Just unlocked reincarnation mode

[Roger Bacon]

First off, this game is absolutely incredible. Couldn't praise it enough, I'm not a huge FPS guy but I absolutely love the synergies and upgrades, it makes each run a bit different.

Just wanted to get that out of the way.

Now on to reincarnation mode. I'm only on level 3 but sweet lord jesus, I can't get past the first level w/o that talent that gives me a massive boost (minus bonus per scroll). Every time i try w/o it I get killed in 2 shots. Its generally the purple rooms which are super small, and there will be melee charging me forcing me to run out in the open since these melee guys can take upwards to like 7 shots in the head to kill. Once I'm in the open and with like 5 crossbowmen, 2 shots boom dead. Maybe I suck, I probably do, but these mobs take so many shots to go down while I drop in 2. Don't even get me started on how long the min bosses take to go down.

Thank god for that 1 talent is all i have to say, bc once I lose all the benefits of it my character is strong enough to dominate.

[Eudicots]

Overconsumption is a good blessing early in a run, but if you are playing solo you will most likely struggle later on. Character specific blessings are a better option since they will dramatically improve your builds especially the further you are into a run.

I don't know anything about your playstyle or which character you are playing, so i'll just give some general tips.

1. If you are playing solo Fake Death will give you a nice safety net with a 45 second cooldown.
2. You have to learn to prioritize enemies. It is better to kill off the highest damage dealing enemies first even if you have to allow certain enemies to get closer to you.
3. Crowd Control exist in this game. The easiest being decay which drops enemy movement speed by 50% for 5 seconds.
4. Miasma (decay+lightning) deals percent damage per second compared to enemy's health in solo. If you are having trouble with damage this is a good way to keep your damage consistent.
5. Prioritize defense. Any defensive scroll should be picked up and you should take every defensive ascension till you find your own sweetspot of defense to offense.
6. Don't be discouraged by failure. This is a rogue you are expected to fail. You'll get better with more runs just take your time and try to perfect your playstyle.

[Songbird]

Adding to the above: short of combos that make you unkillable (like 90% of the things that include Lucky Cat or Paranormality on most characters), the single best stat in the game is move speed, and you prevent most damage in the game by just remembering to keep moving and being fast enough. To complement this, Corrosion Shard and Snow Boots (the latter is better) make you immune to specific/all slows, which is how you will die in an enormously large percent of runs, and also allow the use of Corrosion Enthusiast for +40% move speed (instead of just making corrosion less bad and penalizing you for inflicting corrosion, which is what it does on its own).

Longling Tomb is the most dangerous area by design; the desert has the most dangerous enemies (aside from Nihilation Monks, anyway), but the fire traps in the tomb that restrict your movement and threaten to kill you nearly instantly and through the one-shot protection talent are a huge issue. For the tomb, you really want to prioritize the following much more than normal:

1) Weapons that do burst AoE damage
2) Weapons that can hit through shields, so you don't get trapped by Horsemen and have an advantage against Shielded Crossbowmen
3) Weapons that give a measure of crowd control (corrosion is best, but stagger is useful too). If you don't find movespeed, corrosion becomes a near-must or Elite Spearman can just annihilate you if you aren't able to get it stuck on terrain (which is very finnicky).

Absolute most important tip if you are dying a lot in Longling Tomb:

DO NOT PICK YOUR FIRST FEW WEAPONS BASED ON YOUR ENDGAME BUILD OR THE CHARACTER YOU ARE PLAYING. PICK THEM TO CLEAR LONGLING TOMB.

The best weapons early on are probably:
Pupil - it combines incredible damage and bizarrely amazing accuracy with the ability to stagger, kills heavy crossbowmen like nothing else
Fire Dragon/Fire Tower - effective at the range you will be fighting, hit through barriers and kill very quickly. Fire Tower staggers to give you safety when you don't one-shot. Note that this assumes you have the +25% move speed on melee weapons from talent tree; they are virtually unusable without this.
Crimson Firescale - good for the first 3 floors, but struggles in the large, long room on floor 4 where you often have Longbowmen on the upper floors, so pick an alt to deal with it. The ability to use the alt fire instantly burst elites and horsemen is the reason to consider it.
Deafening Mortar - solves every problem you could possibly have at this point except for horrible ammo efficiency and slowing move speed, just an absolute monster offensively early game if you can make the ammo work out
Shrieker - Discount Deafening Mortar damage-wise, but without the cons listed above either. Requires you to aim for crits, clears rooms very fast if you do and staggers.
Porcupine/Sting/Aura of Venom/Dual Fang/Prism - listed in my order or preference for the tomb, if there is a chance you will fight Elite Spearman and do not already have an answer, being able to slow him can save your life. Bonus if you can inflict miasma.
Bone Dragon - kinda slow DPS, but doesn't really require aiming so you can focus on dodging, and very importantly applies extreme crowd control in a large AoE

