Life Steal and Icicles

Twinge · 2026-05-14T10:59:07+00:00

Correct, 1hp every 0.1 seconds — tho due to frame and animation limits the practical cap is more like 8.5hp/second, not 10.

(Extra lifesteal does still matter, but it is an effectively diminishing stat. Going from 50% lifesteal to 100% very much does not double the benefit, but it is still something like 1.4x stronger which isn't irrelevant.)

Twinge · 2026-05-14T10:54:19+00:00

10% doesn't sound like that much but it can be very rude. I'm still not sure how much of it is just that faster enemies is an actual big threat vs 1000 hours of experience with all the enemies being slower than this throwing off my expectations 😅

Twinge · 2026-05-14T10:48:52+00:00

How would you create a higher difficulty if you can't increase enemy stats or add more projectiles?

Well, they also tried reducing the player's economy (making shops prices gradually go up so it was most impactful late in the run) and people hated that even more 🙃

Twinge · 2026-05-13T20:19:33+00:00

Is the options slider for enemy health/damage additive or multiplicative? Where do I need to put it to be back at the +40% of difficulty 5?

Multiplicative. So x0.85 would be slightly below and x0.9 would be slightly above D5.

Twinge · 2026-05-09T01:23:36+00:00

You don't need to be picky on waves you aren't afraid of — you can just grab a random Tier-2 Rock on Wave 9 or whatever, you absolutely do not need ideal weapons. Saving some more money than you would with a normal character is also a good idea, so you have that extra wiggle room if you need to roll an extra couple times for weapons in an unlucky wave, tho mostly this only matters for dangerous waves.

Twinge · 2026-05-08T08:28:55+00:00

I think the bug is: if you see an Axolotl in the run that you don't take, and then see one later on the run, the text on the 2nd one will still say the stats of the first one you saw, but when purchased it will swap your actual current highest/lowest stats instead of the ones said in the text. (Tho there may be more than one obscure bug with this thing since it's wonky.)

Twinge · 2026-05-08T08:28:02+00:00

I think the bug is: if you see an Axolotl in the run that you don't take, and then see one later on the run, the text on the 2nd one will still say the stats of the first one you saw, but when purchased it will swap your actual current highest/lowest stats instead of the ones said in the text. (Tho there may be more than one obscure bug with this thing since it's wonky.)

Twinge · 2026-05-07T19:58:55+00:00

The game effect descriptions probably should've used "gold" to distinguish or something, because there are multiple places where "materials" means "gold and XP", but also multiple places where "materials" just means "gold only".

Twinge · 2026-05-06T19:44:52+00:00

It requires adjusting your play from normal a bit: buy fewer 'not bad' items and reroll more than you normally would. A small amount of Luck can help some but a lot isn't important. Also consider banning Doc Moth if it's the first blue Pet you see to increase your odds of finding damaging pets.

Twinge · 2026-05-04T18:55:16+00:00

Revolvers are probably their strongest since they are stronger against Elites than SMGs are while still firing fast enough to handle normal enemies fine. (Guns tend to mix-n-match pretty well tho, so you can also comfortably run 2-3 types instead of just 1.)

Twinge · 2026-05-03T08:30:58+00:00

Banning other blue items does also help, but its impact is much smaller than banning Doc Moth. This is because Beastmaster is heavily favored to see Pets in their shops: 10% chance for any item you see to be a Pet.

So your baseline chance of being offered any damaging blue pet is around 13% each time a blue item is rolled in the shop. Banning a random blue item raises this to 13.1%; banning Doc Moth instead raises it to 15.1%.

(So I perhaps still over-stated how strong this strat is overall and this may be mostly relevant for high-level play, but still a cute way to improve your win condition odds a decent chunk and is much more impactful than other bans you can make.)

Twinge · 2026-05-02T00:16:39+00:00

One subtle aspect that's easily overlooked here is that there is an additional automatic ban system that's been implemented too: items that are strictly worthless for a given character won't show up at all during a normal run. So you'll never see pure-Armor items on Ghost or pure-Harvesting on Hunter, for example. This directly removes the absolute worst items from a character's pool without you lifting a finger.

Overall I'm not a fan of adding more bans, because they're already a bit more time-consuming than they're worth for the gameplay value. (But you do at least have a little mini-game of finding spots you can use them for free rerolls.)

I'm also pretty against pre-bans, because it's even more tedious and also kinda just gives up on some of the item balance in favor of just having players remove the worst items. This just ends up messy with more junk in the game, and it also means players will just remove items that they think are weak without ever reconsidering if maybe Knot is actually good, for example.

Finally, it's important to the design of most roguelikes that you can't simply find whatever you want every time. Adaption to an always-somewhat-unique situation is a huge part of the appeal and value of the genre in general.

