A Pretty Darn Speedrunny Abyss Farming Run

Maze: Saint’s Tower

Purpose: Get the last 20 shards I need to start my Prince statue.

Mainball: Vampire Hunter — Originally I was going for the whole ‘never get counterattacked’ shtick. In detail: 20% from Novice Warrior, 15% from Great Swordsmith (Crucible), 20% from Vampire Hunter’s Cloak, 20% from Crystal Dress+Shoes is 75% no-counterattack — plus about a 20% dodge from…something…left me only taking counterattacks 12.5% about the time.

Linkball 1: Kairo Monarch — See below.

Linkball 2: Kairo Concubine — This run only has to go to F60, because I’m more than willing to s/l 30 for half a day if it means finishing this run in a minimum amount of actual runtime. With both Kairos, I only have to actually fight my way to F18, because I start with 2 Robot Capsules and get 2 more every 3 floors — so I can spawn Cubefriends literally every floor from F19 to F60 and only ever need my massive counterattack-denial abilities when punching the boss in the face.

Venture Title: Great Swordsmith (Crucible) — Gotta get that 15% counterattack reduction, boyz.

Melee Title: Sword Dancer — Wanted to max out my Attack ’cause my pets Attack was based on mine. Was thinking Sword Sage, but never got above Sword Dancer.

Magic Title: Magic Apprentice — Just 3 stars for the purpose of spellcasting. 🙂

Artifact: Hand of Balrog — Because 50% bonus Attack (20% from Warrior Jr., 20% from Vampire Cloak, and 10% from the Hand) is a good thing. 😀

Potion: of Titans — I guess? Why not.

The Rundown — Was, like you might predict, really quick and dirty.  The only EP I spent pre-Pumpkin Carriage was on Magic Taffy. As soon as I had the Pumpkin Carriage, I also acquired Great Swordsmith (Crucible), one-starring my way there. Next I 3-starred all three ground-floor classes to get my basics covered. By then, I was on F18 and every floor became “pop a Robot Capsule, find enemies quickly, collect loot, keep moving.”

[EDIT] Right, I did do the whole ‘collect the special spells, gain +50 Atk/Pwr and +500 HP/MP’ routine right on time on F45ish. Just ’cause why wouldn’t I? [/EDIT]

On FX9, I’d spend whatever EP I had built up three-starring my way to Sword Sage (and never quite making it.) Then, I’d pop in on the Boss and kill him.

Boss Strategy:

1. Cast Bless (or Blade of Ruin on F60).
2. Pop a Robot Capsule.
3. Cast one of Stoneskin (F30, F40) or Icicle (F50, F60).
4. Punch face. (F30 dies)
5. Punch face. (F40 dies)
6. Switch over to Light Boss, Cast Divine Favor (F50) or Aurora Barrier (F60).
7. Cast Divine Favor.
8. Punch face.
9. Switch over to Dark Boss, Punch face (F50, dies)/cast Stoneskin (F60)
10. Punch face.
11. Punch face. (F60 dies)

 

Did it Work? — Absolutely. If I had to do it again, I’d swap out Vampire Hunter (strictly unnecessary to fuss about counterattacks when you’ve got Cubefriends doing the munching for you) for Commando (much better Boss facepunching).  It’s not Howling, but then nothing is — but for the low low cost of spending one action at the beginning of each floor, you, too, can get a pretty damned effective speedrun to F60 for the purposes of farming just about any damn thing you please out of two linked Kairocubes.

Wife’s Run: Speedfarming Prince…with Sage!

Maze: Saint’s Tower

Purpose: Getting Prince (because she hadn’t been arsed to before)/Farming Prince

Mainball: Panda — Because who doesn’t love Panda? He’s like Swordsman, but cuter. Also, there’s no better Maze for main Panda than Saint’s Tower, because once you hit F29 and give Master Turtle some wine, you can take out any floor mob for a number of MP equal to the floor you’re on — and there’s no better way to regain MP than Magic Toffee. Oh, and the other two Panda Wines have a crucial role to play in this as well. 🙂

Soul Link 1: Sage — Sage completely freaking ignores the Dark Ward produced by the floor pillars. So you don’t need to waste any time or thought breaking the pillars, because punching faces works all the way down. Also, that big pool of extra MP makes Magic Toffee especially magical even though you’re not going to arse yourself with the big 500-MP-granting spell you could get by breaking pillars.

