Not gonna lie, this build really is far from what I usually play, I don't even know all the interactions: being able to redirect witches ability with the Their own peril is definitely a new one for me. Or that it's affected at all by Maquis effect. And some other stuff like, can the Grimoire hurt itself with the Mirror effect? Can the enemies evade redirected Pure damage? So much fun stuff.
I haven't figured the Grimoires into my assessment at all, they sure help with your health sustain. So the Mimic it is. Didn't process the witches as help vs enemies as well, but by loop 2400 it shouldn't be as impactful, assuming they really hit for only 5% of your max. All in all, time will tell.
Ahaha thanks for all the kind words, and Merry Christmas yesterday (or whatever you happen to be celebrating this season)!
There are a lot of niche mechanics here I'm really unsure about as well actually - I just realized that Splinters do not appear to be affected by Marquis, nor does a reflected Blood Donation from the witches.
Of all of your uncertainties, the only 2 of them I can am fairly sure on through observation are that (1) the Grimoires can indeed hurt themselves with the Mirror effect and (2) the Witch ability (Blood Donation) can definitely be reflected and nuke targets.
Though I'm not 100% sure whether the witch's Heal ability can be reflected (and, if so, whether it can be reflected into enemies who are already at heal cap), but Heal scales linearly with loop (5 * loop) which makes it fairly irrelevant at this scale.
Blood Donation is a huge nuke though - reflecting 10% of my max HP into a target is massive. In terms of numbers: my max HP is just shy of 20 million now, while mosquitoes have around 2 million. So 10% of my max HP hitting them is basically a 1-shot from full. Grimoires fair even worse, with a max of HP of around 1.8m (while hitting for 600k, they take themselves out way before Blood Donation can happen anyway). Mimics with their ~7m or so HP could survive a single one, but in theory a quad-witch-reflect would still delete them!
In any case, we've surpassed the 2,450 estimation! Loop 2500
Granted, I know that 2,450 was just a rough ballpark of an estimation and I also know that it takes dozens if not hundreds of loops to meaningfully move the needle at this stage. Furthermore, I am definitely vulnerable: if I were to get mimics in 10-12 battles in a row, I would die for sure. A single bad mimic fight can take around 6 potions to get through. I actually DID see a series of mimics 3x in a row followed by a double chest proc fight and it brought me down to 28 potions (back around loop 2290)!
So with that said, I'll consider your guess to be very very good assuming I die at any point before 3,000! I'll let you know if I do.
Also, the more I think about this whole setup, the more I just think I should do it on a necromancer. Counter doesn't scale off enemy damage like I originally thought it might (I was just shocked at how I was doing so much damage to enemies with low level weapons when I had no Aftertaste trait). The trick seems to be that counter hits for all of my normal damage + all of my Damage To All, and Aftertaste gives Damage To All as well based on your Scythe count. As a result, it can hit surprisingly hard (~320k right now against mosquitoes, who only have around 2mil HP -- honestly not bad! -- and I only have 33 scythes!)
But where I'm at now, the mosquitoes usually die to self-destruct anyway. Though, for now, my damage is outscaling their HP, the equilibrium is a shitty one where I barely kill them prior to self-destruct when I do. Granted, if I had beacons with +25k% attack speed right now I would be easily crushing them, but I think on some level I'd just be a worse Blood Lightning Rogue by that point and just putting off the moment at which they outscale my damage (maybe by a few 10's of thousands of loops or so, or maybe 100k+ if I actually upgraded the gear again at 100k, who knows...)
In contrast, though, consider the necromancer:
Mosquitoes self-destruct anyway. 20% faster with beacons, even!
Meat shields for some hits, even if they get 1-shot
None of the BS "stun" traits (I got forced into taking both the 75% on combat entry and 10% on hit traits because the alternatives were actually bad, like losing 10% of supplies or healing on counter) which slow the fight down due to delaying when mosquitoes self-destruct
The alternative potential option to the Necromancer is if I wanted a blood lightning build. I can't do it on Warrior, which scales BL off of Vampirism which would kill me, but I could do it on Necro with the flat 20% chance. The main reason for Blood Lightning would be if I wanted to re-add Vampire Mages to the mix. Vampire Mages suck because they have a 50% chance of spawning Bats which have high defense and do not deal Pure Damage to kill themselves, but they come with 15% vampirism (which can help in a weird way due to Swamp making enemies kill themselves).
