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[heydude6]

I thought the consensus was that floor 5 was a dps check, and a test of whether you figured out how to build a wand that could kill the beefy enemies there. You should have found more than enough spells to do the task by that point, even if they were consumable ones.

That's another tip I wanted to share. Don't be afraid to use your consumable spells. If you see a beefy enemy, don't be afraid to shoot a magic missile or firebolt at it. Usually you get enough uses to find the exit before you run out.

[Toady One]

(removed some posts that were developing into a fight.  please don't go after each other in here.)

[Damiac]

So uh... Anyway...

I've played a lot more, and even got a legit win. Had a nice rapid fire wand with concentrated spells perk, that set me for damage. Freeze shot makes the game 75 percent easier, kinda op really...

Won with 3 orbs, mountain, pyramid, and lava lake shrine


Now, I have a bit of a complaint here. Whenever I start a new game, I must decide "do I value 15 minutes of my time or +50 health for my character more?"
You can get the mountain orb with almost any start, same with pyramid. Lava lake one isn't so bad but it's still a short hike.

I wish I didn't have the option to trade tedium for more hp, from an "optimal play" point of view I'm crazy not to. From a "I play games for fun" point of view I'm crazy to do it.

But if I don't do it, then lose a run where that 50 hp could have made the difference, did I waste all that time?

Players like me will optimise all the fun out of a game given the chance, so hopefully they make that situation better somehow.

[forsaken1111]

I usually avoid getting any orbs, unless I am going for some specific orb-related run, as they just make the boss harder.

[heydude6]

The place I die most often is level 2. I keep don't leave that place until I'm happy with my wands, so I often venture into the fungal caverns. Collecting the orbs increases my chances of getting out of there. If I can make it to level 3, I usually end up becoming a god that only ends up killing himself due to stupidity (Last time this happened, I accidentally shot a teleport bolt into the level 1 lava lake).

Now that you've won though, you can now start downloading mods without worrying about them messing with your achievements. I'm sure someone has made a mod that makes you start with those 3 orbs automatically so you can kiss that tedium goodbye. I do wish the devs did something about the tedium themselves though. I mean the game already has meta-progression with the unlocking of spells with orbs, so would it really kill them to spawn a fast-travel portal to the pyramid on top of the mountain temple once you collected both orbs for the first time?

[Fowler]

I usually avoid getting any orbs, unless I am going for some specific orb-related run, as they just make the boss harder.

In what cases, if not a secret? The game itself is still a beginner

[Damiac]

I actually looked for a mod that starts you with those orbs, no luck, at least on steam workshop.

There are mods to start with extra health, which is almost the same thing...

Anyway, I started a new run, on level 1 I found a wand with 4 or 5 chainsaws. Had a nice rapid fire sparkbolt for level 2, found a mess of luminous drills and a wand with autocast ping pong shot.

I picked up the edit wands anywhere perk, and had a nice long range lightsaber hose.

On level 3 I found 2 reduce mana, a rapid shot, and another ping pong shot.

Now I have a full auto laser hose that goes across the screen.

I destroy much of the gold enemies drop, although only a crumb needs to exist to get the nugget.

So I have a good digging wand, 350 hp or so, ambrosia, and teleport bolt.  think I mgoing to head over to a parallel world and get some more perks and health.

I have no healing spells,  but I do have a refill waiting at the bottom of the jungle.

Any advice? I haven't ventured far off the main path yet, so I'm not sure what to look out for.

[forsaken1111]

I usually avoid getting any orbs, unless I am going for some specific orb-related run, as they just make the boss harder.

In what cases, if not a secret? The game itself is still a beginner

There are things that happen in certain circumstances with specific numbers of orbs collected, I won't get into spoilers here.

[Damiac]

I usually avoid getting any orbs, unless I am going for some specific orb-related run, as they just make the boss harder.

