adjacent, but not more than 3 tiles away). You will have to first move yourself adjacent to the egg which is quite costly due to your slow speed, and then remain adjacent while enemies are simultaneously within range 4 of the egg for several turns. This is not a trivial task and you will likely need to rely on your other summons to buy time. Enemies can also just kill the egg during this process. However, if you succeed, the dinosaur that hatches is far more powerful than any of your other summons and even has a strong AOE attack. It will rapidly tear apart both individuals and groups while being quite durable itself.

Most of your god powers are situational, and your poor invocations aptitude makes it costly to bring them all online. Eventually you should aim to get at least 10-12 invocations skill so you can at least activate slouch reliably. It does significant screen-wide damage based on the difference between your speed and the targets, but does not scale directly off of invocations. This is a very useful tool when you are getting overwhelmed.