Soul Link 2: Tarot — Because as long as we’re ignoring the Wards, we should bring along someone who has useful magic-like effects that can be used to heal, defend, and otherwise do useful things on floors with an anti-magic Ward. Between Sage and Tarot, you literally don’t even need a single Ward broken (except occasionally on the boss) to get to and win Prince and/or his fragments.

Melee Title: Warrior (via Royal Knight) — Because HP are good, but epic boss facepunches are also good, since Tarot’s Tower can protect us from the nasty hits.

Venture Title: Treasure Seeker — Yep. That’s it. No time for anything else!

Magic Title: Magic Apprentice — Ditto. Get your spells active and dump all your EP into more Melee-title power.

Artifact: Helm of Fighter — Just to make sure you can spend all your EP on the thing that matters.

Potion: Master Designer/Engineer — To make sure you have the EP for Pumpkin Carriage by the time you need it.

The Rundown: Saint’s Tower is usually a slow grind, with lots of fiddling with Crystals and Wards and Special spells that take three-plus taps per mob to work. This team takes all that away and sets you up to tap tap tap all the way to F60 where you can s/l 30 until Prince shows up.

You do still have to save up your 2k EP to buy the Pumpkin Carriage, but other than that, you really don’t have to do much of anything except tap tap tap tap. Ignore Wards, tap everything, move forward quickly.

The Boss fights go facepunch twice, change ward, facepunch some more. For F50 and F60, start with Panda Wine to make sure you can clear the boss super-fast.

It’s really the quickest, most effective brainless Saint’s Tower run you can get. And all this after I spent a good half-hour ranting violently to her about how Sage sucks just about as bad as a gumball can suck and has no purpose anywhere for any reason.

Yeah, she’s smarter than me. But I got at least one over on her — I married up. 😀

 

Power-Farming Prince with Divine Dragon, Nobunaga, and Merman

Maze: Saint’s Tower

Purpose: Abuse Nobunaga without having to take a 120+floor dive that involves a crapload of delicate mathematics. Just kidding: I needed some Priest frags for pearl-smelting and some Prince frags because some dick at QCPlay decided he should be the “extra Gumball” for one of the new statues, so I decided to try my hand at ‘power-farming’ — as in, it’s not anything fast like 3-eye King, but it’s damn near unstoppable, which is the next best thing.

Mainball: Divine Dragon — Entirely for the Dragon title, though the extra balls will probably come in handy (I used mine for 40 DD frags on this run), and the Divine Favor stockpiles make sure you’re never really threatened.

Soul Link 1: Nobunaga — When you take +30% HP from Knight and +20% HP from Primary Dragon Bloodline, that’s 50% more freaking HP. Which means the +500 HP you get from Galadriel’s Protection becomes 750 HP, which Nobunaga single-handedly turns into +50 Attack. With just a handful of low-level titles, you can walk into F40 with a 200+ Attack like it wasn’t even a thang and back that up with 1500+ HP and 20% damage reduction from Wyvern Bloodline. That sh!t really makes you feel like a mothaf***ing DRAGON.

Soul Link 2: Merman — When you have 1500+ HP and Legendary Mage adding 3 rounds to your Water Mist, that shit heals 450+ HP no matter how low your Power is. While also crippling and damaging your enemies. For a level 1 spell. Now, your Power won’t be that low, because you have Divine Dragon main, but it means you can literally focus completely on your fighting skills because your Magic is going to be distinctly your backup skill even though you (supposedly) have Magic stats and type. Gotta love that.

