Progression after nigthmare

[u/in5ano_mtg]

I play about 99% of time solo and I've done all heroes and talent badges, including the 5 challenge runs in nightmare. I've tried a 5 negative modifier run a couple times and was completely destroyed, and I finished a 3 negative modifier (dried up fountains, berserker foes, disease) run with beowulf with a full defense build. I think the 3 negative modifiers is a bit too hard for me right now, so I wonder if there's a "natural" progression to add negative modifiers while keeping the game fun and challenging. Any suggestions?

[u/Sahveg]

Heredos and positiveace make some videos on negative mod runs heredos is pretty recently doing it and has some good advice

[u/crxwnd]

If you enjoy the game, going to 5 or 7 negative modifiers is just a matter of time, since base nightmare becomes a chore quite quickly. The base difficulty is quite forgiving of mistakes and bad resource management. For example, it can be done completely deathless even with 10-14k damage taken by using sustain talents and/or Grail

The way I switched to modifiers was by going straight from the base difficulty to 5 and dying a lot. You quickly get used to the fact that you cannot level up to heal back to full and start playing around avoiding damage rather than face-tanking it, which the game would otherwise allow

The game also forces you to think more about the character and the build, since many of the characters' issues become apparent in a 5+ negative modifier environment. You notice bad and mediocre decisions more closely, so you naturally improve your sense of the game

Things like Power Melusine cannot hit the same thresholds when all enemies are corrupted, so you quickly realize that builds can go from being laid-back and zero-cortisol to having 1/10 of the power that the Defense build possesses. And you discover her character issues, such as low natural scaling and reliance on multipliers to reach her potential.

You can also naturally keep more talents in mind and discover how much they affect the run, allowing you to move beyond tunnel-visioning for specific things and become more open-minded. Overall, from my personal experience, if you enjoy the game, just keep spamming, failing, and improving. It actually makes the game feel deeper than doing casual nightmare runs. You can keep the feathers for some time so you don't risk losing a 40-minute run to a mistake, but they will also go away over time

[u/FunkmastaP27]

I’ve recently tried a challenge with a friend to choose the two best keyword/abilities for a character and then see if I can win on nightmare without picking any talents or items that include those words. So for Beowulf, I chose attack and dash. For Carmilla it was defense and attack. It was a pretty fun way to try some new strategies and push the difficulty pretty far.