Getting past wave 40

[wukin2k2]

There is no way to past wave 40. i was doing around 20k damage but hardly killed anything and died. any tip?

[elite outsider]

first of all.. i'm nowhere near the best endless player, but currently watching the slideshow on 77 with 4712 armor. here's what i can tell you!

(and you probably know a lot of this stuff already)

you need to collect the following red items (cursed is better, higher % curse is better too like 2.0% giant belt instead of 1.5, cursed lantern with the 1s pulse is extremely useful

- hoodie
- relic
- coin
- stomach
- anvil
- seashell
- greek fire

you need to get every limited/unique item you can, except skip the ones that damage you (like blood donation / bloody hand etc, that's so you can collect tardigrades)
-> so eventually get every single cutemonkey, coupon, pearl, metal detector, gentlealien etc
-> when you start making 10-15k per wave it's easy to reroll like mad and get all these slurped up fast, you want to clean the shop up while your shops are still cheap

other unique items that work with the above: stone skin very important (it's how i have 6594hp and 4721 armor right now, on loud and not demon..)
-> you want every item that turns one stat into another (except bloody hand), maxed out pearls is an incredible boost to %damage since you want to jack your luck up anyway (via cursed luckycoin), power generator etc you basically want to collect the whole set
-> eventually you get to where levelups that offer you dodge are better than attack speed, because red dodge at 20% gives you 80%attackspeed via cursed hoodie while red attackspeed gives 27

get all the economy items obviously (and as many of them cursed as you can manage): trophy, bunny, starfish, blackflag, metaldetector

economy items are stronger in abyssal: only one requires crits to make extra money (trophy), blackflag and starfish don't (so getting these early in your run helps you accelerate easier.. more acceleration earlier means you can go farther!)

fish hook is really helpful - cursed mirrors/coupons/spyglass can help your shop from getting swamped with inflation too early (consider trying to curse every mirror you find, -20% shop price over and over is a HUGE factor)

you have to pivot to ranged damage, you need tons of pierce and pumpkins, don't take ricochet because it reduces your damage too much and you will never outscale it

every vigilante ring, every grind's leaf etc..take all of them, you need every single thing that keeps scaling while the shop gets expensive
in abyssal that includes robot arm: it gives you (small) infinite damage scaling on all your weapons via nail

alien eyes is super important, stack these like mad... they can pierce many times and drag/push enemies back

baby with a beard => amazing because it can pierce and crit, so it can trigger giant belt and greek fire (1 enemy killed -> 20% of hp done to many many enemies) ... granted both belt and fire lower their effect as you go up in waves, but it's still really strong
new knockback is another reason to stack things like baby (knock enemies back who are so far away you can't even see them yet, always pulls them away from you regardless of what angle the bullet hit them)
=> by comparison, ripandtear is bad because it can't crit (so it can't scale damage off the red items, and it robs you of trophy money on kills)

statue becomes amazing in endless: cursed ones giving +96% attackspeed. even when your attackspeed is like 3000 you should keep going, abyssal lets you reach lower breakpoints because there are fractional numbers (so like 0.035s per shot etc), not always easy to push dodge really high for your hoodie so you can add these

stacking insane amounts of xp gain is also good, celery tea/bean teacher etc
you can get to the point where you level up 4-5+ times per wave even in late waves, i'm level 251 on wave 77 right now. that's a lot stats gained!

finally... some weapons are stronger than others. sniper gun is really strong, so is gatling laser. chaingun will fail you because of the reload time gap.
potato throwers are the best with something like demon where you can scale your hp like mad with padding+held materials

if you started with thief daggers (for big economy in the first 30 waves or so), you can usually find drills in the early endless waves to get a big boost, while you collect your pumpkins/bandanas/rangeddamage before pivoting to ranged weapons

you know your harvesting will come way down, so you can deliberately make your armor just slightly ahead of harvesting... then axolotl into tons of armor (for example say it switches your %damage or luck with armor), then build back up the switched stat... better players than me will probably figure out how to break axolotl completely

gardens+super high attack speed+improved tools+spicysauce can give you a panic button (run over all the fruit to blow up the whole map). cursed sadtomato starts you with higher % hp, but your hp isn't maxed at the start so you can run over your fruit to kill bosses (and keep your tardigrades too)

eventuially you'll be overcome even if you do all this stuff to the best of your ability ... curse is such a huge burden and you can never stop it gradually growing, make all the enemies impossible to kill..

if it's not curse stopping you it will be your pc going to 1 fps from all the structures and bullets flying around

[Bumc]

wait, why is ricochet bad, do giant belt procs get reduced as well?

