Rush early game or farm?

[north]

What's the best strat to get set up well for a good long run? I've read opinions that say it's best to bumrush the 4th level ASAP and as you make that in good time (hard/very hard) you are then p much set as long as your item luck isn't terrible.............. however,, there is also the argument for farming hardcore on every map so you're fully tooled up because the chance of picking up something wicked sick early on can change the entire run

[Laiziras]

Id say farm, i dont really see whats the point of rushing

[crowman]

20 minutes for stage 4 seems to be the sweet spot for moonsoon.

[Thqwib]

Timer difficulty doesn't even do anything noticeable. Hopoo should fix that, but for now I say go for items.

[robruckus65]

Items are far more important than rushing through. MOst of the time if you jsut rush you end up underpowered and cant kill anyhting once the difficulty starts to ramp up.

[Necko]

I judge each game by the first stage.

4 to 6 minutes is decent. 7 to 8 minutes is okay if you get good items and hit a shrine of the mountain. If I go over 6 minutes, I rush the next stage.

This is more or less my strategy and it works out pretty well. It's all highly variable depending on gear and zone, and a bit of how I feel like playing.

[Aegix Drakan]

I always farm the whole map. I'm usually at 25 minutes by the time I hit the snow level.

It's just what feels the most fun.

[north]

Everyone who says farm is better over speeding through........ do you loop many times or die when it gets spicy?

[Not Axel]

soft rush until fire level, then farm for gold chests, repeat on each loop. this will allow to get ,more rare items.

[Little Princess Neko Tina]

It depends on your play style I suppose. Me personally I kind of do a mix.

A good strategy is to loot a fair bit of the items, and then fight the boss. And then by time you've defeated the boss you will have enough coins to open the last few chests and you save a little bit of time.

[Cacomistle]

It depends a little bit on character, and on what you're trying to do. Commando for example really needs items to be good, so you'll end up weak if you try to rush too hard. Artificer can make it through a lot of levels without really good items, but she needs op combos to work in the really late game cause she can't just do it with attack speed and procs like everyone else.

The ideal is to get exactly enough money to pick up every chest on the map. But if you've gotta go across the entire map with no move speed, or kill enemies for 5 minutes to get that chance shrine proc, it may not be worth it. I usually go for enough money to get every chest and go for 1-2 procs on each shrine of chance.

If you're trying to get some sort of invulnerable build I think farming is pretty much always better. Because difficulty increases more from stage than from time. If you arrive at stage X 10 minutes later with 10 more items, its only gonna be like 3 levels harder which might be a 10 percent increase in enemy strength or so late game. But items scale synergize (and some even with themselves), so you'll probably be stronger than that increase. You can get actually cubic increases in strength combining attack speed and sticky bombs.

If you're just trying to get a high average level though, going really slow and trying to farm too hard could put you behind the level curve early on. It seems like difficulty increases are not affected by time, but are affected by stage. Late game an extra 2 minutes is almost no difference, but early game that could be like a 30 percent increase in their strength.

[Ham]

the name of the game is looting the whole map efficiently.

When you spawn you are looking for combat or pain shrines or money pods in the immediate area.

if you find an area with many boxes to open but no gold, you stay and farm gold until you have opened the boxes. (otherwise you will need to come back doubling travel time)

Never stand around and fight if you have gold to open boxes, train them all to next loot area. If you open all those and still have gold keep going until you find a box and need gold to open it.

if you find the telleporter early plan a route around the map to full clear, and end at the telleporter

Chance shrines are great if you have gold, but its usually better to open boxes before chance shrines, sometimes is ok to leave them unfinished if they arent paying out and cost alot for next click. If they are close to telleporter you can leave them until after telleporter event.

[Cacomistle]

Originally posted by Ham:

the name of the game is looting the whole map efficiently.

When you spawn you are looking for combat or pain shrines or money pods in the immediate area.

if you find an area with many boxes to open but no gold, you stay and farm gold until you have opened the boxes. (otherwise you will need to come back doubling travel time)

Never stand around and fight if you have gold to open boxes, train them all to next loot area. If you open all those and still have gold keep going until you find a box and need gold to open it.

if you find the telleporter early plan a route around the map to full clear, and end at the telleporter

Chance shrines are great if you have gold, but its usually better to open boxes before chance shrines, sometimes is ok to leave them unfinished if they arent paying out and cost alot for next click. If they are close to telleporter you can leave them until after telleporter event.

You don't want to end at the teleporter. You get gold from fighting at the teleporter. So what you want to do is plan a route ending at the teleporter with the closest chests to the teleporter remaining.

Basically the ideal scenario would be if theres a group of say 3 a short distance from the teleporter. You would path out all the rest of the chests, ending at the teleporter. The path matters a bit but not a ton, cause usually money is the bottleneck rather than arriving at chests, so your path just needs to make sure you can spend your money fast enough to open all the chests. Then you do the teleporter fight. If it hits 90 percent and you don't have money for the few remaining chests, you walk outside and wait for more enemies. Then after the teleporter charges, you spend 20 seconds picking up the few remaining chests and leave.

If you pick up all the chests before activating the teleporter, you are wasting 90 seconds of combat. In fact, probably more because it seems like more enemies spawn during the teleporter event, and there will ofc always be a boss. So you'll need to spend an extra 2 minutes or so picking up gold. Unless you leave a few remaining chests across the map from each other, the time to pick those chests up will be less than the time spent getting money.

[Tanya]

Go for items, of course dont be in the same level for about 10 mins.

[Creamy]

Originally posted by north:

Everyone who says farm is better over speeding through........ do you loop many times or die when it gets spicy?

The timer does not matter if you're gunning for mindlessly long runs. Eventually the game reaches a point where you either kill 20 bosses at once before they even finished spawning because you have 20 will-o-wisps and sticky bombs and the entire map just explodes for 9999 damage times 100, or you get swarmed by endless bosses because no skill or survivor ability will keep up.
The only way you can achieve the former is if you have a ton of items and maybe find some good printers.

[DecisivelyNumbGaming]

Depends on difficulty, but I'd say rush teleporter and kill boss asap then loot what you can and be out of the first stage around 5 minutes. Try and do the same for the second stage. After that you can take more time but best to aim for 20-25 or sub 30 minute first loop. Don't get stuck trying to chip away at an early elite spawn, it's a waste of time unless necessary.

My reasoning is that the first two stages are easy and have too slow mob spawning to efficiently farm while keeping future level difficulty/time in check.