Intermediary and Advanced Tips

[Fernanda]

Recently I made to Endurance of Vild level 100. At level 89 enemies double their HP each stage (x2, x4, x8, x16, and so on) and since there are 64 stages in EoV, it effectively scales like the Wheat and Chessboard problem. At level 100 the Final Boss has HP in the nonillions. Dealing with this requires a lot of scaling that is hard to achieve without planning ahead even if it means having a tough Act 1.

My choice for this challenge is Gunslinger due to the extreme damage from Railgun, and Blood Transmutation as it has the highest potential for damage scaling as of now, but a lot of tips here work for any Avatar or build. I'll eventually turn this into a bigger guide, but for the time being, I'm making this post.


Gunslinger and Rune of Consolidation:

Rune of Consolidation can only affect one weapon regardless of whether you're using the multiple Weapons per rune talent or soul shop bonus. Since Gunslinger can only use one weapon, Rune of Consolidation gets a lot of mileage from the concentrated power of the exclusive weaponry here, in particular Railgun.

There are three ways to increase your weapon count:

1: Buy Shotgun and SMG before upgrading Revolver to Bolt-Action Rifle. This is important because, once you acquire Bolt-Action Rifle, both Revolver and Pistol are removed from your cards. Without Pistol, the other two Gunslinger weapons won't show up anymore.

2: Equip two different Knight Pendants (reward from the Dual Wielding D-Rank Normal Challenge). Knight Pendant allows you to start with Knight Rog weapons regardless of avatar.

3: Once you have Corrupted Core, buy both the Evolution (yes, they do show up even as Gunslinger) and regular weapon from a shop. This in practice requires an Adventurer's License unless you're extremely lucky. Keep in mind that if you choose, say, Death Aura and Fire Ring, you'd have to wait until all three show up at the same time. For that reason, it's best to go with Katana (for the Katana + Fire Spirit evolution) and Thunder Staff (for Thunder Staff + Thunder Spirit) as you get two evolutions and two base weapons, and it's also easier to pull this off as you can do each pair separately instead of requiring 3 cards to show simultaneously.

Also, keep in mind to buy the evolution first, then the base weapon. If you do it the other way, the evolution will simply ban the base weapon, as usual.

Because Rune of Consolidation synergizes so well with this technique, I recommend having enough card levels to make the jump from Revolver to Sniper: Bolt-Action Rifle doesn't scale strong enough to compensate the loss of Pistol adding to the Rune's bonus.


Checking a Stage ahead of time:

The game usually saves after an event, shop, stage or chest is done. This means you can check a shop, event, or chest, even go so far as see if you make money from the gambling event, then save and quit and go back to the world map. Two exceptions: Once you have finished a combat stage, you can't return to the event before (so if you save and quit before picking up the rewards from an Act Boss you will just be moved to the next Act), and you can't cheat Shrines, as they've been intentionally fixed and coded so the event is saved as soon as you activate them. Once your cards are jumbled, that's it.

Enemy Spawn pattern changes from load to load, but Stage layouts and Fountains don't. You can find the road path in the Act 1 Forest that leads to the cemetery for massive exp ahead of time by scouting different routes in the same stage.


Gunslinger Trigger Interactions:

Trigger cards such as Reactive Trigger and Trigger Amulet will trigger all Gunslinger weapons, including the Knight Rog ones. Coincidentally, this makes Thunder Staff and Staff of Storms extremely valuable as they stay after the trigger. This also enables Gunslinger to have a much easier time with Shred builds as although Thunder Staff has typically low damage, it is one of the best weapons for Shred/Def Piercing due to its high amount of hits per frame.


Requirement Manipulation:

You can achieve card requirements by equipping an item that changes your attributes. This is particularly useful in case you want, say, Light Spirit as a pre-requisite for Sola's Lance, or even to mitigate the effects of Corruption from Burning the Village, without having permanent 50 Corruption.


