You can evolve Runetracer now (it becomes NO FUTURE).
Update: I reran and got pretty close to an ideal weaponset and still lost with 20 seconds left. The golems in the final minute overwhelmed my water/bible/axe defensive perimeter despite bone, evolved runetracer and unevolved magic wand* softening them up. (*Last thing I picked, at level 63; thought maybe it could help for boss targeting inside the bible line…)
Hmmm…
Made 7000+ coins, though, compared to 4000+ the previous run. Gotta be from the Stone Mask, and so I gotta take that if offered.
I am now rethinking my strategy, making this moot, but I did track the upgrades I was offered to see the spread. I have 16 total weapons unlocked, and they were offered at the following levels:
New Weapons offered at levels
Clock Lancet: 2, 4
Runetracer: 2 (taken), 3, 6, 11, 14, 26, 28, 30, 31 (evolved)
Peachone: 2, 58
Whip: 3, 28, 30, 41, 43, 44, 45, 53, 57, 61, 62
Axe: 3 (taken), 13, 16, 17, 37, 42 (evolved)
Bone: (starter) 5, 8, 9, 10, 14, 16, 18, 20, 21, 23 (maxed)
Lightning ring: 5, 6, 9, 10, 20, 58, 59, 62
Knife: 7, 12, 35, 36, 37, 40, 52, 54, 61
Garlic: 7, 26, 35
Magic Wand: 9, 17, 27, 34, 57, 59, 60, 63 (taken)
Ebony Wings: 9, 11, 25, 33, 36, 62
Santa Water: 12, 29 (taken), 33, 34, 39, 41, 43, 49, 50, 59, 60, 61 (evolved)
Laurel: 12, 16, 26, 46, 47
Cross: 14, 36, 46, 49, 53, 54, 63
Fire wand: 16, 28, 55, 60, 63
Pentagram: 26, 38, 41, 42, 46, 48, 50, 56,
King Bible: 28 (taken), 31, 36, 44, 48, 49, 51
Interesting. At first it looks like just a couple distinct groups, but there’s a pretty smooth spread. I would need a second run where I didn’t take bible, axe, runetracer, or santa water to check those. Ignoring them for now…
Approximate chance in 60 tries:
2 in 60: Clock Lancet, Peachone
3 in 60: Garlic
5 in 60: Fire wand, Laurel
6 in 60: Ebony Wings
7 in 60: Cross
8 in 60: Magic Wand, Lightning ring, Pentagram
9 in 60 Knife
11 in 60: Whip
See, now this is a good distribution. Every single weapon is offered at least twice, preventing a possible problem of offering two weapons once ever each but both at the same time.
What I’m saying is a bad distribution is when one of the weapons is NEVER offered. If you think that is a good possibility to have, do you think this distribution is bad since it lets the player pick any 6 weapons they want?
That’s because there is one, Dommario. Excepting Laurel, there is a character that starts with every base weapon.
The RNG is part of the game and adapting is also part of that. Even with the ability or skip, reroll and banish it’s no guarantee to get anything. And it’s a choice between waiting and grabbing what you can and making the best of it. Some runs you get a poor build and you just die.
Except I chose to wait but was still never offered one of the weapons. So those really aren’t the two choices, to wait or to grab what you can.
If that had been the run right after I had unlocked Bible, I would have been confused that Bible was never offered to me even though I had just unlocked it.
But so I understand it, you guys are saying one of the linchpins of this genre is that you can usually choose what items you want, but occasionally some options you have unlocked are just arbitrarily unavailable to you?
Would it be better if only half the options available to you were offered to you in any given run? Because that would really have the effect you guys are talking about.
Right now, it’s pretty rare to never be offered one of the items for an entire run. I suspect it would be tough to duplicate, as in it was possibly a bug. The distribution I posted a couple posts up seems to indicate that every single item is offered at least twice every single run by design. I had multiple examples of two or three offerings in 60 tries. If that were a true raw percentage, there would be many runs when those weapons would just never appear or only appear once. But yet when I tracked it, the results looked like they were massaged to force at least two offerings per run for every single option.
