Cain starts with Luck Foot, which boosts luck, increasing the chances of stuff dropping when you finish a room and with gambling. He used to be much better in vanilla, when he inadvertently had PHD as well, making all pills good.
I should probably stop eating every unknown pill I find before getting PHD. I don't know the actual numbers, but it's probably hurt my runs as much or more than it's helped.
I think the original's implementation of Luck was kind of nebulous while Rebirth's Luck is actually a stat that you have to pump beyond one or two points to make it effective.
This is coming from experience with some really good Cain runs where I got a bunch of Luck up items including pills and it just snowballed from there.
The Escape Goatincorrigible ruminantthey/themRegistered Userregular
Completely anecdotal evidence, but pills almost always tend to be a net positive for me. It's at the point in this Eden run that started with Leo that I'm running over every mushroom because if two blow up on me another paid out with Balls of Steel and I get a net health gain.
Yeah, I'll pop every pill I find. If was doing badly enough that the negative effect kills me then I was probably going nowhere on that run anyway.
Plus pills are so common that whilst I assume you might have an equal chance of good or bad ones before luck boosts, the good will eventually outweigh the bad due to you stopping eating duplicate bads but continuing to eat duplicate goods.
Yeah, I'll pop every pill I find. If was doing badly enough that the negative effect kills me then I was probably going nowhere on that run anyway.
Plus pills are so common that whilst I assume you might have an equal chance of good or bad ones before luck boosts, the good will eventually outweigh the bad due to you stopping eating duplicate bads but continuing to eat duplicate goods.
That was always my logic, a bad pill can only screw me once. A good one can pay off multiple times over.
Woo! I just beat Mega Satan. I didn't even have that ridiculous a build; Samson with Technology, Bob's Brain, a few damage upgrades and only five red hearts (no spirit hearts), quite a few tear upgrades, flight and several speed upgrades. Oh, and fear/poison/slow tears. For my trinket I had the hoof, so I was just buzzing around the place.
The really funny thing is that I sequence broke the game to get there. After getting the two key pieces and heading to the Cathedral, I found a black market with a hole to the next level. I shrugged, said "YOLO" and jumped in, and lo and behold I was in the Chest without fighting Isaac.
The toughest part was getting him to his final form. Once I did, I just stayed as far away from him as possible and spammed lasers, which slowed him down so much his shots couldn't reach me. I was at half a heart when he went down!
No achievement, though, which is a total fucking ripoff. I'm not sure the Vita version even has an achievement for that, or if sequence breaking it broke the records, because Samson has a Hard mode heart kill on his page, and a Normal mode Satan kill. Nothing beyond that, though. Maybe Mega Satan doesn't actually show up on it? I dunno. Still, Ending 16 is unlocked. I think 15 is the only one I have left before the secret endings.
Tonight before I started Isaac, I noticed I had 69 hours played. Hah.
I had some weeeird god damn runs tonight though. I decided to finish up Judas hard mode to the Chest, again it took a few tries to even get a run going, but even the run that got going was really shaky. Hard mode really reduces the consumable drops a lot, so it can be pretty tough to get bombs or enough keys to even go to item rooms. I got Fire Mind in Basement 1's item room, but I had to skip Basement 2's item room for lack of keys. After the Caves 1 boss, I got an Angel room which had Trinity Shield in it, which is a shield item that moves around to the direction you're firing in can can block tears. It's kind of cool... I did get some keys and either in Caves 1 or 2's item room I then got Holy Mantle, and after fighting The Fallen as Depths 1's boss, I got the Dark Bum. So I had an insanely defensive build going, and a deal with the devil from the fight that had two items, Pentagram and Mom's Knife. I took Pentagram, but debated on taking it for a while, but up to that point I had pretty crappy damage and I knew it was going to fall off soon... so I grabbed it. So I had Judas running around with a shield and 'sword', being almost invulnerable to everything and rolling full spirit hearts. The boss of Womb 1 completed the look for me:
Thanks for the mount, Conquest!
Needless to say, the rest of the run was a god damn breeze, especially all the 'bullet hell' bosses. Good luck getting through that shield, chumps!