[elite outsider]

i don't know this well enough, somebody who looks at the code or whatever will have to chime in

but it basically applies a penalty to every bounce (not the -%damage on the item but a different penalty you can't see anywhere), i'm pretty sure it reduces the final damage by some %, and all the bounces are applied before starting to pierce, something like that..so it means your chain of pierces you build up with infinite bandanas/eyepatches/pumpkins is strictly weak

so it's basically just horrible, especially once you get farther in endless and giantbelt effectiveness drops off (presumably greekfire does the same thing)

in a regular 20 wave game it's somewhat easy to see the effect - you can have a "decent" build that's clearing waves pretty well, add ricochet thinking you're doing a good thing and then suddenly you're tickling everything and it's barely surviving (same as like having shotguns without enough pumpkins) .. even after you recover the lost %damage from the item downside it still won't feel right

[Kappa]

Originally posted by wukin2k2:

There is no way to past wave 40. i was doing around 20k damage but hardly killed anything and died. any tip?

To me it's just a matter of time and how long it takes for player/s to get bored ( or how long it takes for the game to start lagging/stuttering ) rather than dmg issues.

If you are struggling, try go with the streamer which is one of the easiest one ( to build up early game, start with wrenches and turrets, positioning yourself accordingly between them ).

[x99]

Which game mode or difficulty is this? I barely pass wave 25-27.

[wukin2k2]

Originally posted by elite outsider:

first of all.. i'm nowhere near the best endless player, but currently watching the slideshow on 77 with 4712 armor. here's what i can tell you!

(and you probably know a lot of this stuff already)

you need to collect the following red items (cursed is better, higher % curse is better too like 2.0% giant belt instead of 1.5, cursed lantern with the 1s pulse is extremely useful

- hoodie
- relic
- coin
- stomach
- anvil
- seashell
- greek fire

you need to get every limited/unique item you can, except skip the ones that damage you (like blood donation / bloody hand etc, that's so you can collect tardigrades)
-> so eventually get every single cutemonkey, coupon, pearl, metal detector, gentlealien etc
-> when you start making 10-15k per wave it's easy to reroll like mad and get all these slurped up fast, you want to clean the shop up while your shops are still cheap

other unique items that work with the above: stone skin very important (it's how i have 6594hp and 4721 armor right now, on loud and not demon..)
-> you want every item that turns one stat into another (except bloody hand), maxed out pearls is an incredible boost to %damage since you want to jack your luck up anyway (via cursed luckycoin), power generator etc you basically want to collect the whole set
-> eventually you get to where levelups that offer you dodge are better than attack speed, because red dodge at 20% gives you 80%attackspeed via cursed hoodie while red attackspeed gives 27

get all the economy items obviously (and as many of them cursed as you can manage): trophy, bunny, starfish, blackflag, metaldetector

economy items are stronger in abyssal: only one requires crits to make extra money (trophy), blackflag and starfish don't (so getting these early in your run helps you accelerate easier.. more acceleration earlier means you can go farther!)

fish hook is really helpful - cursed mirrors/coupons/spyglass can help your shop from getting swamped with inflation too early (consider trying to curse every mirror you find, -20% shop price over and over is a HUGE factor)

you have to pivot to ranged damage, you need tons of pierce and pumpkins, don't take ricochet because it reduces your damage too much and you will never outscale it

every vigilante ring, every grind's leaf etc..take all of them, you need every single thing that keeps scaling while the shop gets expensive
in abyssal that includes robot arm: it gives you (small) infinite damage scaling on all your weapons via nail

alien eyes is super important, stack these like mad... they can pierce many times and drag/push enemies back