Yeah there's a trade off, but the boss is still pretty darn easy with 3 orbs. 75  extra health at the start of the coal mines is almost double your normal health for the low price of 20 minutes of your time.
The boss gets 8x health, but in my experience that's still less than a second of dps. His health with 0 orbs is shockingly low.

[heydude6]

The 75 extra health doesn't kick in until you reach the first holy mountain. The heart containers are empty. It's up to you to fill them up. That's why I was hoping for a mod that spawned you with the orbs rather than a mod that simply gave you extra health, cause starting with an extra 75 health gives you an unfair advantage in the mines.

I'm sure there are some debug tools that simply allow you to spawn orbs.

[Frumple]

The cheat ui thing lets you fiddle with a fair amount, iirc, yeah.

[Damiac]

The 75 extra health doesn't kick in until you reach the first holy mountain. The heart containers are empty. It's up to you to fill them up. That's why I was hoping for a mod that spawned you with the orbs rather than a mod that simply gave you extra health, cause starting with an extra 75 health gives you an unfair advantage in the mines.

I'm sure there are some debug tools that simply allow you to spawn orbs.

This is true, I did see a mod that just spawns 3 +50HP hearts at the start of the game, so you'd still have to fill them, but your orb count wouldn't go up, and you could still collect the orbs. It's pretty close, admittedly.

 So I used my laser hose to dig around, and fought the alchemist boss.  I cheesed the hell out of him by drilling up from underneath and shooting him through the little slots I dug.  It seems his reflective shield doesn't keep the trigger part of the spell, so even when one or two came back at me, I only took 8 damage instead of a couple hundred.  Still, I had more success with a triggered lightning bolt than my machine gun wand.  Got the alpha spell from him, so I now have unlimited uses of any spell, as alpha will happily copy a spell with 0 charges and cast it for 30 mana.  Still no healing spells found.

Kept going west until I hit the border wall.  My laser hose made short work of the wall, although it would have been faster to use black holes. I wasn't used to infinite black holes yet.  A quick spritz with ambrosia and several teleports later, I was on the other side with full health.  I really expected it to be harder somehow.  I highly recommend heading to the parallel worlds the moment you assemble a toolkit. Ambrosia, digging method, and teleport are the safe way. Teleport is good to have anyway because otherwise it's a long hike.  Just pouring ambrosia at my feet took about 7% of the bottle to stain me, and if you dug a little pit you could probably do it with less. Either way, a bottle of ambrosia will go far if you use it that way.

I used my ambrosia to collect several corrupted orbs. +50HP each, ambrosia blocks the crazy poison it gives you. Then I just dove down the mountain, got a +50% health perk, now I've got 1100 health.   Collected a nice storage wand with 26 slots, I'm so glad I took the tinker anywhere perk.  I got oil blood, finally got fire immunity.  Found two freezing charges, although I'm not sure it's worth using anymore, enemies who can be frozen tend to die real quick anyway, and those piles of snow everywhere get annoying...

Accidentally went through the portal at the bottom of west vaults, oh well, might as well finish the main dungeon and kill the boss before I collect any more orbs. I've got 11 now, much more than I meant to fight the boss with. 

It was time to end it for the night, but I was curious so I made a backup and tried the boss with the wands I had on hand.  It was slowgoing, but if I could bring my machine gun wand to bear his health dropped at an OK rate.  I realized I should have drilled a loop to kite the boss through, it sucks getting cornered by him and having to run past, took a good amount of damage that way. I had him down to about 3/5 health when he hit me with a polymorph orb at point blank range and my own machinegun did the rest.  I guess saving grace and extra life do nothing when polymorphed? Kind of stupid...

So... clearly going to have to build a more damaging wand.  The boss's shots go through the wall, so I couldn't cheese him like I did to the alchemist (although maybe his polymorph shots would still get blocked?).  With 1100 health I could afford to take a lot of hits, but I couldn't just tank his shots, I'd go down first.  I have a single heavy shot which is attached to the payload on my spitter bolt with trigger machinegun, so I'm doing around 60 damage per frame, for 3600 DPS. That's been more than enough elsewhere, but clearly I need to step it up.