Magic Title: Legendary Mage (Air) — Maximizing Merman’s unique spell Water Mist 100% requires Legendary Mage. At 3 turns, Water Mist is barely even a spell. At six turns, meaning double damage and double healing, it turns into a decent option — far, far stronger than if you chose to boost it by taking Water Master instead. Also, the 40% reduction to enemy Attack and Accuracy is static, so again, no huge need to focus on Power. Which means we can go the Air route and get bigger long-lasting Electrostatic Fields and Disrupting Rays without losing much compared to taking the Earth route.

Melee Title: Light Paladin — it’s all about those big huge HP boosts, and this one is no exception. Don’t take the Light Paladin level to regain health — the part you’re after is the HP boost. Wait until you’ve cast your +500 HP spells, taken every other source of HP you can squeeze out of all of your levels, and keep any big +HP gear even if you’re not going to use it regularly just so that you can put it on before you take Light Paladin’s main title. This isn’t going to give you the same kind of ridiculous Attack boost that Sword Sage would — not by a longshot — but you’re not aiming deep, you’re aiming for a super-easy, consistent cruise to F60-80 for Prince farming purposes. This will give you the HP to do it without a sweat, and a solid Attack boost besides. If you have the spare EP, go ahead and level up the effectiveness of your giant stockpile of Divine Favors. Because why even get near the risk of death?

Venture Title: Whatevs — Again, you’re not aiming to go deep, and beyond taking Treasure Seeker for simple tactical purposes, you shouldn’t even have time to EP out your Venture titles. If you do, I’d probably go for Holy Blacksmith with the intent of crafting Pharoah’s Helmet and Istantine. And maybe a Great Druid’s Cloak, too. Triple damage Water Mist for double the duration would be a doozy. 😀

Dragon Title: Yep — You’re going to want to at the minimum take all three stars of Wyvern Bloodline and all three stars of Young Dragon bloodline. That 20% damage reduction and 20% HP boost are forces to reckon with. I stopped there, because the +HP from killing monsters was completely unnecessary.

Artifact: Duke of Destruction’s Belt — the Artifact Stars for Legendary Mage and Light Paladin are kind of meh for this build, and besides your Neck and Armor slots will already be full with Merman’s Conch Shell and Saint’s Tower’s Crystal Dress. This gives you +HP and +Attack, which is really what you care about. Alternately, you could totally take Adventurer’s Harp. That would work just fine.

Potion: Lich’s Enhancement Liquid — Because screw the boss and his Magic Resistance. If you don’t have LEL yet, I’d choose either Vampire Hunter’s Potion or Whale Oil.

The Run Down: I took nothing until I had a stockpile of 2k EP for to buy the Pumpkin Carriage. Then I never spent below that while I went about getting one star of Novice Warrior, all three stars of Knight, one star of Wyvern Bloodline, and all three stars of Young Dragon bloodline in that order before anything else. I wanted that 50% HP boost ASAP.

Then I took all three stars of Magic Apprentice, the other two stars of Novice Warrior, the other two stars of Wyvern Bloodline, and then settled in to work my way up to Legendary Mage (Air), filling in every star along the way. Once I had three stars in +1 Round to Aid Spells, I took all three stars in Treasure Seeker so I could tap less on the way down. Then I took one star of Silver Knight, then all three stars of Heavy Armor Knight, then backfilled Silver Knight. I ended up taking Light Paladin on F69, having used a Limited Broom and nothing else in terms of backtravel.

The floor strategy was pretty straightforward: reveal a thing, punch it to death before revealing anything else, repeat. When you get down by ~30% of your total HP, reveal as many enemies as you can, pop a Water Mist, and punch the highest HP or lowest Attack critter (or just collect items) while the Water Mist cripples and whittles away the enemies. (Note that I never got down far enough to pop a single Water Mist until F58, because I kept gaining more MaxHP than I was taking damage!) That 40% counterattack reduction (Crystal Dress+Crystal Shoes+Novice Warrior) stacked on top of the 20% damage reduction from Wyvern Bloodline is basically half your game — all you have to do is keep your Attack up high enough to take everything out in 1 or 2 hits, and this build can do that no problem.