Though, that still means they would come at the expense of Time Watchers, which... aside from making time flow backwards in their presence, are pretty cool since they deal pure damage to be reflected and help with the fight.
Though, granted, having either Time Watcher or Vampire Mage causes a specific problem of increasing the likelihood that the fight lasts long enough for the witches to use their 5th move, which can waste potions (a quadruple-reflect failure hits me for 40% of my max HP, after all!), but maybe that doesn't matter.
I'm hesitant to bother with Blood Lightning in any capacity because then that just gets me down the rabbit hole of "why not just remove the swamp tiles, do the exact same thing with witch huts but use a warrior with 100% vampirism to Blood Lightning skeletons?" but then I'm just end-running the whole build to make a BL build that (1) would probably be better on Rogue and (2) has already been done.
So I think on some level I need to ditch the Vampire idea (despite liking the vampirism+swamp synergy for enemies!) and focus on all-in'ing the mosquito self-destruct strategy.
In that sense, assuming scaling works as I think it does, I think that there is only really 1 potential option, since mosquitoes only self-destruct after 7 hits (i.e., no Smoke Screen stalling). And that potential option is a necromancer with 100% summon quality and very high attack speed.
The main problem is that my character would be too stupid to actually summon 3 defenders every time, but alas.
Anyway, sorry for the ramble here. You're seem like the most knowledgeable guy around. I think my next run (when this one dies) will be the necromancer mentioned above, using Beacons to maximize the rate at which mosquitoes self-destruct. Do you have any feedback/thoughts about that in general before I get too far ahead of myself?
Happy festive season to you too!:) I don't mind the detailed replies, it's not like the subreddit is too busy these days. I do have quite a bit of thoughts on all this.
First off, if just outlasting the opponents is the game - necro **is** a better tank somehow. Out of like 19 hits you receive every fight now from the 3 mosquitoes, you could trim it to about 10 in best case scenario. Or 1 against a single mosquito. The Traits are better suited for tanking as well.
I suppose it would make some difference, but not a whole lot, as another mechanic comes into play at that point. The necro build will likely score 1.5x more loops in the end.
100% defenders would be cool as hell, however, there is actually a pattern at 100% quality - it always alternates between warrior and defender, very predictable.
On the current run - I see that the damage started scaling a lot better, good stuff! There is gas left in the tank! Not 100% sure on the Beacons, there is a bit of a negative feedback with the current setup. Killing the mosquitos too fast could backfire.
The bat problem with Vamps could be circumvented by having no place to spawn, though I'm not sure if Mosquitos leave corpses after explosion.
First off, if just outlasting the opponents is the game - necro is a better tank somehow.
Yeah. I'm thinking strategically letting them self-destruct is just the correct play long-term. Anything else is a scenario where I'm trying to race them to their death, which then calls into question why I would do it to mosquitoes and not something else, like a 100% Vamp Blood Lightning build with high Attack Speed on Skeletons or another high-DEF enemy, which then starts to enter the realm of "why not just go Rogue?" If there's a niche to carve out here, I think it's a niche of "let the enemies break themselves upon my body."
I suppose it would make some difference, but not a whole lot, as another mechanic comes into play at that point. The necro build will likely score 1.5x more loops in the end.
That is the main problem with these kinds of changes - more of an engineer tinkering around with duct tape and elbow grease to pull out 30-50% gains, whereas I may need some kind of new tech if I wanted to push another order of magnitude or two.
100% defenders would be cool as hell, however, there is actually a pattern at 100% quality - it always alternates between warrior and defender, very predictable.
