Which kind of characters can take on melee tank ghosts?

So ghosts are build on the basis of prior characters. They essentially have the same stats are a player char plus some ghost properties (undead, immune to poison). In general a very nice idea.

They only occur in optional branches and are always behind transparent doors so the player can see them before deciding whether they can take them on or not but if you decide you can’t, you also can’t come back later. That means in terms of game design they should have a difficulty that some characters can take and some cannot.

For the spellcaster ghosts I think this works exactly as intended. If you have resistances or other defenses against the particular spells of some ghost and a way to take it down reasonably quickly you can fight them, otherwise you shouldn’t. Great.

But for the melee tanky ghosts I’m not sure which characters can effectively fight them. They have a ton of AC and they have massive melee hit damage. That is the whole idea behind them. Sometimes they have little will so that can be way to fight them but usually they have at least 2 or 3 stars of will so you can’t get at them that way either. So for me, whenever I saw one of those, I just skipped the door, no matter what char I was playing.

So, question, which kind of builds can reliably fight these and how? And the reason why I posted this in game design, if no char can, then they should be nerfed somehow so that at least some characters have a good shot at defeating them. Maybe deliberately giving them low willpower would be a good way to go but that is just one idea.

Ghosts are honestly overly powerful, naturally, they are also monsters, they are favored by the system, favored by the dungeon. The advanced ones are souls eligible to become pandemonium lords.

That being said, not all of them appear nigh invulnerable. And I can say confidently that none can withstand Dispel Undead hehe. See also Maxwell’s Capacitive Coupling.

About the tanky ones. Tanky players can attempt to fight one at their similar level (only one on one to be safer) use good judgement so as not to YASD in vain.

I find the tanky melee ghosts least scary TBH. You can use translocations to get away from them. You can dominate them using divine gifts, evocations, scrolls and potions, all of which they lose the instant they die. And you can swap out your equipment to take advantage of any particular weaknesses they have.

Magic ghosts are sometimes a big Nope. If it can kill me in 2 turns from a distance, I’m not opening that door.