I suppose a fast path to more DPS would be to swap out the spitter orb payload for a triple shot, tripling the heavy shot damage. However if I do that I won't be able to fire continuously, although that's probably fine.  What I really need is a fast wand with a lot of slots. So I should probably try out the tower, and maybe I'll pick up some good spells.

[Kagus]

Are homing mists still a thing? Or did that get patched out? I think that's how I got my first overkill on the main boss, and that was with a few orbs under my belt. He died, then my framerate died. I ended up taking damage from that fight, but only because there was so much stuff happening that the game couldn't process my move commands and I stood in lava mist for a while before getting to safety.

[Damiac]

I tried the boss fight again with a small modification, I swapped the two spells my spitter bolt casts on trigger to chainsaws. 

This may have upped my dps a little but it was still a slog.

I'm not sure why, but this time the boss chased me back to the laboratory/temple, then just hung out there shooting at me from max range.  Can he not destroy brickwork?  That made the fight just a matter of patience. Carved a little niche to jam myself into so i could keep my wand on the boss despite the recoil. That made his life bar drop a lot faster. All he could do is shoot his bullet hell bullets around (these also seemed not to go through the brickwork, which is different from what I saw the first time) and occasionally shoot his slow polymorph orbs, which are easy to dodge when you're not frantically dodging a bunch of other stuff at the same time.

11 orb boss had 151000 hp, while I seemed to manage about 1.5k dps when I could keep him in my crosshairs.  I know he has big damage reduction against most things, not sure if chainsaws are included in that. 

After that I went to the tower. Due to foolishness around cursed rock I was down to 42 health when I reached the top. Grabbed the wand of swiftness and GTFO'd. 

The wand of swiftness was a decent upgrade, mostly due to additional slots over my old wand.  I was able to add more to my triggered shot, so now it shoots 5 projectiles with heavy shot and damage + applied. On the statues I get around 10000 dps, but that's with most of the triggered spells bouncing off, so I suspect my true dps is much higher.

Picked up the homing perk, not sure if that was a great move.  Nice for some stuff but having my black holes chase after enemies instead of digging where I want can suck.  Oh well, the luminous drill doesn't curve much so I still have that if I need to dig around enemies, although I'm beginning to wonder if i've outgrown my laser hose. It is nice for killing enemies on the other side of obstacles, but it makes a mess of the level and destroys much of the gold. 

I visited a couple more parallel worlds after that, just diving down for perks.  Once you can do that the game is well and truly broken.  I have over 5k hps, 2x faster movement, 3x critical +, immunity to electricity, fire, and explosions, perk lottery and extra perk so I get multiples sometimes, at this point I'm just winning more. If I do another parallel world odds are I'll come out with 15000 hp or so, given the frequency of HP+ perks i've been seeing.  I mostly just ignore enemy fire at this point.

Oh, and I found healing bolt so I've got infinite healing, albeit rather slow.  I don't bother with ambrosia for the cursed rock, I can just tank the 500 damage or so from walking across and fill it up at the first temple.

It's funny how absurdly powerful you can end up and I know I'm barely scratching the surface with my dps.  I'm not exactly sure what I am building toward at this point though...

I guess I should take on the various bonus bosses, and just focus on unlocking everything since I can't go NG+

Unfortunately, I have collected 14 orbs, not realizing more than 11 locks you out of ng+. 

[Aoi]

Aren't chainsaws actually pretty low in damage, despite how they look?

My best damage dealer ever (sort of) was on a quadfire laserhose... with always-cast acid trail. I grabbed the perk at the final Holy Temple, looked at the spell it gave me... paused, shrugged, and fired it straight down into the boss. It pretty much vaporized, and my save file corrupted itself when it crashed.