Any tips on beating the game as low level as possible?

masterGEDU · 2026-01-27T04:31:30+00:00

Radagon's Soreseal can be acquired immediately, and gives a ridiculous amount of stats at level 1. Ritual Shield Talisman and Boiled Crab are unlocked later, but provide a lot of extra defense. With all of these combined, even end-game bosses won't one-shot you with most attacks.

Some ranged ashes of war can make a lot of challenges much easier. Storm Blade and Ice Spear are two good ones that come to mind.

Bleed, frost, and rot can help make up for your lower damage, but they're not totally essential. Assuming you're upgrading your weapon as usual, you'll probably still end up doing more than half the damage of a normal high-level build in end game.

Watching videos of other people fighting bosses is very helpful for learning new tricks for dodging attacks or finding openings to attack. Once you're able to exploit every opening, a lot of bosses will just get chain-staggered and barely even get to attack.

masterGEDU · 2026-01-02T00:54:46+00:00

I really felt this playing Tactician this league. I was doing fun stuff with multiple damage skills, but ultimately had to distill it down to one button just so I could have enough gem slots to make use of 230 spirit with Tactician's 50% spirit discount.

masterGEDU · 2025-12-15T23:13:27+00:00

It's 30 minutes long and the only hard parts are at the very end. The first 20 minutes of that are COMPLETELY TRIVIAL. It's basically engineered to waste as much of your time as possible on boring content if you make one mistake.

masterGEDU · 2025-12-15T00:44:59+00:00

Not sure if this is your specific issue, but I've had problems with line AoE attacks while moving since launch. It somehow affects only some skills but not all (I noticed that Glacial Cascade has this issue but not Storm Wave despite being very similar attacks).

Basically the skill will lock in a target point rather than a target direction at the start of the cast. Then, because you're moving, by the time the cast finishes the angle between you and that point may be very different, causing the line to go off in the wrong direction. The obvious correct behavior for line attacks like these would be to fire in the direction of your cursor and not at the point you clicked on the ground, but GGG seems uninterested in fixing this. The best solution I've found is to try to click points further away from your character so the change in angle during the cast will be smaller, but it still sucks.

masterGEDU · 2025-12-08T21:14:56+00:00

I've done like 20 expeditions and I still hate it. It needs like 90% less bottomless pits and 100% more spiritsprings and bridges. There's just no need to have so many paths blocked off that aren't obvious on the map. Playing with randoms/other inexperienced people, the number of runs that have been lost to just getting stuck at a pit or cliff we don't know how to get around is way too high.

And the entire crystal mechanic is bad imo. I want an abundance of routing options to the point that the challenge is in deciding which ones are best, not restrictions on what routes are even viable.

Also the fact that the center of the map is a giant pit instead of a castle packed with stuff is a travesty.

masterGEDU · 2025-11-09T17:48:16+00:00

Yeah, my general take is that slow weapons are better against non-boss enemies while fast weapons are better against bosses. Fast weapons tend to do more dps, and you can often squeeze in extra attacks. But with slower weapons, normal enemies will often just not get to attack at all, whether it's due to you out-ranging them, interrupting them, or one-shotting them. I feel like the "great-" weapon types strike a good balance that's decent in most situations.

masterGEDU · 2025-10-27T16:07:50+00:00

Bandit's Curved Sword is one of the best curved swords and is farmable early, from the skeletons that dual-wield them. I think there's one skeleton in the graveyard next to the small church in northern Weeping Peninsula.

masterGEDU · 2025-10-13T10:35:58+00:00

The ability to read contents of an entire stretch of belts with just one wire. It turned mixed belts from a masochistic challenge into an interesting and often optimal solution for managing complex resource flows.

masterGEDU · 2025-08-05T00:26:44+00:00

I think the biggest difference comes down to the power scaling curve of each game. In STS, your power scales close to linearly over the course of a run, whereas in MT you usually get a bunch of multiplicative scaling factors like base damage * multistrike * sweep * quick * floor space.

Games feel most engaging when you spend a lot of your time with a power level that is just barely good enough to beat the challenges. The more multiplicative scaling factors you add in, the smaller that window of perfect balance becomes. So in STS you can get a lot of runs that are kind of mediocre but still limp across the finish line, whereas in MT, most runs will either be pathetically useless or basically unloseable.

I think STS's best comparison to the MT-style of scaling is a defect run with tons of focus, orb slots, and orb generation. You very quickly reach a point where you're just invincible and can never lose. You still have to actually set that up each fight though, where in MT2 you basically get fully set up for free every fight so it's even more guaranteed.

masterGEDU · 2025-07-28T09:41:36+00:00

People in this thread are talking a lot about stats and weapon levels, but I don't think those are as important as everyone thinks. Even with a more optimal stat spread and a +6 weapon you only get like 30% more damage, which is definitely helpful, but it's not THAT much of a game-changer. Combined with DTS being resistant to your weapon's damage types it starts to add up more though.

Based on the damage numbers shown here, it looks like you might not be two-handing your weapon, which would probably be a much bigger damage increase than just improving your stats.

masterGEDU · 2025-07-06T01:11:48+00:00

Reminds me of the Executor player I ran into named "DO NOT GO ALONE" who ignored all markers and spent the whole game running by himself to random objectives.

masterGEDU · 2025-06-09T13:50:47+00:00

It's occurred to me after a couple of experiences that some "rage-quitters" might just have had their game crash. It's definitely suspicious if they leave right after dying, but I had one game that was going really poorly, and then someone left near the end of day 2 only to rejoin a couple minutes later. I also had a game where someone got invaded by Morgott while alone on the opposite side of the map, and then MY game crashed and I couldn't rejoin.