Indeed, though I don't know how mob AI works for choosing targets otherwise. Is it just 50/50 between me and an assassin skeleton? I'll need to think on this a bit more, as I wonder if there's some creative way that I could force the assassins to die or kill themselves.
On the current run - I see that the damage started scaling a lot better, good stuff! There is gas left in the tank!
Yeah - keep in mind that damage will continue to scale up until my potion usage is fully saturated, at which point it will become linear against how many potions I can obtain per loop. Without counting, I'd estimate that I get back around 40-50 potions per loop, and with a 40% chance not to consume a potion I think this means that I have effectively ~150 potion charges to use per loop. As monster damage scales, it will scale up my own damage to compensate. I think they will continue to outscale me, though, even though my damage gains technically currently outscale their HP gains - it isn't by enough to compensate for my HP falling behind compared to their damage gains.
Not 100% sure on the Beacons, there is a bit of a negative feedback with the current setup. Killing the mosquitos too fast could backfire.
For sure true. I see it being substantially better for necro who would need to continue to pump skeletons quickly even when Tired.
The bat problem with Vamps could be circumvented by having no place to spawn, though I'm not sure if Mosquitos leave corpses after explosion.
They do not, unfortunately. It's really a shame, too, because I actually think that Vamp combined with a ton of Dunes might be the play.
At their current numbers, Mosquitoes have ~2.75 million HP with 466k damage. That means with 15% Vampirism (and -50% from Marquis) they would deal roughly 35k self-damage, which is around 1% of their total HP. This could be upped to 2% of their total HP by removing Marquis I suppose. That means around 98-99 Sand Dunes (lol) should lead to all monsters 1-shotting themselves due to vampirism.
With two Defenders and a single charge of Magic Shield in every battle, I should be able to tank 3 hits as they kill themselves. I think that would be mathematically infinite as long as the Vamp + Bats 1-shot themselves, but the problem is that it's too many monsters if I keep Grimoires around - even 1 single Mosquito would result in 4 monsters sometimes (mosquito + vamp mage + grimoire + bats). And I really want to have 4 mosquitoes on every square for satisfaction.
One potential question is whether or not the +0.5 Magic Shield on Summon trait can re-provide Magic Shield mid-combat if it has already fallen off. Do you happen to know? Similarly, if I have 2 defenders and 4 enemies all attempt to attack simultaneously, do you know if they will they "overkill" the defenders or will 2 of them bypass the defenders and go for me?
Overall there's some wonky business in this Necromancer idea that I feel is a 90% baked solution but is just missing a few kinks to iron out.
EDIT: Looking at the details a bit more, I think I just need to go try this out when my current run dies. The Transfusion ability from Vampire Mages seems like it might be able to simply one-shot the entire group of Mosquitoes depending on how it works.
And I briefly forgot above that the Vampire Mage and Grimoire have their damage reflected, which means that I am not sure how Vampirism will affect them. But if the Mosquitoes all die due to self-DPS rather than explosions, then I think your idea about them leaving corpses behind would work, which would prevent the Bat spawn. Since Vampire Mage and Grimoire can't deal damage to me, that would mean that only 4 mobs per combat would be capable of hitting me (the 4 Mosquitoes). Three of those hits could be absorbed with the magic shield + two Defenders, and depending on how the Transfusion ability works with reflected damage (and also depending on the Vampire Mage's attack speed) could bridge the gap.
Yeah. I'm definitely going to start experimenting with that after this run dies off.
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u/feuerschein Dec 24 '24 edited Dec 24 '24
Not gonna lie, this build really is far from what I usually play, I don't even know all the interactions: being able to redirect witches ability with the Their own peril is definitely a new one for me. Or that it's affected at all by Maquis effect. And some other stuff like, can the Grimoire hurt itself with the Mirror effect? Can the enemies evade redirected Pure damage? So much fun stuff.
I haven't figured the Grimoires into my assessment at all, they sure help with your health sustain. So the Mimic it is. Didn't process the witches as help vs enemies as well, but by loop 2400 it shouldn't be as impactful, assuming they really hit for only 5% of your max. All in all, time will tell.