How do I know my beards are ready to roll over?

[silversoul255]

So I'm just starting to reach Beast 2 in Normal, and I'm almost done with my challenges. I'm training to reach Boss 301. My thought was that I'd run 12 hour runs to maximize my beard levels and focus on leveling up my NGUs. I have the perk that cuts the time for permanent level gains to 12 hours from 24, but there are also Gold Diggers to consider. Will using Beard diggers speed up the permanent level gain? How do I know I've reached the maximum permanent level gain for beards each run?

[Fel]

Bonuses to beard speed and to energy/magic bars are the main factors for beards gaining levels.

As long as you use a ratio for your energy/magic that doesn't cut down the bars to a ridiculously low amount compared to the "base ratio" from exp costs your beards will continue to grow faster and faster until they reach the point where they gain 50 levels per second for the whole duration of the rebirth.

The biggest boost you can give to the permanent level of your beards is from the bank perks (and quirks but those are for late evil difficulty usually) because with 50% banks you are significantly raising the temporary level of your beard when you rebirth.

Originally posted by silversoul255:

How do I know I've reached the maximum permanent level gain for beards each run?

When the bars for the levels gained in temporary levels remain full even after a full rebirth length you will have reached the limit of what you can get from beards (outside of the bank perks/quirks) but that happens near mid-late evil difficulty.
After that you can start to remove bonuses to beard speed like the diggers to see if you still gain levels at the maximum speed but really nothing outside of rebirth length and banks will be able to influence the permanent levels you gain.

In reality it is not worth running 12h rebirths for beards even with the perk, because when you are at that point in the game you are supposed to have your fruit of wisdom (and other fruits) getting close to a max rank of 24 and a fully grown rank 24 fruit of wisdom is worth far more than extra levels on permanent beards in the majority of cases.

[silversoul255]

Okay, while technical, I hear you that my idea was not a good one and I shouldn't worry about that.

Do you have an alternative recommendation for runs I could be doing to boost myself from Boss 270 to 301? Even after 4 hours, I barely got my Number positive, so clearly I need to improve something.

[Fel]

The best "alternative" is to get chocolate zone's set first and to continue with 24h rebirths, preferably with high rank fruits.
I don't know how your fruits look like but fruit of power beta and fruit of number increase their total bonus every time you eat them, fruit of power alpha gives you quite a big boost for that rebirth as well.
On top of that, your NGU levels should be going up fairly quickly at that point in the game, meaning that your augments are becoming stronger, your wandoos takes less energy/magic and your attack/defense and number get higher all the time.

By the time you get close to the beast's v4 if you still are somewhat far from boss 301 you can take advantage of the attack/defence for rich jerk from the exp menu and the stat boost for rich perk from itopod since you are going to need them for evil difficulty anyway.

If you aren't doing it already, you can probably run wandoos meh, an augment+upgrade (probably shoulder mounted cannon or energy buster) and most blood magic rituals (you can spend a few hours of blood in the numbers spell to great effects) on top of the advanced trainings (and obviously the beards).

[Elenoe]

wandoos XL by that time is for free the entire rebirth. Other then that simply "wait". You are getting boost from 24h power beta Yggdrasil, A/D beard, and as your Energy raise you can afford better and better augments. That's what pushes you over 301 eventually.

[silversoul255]

Okay. So at this point, I'm just putting my diggers into NGU and doing 12-24 hour runs for NGUs and Yggdrasil. I've gained something like 100K levels in my energy NGUs in the last couple days! I guess I'll also get the seed boosters from Quests and Perks so I can level my seeds more quickly. Thanks!

[Huillam]

Originally posted by silversoul255:

Do you have an alternative recommendation for runs I could be doing to boost myself from Boss 270 to 301? Even after 4 hours, I barely got my Number positive, so clearly I need to improve something.

If I remember correctly by the time I reached boss 301 (without eating my fruit of power alpha as I wrongly assumed it to not be worth it anymore) I was still few weeks away from the recommended stats to enter evil.

If that boss is the only thing stopping you from entering evil you could use some poop on the fruit of power and the fruit of number. Spend more time working on augmentations (with the badly drawn gun equipped to level them up even more). Max Stat Boost for Rich Perks I (that one is pretty much mandatory for evil anyway).