The boss strategy is almost boringly effective: Pop an everlasting Electrostatic Field, swing with Sauron’s Roar, then Icicle, then more Sauron’s Roars. If the boss’s injurious Aura threatens to kill you, swap him over to the Light Side and crack open a can or two of Divine Favor and maybe give him a good old facepunch before swapping back and blowing him up the rest of the way.

The thing I like about this build is that if you get to F60 and there’s no prince, you can be completely assured that you can push through to F70 in much less than half an hour, so you can try again — and then again on F80 within the same half-hour. I could definitely have gone farther than that if I had needed to, but the rascally royal showed his face by then, so I quit and came here to tell you all about the excitement. Hope it was worth your time! 🙂

 

 

Let’s Playtest Phoenix (and Earth Elemental’s Talent) to F100!

Maze: Saint’s Tower

Purpose: To see just how sweet Phoenix can be when given optimal conditions (i.e. +50 Power from Angmar’s Curse.) Also, to see what it looks like when Earth Elemental’s talent combines the Earth Set into an Earth Orb. Also, to collect an Earth Set and a Water Set for the Honor Quests.

Mainball: Phoenix — Because seriously, a gumball that plays Legendary Archer all by his lonesome deserves to be in the front of the back. (OK, really I just wanted the high power.)

In case you haven’t seen it yet, Phoenix’ main trait is that every 8 turns, he deals .6*Power to all visible enemies. Despite being called Eternal Fire, it’s not buffed by effects that buff Fire. Or anything else. Even Electrostatic Field. Nope. Just .6*base Power. But it’s more than enough.

Link1: Future Cat — Almost mandatory for playing Phoenix, so that you can use the Hidden Cloak to quickly reveal all enemies so they all get nuked every 8 turns. All the other fun, ridiculous stuff that comes with him is just a bonus. 😀

Link2: Merchant — Yup, no Melee titles this run. It’s more important for me to get lots of chances at equipment so I can fill out those sets.

Magic Title: Dark Priest — Because with Phoenix burning through the floors, I’m going to want a strong tool to take down the lower-floor Bosses…and 3 free Implosions with +75% effect and +60% effect and a 50% chance at 200% damage sounds like my kind of math.

Venture Title: Great Swordsman (crucible) — Because I know Phoenix is going to stop keeping up at some point, and I might need to go a few floors deeper. Every Swordsman’s Rune is 1 floor with no counterattacks, so bingo. Also, the standard-issue 15% counterattack reduction stacks with Crystal Dress and Crystal Shoes to great effect.

Artifact: Belt of Time Lord — Because it’s the only slot that isn’t taken up by either the Dark Suit, the Water Suit, or the Dimension Bag/Phoenix Feathers.

Potion: Hell Crimson Reagent — Because I thought it might buff Eternal Flame. Oh, well.

The Playtest: Made it to F101 after a Limited Broom, a time Machine, and a 31-floor PoE, for a total of 177 floors traveled. Who says you need all three Title types to go deep? 😀 I didn’t max out until about F70 (after all three of the above go-backs, so effectively F146). But I did spend about seven sh!tloads of EP on gear, mostly Magic Toffees, Magic Brooms, and upgrading bits of the Water and Earth suits.

The Phoenix power itself reached the limit of its usefulness somewhere around F70, too. It does an amazing job of allowing you to clear floor after floor after floor with minimal expenditure of resources for those first 60 floors, and after that it can get enemies significantly damaged (but not kill them) for another 10. Past F70, it’s best to play as though you don’t have the ability and just enjoy it when it happens to go off usefully. I imagine that if you built around Fighter stats, it would probably peter out around F50.

However, this was Saint’s Tower, so the Phoenix Power not keeping up just meant it was time to switch tactics. First, I ran through the several Blades of Ruin that you get from running Phoenix main (one per 20 floors, and I had arranged my go-backs so that I always landed on Fx9 so I could get another BoR upon going down one floor). Then I just went all-in and used my level 50+ X Roars to nuke everything, popping the occasional Magic Toffee so I could keep doing it.