Then I went for Isaac hard mode through the Chest just to round him out, and that run ended up being even crazier. I got Pentagram from the boss on Basement 1 and was feeling pretty good. Then I got Curse of the Blind on Basement 2, and my item room had Dr. Fetus... fuuuck. Not only that, but blowing up all the rocks around the floor revealed the 'black market' thing, but since I was blind I couldn't see what any of the bargains were. I ended up grabbing a pill bag and I think the best pill was a speed up or something. Caves ended up being XL, and I was just kind of waiting to die, because Dr. Fetus is fucking terrible now... then something amazing happened. One of the item rooms on the Caves had Ipecac. I didn't really know if there was a synergy, but I just grabbed it because I figured the run was fucked anyway. It turned my bombs into poison bombs, which was cool... however the other thing it did was my bombs now had the 'screen shake' effect of Mr. Mega. They also started doing waaay more damage, would explode on contact with enemies/rocks/walls, and had a larger area of effect. This seemed a bit dangerous, so I was trying to be careful... however on a room I seemed to get clipped at the very edge of the explosion... I thought I got thrown back, but I didn't seem to take any damage. I remembered that Ipecac shots actually don't normally hurt you by default, or something like that, I don't recall how Suicide King works itself. So in the next room I just ran to a wall and fired a bomb into it... sure enough, I got thrown back but didn't take damage. Holy shit, this was now amazing.
I don't know why that combo works so well, but you end up having these ridiculously powerful bombs with a large radius that don't hurt you and explode on contact, so you don't have to wait and fire where an enemy is going to be after the fuse is up or whatever. And when I say powerful, I mean that they basically one shot almost all bosses up to the Womb or so. Even if the initial bomb hit doesn't kill them, they get poisoned and the poison seems to do a metric ton of damage to finish them off. It was god damn crazy. I was blowing through the rest of the game no problem at all... and got Curse of the Blind on the Chest. Fuck you game. I just went to the boss and finished it. But I suppose without that first Curse of the Blind, I never would've picked up Dr. Fetus (would've rerolled it), and I never would've found that insane combination.
I had an awesome Lazarus run last night. Beat the heart...and a doorway opened. Went into the light-- it was awesome!
I beat the final boss of that zone without getting hit on my first try. That fight reminded me of Ikaruga in a lot of ways and those old reactions came back. Was a really fun fight.
Stories like this are why I usually just pick up everything, as long as it isn't a clear tradeoff for something worse, like picking up Telepathy for Dummies when I have Tammy's Head or something.
I own the original's OST, so I'm using the 'A version by VostokTheROBOT' one in the second section. Just finished a few runs and it seems pretty damn nice, it loops pretty cleanly from what I could tell. I haven't been to the Cathedral and beyond just yet, I needed a Lamb kill with Eden, so that's what I was working on.
Since it's basically just utilizing the override system built into Rebirth, you can actually customize it pretty easily by just deleting/renaming the songs you don't want to override. For instance, I forgot how 'nothing' the music was in Sheol originally, so I might delete the Sheol track to let the Rebirth one play instead. And if you want to switch back and forth, you could just rename the 'music' folder itself to something else when you want the Rebirth soundtrack to play, then rename the folder back to 'music' when you want the original. Very neat.
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The Escape Goatincorrigible ruminantthey/themRegistered Userregular
Needed to beat Isaac in the Cathedral one more time to unlock the Polaroid. Decided to do it on Eden for shits and giggles, and also cause I hadn't beaten Isaac on Eden yet.
I started out with Mom's Bra and Sacred Heart. WELP. And then I ended up getting a lot of damage ups and Double Shot a few floors later. Literally every boss went like: Pop Mom's Bra, shoot boss, kill it while Mom's Bra is still active. Such an insane run.
Good god... Hard mode ??? runs are fucking obnoxious. I just went through quite a few, somehow ended up getting a Chest kill finally, though I always felt like I was on the brink of death... well, up until I got to the Chest. I was running Mom's Knife and had the Satanic Bible, but I just could not get health built up, I was always right around 3 or 4 hearts at all times. Because of Polaroid invincibility, I managed to finish the Cathedral with... one heart left I think.
