Struggling to get good with Christine, need some advice on building her

[☠Black Knight]

I'm pretty new to this game, it's only my second time playing. I've been told Christine is awful in the early game but gets better later on, and I want to use her because the cooldown reduction is cool, but jesus... it feels like she needs 4-5 full item stacks just to become even viable.

By far I have had the most success using Poe. Getting Garlic + Bible + Whip seems to kill just about anything and everything at least up to the 16:00 mark. And if your lucky enough to get evolved garlic, you can literally just stand in one spot and let the game play itself.

With Christine, if I don't have full pentragram & crown, level 5 bible, level 3 whip, and a few other damage items all by the 10:00 mark the run is basically over.

That's an awful lot of very specific requirements in a very short amount of time. A fact that is only made even worse by the -35% damage she has. Meaning you need 4 spinach just to get her back to baseline damage so she can be on par with any other character.


My current item priority for her (and my reasoning for it) is:

1. Pentragram = Gotta get it max or the run has no chance.
2. Crown = She NEEDS this maxed, along with pentagram, or the run has no chance.
3. Bible = It seems to be the best item in the game, and it's even more OP on Christine.
4. Whip = it's the knife, but better.
5. Empty Tome = even more cooldown reduction for bible.
6. Spinach = +10% damage to everything is self-explanatory.

Is this the right build and I am just getting unlucky? Or am I doing something wrong here?

[Soul]

Bible is not as strong as you think. It's kind of like Garlic, it's good early game, but falls off late. By the time you get to late game, you could have much better items. Also, the whip by itself isn't that great of a weapon, unless you intend to upgrade it.

If you are going for Spinach, get the Fire Wand and if you are getting empty Tome, get Magic Wand. Pentagram and Crown is a must like you said, just make sure not to upgrade your pentagram if there are a lot of items on the screen, cuz you might lose them all.

Since you are still pretty early in the game, it might be hard to finish maps with Christine (or most characters for that matter), just focus on unlocking more stuff. Christine becomes much more useful once you have more items to choose from.

[sweener2001]

Change your focus to high damage/high cooldown items. Like the fire wand and axe. Keep buying global powerups. Maxing out the initial powerups (minus curse) makes any character pretty easy to play with. It's all whatever until you get Sigma and start Egg farming with Trouser anyway.

[sweener2001]

I also forgot, focus on just pentagram and one other weapon initially. You want to level up and evolve pentagram as quickly as possible so it stops nuking your XP and chests. Once that's done, Gorgeous Moon helps you make up for the lost XP pretty quickly.

[Zebefreo]

Invest in some luck to have less chances of losing exp or chests to pentagram; she has a base -15% cooldown, pair it with empty tome to increase your fire rate.
Also remember that with silent old sanctuary, two weapon limit (to get laurel) and a lv5 empty tome you're basically invincible since the laurel will recharge so fast you won't be able to lose all its three charges (it's pretty hard, but not impossible).