I've now played all five assassin characters one-on-one versus the Unclean Beast, and I have to say, that Unclean Beast is pretty strong. I don't know if it's one of the strongest demigods, or whether I just didn't have that much practice against it, but it ripped through my first two characters. And when I played as Unclean Beast myself, it still managed to fight me to a standstill. On the other hand, my last two games, I beat it handily, so maybe it was just an issue of me getting better as time went on.
It's hard to say. I won the game all five times, because the easy-level AI does not appear to understand how to actually win the game. It goes after fortifications only intermittently, and doesn't seem to know that focus-fire is really important for taking them down, especially when the enemy (i.e. me) buys the auto-repairing upgrade. Yet some wins were undeniably more elegant than others.
Regulus was the most decisive. I wound up with double-digit kills without suffering even a single death. I suspect this is because the AI can't cope with kiting tactics. What I'd do is get the Unclean Beast's attention, then run back to my fortifications, and snipe at it from relative safety. A human would not have fallen for that more than once or twice. Still, the ranged attack is incredibly powerful and versatile. Not only did it work wonders on the Beast, it allowed me to take down enemy fortifications in nearly absolute safety.
The next best was Rook. I only suffered a couple of deaths, but, in turn, got hardly any kills. Mostly, this is because Rook has a high enough defense to survive healing itself, but is not fast enough to pursue a fleeing enemy. Thus, the Unclean Beast was able to repeatedly retreat back to its base and lick its wounds (and unlike the AI, I am not foolish enough to try and follow it). Rook may well have been the best at actually winning the game, though. While not as overwhelmingly dominant as Regulus, it did have the advantage of not having to run halfway across the map every time it encountered the enemy. Plus, it has a special anti-fortification skill that makes advancing through the enemy defenses virtually trivial.
Unclean Beast vs Unclean Beast was an interesting fight. Obviously, the characters were evenly matched, but I was able to leverage my ability to think strategically into a small, but significant xp advantage. Eventually I got enough of a lead in levels that I was able to break through the AI's defenses.
The last two characters lost to Unclean Beast so many times, the AI was able to dramatically out-level me. I won the matches by playing conservatively, refusing to engage the beast and concentrating all my powers on attacking fortifications. The thing that both the Demon Assassin and the Torch Bearer have in common is that they are very offense-oriented characters. They have powerful attacks, but crumple under direct attack. I may have been able to get more out of them with a different build (in particular, I failed to use any of the Demon Assassin's active powers), but I've got a feeling that they're optimized for a different tactical role than assassin vs assassin combat.
On the forum, Assclown told me that playing 1v1 would not give me an accurate perception of the game, and I think they were right. Clearly there are group synergies that make some characters better in teams than they are alone. I wouldn't be surprised, for instance, if an Unclean Beast and a Demon Assassin were better than two Unclean Beasts. And I'm almost positive, even without playing them, that none of the generals are a match for the Unclean Beast by themselves.
However, I am somewhat stubborn. I've started something with this little 1v1 experiment, and I intend to finish it, regardless of how transparently ridiculous a project it might be (hey, why does that sentiment sound familiar?)
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