On the Chest, the first 4 gold chests had, Dead Bird... Monstro's Lung, Polyphemus and... I think another damage item, can't quite recall. Mom's Knife went from doing really good damage to was there a boss standing in front of me? I had to be careful for a number of rooms, but then I got another black heart from the bible and a Famine or something dropped a spirit heart as well. Finally made it to ???, got hit almost immediately, so I stood by him and watched his gigantic health bar just drain. He was dead in no time.
I still need a Satan kill with ??? (normal or otherwise), so I suppose I may as well stick with hard runs, but man. I don't yet know if hard mode boss rush actually has unlocks for all characters or not... I kind of hope not because fuck that's going to be hard. You end up having to skip so many item rooms purely from lack of keys unless you get ridiculously lucky.
With the music mod, it was so nice to hear My Innermost Apocalypse again on Isaac. Such a great damn song. I think I'll switch back to Rebirth's soundtrack for a few runs though. It's going to be a bit tough to try to figure out what all to keep and override for some things, like I really enjoy the new Basement song. I don't know.
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The Escape Goatincorrigible ruminantthey/themRegistered Userregular
I haven't really noticed much of a difference on hard mode other than getting a curse on 2/3 floors. I've had a few runs be key-starved and that sucks, but they're the vast minority. I've been running on hard mode by default for a while now, except for Eve and Blue Baby runs (of which I do very few to begin with).
So I beat mom a second time and a mysterious second door opened up. I had no idea that was a room full of endless god damn bosses. >_< Does that ever let up because I was in there quite a while with seemingly no end in sight. I finally ate it when variations of the four horsemen showed up and flooded the screen with scythes and explosions.
On a related note, holy fucking shit is Daddy Long Legs ridiculous.
EDIT: Oh, and the character who requires you to beat two levels. Is that two floors or two sets of floors (i.e. beating both basement floors and then the two floors of whatever it is after basement)? Also, is that two levels in a row or just two levels whenever?
The boss rush is like 30 bosses in 15 waves and you get another item at the end of it.
That character unlock is just straight up two floors, not two sets. People sometimes get confused because they might have one of the -Boy achievements for not taking damage on a set and yet not have the character unlocked. Strangely, the way the -Boy achievements work is they only count damage taken on the second floor of a set. I'm not sure why they did it that way because it doesn't exactly match the 'description' of what the achievement is supposed to be for.
In other news, after many attempts, and fucking up a few runs that were pretty good, I finally got my ??? hard mode Lamb kill. Fuck that was frustrating. I still kind of hate Brimstone (one of the lost runs), and I ended up getting the d6 in the Caves and got Mom's Knife on a reroll of the Anarchist's Cookbook that dropped from Pride in the Depths. Pretty crazy.
I should probably stop eating every unknown pill I find before getting PHD. I don't know the actual numbers, but it's probably hurt my runs as much or more than it's helped.
I think it's best to try every unidentified pill you get. If it's a downgrade, then you know and you never have to use that pill again. If it's an upgrade, you will take more of those pills if you find them and get multiple upgrades
Yeah, I'm thinking it's more of an edge case situation than I initially assumed. Characters or challenges on the margins with little range or health are probably better served by holding out unless there are a significant number of pills available all at once to balance each other out if things go poorly. Normal runs have a little more wiggle room for experimenting.
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The Escape Goatincorrigible ruminantthey/themRegistered Userregular
I should probably stop eating every unknown pill I find before getting PHD. I don't know the actual numbers, but it's probably hurt my runs as much or more than it's helped.
I think it's best to try every unidentified pill you get. If it's a downgrade, then you know and you never have to use that pill again. If it's an upgrade, you will take more of those pills if you find them and get multiple upgrades
A good idea is to wait for the end of the floor if you can, just in case you get telepills to I Am Error, so that you don't miss the boss room item or anything.
I haven't really noticed much of a difference on hard mode other than getting a curse on 2/3 floors. I've had a few runs be key-starved and that sucks, but they're the vast minority. I've been running on hard mode by default for a while now, except for Eve and Blue Baby runs (of which I do very few to begin with).
The drop rate for items is also seriously reduced. I have had hard mode runs where I go entire floors without getting a single consumable drop.
I should probably stop eating every unknown pill I find before getting PHD. I don't know the actual numbers, but it's probably hurt my runs as much or more than it's helped.