baby with a beard => amazing because it can pierce and crit, so it can trigger giant belt and greek fire (1 enemy killed -> 20% of hp done to many many enemies) ... granted both belt and fire lower their effect as you go up in waves, but it's still really strong
new knockback is another reason to stack things like baby (knock enemies back who are so far away you can't even see them yet, always pulls them away from you regardless of what angle the bullet hit them)
=> by comparison, ripandtear is bad because it can't crit (so it can't scale damage off the red items, and it robs you of trophy money on kills)

statue becomes amazing in endless: cursed ones giving +96% attackspeed. even when your attackspeed is like 3000 you should keep going, abyssal lets you reach lower breakpoints because there are fractional numbers (so like 0.035s per shot etc), not always easy to push dodge really high for your hoodie so you can add these

stacking insane amounts of xp gain is also good, celery tea/bean teacher etc
you can get to the point where you level up 4-5+ times per wave even in late waves, i'm level 251 on wave 77 right now. that's a lot stats gained!

finally... some weapons are stronger than others. sniper gun is really strong, so is gatling laser. chaingun will fail you because of the reload time gap.
potato throwers are the best with something like demon where you can scale your hp like mad with padding+held materials

if you started with thief daggers (for big economy in the first 30 waves or so), you can usually find drills in the early endless waves to get a big boost, while you collect your pumpkins/bandanas/rangeddamage before pivoting to ranged weapons

you know your harvesting will come way down, so you can deliberately make your armor just slightly ahead of harvesting... then axolotl into tons of armor (for example say it switches your %damage or luck with armor), then build back up the switched stat... better players than me will probably figure out how to break axolotl completely

gardens+super high attack speed+improved tools+spicysauce can give you a panic button (run over all the fruit to blow up the whole map). cursed sadtomato starts you with higher % hp, but your hp isn't maxed at the start so you can run over your fruit to kill bosses (and keep your tardigrades too)

eventuially you'll be overcome even if you do all this stuff to the best of your ability ... curse is such a huge burden and you can never stop it gradually growing, make all the enemies impossible to kill..

if it's not curse stopping you it will be your pc going to 1 fps from all the structures and bullets flying around

Thanks for all the inputs! I never like ranged, so I mainly melee only with different characters on abyss/D5. For those red/unique items are hardly come by, sometimes i don't even get 1 of those thru wave 40. I have no idea how ppl get those rarity earlier. Thanks again!

Originally posted by x99:

Which game mode or difficulty is this? I barely pass wave 25-27.

Abyss D5. I would say the game very easy before wave 39. At wave it suddenly became unbalanced. Anything before wave 40 I mostly one shot them.

[elite outsider]

Originally posted by wukin2k2:

Thanks for all the inputs! I never like ranged, so I mainly melee only with different characters on abyss/D5. For those red/unique items are hardly come by, sometimes i don't even get 1 of those thru wave 40. I have no idea how ppl get those rarity earlier. Thanks again!

get tons of luck and make tons of money, it'll happen! once you get lucky coin it smooths a lot of stuff out (but it really is better to get a cursed one)

thief daggers don't make a lot of money in the first few waves, but once they pop off it's very noticeable. i can break 1k materials made on wave 9 pretty regularly now.. runs that do that end up making 5,6 or 7k on the last couple waves before the bosses on 20, starfish and blackflag are so crazy..

you have to get lots of dodge+armor+consumableheal+range to make them work - once you hit the right mix of stats you can wade through enormous groups and never die .. dodge+heal is the most important part of that (adrenaline is a huge item for this)

edit: should also mention "a bit of luck" in the first few waves is important to getting enough fruit to heal. you need like...let's say 20-30ish luck for that part. that's so you can walk straight through crowds daggers-a-blazing and let your dodge+fruit heals carry you. try to get like 30ish dodge before the first elite fight, and definitely hit 60 as soon as you can after that. gambling token, leather vest + levelups can get you there.


a little bit of range above 0 is really helpful for this. to see it: try playing crazy with thiefdagger, now switch to loud with thiefdagger and look how much more dangerous it is to walk through groups. so on loud/demon/etc you might consider taking some gummy berserkers early on and get a bit of extra range.

but to get nice items appearing a lot in later waves you should get a lot more luck (pick up a bowler hat or lucky charm if you see it, basically)