[archmag]

Originally posted by silversoul255:

Okay. So at this point, I'm just putting my diggers into NGU and doing 12-24 hour runs for NGUs and Yggdrasil. I've gained something like 100K levels in my energy NGUs in the last couple days! I guess I'll also get the seed boosters from Quests and Perks so I can level my seeds more quickly. Thanks!

By that time you should get at least 6 diggers: Adventure, 2 NGU, PP, Blood, XP. At the end of the normal difficulty they should be always on. Well, when you are in normal ITOPOD farming mode at least. Some of them are useless during Quest item farming. You may want Drop rate digger during Chocolate zone item farming later (or just in case for when you autokill the Beast for its drops). And don't forget to turn on Stat digger at the end of the run to complete few more bosses.

Reaching 301 is not really a breakpoint for anything. So you don't have to go specifically for it. Just work on your Yggdrasil fruits, collect exp and invest it to boost energy and magic. Unlock most perks and some quirks.

When you first enter Evil difficulty your stats get a huge hit, so you need to have high numbers to even be able to progress in it. For example, if you can max Wandoos XP speed with ~10k energy/magic in normal very early in your run (with some resources in advanced training), in evil you would need 10B for the similar result on just Wandoos 98. You may get some easy evil NGU bonuses, like Yggdrasil drops, but you won't even be able to turn on last few diggers until you get to boss 58 and can defeat at least one enemy in new adventure zone (need ~5T toughness at least) so you are going to lose on extra XP and some other stats due to lower level of diggers. You will be able to run only first few blood rituals for some time, so no Iron Pill spell or Blood MacGuffin Alpha for some time.

[silversoul255]

That gives me an excellent perspective on what I need to enter Evil Mode, thank you! I haven't gotten the stats to enter Chocolate World yet, so I will keep doing runs to boost my NGUs and work on building up Perk and Quirk points. Thanks for the input, it was very helpful!

[archmag]

Originally posted by silversoul255:

That gives me an excellent perspective on what I need to enter Evil Mode, thank you!

You are welcome but when you get to it don't worry about trying to enter Evil mode yourself even if you are still unprepared. Seeing it with your own eyes will help you prepare for it better. Even if you decide to go back to Normal difficulty (if you can't progress in Evil at all or feel that it slows your progress too much) you will only need to defeat Boss #137 before you unlock everything back and can return to 24 hour rebirths. By that time you should be able to defeat that boss in about 10-12 minutes with 3-4 very short rebirths. I tried Evil difficulty twice and then went back to normal before finally deciding to stick with it on the third try when I finally felt satisfied with the change.

[Edwin]

Originally posted by Fel:

Bonuses to beard speed and to energy/magic bars are the main factors for beards gaining levels.

Your beards will continue to grow faster and faster until they reach the point where they gain 50 levels per second for the whole duration of the rebirth.

The biggest boost you can give to the permanent level of your beards is from the bank
because with 50% banks you are significantly raising the temporary level of your beard when you rebirth.

Hi Fel, I'm little bit confused about beards:

1) Beard speed has a 50/s cap, so that's why Beard diggers are useless in late game, right? So Beard speed quirks are bad too?

2) Now I can't reach that cap even with diggers, is it necessary to keep diggers on? Maybe I can turn off Daycare digger and Blood digger for them.

3) And why 12h beard perk is bad? Because 24h rebirth can always get max time factor for Permanent bonus?

4) When should I get some beard bank perks/quirks? After I can reach speed cap?

[Elenoe]

1) yes, useless

2) yes. I would pick beard digger rather then blood. Blood is heavy exponential. Blood digger helps just a bit (and you may turn it on on rebirth start when you are gaining gold/drop chance. Not worth for iron pills on normal at all)

3) yes. You will do 23-24h anyway for Yggdrasil.

4) You will get them before cap. Banks help as long as the feature runs all the rebirth which beards do, cap or not. Bank significance only gets stronger for capped features. So it's good to buy few banks you can easily afford. You don't need quirk ones yet.

[Fel]

To expand a bit on the 1, there aren't beard speed bonuses in quirks or in any of the features after it specifically because beards have been "abandonned" (which is also why they don't get touched by the difficulty).

[Elenoe]

Quirk (10) The Beast's Special Beard Tonic (50% beard speed). It still annoys me a bit there :) Soon enough I will buy it just for the completionist sake and forget that as well :P

[Fel]

For some reason I thought that the beard quirk was the one reducing the optimal time for beards instead.

[Edwin]

Thank you guys