I think it's best to try every unidentified pill you get. If it's a downgrade, then you know and you never have to use that pill again. If it's an upgrade, you will take more of those pills if you find them and get multiple upgrades
This makes sense in theory but I've had a lot of runs where just every single pill is awful and no upgrades exist. It would be much more of a definite thing for me if two of the six pill types to drop in a given run were guaranteed to be something as good as a stat up, but lots of times it ends up being Health Down, Tears Down, Speed Down, Luck Down, Puberty and Bombs Are Key.
It's true that you can have a completely terrible pill pool, but the benefits will still outweigh the risks most of the time. I wouldn't rule out an overall good strategy just because it can sometimes backfire
In addition to upgrades, pills like explosive diarrhea, lemon party, and bad trip are almost always useless if you don't know what they are, but are great if used at the right time.
Bought this for Vita on recommendation from @Grove
I was going to play it for 30 minutes this morning before getting ready for work. Played for an hour.
So...thanks?
I have some bigass games waiting for me to play, and I think I'll just play this instead. Especially next week, when I'll have my Vita and nothing else going on.
Such a weird game. My second run had me running around with a leech, the blue baby ghost, and a blue fly thing that I'm not sure actually does anything. I have a crew. It's nice.
The boss rush is like 30 bosses in 15 waves and you get another item at the end of it.
That character unlock is just straight up two floors, not two sets. People sometimes get confused because they might have one of the -Boy achievements for not taking damage on a set and yet not have the character unlocked. Strangely, the way the -Boy achievements work is they only count damage taken on the second floor of a set. I'm not sure why they did it that way because it doesn't exactly match the 'description' of what the achievement is supposed to be for.
In other news, after many attempts, and fucking up a few runs that were pretty good, I finally got my ??? hard mode Lamb kill. Fuck that was frustrating. I still kind of hate Brimstone (one of the lost runs), and I ended up getting the d6 in the Caves and got Mom's Knife on a reroll of the Anarchist's Cookbook that dropped from Pride in the Depths. Pretty crazy.
Well what, the hell, I've cleared two floors in a row without any damage. Does it have to be on an RNG run and not a seed run?
The boss rush is like 30 bosses in 15 waves and you get another item at the end of it.
That character unlock is just straight up two floors, not two sets. People sometimes get confused because they might have one of the -Boy achievements for not taking damage on a set and yet not have the character unlocked. Strangely, the way the -Boy achievements work is they only count damage taken on the second floor of a set. I'm not sure why they did it that way because it doesn't exactly match the 'description' of what the achievement is supposed to be for.
In other news, after many attempts, and fucking up a few runs that were pretty good, I finally got my ??? hard mode Lamb kill. Fuck that was frustrating. I still kind of hate Brimstone (one of the lost runs), and I ended up getting the d6 in the Caves and got Mom's Knife on a reroll of the Anarchist's Cookbook that dropped from Pride in the Depths. Pretty crazy.
Well what, the hell, I've cleared two floors in a row without any damage. Does it have to be on an RNG run and not a seed run?
Yeah seeded runs don't unlock anything, and for very good reason.
The boss rush is like 30 bosses in 15 waves and you get another item at the end of it.
That character unlock is just straight up two floors, not two sets. People sometimes get confused because they might have one of the -Boy achievements for not taking damage on a set and yet not have the character unlocked. Strangely, the way the -Boy achievements work is they only count damage taken on the second floor of a set. I'm not sure why they did it that way because it doesn't exactly match the 'description' of what the achievement is supposed to be for.
In other news, after many attempts, and fucking up a few runs that were pretty good, I finally got my ??? hard mode Lamb kill. Fuck that was frustrating. I still kind of hate Brimstone (one of the lost runs), and I ended up getting the d6 in the Caves and got Mom's Knife on a reroll of the Anarchist's Cookbook that dropped from Pride in the Depths. Pretty crazy.
Well what, the hell, I've cleared two floors in a row without any damage. Does it have to be on an RNG run and not a seed run?
Yeah seeded runs don't unlock anything, and for very good reason.
Gotcha. I had a suspicion that was the case. Thanks!
The boss rush is like 30 bosses in 15 waves and you get another item at the end of it.