For the first boss, a lot of the above weapons other than Pupil will struggle in one of the two fights, so switching to a weapon with good ability to crit at long range and high DPS like Scalpel, Double Caliber, Illusion, Golden Bow, or even something like Big Hippo (if that's the best you're offered and you're fighting the golem) can be valuable. Golem needs accuracy at long range and something that can deal with the rocks (i.e. not melee, not a grenade launcher, not a sniper without splash). For Lu Wu, anything that slows your move speed is probably a death sentence, and you want weapons that are comfortable at mid and close range and don't rely on scoping.

For the desert, you then have a lot of the same sort of questions: can I slow and/or stagger Rogue Arsonists (stagger interrupts their flames, once per 5 seconds), do I have something accurate enough or with a big enough hitbox to hit Bandit Retainers, etc. Weapons like Crimson Firescale that are good in the tomb become garbage here because accuracy at a distance is far more important. Weapons that slow you down need to secure their kills quickly or will die very very fast (a build-around Mortar is OP enough offensively, a Big Hippo is inviting misery). This is also the point in the run where a lot (but not all) skill damage builds that got a head start off the first spiritual blessing start to actually get damage-checked pretty hard; High-powered Arc chain lightning will stop killing stuff so easily and Fatal Current is not very likely to one-shot, for example. (There are exceptions, like Thunder and Glory + Thunder Nemesis or Thorny Bloom are just so ludicrously OP they will never stop one-shotting, but it's something to watch out for.)

Getting out of the early game is the most important thing to a good run. Once you have found the OP combo of scrolls or the defensive ascensions that make you virtually impossible to kill, the rest of the game is just a victory lap. This is why all the posts on these forums boasting about how much damage they managed to do are irrelevant; this is fun, but it has virtually no effect on actually winning runs.

[ShadowMystic]

Originally posted by Roger Bacon:

First off, this game is absolutely incredible. Couldn't praise it enough, I'm not a huge FPS guy but I absolutely love the synergies and upgrades, it makes each run a bit different.

Just wanted to get that out of the way.

Now on to reincarnation mode. I'm only on level 3 but sweet lord jesus, I can't get past the first level w/o that talent that gives me a massive boost (minus bonus per scroll). Every time i try w/o it I get killed in 2 shots. Its generally the purple rooms which are super small, and there will be melee charging me forcing me to run out in the open since these melee guys can take upwards to like 7 shots in the head to kill. Once I'm in the open and with like 5 crossbowmen, 2 shots boom dead. Maybe I suck, I probably do, but these mobs take so many shots to go down while I drop in 2. Don't even get me started on how long the min bosses take to go down.

Thank god for that 1 talent is all i have to say, bc once I lose all the benefits of it my character is strong enough to dominate.

I can't say anything you're doing wrong in particular, but make sure your talents are maxed. How you should play will be highly dependent on the character. On reincarnation, getting a corrosion weapon ASAP in a must. Are you doing crits? Crits are needed as enemy health rises. Maybe even more important are the fusion effects.

Other than that are you able to dodge all the enemies? It was originally in the context of Binding of Isaac, but the advice of leaving an enemy you have trouble with alive to learn its patterns can be really helpful in all sorts of games. Did you know you can dodge left and right between the longbowman's consecutive shots?

[Roger Bacon]

I've been mostly playing the fire girl. This is all good advice I appreciate it.

[Rugged Lemmings]

Originally posted by Roger Bacon:

I've been mostly playing the fire girl. This is all good advice I appreciate it.

If you're going with the Fire Fox and playing solo I'd recommend going for her meteor build. Those few moments it takes to charge up a big fireball can lead to some sticky situations, while the meteor build is still really strong and much more spammable. Go for the Cataclysm Spirit Blessing from the first mushroom man.

Other than that: keep to the advice that's already been posted (I'd like to emphasize how strong Corrosion is in the Tomb, particularly against the Elite minibosses) and you'll climb that reincarnation ladder!

[Auri Crystal]

Originally posted by Songbird:

.

I'm not OP but I'm new and this was very helpful, thank you and have an award!