Character Mastery Challenges

[NoahL54]

Genuinely curious how people feel about these, I barely managed to scrape my way through the run for Commando but breezed through as Rex. What about you guys? Were the runs hard or easy? What characters have you done the challenge for?

[msarge]

I really enjoyed the new Challenges, for the most part.

I've unlocked almost all of them, but I'm still missing a few:

Artificer: Massacre: I've been playing her a lot lately and I'm pretty surprised I haven't gotten a 20 enemy multikill, but I don't really care about the unlock.

Mercenary: Ethereal. Only attempted a few times, but I just always take damage... One day.

Anything related to Rex, I am just bad at Rex

The Huntress unlocks were a huge pain. Taking no damage on Rally Point Delta was so hard, but was super intense when I finally did it. Finding a Crowbar printer to print 12 Crowbars for her other unlock was really annoying because it was 100% based on chance.

Otherwise I thought they were all really fun and gave me a some nice little goals and some reasons to pick up some other characters for a change.

[Ittrix]

I generally was a monsooner before the mastery runs came out, but I love that it encourages me to really try out some other characters. That and the health regen nerfs (intended or not) made it a bit more challenging.
It could be being forced to use them, or it could be some newer burst damage skills, but I found a new respect for quite a handful of characters this patch.

Unlike the skills, the skins are just frosting on top. I don't need them and they don't effect my game much (honestly they aren't much to see- Commando, MUL-T, and Mercenary's skins I actively dislike, and Loader's skin is so minor I can't say I care one way or another), so any frustration is confined to losing, not to not getting stuff I want.

A lot of the skills are unnecessarily hard or long, I find. I generally like difficult content, but players should be going to it because they want to, not because a play style changer is locked behind it.
Commando's 20 stage run without lunar items, for instance. Was it hard? No, I did it in an hour or two on drizzle. Was it boring for me? Yes.
Mercenary Ethereal challenge? ... Yeah. That's just a mean one for a skill unlock. I did it and enjoyed it because it was a fun challenge, but if I was new player who just wanted the skill? Yikes.
But hey, this is coming from the mindset of someone who has already played awhile and got the patch after. Maybe the longer ones'll thrill new players who aren't used to the game yet.

Edit: I generally find the runs challenging but doable. With the right strategy, a good understanding of my skills, and a little bit of time and luck I can usually squeeze by. I've done the mastery runs for everyone but Loader. Obviously for certain characters I struggled more, but there was definitely a trend of completing them in less attempts the more characters I ran them on.
Double Edit: Did Loader now too. She moves around so fast I had to approach it a bit differently.

[Percher]

I generally don't really like the character challenges because they're very bipolar in difficulty.

Merc's alt R not only requires you to avoid every single source of chip damage flawlessly three maps in a row, but also asks you to not accidentally take invisible damage. (Still salty about that.)

On the opposite side of the spectrum is Artificer's airborne assault. All I had to do with Artificer was let enemies spawn for a while in a sloped area before slowly hovering downhill.

They don't feel like challenges. They feel like chores.

[Talezteller]

I second that there are wild fluctuations in difficulty between different challenges.

I have yet to unlock Artificer's ice spear, loader and commando mastery, and everything to do with Rex because I cannot "get" that character at all.

All in all I have a bit of a problem with mastery challenges.
You can be having the greatest of runs, with a million damage items, but by level 4 one Elite jellyfish, whose sound is completely covered up by the madness going on around you, coming at you from your blind spot, and bam, you're gone. One-shot protection means nothing when fire instantly applies a second damage tick.

I feel like pretty much the only way to win a monsoon challenge is to cheese stacks of lunar items, Glass + Corpsebloom + Transcendence + Gesture

[Percher]

Originally posted by Talezteller:

bep

Play fast and don't full clear stages. Three items per stage, including boss rewards, is good.