That character unlock is just straight up two floors, not two sets. People sometimes get confused because they might have one of the -Boy achievements for not taking damage on a set and yet not have the character unlocked. Strangely, the way the -Boy achievements work is they only count damage taken on the second floor of a set. I'm not sure why they did it that way because it doesn't exactly match the 'description' of what the achievement is supposed to be for.
In other news, after many attempts, and fucking up a few runs that were pretty good, I finally got my ??? hard mode Lamb kill. Fuck that was frustrating. I still kind of hate Brimstone (one of the lost runs), and I ended up getting the d6 in the Caves and got Mom's Knife on a reroll of the Anarchist's Cookbook that dropped from Pride in the Depths. Pretty crazy.
Well what, the hell, I've cleared two floors in a row without any damage. Does it have to be on an RNG run and not a seed run?
Yeah seeded runs don't unlock anything, and for very good reason.
Gotcha. I had a suspicion that was the case. Thanks!
Also, HP down is equivalent to taking damage for the purpose of those unlocks, just FYI.
So, Azazel/Brimstone plus Ludovico Technique plus Spoon Bender plus damage upgrades is hilarious and fun.
As was having piercing shots from something or other, combined with Strange Attractor and damage upgrades, turning my tear-stream into a room-clearing vacuum.
Those two runs established a standard for me: if it doesn't liquefy Fistula in two seconds or less, it isn't a great build (yet).
My favorite musical instrument is the air-raid siren.
Hahaha. Rubber cement + soy milk + lost contact + some assorted range and damage upgrades. I accidentally turned BoI into a bullet hell shooter; just this giant wall of rebounding shots that destroys everything.
I was having a rather lame run as Lazarus, but then I found a 1-pip dice room. Wound up getting Ludovico Technique combined with Technology (I think). It was a red laser ring that ate hitpoints like nobody's business. Carried me through to beat Satan. Fun times.
I just had a ridiculous Azazel run where I got Libra, which brought my brimstone damage to minimum. I thought it would wreck the run, but I ended up getting guppy status, which meant a flood of flies because of the ridiculous number of hits I did. I demolished the boss rush room and got lil brimstone and fire tears, plus dead cat earlier on in the run, ankh and guppy's collar for 11 extra lives. I didn't need them; I beat the Lamb in about 10 seconds for the first time and got Golden God!
Yeah, Libra is really shitty. I wonder just how the 'balancing' of the stats is supposed to work, because it mostly just seems to ruin your stats regardless. Thank goodness Guppy can save runs, particularly with high fire rate. Interestingly, Mom's Knife doesn't seem to work that well with it... apparently while it's in the enemy it doesn't do a bunch of rapid hits like Brimstone does, so it really doesn't produce many flies. Grats on Golden God though!
Last night I knocked out Head Trauma, Demo Man and Cursed. The thing that saved Head Trauma was an early tears upgrade (with shot speed), and getting Lump of Coal about halfway through the run. On first pass it isn't much, but when the tears swing back around in the outer orbit they get pretty damn big and actually do a ton of damage, especially with how many of them I was firing. Disappointingly, after I beat Mom I checked the Devil room that popped up... and picked up Death's Touch for 2 hearts. Man, I wish that had shown up earlier, because it looked awesome:
Demo Man was mostly just keeping and using Remote Detonator constantly, which is something I wasn't doing my first attempt at it. And Cursed... I don't really remember what saved that, lots of HP upgrades and a couple of Full Health pills in my rotation I think, a couple of Balls of Steel pills as well. Oh, and a fairly early Goat Head from a red chest, ensuring I got Devil deals despite how much damage I took on the cursed doors. I do know I got a chance at Abaddon on a Devil deal in the Caves, but that was too early to roll on pure spirit/black hearts, so I passed it up. My damage wasn't too great, so the Mom fight took a bit, but I had plenty of health.
I've got 6 challenges left to finish, Solar System, Suicide King, Glass Cannon (which isn't unlocked yet), Beans (which seems ridiculously hard, or at least annoying), Family Man (which also seems annoying, since none of your stats affect the familiars' fire rate or anything, ugh), and Purist. I also have to finish up hard runs to Lamb and ??? on Eve, Samson and Lazarus... and I need to try to work on boss rush runs on everyone but Azazel. So, still quite a bit to do...