I finished the Earth Elemental set around F65 (the first time past it; I went past once more later). Turns out that when Earth Elemental turns the Earth Suit into the Earth Orb, it becomes an Accessory item that gives:

• +8 Attack and +8 Power,
• A 40% boost to all Earth spells,
• A free random Earth scroll every floor (not PoE, sorry), and
• Access to the spell Earth Elemental Ball, which costs 10 mana, uses no scroll, and does damage equal to your Power to one target.

As a side benefit, once it’s fused, you can put on a second copy of any Earth Suit item (except Thorn Orb, natch), and the 40% bonus from the Earth Orb stacks with the 25% bonus from that item. Good times.

I would’ve quit way earlier in the maze, but I got punk’d by RNG: I was able to easily gather every piece of the Water suit…except the FIRST ONE. I went the whole run without seeing a Water Spirit’s Cape, and I kept pushing on only because I really wanted to see what the difference between a 2* (water) and 3* (earth) Fused Orb would be.

Alas, F101 saw me locked into a corner with a No-Spells Ward up that I had no Light Crystal to break, and I had used up all of my Swordsmans Runes getting from F91 to F99. Sigh. Next time, Water Suit. Next time…

Honor Questing in Saint’s Tower w/ Ranger Song

Maze: Saint’s Tower — Because it’s easy to get to F100 when you have +50 Atk and Pwr and +500 HP and MP. Also, the Workshops here let you level up Elemental Suits, and you can Steal parts of the Light and Dark suits here, so it’s the place to go if you need a Dark and/or Light suit for Honor Questing.

Purpose: To get the Honor Quests ‘Take a Ranger Song team to F100,’ ‘Obtain the Dark Suit,’ ‘max out Great Swordsman,’ and ‘max out Pope.’

Main Gumball: Divine Dragon — I knew I was going Pope for the XP, and I figured that would take me through Light Master, so the free Divine Favors from the Dragon would be super useful. Also, the 20% boost to MP from Primary Dragon would add to the value of Magic Toffee.

Soul Link 1: Lionheart King — Because if you’re going to have Dragon titles tacked on to your usual set, you might as well make them cheap. Also, this makes the XP quest for Great Swordsman 30% less annoying. 🙂

Soul Link 2: Kaito — Because I’m planning on stealing the parts of the Dark Suit from the mobs in Saint’s Tower.

Magic Title: Priest –> Light Master –> Pope — For the XP! Also, this will make it much easier to nuke down the boss in his Dark phase.

Melee Title: Knight of Faith –> Armored Knight –> Light Paladin — Because I want those Divine Favors to achieve maximum value, and getting a bunch more doesn’t hurt, either.

Venture Title: Rune Master –> Weapon Master –> Great Swordsmith — 15% more Holy Bolts sounds like winning, the 15% Counterattack Prevention stacks neatly with the Crystal Shoes and Crystal Dress, and Swordsmith’s Runes read “beat one floor free of charge,” so 9 of them will get me from F91 to F100 easy-peasy. (Actually, one floor I did punch enemies in the face for so long that the dungeon nearly collapsed on me…got out on my 98th turn!)

Dragon Title: Medium Dragon Bloodline — Because I had them, and I had the EP to buy them. 🙂

Artifact: Ring of Great Enchanter — Not useful for my classes, but between the treasures of Saint’s Tower and the pieces of the Dark Suit, I was limited to choosing between Rings and Gloves, and I wanted to get plenty of Power but also recognized that a little Attack is vital for punching your way past the early game.

Potion: Mixture of Light and Dark — Because it’s the only way to eke any more utility out of those Divine Favors and also Pope.

Other Gear: I used the Crystal Shoes and Crystal Dress to reduce enemy counterattacks so that I could keep punching faces for as long as possible, for to conserve spells. I did successfully build the Dark Suit, but ended up discarding everything but the Voodoo Cloak, which I kept because it’s one of the few ways to get Power (instead of MP) out of the Cloak slot. I also wore the Magic Boy’s Glasses for the same reason.