Synergy: Blood Transmutation, Commoner's Guidebook and Tainted Cards:

Once you exhaust your entire card pool, the only cards left on shops are tainted cards. There are more tainted cards than slots available on shops, and with Adventurer's License you can rotate between all tainted cards. They will not repeat when you refresh your shop, so keeping only Durability will make the shop show Durability, then nothing, then Durability again. Because of that, in a Blood Transmutation build you will get more mileage out of Commoner's Guidebook by not banning any Tainted Card, with the exception of Discipline (unlocked by Zealot > Holy Skin) which reduces your HP.


Synergy: Collection Book, Corrupted Core/Limitbreak and Town Hall Registry

Collection Book increases your damage per unique card, and Town Hall Registry increases your critical per banned card. If a card is not useful for you and have multiple levels, you can spend one point in them and then ban them. If a card only has 1 level you can pick them, and ban them once you have Corrupted Core, or mass ban them once you reach a shop with Limitbreak by banning all such cards and rerolling until you're done.


Pouch of Greed Manipulation:

Because the Village event is far more common than a Shrine and its results are more controlled, I switched from fishing for good shrines to fishing for the Save the Villagers event.

First, you can control whether you get Commoner's Guidebook (<20 Corruption) or Pouch of Greed (>5 Corruption) by Save and Quitting upon finding a Village event, swapping to an item that increases your corruption, and entering it. And yes, it's possible for it to show both options depending on your corruption.

Second, Pouch of Greed will distribute 10 levels equally across the cards that are not at maximum level, and randomly if you have more than 10 of those. Because of that, by holding onto a few maxed cards and leveling the card you want to overlevel to its max level -1, you can force it to gain 9 levels above its cap. There are also a few corollaries from this:

1) If you don't have Corrupted Core, you can buy every card with a max level of 1 without worrying.

2) But you also can't use this to overlevel those cards early on.

3) You cannot have tainted cards before you do this, as it's unrealistic to maximize them while still making good use of this tech.

4) This is only useful when leveling a card that will add enough damage to offset the HP increase from the permanent Corruption gained. You can further mitigate this by using items to force Light Spirit to show up.

I use this to level Rune of Consolidation from 4/5 to 14/5. The best Health cards have a baseline of 1 level and this needs to be done as early as possible. There are other good cards to overlevel, especially for other builds.

It's worth checking adjacent nodes because Pouch of Greed can not only show up in Chests but also in Shops, albeit at a staggering low chance.


Semi-Manual to Manual Hotswapping

This is a bit simple: You can leave a lot of levels queued up and, if at any moment, you feel like you have reached your final desired card outcome, you can go on Options, change Card Selection to Manual, and after you pick your card the game will resume until you hit the level up key again.


Drop Chance Hotswapping

Before the next card choice, be it from chests or level up, you can change your items to influence the card rate appearance.

This is especially useful if you've been running Stones, as the common and powerful Stellar and Storm Stones affect card rate. This is also useful if you can't find weapons, which seems to be a common complaint.

For Weapons: Weapons don't have tags, so removing items which affect tag drops (such as stones, or shields with +Moon drop rate, etc) will greatly increase the odds of weapons appearing, especially existing ones you want to level up.

For other cards: It is hugely advantageous for you to swap to specific tags when fishing for a specific card. For Rune of Consolidation which only has a Fire Tag, swapping to two Fiery Stones increase the odds of finding or rerolling into it considerably. It's hard to overstate how much this saves rerolls.


Emptying the Boss Artifact Pool:

Since Corrupted Core is the most important artifact in the game, especially now that it can add +2 instead of +1, it's key to reroll every artifact that is not mandatory for your build and not in the Boss pool. This adds a lot of value to Chests' reroll. The following are the artifacts shared between Bosses and Chests:

Adventurer's License
Hand of the Cheater
Commoner's Guidebook
The Destabilizer
Carved Dice
Holy Cross
Light Arrow
Luna's Cross & Sage's Leaf
Mimic Companion
Old Coin (but NOT Magnifying Crystal)
Portal Shard
Ranked Dice
Sacred Sword
Shopkeeper's Place
Stone Heart
Training Dummmy
Training Weights
Voltstrike Gauntlet

Of note, Stone Heart can only be found in Chests and Act Bosses. For a Blood Transmutation build, this alone adds more value to Chests than Shops early on.