I cheesed Mom on Cursed! just now. If you head to the square just to the bottom-right hand side of the southern door, and shoot tears to the left, literally the only thing you have to worry about are the occasional summons coming after you. There's a champion version of Mom that doesn't summon anything and it's a guaranteed perfect victory if it pops.
I'm positive it's a bug, and I don't always use it, but I do on bullshit challenges like that one. But it works every time regardless if you're looking for an easy Mom kill.
And by literally the only thing you have to worry about, I mean literally. If you head straight for that spot at the start of the Mom fight, the foot never comes down as long as you stay right there, and the hand that you'll be shooting from the southern door never hits you.
Posts
That's 5 'wins' so far.
This game is too addicting.
What's the deal with Cain as a character?
This is coming from experience with some really good Cain runs where I got a bunch of Luck up items including pills and it just snowballed from there.
Streaming 8PST on weeknights
Plus pills are so common that whilst I assume you might have an equal chance of good or bad ones before luck boosts, the good will eventually outweigh the bad due to you stopping eating duplicate bads but continuing to eat duplicate goods.
That was always my logic, a bad pill can only screw me once. A good one can pay off multiple times over.
The really funny thing is that I sequence broke the game to get there. After getting the two key pieces and heading to the Cathedral, I found a black market with a hole to the next level. I shrugged, said "YOLO" and jumped in, and lo and behold I was in the Chest without fighting Isaac.
The toughest part was getting him to his final form. Once I did, I just stayed as far away from him as possible and spammed lasers, which slowed him down so much his shots couldn't reach me. I was at half a heart when he went down!
No achievement, though, which is a total fucking ripoff. I'm not sure the Vita version even has an achievement for that, or if sequence breaking it broke the records, because Samson has a Hard mode heart kill on his page, and a Normal mode Satan kill. Nothing beyond that, though. Maybe Mega Satan doesn't actually show up on it? I dunno. Still, Ending 16 is unlocked. I think 15 is the only one I have left before the secret endings.
Still pumped from killing that guy, though!
I had some weeeird god damn runs tonight though. I decided to finish up Judas hard mode to the Chest, again it took a few tries to even get a run going, but even the run that got going was really shaky. Hard mode really reduces the consumable drops a lot, so it can be pretty tough to get bombs or enough keys to even go to item rooms. I got Fire Mind in Basement 1's item room, but I had to skip Basement 2's item room for lack of keys. After the Caves 1 boss, I got an Angel room which had Trinity Shield in it, which is a shield item that moves around to the direction you're firing in can can block tears. It's kind of cool... I did get some keys and either in Caves 1 or 2's item room I then got Holy Mantle, and after fighting The Fallen as Depths 1's boss, I got the Dark Bum. So I had an insanely defensive build going, and a deal with the devil from the fight that had two items, Pentagram and Mom's Knife. I took Pentagram, but debated on taking it for a while, but up to that point I had pretty crappy damage and I knew it was going to fall off soon... so I grabbed it. So I had Judas running around with a shield and 'sword', being almost invulnerable to everything and rolling full spirit hearts. The boss of Womb 1 completed the look for me:
Thanks for the mount, Conquest!
Needless to say, the rest of the run was a god damn breeze, especially all the 'bullet hell' bosses. Good luck getting through that shield, chumps!
Then I went for Isaac hard mode through the Chest just to round him out, and that run ended up being even crazier. I got Pentagram from the boss on Basement 1 and was feeling pretty good. Then I got Curse of the Blind on Basement 2, and my item room had Dr. Fetus... fuuuck. Not only that, but blowing up all the rocks around the floor revealed the 'black market' thing, but since I was blind I couldn't see what any of the bargains were. I ended up grabbing a pill bag and I think the best pill was a speed up or something. Caves ended up being XL, and I was just kind of waiting to die, because Dr. Fetus is fucking terrible now... then something amazing happened. One of the item rooms on the Caves had Ipecac. I didn't really know if there was a synergy, but I just grabbed it because I figured the run was fucked anyway. It turned my bombs into poison bombs, which was cool... however the other thing it did was my bombs now had the 'screen shake' effect of Mr. Mega. They also started doing waaay more damage, would explode on contact with enemies/rocks/walls, and had a larger area of effect. This seemed a bit dangerous, so I was trying to be careful... however on a room I seemed to get clipped at the very edge of the explosion... I thought I got thrown back, but I didn't seem to take any damage. I remembered that Ipecac shots actually don't normally hurt you by default, or something like that, I don't recall how Suicide King works itself. So in the next room I just ran to a wall and fired a bomb into it... sure enough, I got thrown back but didn't take damage. Holy shit, this was now amazing.