I would not say you can “usually” choose the option you want. FTL is my most played roguelike. I’ve beaten it a hundred times. I don’t know if I’ve ever had a run that I would consider ideal (probably 4x burst laser II, pre-igniter, cloaking, mind control). Hades too, hardly ever get what you really want. A big part of the challenge is choosing upgrades strategically so you can do well even if you don’t get a perfect run.
And no, precluding the ability of a perfect run isn’t a good thing because those are pretty fun if you’re lucky enough.
I don’t think this game has enough diversity in play strategies for this to matter much though. It’s basically the same strategy no matter what you pick up and it’s enough DPS or it isn’t. Which is why it’s a $3 game that’ll get 20 hours of play and not the 1000 I’ve played of FTL.
That’s my understanding of the genre based on the replies I’m getting. My point is that this game is not like that. This game appears to almost always give you the option of every single option you have unlocked in every single run.
I’m saying if you leave a weapon (or passive) slot open until everything else is maxed, around level 60 when you’re forced to finally take something, you will almost always have already been given the option of every single weapon multiple times before that point.
It’s not inconceivable that my Bible-less run was actually a bug. Or possibly a human bug, as in maybe it was offered to me and I took something else and just forgot. I’m pretty sure that’s not the case but I can’t 100% rule it out.
I can fairly reliably evolve 4-6 weapons on every run, but I prioritize picking up combinations even if they’re not my favorites over trying to get specific weapons for every run. It’s also helpful to know which passives are guaranteed map drops in each stage, so you have the option to take them if you need them for a weapon upgrade. Leaving open both passive and weapon slots until the very late levels also gives flexibility if you’re not offered the specific thing you want, and I always prioritize going for finishing combos over picking up a thing that I still need to find a pair for. I do always prioritize the Bible, though.
Although some weapons are better than others, just having mainly evolved weapons will usually work in most combinations. I agree the Bible is the closest thing to a must have, but that’s more for defensive push-back purposes than damage. It helps that an unevolved bible is still quite good.
I need to clarify a distinction. If you’re still gathering weapons, and are given just a choice of 3 weapons and none of them are the ones you want, that’s not something I’m complaining about. I see that as what you all are saying, a normal part of the genre, you can’t always get the perfect setup, etc… I’m totally on board with that mechanic.
My complaint is when you leave a weapon slot open for the entire game and yet some weapons are just never offered. That’s a completely different animal, to my mind. It means a weapon you have unlocked may never be offered, as if you didn’t unlock it. That seems wrong, not genre-based, and almost worth a bug report.
Yes, especially later and with unlocks you haven’t gotten yet in your game.
What choices you are given is random. So at times you will have bad luck and not get the Bible. It’s a step up in rarity from the most common items, but less so than Garlic.
You still chose to wait until you had no option rather than take something less desired. You gambled and lost. Which looking at rarity shouldn’t happen often.
Correct. And as the pool of items grows - and I hope it grows substantially - the odds of getting any particular item or any particular evolution will go down.
I also hope they focus more on interactions between different items, like the way garlic increases the knockback enemies take from other weapons. That’s the big fun of games like this - large pools of items with glorious, messy, sometimes conflicting, sometimes dangerous, sometimes unexpected interactions.
Consider The Binding of Isaac, one of the giants of the genre. It has something like 700 items which can be unlocked and added to the pool. There are mitigation strategies and a few edge cases, but you won’t see all of them on 99% of runs. Dead Cells is pushing 200 items. You will not see all of them in a run. And so on.
My ideal outcome for this game would be for the pool of items to increase by at least double, along with more strategies and potential edge cases for bending or breaking the baseline probabilities and limitations.
But go back to Dead Cells for a moment. It has an option to simply strike certain items from the pool of those offered to you, which also increases the odds of getting stuff you like. You can disable something like 10 for ‘free.’ After that it disables achievements, but you can drill down as deep as you want and guarantee that you’re only ever offered your 5 most favorite weapons. Not a feature I’ll use, but a good one to have available.
I would be absolutely fine with the game adding options to appeal to players who want more predictable runs, but I sincerely hope the baseline experience stays true to the genre.
Ah ha. I haven’t unlocked him yet.
The game devs posted a roadmap post not long ago and are planning to add 16 more weapons and 2 more upgrades among other features.
This does not strike me as a bug or even weird/unexpected in the slightest.
