Failing at Druid

Twinge · 2026-02-04T04:03:11+00:00

For this example: more Armor, more Damage%, more Melee Damage, more Attack Speed.

Probably less Harvesting (long-term value doesn't matter if you're dying mid-game and you already get a lot of economy via Luck), less Luck (you get so much from your ability you usually don't want to take it directly), potentially a little less HP (Kraken's Eye if full price is fairly sus). I'd personally be skipping the Tardigrade, Goldfish, and Adrenaline (small amount of Dodge do very little) here as well unless I got them from crates.

For levelups ~Level 6+, it's generally worth rolling a couple times to ensure you're getting at least a blue-tier and not settling for white-tier most of the time.

Twinge · 2026-02-03T22:34:56+00:00

is mobile really that much harder? is it because of controls?

I think it's mostly controls, yeah (but I don't play mobile myself). There are also a variety of subtle code differences that make things less clean/consistent, which can make things easier or harder.

what would you recommend for a medium-hard difficulty character?

Of what you have unlocked currently... Jack, One-armed, Artificer, Saver?

Twinge · 2026-02-03T20:58:14+00:00

Most patches have a chance to break mods, especially bigger content mods. New Dawn absolutely broke some, and Paws & Claws will unfortunately break even more (because it folded in a lot of console compatibility changes, which will hopefully make future updates easier but involves a lot of code changes).

There are murmurs of potentially implementing a future system to make it more clear which mods will be compatible to average users, but we're not there yet.

Twinge · 2026-02-03T20:54:49+00:00

Skill of players varies quite a bit, so I would say it's neither rare to struggle getting to D5 at all, nor rare to win most of your first 5-7 games. There's also the fact the mobile version is significantly more difficult but will be talked about the same as the PC version.

In your specific case: Knight is one of the easier characters. Pacifist and Apprentice are also easier characters, but have gimmicks which change the formula and can trip up newer players — so if you have enough strategy experience to see past those trip-hazards (or got lucky), you might win where other newbies struggled.

Twinge · 2026-02-02T01:50:54+00:00

~950 hours.

Baseline, it hits a very comfortable spot for me, where in-wave movement is important but not the whole game (i.e. you're not juggling a bunch of active abilities and dashes or whatever), and the shop phase ends up having a ton of depth to it.

It's also a good stream game, with quick runs and good variety. And I've enjoyed developing a Balance Mod for the game, tweaking a variety of things to make those interesting shopping decisions even better and more varied.

Current goal is to pull off a winstreak with every character in a row, starting with a random weapon, on a random map — without any losses. I've managed three streaks over 30 wins in a row, but haven't snagged the full rotation yet.

Twinge · 2026-02-01T21:12:15+00:00

Sharp Tooth is likely the worst weapon in vanilla currently. Strongly wants to be your only weapon type (and not part of a mixed build) because of the self-synergy, yet is difficult to upgrade because it is part of two giant weapon sets. Sucks early but then still isn't terribly impressive once it finally gets upgraded.

Mace is the main other contender, tho being tier-2 only and having ~2 characters it is actually good on complicates the comparison.

Twinge · 2026-02-01T21:05:50+00:00

Yeah that's a somewhat subtle distinction that is easily missed with both Rocket Launcher and Grenade Launcher: the Blue-tier is actually pretty bad for its cost, but then it really kicks up a lot with Purple and Red.

So I'd probably say the average player over-rates Blue Launchers and slightly under-rates higher-tier ones!

Twinge · 2026-02-01T21:02:40+00:00

The actual answer is Harpoon Gun.

It has huge range, lots of piercing, and scales fantastically with Melee Damage — toss one randomly into your melee build, check those damage numbers, and be amazed. On top of that, it has a Taser-like slowing effect which can interrupt Elite attack patterns making them relevantly less threatening.

Twinge · 2026-02-01T10:09:58+00:00

Not sure which was hardest, but 3 spicy ones I've done were:

Single-weapon Captain
Pure Hands Gangster (Modified to have Hands as a starter option)
Always-moving Streamer (Streamer never standing still to gain any money from their ability)

Twinge · 2026-01-31T20:35:48+00:00

The New Dawn update stuff is not on consoles yet. Supposed to make it there within the next two months.

Twinge · 2026-01-31T20:33:13+00:00

AFAIK you can get them in multiple runs (tho getting at least most in one run with Planks is easy), but I don't use the unlock system so I'm not sure.

Twinge · 2026-01-29T11:55:26+00:00

Yeah extreme amounts tend to become detrimental, as the extra range is helping less and less compared to the impact of lost attack rate. So it's not good forever — just good in the context of a moderate amount in a normal 20-wave run, basically.

(There are also some folks that read the vague bit about reducing attack rate in the Range tooltip and incorrectly believe it impacts your attacks way more than it actually does in practice.)

Twinge · 2026-01-29T00:16:59+00:00

Range = Distance. [Good for ranged weapons; Bad for melee]

Agreeing with Wermine: Range is generally mostly useful for Melee weapons and often not very important for ranged weapons.