I don't know why that combo works so well, but you end up having these ridiculously powerful bombs with a large radius that don't hurt you and explode on contact, so you don't have to wait and fire where an enemy is going to be after the fuse is up or whatever. And when I say powerful, I mean that they basically one shot almost all bosses up to the Womb or so. Even if the initial bomb hit doesn't kill them, they get poisoned and the poison seems to do a metric ton of damage to finish them off. It was god damn crazy. I was blowing through the rest of the game no problem at all... and got Curse of the Blind on the Chest. Fuck you game. I just went to the boss and finished it. But I suppose without that first Curse of the Blind, I never would've picked up Dr. Fetus (would've rerolled it), and I never would've found that insane combination.
Wild games for sure.
I unlocked every character and have beaten the heart with all of them, now I'm working on heaven/hell wins with all of them.
I beat the final boss of that zone without getting hit on my first try. That fight reminded me of Ikaruga in a lot of ways and those old reactions came back. Was a really fun fight.
Fuck this game is so good.
Stories like this are why I usually just pick up everything, as long as it isn't a clear tradeoff for something worse, like picking up Telepathy for Dummies when I have Tammy's Head or something.
I love seeing new combinations.
http://www.reddit.com/r/bindingofisaac/comments/2mlmux/mod_original_soundtrack_in_rebirth/
I own the original's OST, so I'm using the 'A version by VostokTheROBOT' one in the second section. Just finished a few runs and it seems pretty damn nice, it loops pretty cleanly from what I could tell. I haven't been to the Cathedral and beyond just yet, I needed a Lamb kill with Eden, so that's what I was working on.
Since it's basically just utilizing the override system built into Rebirth, you can actually customize it pretty easily by just deleting/renaming the songs you don't want to override. For instance, I forgot how 'nothing' the music was in Sheol originally, so I might delete the Sheol track to let the Rebirth one play instead. And if you want to switch back and forth, you could just rename the 'music' folder itself to something else when you want the Rebirth soundtrack to play, then rename the folder back to 'music' when you want the original. Very neat.
The order doesn't really matter. Just go ahead and play whichever character you feel like and gun for the bosses you don't have with them yet.
Though beating Satan with Isaac first is probably a good bet, since it unlocks the single most powerful item in the game.
I started out with Mom's Bra and Sacred Heart. WELP. And then I ended up getting a lot of damage ups and Double Shot a few floors later. Literally every boss went like: Pop Mom's Bra, shoot boss, kill it while Mom's Bra is still active. Such an insane run.
Battle.net Tag: Dibby#1582
On the Chest, the first 4 gold chests had, Dead Bird... Monstro's Lung, Polyphemus and... I think another damage item, can't quite recall. Mom's Knife went from doing really good damage to was there a boss standing in front of me? I had to be careful for a number of rooms, but then I got another black heart from the bible and a Famine or something dropped a spirit heart as well. Finally made it to ???, got hit almost immediately, so I stood by him and watched his gigantic health bar just drain. He was dead in no time.
I still need a Satan kill with ??? (normal or otherwise), so I suppose I may as well stick with hard runs, but man. I don't yet know if hard mode boss rush actually has unlocks for all characters or not... I kind of hope not because fuck that's going to be hard. You end up having to skip so many item rooms purely from lack of keys unless you get ridiculously lucky.
With the music mod, it was so nice to hear My Innermost Apocalypse again on Isaac. Such a great damn song. I think I'll switch back to Rebirth's soundtrack for a few runs though. It's going to be a bit tough to try to figure out what all to keep and override for some things, like I really enjoy the new Basement song. I don't know.
On a related note, holy fucking shit is Daddy Long Legs ridiculous.
EDIT: Oh, and the character who requires you to beat two levels. Is that two floors or two sets of floors (i.e. beating both basement floors and then the two floors of whatever it is after basement)? Also, is that two levels in a row or just two levels whenever?