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In conclusion, these are some tips I wanted to share with the community. Hope at least one of them was helpful for you.

[S'bass thulu]

All great tips. Having read your DPS guide before I learned a new approach here. Thanks.

I'd like to mention with gunslinger, testing it out, don't use the trainers glove... as at least when I've started with my lvl 8 glove, I don't see any other gun choices after and I only get the knight's amulet choices for weapons with gun modifiers for my pistol. Maybe I'm misunderstanding it. After starting without trainers though I got the rest of the evol pattern going with practice. Otherwise on two full runs where pistol started on lvl 8 I personally didn't see another gun option. Maybe it's mentioned here and I'm missing it. I see that talk about order/priority of course and figure it's something with that, but generally... don't start with trainers gloves to do this method. Am I wrong? Respect.

[BeefPudding]

wow a lot of mechanics that i would consider "cheesing" are mentioned in this guide, thats funny

[Fernanda]

Originally posted by S'bass thulu:

All great tips. Having read your DPS guide before I learned a new approach here. Thanks.

I'd like to mention with gunslinger, testing it out, don't use the trainers glove... as at least when I've started with my lvl 8 glove, I don't see any other gun choices after and I only get the knight's amulet choices for weapons with gun modifiers for my pistol. Maybe I'm misunderstanding it. After starting without trainers though I got the rest of the evol pattern going with practice. Otherwise on two full runs where pistol started on lvl 8 I personally didn't see another gun option. Maybe it's mentioned here and I'm missing it. I see that talk about order/priority of course and figure it's something with that, but generally... don't start with trainers gloves to do this method. Am I wrong? Respect.

Trainers Gloves are definitely useful. The next tier of Gunslinger weapons require Card Level 20, that's why you might be missing them.

[Dirian]

Fernanda, thanks for this guide. It's really well write.
I hope new players will be happy with it.

Originally posted by BeefPudding:

wow a lot of mechanics that i would consider "cheesing" are mentioned in this guide, thats funny

In RG everything is about cheesing.
There is challenges and achievements design around it.

[Fernanda]

Originally posted by BeefPudding:

wow a lot of mechanics that i would consider "cheesing" are mentioned in this guide, thats funny

A lot of things that were game-breaking cheese, like chests changing items when you save and load, or save and quitting after a shrine have been reported and fixed. Some things might change (I'm personally in favor of not being able to change your loadout mid-run), but a lot of the RNG-related bugs and cheeses have been fixed.

In any case, these were techniques that I had to use in order to get past EoV 87 and some of which to get to FSH 17, which is another beast entirely.

Originally posted by Dirian:

Fernanda, thanks for this guide. It's really well write.
I hope new players will be happy with it.

Originally posted by BeefPudding:

wow a lot of mechanics that i would consider "cheesing" are mentioned in this guide, thats funny

In RG everything is about cheesing.
There is challenges and achievements design around it.

Thank you for your kind words.

[S'bass thulu]

I also had weapon specialist on. That was probably it. Like you said... check the modifiers. Derp. Cheers.

edit: actually it was my weapon limit.

[Radiowavehero]

Crazy , I didn't know half of this stuff was even possible , very cool.

[Fernanda]

Completed EoV 111 last night. Was a very tough run: No corrupted core until Zone 3, no Pouch of Greed, no Leaping Boots until Zone 4, no Stone Heart until Zone 4 either. Had to +2 instead of +3ing the relevant cards.

https://youtu.be/rZ3-6z1PEuM

To add content: A strategy I used to beat Necromancer (which is effectively the final boss in the run, as the last stage requires a Phoenix Totem since Lava Titan is effectively impossible) was to drop all Tag-influencing items to find a Crit Altar (their chance of spawning is based on your tag %, so finding a Skaldi statuette from the Sculptor event is ideal), then sit on the Crit Altar to phase Necromancer by killing the minions next to him and praying they hit him with the Rune of Necromancy.