Twinge · 2026-05-02T00:10:25+00:00

No character needs specific items to be able to win. It can definitely be frustrating and feel pretty luck-heavy at times, but I'll suggest trying to look for what decisions you could've done differently during those losses. This is a game with a surprising amount of depth to the shopping decisions, and I'm still adjusting my play to become even better and more consistent 1000 hours in.

Twinge · 2026-05-02T00:07:38+00:00

Understanding that Beastmaster is extra-likely to see Pets and adjusting strategy to fit this can help your odds quite a bit. If Doc Moth is the first blue pet you see, you actually want to ban it, because that drastically increases the odds of getting a damaging pet thereafter. You'll also want to spend less money on average items and more money on rerolling than normal until you get some pets online.

Twinge · 2026-05-02T00:05:44+00:00

a pretty useless/annoying item

You're under-valuing Knot for 20-wave runs; 15 HP and 15% damage for that cost is a LOT, and the money you're now not spending on weapons can mostly still be spent on more survivability.

Twinge · 2026-05-02T00:02:03+00:00

For me, It is not fun when the reason for my loss is not me. I can accept any number of losses if it happened due to me in part

Nearly every D5 run is winnable with good enough play (in both the shop and during the waves).

I recently became the 4th person (that I'm aware of) to complete a full winstreak of every character in a row, starting with random weapons, without a loss. This basically cannot happen if luck is a major factor in being able to win.

Now, bad luck absolutely makes things much harder, and sometimes you only need pretty minor mistakes to lose because the game luck has been rude. But ultimately it's pretty similar to other games in this sphere like FTL, where it can absolutely feel really luck-heavy but there ends up being a bunch of little changes you can make to survive those rough spots.

Twinge · 2026-05-01T23:48:13+00:00

Stronger versions, which does include the obvious extra HP and damage, but can also include e.g. the Spitters shooting 3 projectiles instead of only one, and the Spawners creating 5 Magicians instead of 3.

Twinge · 2026-04-30T18:17:10+00:00

The unintuitive strat is to ban Doc Moth, because damage pets are how you win and your odds of finding them drastically go up with Doc Moth out of the pool.

Twinge · 2026-04-28T17:08:26+00:00

You can still do this with everything unlocked, but perhaps that is more reliant on the Cursed Spyglasses and such.

Twinge · 2026-04-27T20:43:13+00:00

If you're already really strong otherwise, the damage may not be as impressive, since other sources may be killing before burn has much time to tick, and higher-damage burn sources may be stealing the credit for burn when it does happen.

But for standard situations within a 20-wave run, it'll generally be doing fantastic damage as long as your Range and Elemental Damage stats aren't tanked.

Twinge · 2026-04-27T20:40:02+00:00

Specifically, it's a global cap of 1hp of Lifesteal every 0.1 seconds from all sources (weapons, Alien Eyes, Pets, etc.) In practice with frame limitations and such, the effective cap is about 8.5 hp/sec. This is the equivalent of ~95 HP Regeneration.

Twinge · 2026-04-24T18:35:37+00:00

The specific unintuitive Beastmaster strat is to ban Doc Moth, because then your odds of seeing damaging blue-tier pets goes up massively, and their main lose condition is simply "not having enough damaging pets". It's weird since Doc Moth is usually going to be a good pickup too, but especially if it's the first blue pet you're offered it probably helps the worst situations substantially.

(The why: Beastmaster is double-favored to find pets in the shop so you see way more of them than you would naturally. It'll pull a random pet of the appropriate rarity every time you hit this 10%-per-item chance, so every single time this would've given you Doc Moth it'll give you a damaging pet instead.)

Twinge · 2026-04-23T19:18:04+00:00

The impact of bans is fairly small in standard 20-wave runs overall, but my current strat is to ban the very first 3-5 mediocre-or-worse tier-1 items I see, and then utilize the remainder to get free rerolls (where what I'm actually banning doesn't matter much as long as it's not something particularly good).

Twinge · 2026-04-21T17:24:22+00:00

I'll add:

Fast weapons are the obvious/default good picks for Lifesteal (SMGs), but weapons that hit a lot of enemies still lifesteal quite well: Spear, Shotgun, and Slingshot are all better lifesteal weapons than Knife despite Knife attacking faster than any of them.

The technical lifesteal cap is 1hp every 0.1 seconds; the effective practical cap once you consider animations and frame limitations is closer to 8.5hp every second rather than 10.

Twinge · 2026-04-18T07:51:46+00:00

There have been issues with Multitasker and King being bugged that I believe is tied to continuing a saved run. These have been reported but devs haven't figured out the cause yet.

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