I don’t have a problem with that personally. I fill my six weapon slots pretty quickly. If there’s a choice of weapons and one is a preference then I will choose the preference. If my preference isn’t there but an item that evolves one of my existing weapons is there, I’ll choose that. If none of those is available then I’ll just choose a weapon I don’t prefer. My goal is to get six evolved weapons by the end. Six of my preferred weapons would be great, but I’m not holding a slot open for something.
I complained after the only run where I was never offered bible. In every other run, it has been trivially easy to get everything I want. Usually at least 10 of 11 items exactly how I wanted, often 11 of 11. (No roll for the starting weapon, of course.) It is extremely unusual for this game to shut you out of any arbitrary weapon combination you desire, though I suppose that may start to change as more weapons get added. Maybe eventually this game will start to become the kind of game you all are talking about. But it’s not that now. You can plan all 11 items at the start of a run and almost always get all 11 without any trouble. I have two rerolls and one or two banishes and other than that one bible-less run, I’ve used them a combined maybe three times ever.
Just passed 100k coins after running my first hyper mode on the first map, which netted 11.5k. Not harder at all, just more enemies so more coins. Much better! And now I’m realizing that maxed Curse is how you maximize your coin farming, as it increases the number of enemies. The problem there is the description makes it sound like it’d be actually harder. Something to strive for.
So far I have the first two arcanas, heal and revive. Typically I just suicide 3 times immediately at the start of the map to get the +15% damage, speed, area, etc… I save one revive (the only one I’m allowed to pay for so far) for actual emergency use. I do occasionally die, but more often than not, when that happens it’s because I’m underpowered. Extra revives wouldn’t help anyway. So I just keep the one in case of spacing out or something weird happening. It’s rare I end up using it. Until the end, actually, when I guess you have to use up your revives to make the run end? Weird mechanic.
It occurs to me that I don’t see or play this game as either a bullet hell or roguelike. To me this plays more like a tower defense game. Just a single mobile tower that does it all.
I’ve played a number of games now (enough to unlock new map and a half-dozen characters plus some stat upgrades) and I can see where it has its charm and is absolutely great value for the price but I can’t fall in love with it. I’m not a huge fan of the game design choice of “Player needs to lose a bunch of times before they can afford to start winning” or the randomness of things. I get it: roguelike blah-blah, etc so no one needs to explain it to me, I just don’t feel like it’s making great use of my time. I prefer to lose based on me playing poorly/inexperience versus plain happenstance or because it’s literally impossible to win until you’ve played & lost enough to get the tools you need to actually start playing. Nicely made though and I’d still recommend people try it for the low cost and because a whole lot of people love it even if I wasn’t so enamored.
Yeah. If cost $15 I would be a lot less enthused. For $3 though it has more than delivered on value for my entertainment dollar.
It didn’t feel I needed many upgrades to win, or at least last 30 minutes, I’m not sure if you’re supposed to be able to beat the Reaper at some point. The second map is easier and the Genarro character is powerful with his extra projectile for all weapons. With those two things and learning more about the game (I have a weapon evolution sheet so I know what items to go for), I could last the 30 minutes. After you’ve done it once you get a lot more coin to upgrade with and winning becomes easier or you can tackle harder maps.
Not sure if you are “supposed” to but it has been done. It is exceptionally difficult and most seem to employ cheese tactics.
The Reaper does something like 65,000 points of damage per hit and they have 655,000 hit points times the player’s level when it spawns. So, if you are level 100 at the end it will have 65,500,000 hit points (even blasting non-stop could take well over an hour to kill one).
But, as mentioned, people have done it.
Yeah, it feels like it’s supposed to be the end of the game. Like the very first boss in Souls games that you are intended to die to for narrative reasons but can be beaten.
I like garlic. It’s very useful in the early game as it lets you move through enemies picking up your gems on the way. It one-shots more than just the bats.
Yep, it’s not a satisfying gameplay loop for a lot of people. Have you tried Hades? That’s often described as a roguelike for people who don’t like roguelikes.
I think the way most people do it is by hardly leveling at all, so that the boss doesn’t scale hitpoints and you’re able to kill it. And then there are other cheesy things you have to do on top of that. Doesn’t seem worth it to me, but I am not a video game completionist.