Do some boughs even work?

[Hentaika]

Was testing useful boughs to figure out what to use and here is what I got so far from what I tested that works:
1) Energy drain - this is noticeable and overpowered.
A must for groups of enemies, pointless on solo bosses.

2) Last stand - this does increase damage
Penalty is no recovery, so kind of sucks unless you swap it in and out or are confident in yourself.

3) Headgear/Two handed/One handed power boosts - those do work correctly, kind of decent to have at least 2 of those on mask and use them on end game weaps and maybe 3 sloted hat if you find enough useful boughs of your choice due to severe lack of good boughs.
Moreover this works on both inherent and slotted boughs, so super good on post game weaps.

4) Life Drain - does work correctly and is helpful for groups of enemies.

5) Counter - this is godly because it's +50% damage and it does work. It lasts for about enough time to do a few attacks and a skill... more importantly a massive skill damage boost...

6) Double edged sword - does work and comes at okay price - take double damage.. this comes at a price of taking double damage but it's worth it unless you are one shot due to it.

7) Daredevil - does work and is super good if you are confident in your skills to last on low HP... also a bit profit even if you simply lose a bit HP, so why not.

Boughs that don't seem to work:

1) Chain combo - sounds powerful from what is written but seems to do nothing for me.. maybe I misunderstand what it does or something?

2) Sun/Rain/Snow goddess - damage during X weather sounds super good on paper again... but tested with different ones and 0 difference, no damage boost to be noticed.

3) Brilliant virtue - not sure if it doesn't work but difference is pretty small if it does(it's a small bonus to begin with though)


Am I missing some good ones?
So far my weaps are:
One/Two handed post game ones with counter + daredevil + double edged sword + overstuffed(food is important as you move on and is adding a decent bonus especially if you make some more expensive ones, those can make hard stages a breeze) + safeguard + chain combo(while I think it does not work - I am taking it just in case I just misunderstand how it should work and it works in reality) and never really swap those out.

Head has energy drain, life drain, used to have tycoon for more amber until I maxed out everything now I think I will take SP +20 instead(24 in reality)
Those 3 are swappable - usually I swap them on boss to resist what boss does against me. And if I grind some easy content - I also add last stand for more damage. instead of recovery.

Mask has one hand/two hand/head bough.

For armor I use the wave one for skill cost reduce.. it has decent other bonuses for non solo boss fights as well.

[phenir]

For combo based effects, it might be talking about crash combos.

[Lt.Head]

I'll have to do some further testing, I like using the retribution bough (Restores HP by xx% when a group of enemies is defeated) comes in real handy for continuing to fight on an empty stomach.

[phenir]

For chain combo at least it does work. I tested it on a pig in training doing a full 1h ground combo into a air combo. The last hit on air combo would do around 1200 damage with the bough equipped and around 800-900 without.

[xaerock [RVR-42]]

Celestial Maiden works. I think it's a must-have for later shrine floors as you're probably using a lot of defense downs while comboing high defense enemies (at least 230+ for me, I guess 190-200 too). Unless you grinded levels a lot of enemies take 1 damage from everything until you defense down despite all other bough equips.
Since defense down can be stacked on the same enemy multiple times the effect adds up there.

I think it increases healing from the raiment soul steal as well. You can easily get over 300 healed off a single grab. Good for some solo bosses.

Seems to stack with Milky Way's debuff multiplier. Easy way to get rid of pesky clams/bots and heal.

Not a bough afaik but that thing that makes all crits hit as weak element is super strong, kinda breaks everything below floor 190

[Hentaika]

Non boss floors are pretty much all about spamming Rising Carp for me while having 25% damage(bough + wave armor... actually 29% in reality probably since bough is profiting from weapon mastery) increase per kill... it's so crazy that any floors with small enemies make you deal 1000-2000 damage per carp on enemies that originally take 1 damage... which is to say most of the non x90-x00 floors or so...
I did bother to farm out the cloudy crystals early though on floor 100 for best 2 handed weap around floor 150 though when I got some good +weaps to speed up the process of farming it.
Specifically the one handed plant gathering + one when upgraded by kinta into alternative version becomes a nearly 400 atk one handed weapon which is extremely powerful for that point in the game(unless you farm cloudy crystals - that's the attack of two handed +weapon until floors 200+ otherwise)


As for celestial maiden - only ever used it on boss floors, but it does help, yeah..
Not sure how long the def down lasts for it to stack though, have yet to test that, but on bosses it does help a lot.

Until floor ~250 I used cooked brown rice + 4x bear meat..
After that I went all in and started using the super expensive night owl food.

[xaerock [RVR-42]]

Originally posted by Hentaika:

Not sure how long the def down lasts for it to stack though, have yet to test that, but on bosses it does help a lot.

Pretty sure how it works is if you trigger debuff x2 it resets the timer instead of the first proc running out. So it's realistic to keep stacking them, especially cause you can still continue combos after the grab. I think that achievement for doing double debuff is to make players realize this is a thing if they haven't found it themselves

[Hentaika]

Okay, tested it out with defence one and 1.5x raiment skill boosted by 20% via mastery - this much is enough to reduce defence as much as it allows in 2 debuffs.
Doing 3rd+ simply refreshes cooldown.. as for the time it lasts, I approximate something like 7-10 seconds.