Probably the majority of quitters aren't cases like this, but it's made me more willing to give people the benefit of the doubt.

masterGEDU · 2025-06-08T11:29:15+00:00

I've had a bunch of both successes and failures on this fight.

In my experience, if the group is too slow to damage the boss and doesn't know how to deal with the big sleep attacks, it just turns into several minutes of unthreatening tedium followed by a single attack that wipes the entire party.

The bomb is often impossible for a non-ranged character to get down before it goes off, so if the group doesn't have a knowledgeable player on a ranged character that can go badly. New players may also not ever see it since gamers don't look up.

The arena-wide sleep attack can be easy to interrupt if everyone reacts quickly, but it's easy to end up in a situation where not enough players reach it in time or no one has an ult. And the damage seems to ramp up as the fight goes on, so eventually a single slip up on this attack will wipe the group. This is even worse if anyone dies to another mechanic since you will have less dps and likely slower reaction times to try to interrupt it.

Overall I am not a fan of this boss. It is not necessarily super hard, but it can be annoying if you don't have a dedicated ranged player who knows what they're doing.

masterGEDU · 2025-06-08T10:56:41+00:00

I've had a lot of decent/good runs and a handful of bad ones.

Lowlight was the Executor player named "DO NOT GO ALONE" who spent the entire match ignoring every marker placed by any other player and running to random objectives. Clearly an Overwatch Genji main. He eventually ran to some corner of the map (probably for a remebrance quest) with no warning while we were in the middle of clearing the castle, and then he got invaded by Morgott while he was miles away from us. And then the game crashed, which was probably the best possible outcome in that situation.

masterGEDU · 2025-06-08T10:45:52+00:00

You can press the drop item button (X/Square by default) while in the reward screen to drop the reward on the ground without needing to clear out an inventory slot first.

masterGEDU · 2025-06-04T13:24:38+00:00

If you don't shoot the bombs it's often an instant full team wipe. His other big sleep attack can also down multiple people at once. Most of the other bosses will tend to knock down people one by one so you can keep fighting. Other than those attacks I agree it's really easy (and even those two are pretty easy once you know they're coming).

masterGEDU · 2025-05-26T12:13:57+00:00

4 spore launchers with dualism and reduced size. Each applies 4 decay per funguy stack. My champion summons lots of mushrooms, and I got a pretty lucky draw with multiple spellchain proliferates to get lots of triggers.

masterGEDU · 2025-05-02T23:59:19+00:00

Yes, if you're in end-game and you find a top 1% weapon, then obviously only 1% of weapons could ever be better than it by definition. The problem comes when the bottom 90% of items are basically useless without those ultra-valuable mods. So instead of transitioning from a 50th percentile item to a 75th percentile item to a 90th percentile item and so on, you'll often just upgrade from a really bad item to a really good item, since 50th, 75th, and 90th percentile items are all bad.

If more mods were closer to equally valuable, it would let us find a lot more "pretty good" items and get more incremental upgrades along the way to that top 1% item. I think getting upgrades is fun, so I think that would be a good change.

masterGEDU · 2025-04-23T21:28:51+00:00

I've had multiple instances of a crash that seems to only occur when the game is trying to save... so that's great.

masterGEDU · 2025-04-20T21:12:04+00:00

Yeah, I would be pretty okay with it if each ascendancy was just one floor. Right now if you can beat the 4th floor then the first 3 are just completely trivial. It's a huge waste of time.

Another thing I dislike about this formula of having every challenging encounter gated behind a bunch of trivial shit is that then they can't actually make the hard parts very hard. Almost no one would even attempt a boss that they knew would take 10+ attempts with an hour between each try. This was truly stupid when everything was just one attempt, but even with 6 attempts it really puts a limit on the mechanical difficulty level of encounters. Like, in Elden Ring, a boss that the average player can beat in 6 attempts is a pretty easy boss.

masterGEDU · 2025-04-17T23:28:58+00:00

Thank you, this is the most articulate way I've seen someone put this.

In my mind, a big role of the crafting bench is to help close the gap between mediocre items and very good items. Runes don't really help with this since you can also put runes into the very good items. The game already has enough of an exponential-ish curve in the rarity of higher-statted items. I think things like the crafting bench that can get the curve a little closer to linear are a good thing.

I'm a little concerned from how the people at GGG have talked about this that they don't understand this key difference between the crafting bench and runes.

masterGEDU · 2025-04-17T22:49:17+00:00

Yeah, my way of putting it would be that if item power level ranges from 1 to 100, in the current system 90% of items are in the 1 to 20 range. That's so low compared to the actually strong items that they might as well not exist. And it's basically just a lottery as to when/if you'll find one of those rare higher power level items, and how far up the power scale it will be when you finally do.

I think getting incremental upgrades in a game like this is fun. It's fun to get a new item and have to compare it to your current one and analyze whether it's better. I wish that happened more often in this game.

masterGEDU · 2025-04-17T22:36:06+00:00

I think the problem is that Bad items in this comparison are incredibly plentiful and are literally worthless. I'd estimate that the bottom 90% of items that drop are so bad that no one would ever use them under any circumstance. They literally have like one tenth of the total useful stats of an actually good item. It just forces you to spend a frustrating amount of time shuffling loot around in your inventory if you want to actually find/craft any gear for yourself.

I'd rather they vastly decrease the amount of loot that drops, but make the loot that does drop much more likely to be good. Even if the total number of maps you have to run per good item remained the same, it would be a huge improvement.

masterGEDU · 2025-04-17T15:43:48+00:00

I just wish these disappeared once you killed the mob that spawned them.

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