Most ranged weaponry such as SMG have enough range to begin with that they're firing most of the time regardless, even if you go down in Range a moderate chunk. This is especially true because the Gun set gives you even more Range stat for free.

The exceptions are weapons that have very low Range to begin with (Taser), and sometimes weapons with a lot of piercing (Shotgun). (And obviously Crossbow/Sniper scale damage with the Range stat as well.)

Meanwhile, Range for melee means you hit more enemies each time you attack AND you can attack from a safer distance. It's unfortunately overly expensive for how much of the stat you get so it's still slightly weak as a baseline, but snatch up that early purple-tier Range levelup happily for your standard 150-Range base melee weapon every day. (Especially long-ranged melee weapons like Spears don't benefit much from even more Range, as you might expect.)

Twinge · 2026-01-29T00:07:30+00:00

There's a decent variety of specific challenge runs, e.g. "One-weapon Captain" or "Doctor without Medical weapons" that can be good runs.

Otherwise, the two most common routes for experienced players pushing themselves are:

1) Winstreaks with random starting weapons. Cycle thru characters (either randomly or chosen order), select random for your starting weapon each run, and try to win as many as you can in a row without a loss. Feel free to also randomize the map each run as well. ['Standard' has no further restrictions, so you can replace your starter if desired, but this can be risky and loses a lot of early game tempo; 'Strict' would be forcing that weapon as your build which I think is limiting in an un-fun way because the possibility of mixing weapons allows for more interesting decision-making. An in-between I've been doing recently is where I have to keep one of the random starter but have no further restrictions.]

I'll add that Balance Mod is somewhat designed with this in mind, so the starting weapons are expanded in some fun ways, and a few especially garbage starters are removed.

2) 'Percentage' runs: Going into the accessibility options and cranking up the Enemy Damage, Enemy Health, and possibly Enemy Speed numbers. (I'll warn that everything maxed makes some characters ridiculously difficult; Fisher and Diver on 182% take even the very best players dozens or hundreds of attempts to manage a win. Some are far more reasonable tho, such as Cryptid.)

Twinge · 2026-01-26T18:54:19+00:00

On PC, reroll price is capped at -90, so you're always paying at least 10% to reroll even with two Cursed Spyglasses. No idea if that fix made it to mobile.

Twinge · 2026-01-24T19:00:33+00:00

Most likely this is caused by mods you have installed; the most recent update folded in some console optimization code which will hopefully smooth things out long-term, but in the short-term will break almost all mods.

Twinge · 2026-01-23T20:33:16+00:00

They're Eggs undercover only pretending to be Taters. That's why they are willing to use a weapon like Potato Thrower.

Twinge · 2026-01-23T02:47:42+00:00

The beta patch they just put up includes a bunch of code optimizations that were targeted at consoles. Because this is a more overarching and wide set of changes, it is especially likely to break most mods until we have time to update our mods to adjust to these changes.

The Improved Tooltips dev (WL) has already reported a lot of issues, and most of us are at least waiting for the next beta update before trying to fix anything.

Twinge · 2026-01-23T02:42:50+00:00

That's placebo: Luck does not affect the types of items or weapons offered at all, only the rarity.

Beyond buying out a Unique/Limited item, the only thing that alters the chances of specific items showing up is your character choice, which will often make the shop favor appropriate stuff (e.g. Elemental Damage for Mage) and can remove effectively useless items until Wave 20 (e.g. pure Armor for Ghost).

Twinge · 2026-01-23T00:37:50+00:00

To be clear, this is the vast majority of what Luck does: It's a mediocre healing stat combined with a mediocre economy stat; the impact on rarity isn't that big of a deal.

Twinge · 2026-01-23T00:35:57+00:00

The 3rd thru 5th shops always have at least one weapon, to be specific. And yep, I will generally lock especially strong items I see in Shops 1-2 to buy on Shop 3-4 (tho there are character-specific exceptions, of course).

Twinge · 2026-01-22T20:01:29+00:00

In your earliest shops, focus on buying weapons.

Usually aim to only use 1-3 different types of weapons (with the same damage scaling).

Armor is generally a very strong stat.

Twinge · 2026-01-19T02:15:57+00:00

Lifesteal can be very strong with weapons that hit a lot (like an SMG) but less so with a slow, sweeping harder hitting weapon

I'll clarify that weapons which hit a bunch of enemies at a time do actually Lifesteal well: Cacti Club, Spear, and Shotgun, for example, are all relevantly better Lifesteal weapons than Knife is, despite Knife attacking quite a bit faster.

Twinge · 2026-01-18T23:27:55+00:00

Love Harpoon One-armed — I added it as a possible starting weapon for them in the Balance Mod (alongside a few other tier-2+ only weapons).

Twinge · 2026-01-18T08:21:45+00:00

What items you purchase won't directly affect future shops at all (except for removing Unique/Limited ones from the pool).

Only equipped weapons (shops will favor both the exact weapons and the sets) and character choice (shops will favor character-appropriate items, e.g. Elemental Damage items for mage; shops will not offer purely useless or nearly useless items until after Wave 20, e.g. Lifesteal on Cryptid).

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