That character unlock is just straight up two floors, not two sets. People sometimes get confused because they might have one of the -Boy achievements for not taking damage on a set and yet not have the character unlocked. Strangely, the way the -Boy achievements work is they only count damage taken on the second floor of a set. I'm not sure why they did it that way because it doesn't exactly match the 'description' of what the achievement is supposed to be for.
In other news, after many attempts, and fucking up a few runs that were pretty good, I finally got my ??? hard mode Lamb kill. Fuck that was frustrating. I still kind of hate Brimstone (one of the lost runs), and I ended up getting the d6 in the Caves and got Mom's Knife on a reroll of the Anarchist's Cookbook that dropped from Pride in the Depths. Pretty crazy.
I think it's best to try every unidentified pill you get. If it's a downgrade, then you know and you never have to use that pill again. If it's an upgrade, you will take more of those pills if you find them and get multiple upgrades
A good idea is to wait for the end of the floor if you can, just in case you get telepills to I Am Error, so that you don't miss the boss room item or anything.
The drop rate for items is also seriously reduced. I have had hard mode runs where I go entire floors without getting a single consumable drop.
This makes sense in theory but I've had a lot of runs where just every single pill is awful and no upgrades exist. It would be much more of a definite thing for me if two of the six pill types to drop in a given run were guaranteed to be something as good as a stat up, but lots of times it ends up being Health Down, Tears Down, Speed Down, Luck Down, Puberty and Bombs Are Key.
In addition to upgrades, pills like explosive diarrhea, lemon party, and bad trip are almost always useless if you don't know what they are, but are great if used at the right time.
I was going to play it for 30 minutes this morning before getting ready for work. Played for an hour.
So...thanks?
I have some bigass games waiting for me to play, and I think I'll just play this instead. Especially next week, when I'll have my Vita and nothing else going on.
Such a weird game. My second run had me running around with a leech, the blue baby ghost, and a blue fly thing that I'm not sure actually does anything. I have a crew. It's nice.
Well what, the hell, I've cleared two floors in a row without any damage. Does it have to be on an RNG run and not a seed run?
Yeah seeded runs don't unlock anything, and for very good reason.
Gotcha. I had a suspicion that was the case. Thanks!
Also, HP down is equivalent to taking damage for the purpose of those unlocks, just FYI.
As was having piercing shots from something or other, combined with Strange Attractor and damage upgrades, turning my tear-stream into a room-clearing vacuum.
Those two runs established a standard for me: if it doesn't liquefy Fistula in two seconds or less, it isn't a great build (yet).
I am become death, destroyer of Moms.
Last night I knocked out Head Trauma, Demo Man and Cursed. The thing that saved Head Trauma was an early tears upgrade (with shot speed), and getting Lump of Coal about halfway through the run. On first pass it isn't much, but when the tears swing back around in the outer orbit they get pretty damn big and actually do a ton of damage, especially with how many of them I was firing. Disappointingly, after I beat Mom I checked the Devil room that popped up... and picked up Death's Touch for 2 hearts. Man, I wish that had shown up earlier, because it looked awesome:
Demo Man was mostly just keeping and using Remote Detonator constantly, which is something I wasn't doing my first attempt at it. And Cursed... I don't really remember what saved that, lots of HP upgrades and a couple of Full Health pills in my rotation I think, a couple of Balls of Steel pills as well. Oh, and a fairly early Goat Head from a red chest, ensuring I got Devil deals despite how much damage I took on the cursed doors. I do know I got a chance at Abaddon on a Devil deal in the Caves, but that was too early to roll on pure spirit/black hearts, so I passed it up. My damage wasn't too great, so the Mom fight took a bit, but I had plenty of health.
I've got 6 challenges left to finish, Solar System, Suicide King, Glass Cannon (which isn't unlocked yet), Beans (which seems ridiculously hard, or at least annoying), Family Man (which also seems annoying, since none of your stats affect the familiars' fire rate or anything, ugh), and Purist. I also have to finish up hard runs to Lamb and ??? on Eve, Samson and Lazarus... and I need to try to work on boss rush runs on everyone but Azazel. So, still quite a bit to do...
I'm positive it's a bug, and I don't always use it, but I do on bullshit challenges like that one. But it works every time regardless if you're looking for an easy Mom kill.