I ended up carrying around a Dark Book as treasure, and swapping it out for a Skullcap Wand whenever I had to heal myself (15% healing magic boost FTW). I also swapped out my Voodoo Cloak for an Oracle’s Cape when it came time to kill bosses, and my artifact ring for a Ring of Faith whenever I had to heal myself.

The Run-Down: I basically facepunched everything from F1-F59 (except the boss). Even with my miserably low Attack, I forced my way through in melee, relying on massive counterattack reduction and the fact that Divine Favor basically took me from single-digit HP to near full in a single cast. Then, I cast my one PoE to go back 27 floors because I didn’t quite feel ready for the F60 boss. Looking back, I have no idea why I felt that way because the bosses were the easiest part of this run by far. Getting +100% effect Holy Bolts (+75% from Pope and +25% from Oracle’s Cape) that double-cast themselves (thanks Pope) meant that the F30, F40, and F50 bosses dropped before they could take an action, and the F60 and F70 bosses dropped before they could take two actions. 🙂

It was F49 that I realized I had gotten level 5 in all four of Saint’s Towers custom buffing spells, and I had 7 Magic Toffees, so it was time. I cast 10x “Give me 50 MP,” used a couple of Toffees, cast 10x “Give me 5 Power,” used a couple of Toffees, cast 10x “Give me 50 HP,” used a couple of Toffees, cast 10x “Give me 5 Attack,” used a single Toffee, and moved on to kill the F50 boss with a smile in my heart.

Title-wise, I drove straight to Pope, then backfilled Magic Apprentice and Light Master. Then I took 3 stars of Novice Warrior, one star of Knight, Knight of Faith, and Armored Knight, and then backfilled Knight of Faith for more Power. Then I took one star each of Fortune Finder and Explorationist, all three stars of Rune Master (for more Holy Bolts!), one star of Weapon Master, and one star in Great Swordsmith. Then I filled in ALL of the Dragon Titles, went back to obtain every point of HP that I could from everywhere before taking Light Paladin, went back to obtain every point of Power that I could, and finally just filled in everything else pretty randomly. I maxxed out my Titles completely around F92.

Once I got below F60, I started using the Roar spells to snipe off ranged attackers, and facepunched the melee attackers until F81. Burned through about half my enormous backstock of Divine Favors (yes, I refilled my 1200+ HP more than once per floor on average!) Then I used the Roar spells to kill basically everything until F91. 10 MP to cast a spell doesn’t mean sh!t when you’ve got 1500 MP. Literally made up all the MP with a single Magic Toffee on F89. 😀

F91-99, as mentioned, fell like wheat to a series of 9 straight Swordsman’s Runes. The only danger was nearly collapsing the dungeon on myself killing a pair of 1200-HP Rock Golems with attacks that were dealing 27 damage each.

The bosses dropped easily to a basic run of Electrostatic Field, Disrupting Ray, and endless Holy Bolts until F80. The F80 boss I had to futz around a little with an Aurora Barrier and a couple of Icicles. The F90 boss was a genuine pain in the ass, requiring multiple switches back and forth between nuking the Dark-side boss with Holy Bolts, then switching to the Light side for a Divine Favor (which at this point was an automatic trip to full life), another Electrostatic Field, and another Disrupting Ray, then a switch back to the Dark Side. Also several Stoneskins and a couple more Aurora Barriers.

Oh, and Timestill. I Timestilled the F80 boss once and the F90 boss twice. It’s crucial to know that Timestill prevents the boss’s “hurt you badly” aura from going off, so it’s a clutch tool for ekeing out the last three Holy Bolts when you’re about to die.

I quit when I reached the F100 boss. I’m 100% sure I could have beaten him if I had devoted 15 minutes to it, but I had accomplished all four of the Honor Quests I started out to achieve…and besides, I had a dungeon in the brand-new Elemental Event go to clear out before it reset. 🙂