Best perks?

[ovni.demon]

What are the best perks?
I suppose punch through+bounce are in it, but what for the rest?

[Donoghu]

It all depends on what you have unlocked (cards) and have researched and what Tier/Rank your perks are at.

For example, in my case, my soldier has quite a lower DPS than my turret and drone (around 150x less DPS) while in hover mode, so I usually keep my soldier with team support perks such as Teamwork and Gold.

The Teamwork perk gives less overall DPS than any other perks, but gives it to everyone in the team, meaning that while it's less for the one who have it equipped, it's close to 0.75x the DPS of an additional perk for others.

The Gold gives +% gold and is self-explanatory. It allows early unlocks and a bit more leeway between the time you have to check on and unlock manually the perks.

Since my soldier deals less damage unless I highly focus on its DPS which, in the best case, makes it only "as strong" as the turret and drone, I leave him with support perks that boost said drone and turret. For example, with perk stacking research just at 1/3, having 2x Teamwork (Tier 2 Rare) gives + 2.8x damages to both Turret and Drone (and 2.6x to soldier while at it) and 2x Gold gives (Tier 2 Rare) +3.5x Gold.

At researches for Automatic Fire + Dual Wield at least at 3/9, I can leave them constantly active with the Plasma Rifle which recharge faster than it is used. If you have higher rank for those 2 researches, you might be able to use the Pulse Pistol, but its cost in energy is slightly too high for even 4/9 (you end up with no charge in AF and DW for about 15-20 secs). Fire Rate doesn't recharge the abilities faster so it's useless unless you use pistol as you end up wasting 1-3 shots during the 0.75 sec it takes for bullets to hit the targets.

As for my Drone, I use Fire Rate + Multi-Shot + Fire Rate + Gold with pulse pistol equipped. For the rare times where the DPS gets too close to the mobs' life, I switch it for Plasma Rifle while in the 0-1/4 perks active.

For the Turret, it's Multi-Shot + Fire Rate + Fire Rate + Gold with pulse pistol.

Fire Rate x2 + Multi-Shot has the highest DPS with both the drone and Turret.

At Tier 2 Rare, each Fire Rate gives 2.4x fire rate which means 2.4x more DPS (if bullets hits) and also gives +2.7x DPS. This is where the Pulse Pistol comes in as its "hit on shot" means there's never any shot wasted and instantly hit. Since a regular turret and drone fire rate with Pulse Pistol is 1/sec, 2x Fire Rates makes it 4.8x shots per sec.

1x Multi-Shot boost the DPS output by 8x spread in a pattern. With the right pattern and spread, it's a killing wave that can clear out a room in 1-3 shots. I use, for both my turret and drone, "Spread" mode. Drone has 65 angle and turret has 75 angle. This is because the drone is always away from the enemy spawn zone so more concentrated fire is better (10 degrees less) while the turret is almost always close by (wider spread = more mobs hit) Together, it cover a wide and big area from 2 different crossing angles. The time to clear any wave is 0.5 to 3 secs depending on enemies spawn positions (including the spawning time). Most of the time is between 1 and 2 secs.

When the gold gain is too low, replacing gold for Punch Through is a viable alternative for the Turret and Drone. (Not for the soldier in my case due to its far lower DPS regardless.) It drops the time to kill a wave by around 0.25-1 secs.

Bounce is semi-useless for most of the cases with the turret unless you use a Cone or Circle Spread perk. As the game's "cube-ish" nature makes the angle bad for reflected shots. You might get a lucky shot 1 out of 4 shots if you use slow projectiles as the enemies moves, but considering that instant hit is faster, it comes at a cost of time. The turret position is always not efficient with the mobs's spawn position. (It's a bit less bad with the Drone.)

This is why, whenever possible, I focus my card as (K) Kings, + (8) Pulse Pistol, + (6) Drone DPS or (7) Turret DPS, (3) + Gold, (4) + All DPS, etc. in that order.

[ovni.demon]

Just to point out: Multishot lower the DPS, in general; the damage is divided between all the bullet. It's great to destroy wave but can be a bad idea near the end of the run.

[Donoghu]

Originally posted by ovni.demon:

Just to point out: Multishot lower the DPS, in general; the damage is divided between all the bullet. It's great to destroy wave but can be a bad idea near the end of the run.

Kinda strange considering the perk's description that only appears when you unlock the perk precisely state that each projectile deal the same damage as normal shots. I tried to look if that description appears anywhere else, but it seems that it's only appearing on screen when you first unlock it from one of the early zones.

I know a dev did mention it as being divided between projectiles around 3 years ago (in 2018) as I tried looking around, but it might have been changed since then considering it seems the perk was modified a LOT over the years. But since the search function through the patch notes really hates using the minus "-" symbol (in "Multi-Shot"), looking up for the perk in said notes return 0 results even though its clearly in some of them.

Even when I was starting and had barely the same DPC as the enemies HP, my shot with Multi-Shot was still killing anything in 1 shot. In fact, I was able to kill some "late run" bosses in 1 shot by equipping it with a small angle (all projectile hit it) while it was taking at least 2 shots with the Slow Projectile (best +DPC) in its stead.

Even while I'm typing this, I got close to my "run end" (where my DPC is too close to the enemy HP with time wave zone) and while my turret DPC was around 1/20 of the enemies, I counted 24 shots / kill with multishot super wide spread.

I'm not writing that Multi-Shot doesn't divide the damages, but it's clear that it doesn't divide it by the number of shots anymore. After all, at Tier 2 Rare, it divide by 8 and that would make an huge visible difference when dealing with mobs with the same amount of HP as the DPC.

=EDIT=
Funny enough, while I was close to the end of my run, I just got 3 cards and one of those was the 4th King I was missing... Now I'm back in the run.

[Whisper]

A good mid-starter game combo is multishot-slow-tracking-punchthrough. If you equip it with the plasma rifle the shots will be recycled 2 or 3 times, and don't usually crash into the ground because of the slowdown perk. It truly makes the most of the ammo. (If you are in an open space you can replace slowdown with bounce to waste none.)