lad=Mekadragon, sorrySumez wrote:
What's "the lad"?
The final boss isn't giving me trouble, but he could potentially be a run killer on a really tight one. I think the best I've done is taking 3 or 4 hearts of damage (including ones taken from the timer).
I have two different approaches to him, but I'm not sure which is better. One is just camping at a sword's length beneath him when he flies up, to hit him once every time, and just stand completely still during straight fire attacks. That one is playing it super safe, but some times he does two jumps straight in a row, which is impossible to see coming, and will always get me bodied.
The other strategy is getting on his right side (you can run through him right when he spawns), and push him into the left corner. You can keep jumping at him and often get two hits in per jump, but the bounce-back from that is inconsistent, and occasionally he'll just screw me over when doing that, but on other occasions it'll make him go down in no time. I don't know if there's an approach that can make that strategy safer.
But I tend to go for the super-safe approach because pushing him to the left corner always gave me trouble (bouncing back and getting hit without being able to defend is a frequent result).
I think that it would take an average of 4-5 hearts to kill the boss, so I generally do not worry if I have at least half a life+potion.
I think that it can be killed faster and more efficiently, but with method 1 you shouldn't have too many problems.
I did forget to mention that it magic attacks can make life much easier when fighting him, especially the lightning, because on tense moments in which I lose the pace, I can always recover with magic.
What I am beginning to suspect is that the game has some proto-rank.
In fact:
OK, I am wondering if the game becomes stingy with heart drops with you early on; on some runs in which I kept getting hit too often, I even got big hearts (full stock) as early as stage 5 (the devils in the desert, for instance).See, that's exactly the luck thing I was talking about. Since picking up the game this time over, I haven't gotten a single heart drop from those guys, but I think I got some on my first 1CC when I played the game a few years back.
Unfortunately, my trick about repeating the gold bats for hearts doesn't seem to work on every run, and you actually can't get 100K points from them fast enough to counter the timer, so that part isn't (always) as broken as I thought. It feels like the drop RNG on enemies is determined the moment you enter the stage (or maybe even when the whole game starts?), and repeating sections of the maze won't change what drops you are getting from each enemy... with the exception of certain deviations? I wish I understood how it works.
So yeah, you can easily get a final stage without a single heart drop, and it's happened to me several times now. So the best way to combat that I guess is just not to get hit by anything. Forcing the hobgoblin into a corner with magic spam to get a clean kill on him helps a lot.
Your scenario sounds particularly nasty, because I usually experience the opposite. The bats and mice before mekadragon always give me a few hearts, and not getting hit much means that those hears give me a full stuck.
Maybe, though, the game determines the item drops (not much the enemies that drop them, but the kind of item dropped) based on performance and number of coins.
It sounds possible to me, since once you have loads of money, you can buy health all the time (...except the labyrinth, of course).
I am going to check again the coin progression and scribble it down, but the idea is simple:I had a run where I did kind of what you were talking about, and only getting 60+ coins on occasions where I knew I was guaranteed to do it via 5 whirlwinds bought on stage 2 (so, no waggles) and two occasions where I let an enemy bump me into one. How were you able to get the legendary armor on stage 6? I probably got like 4-6 "60+" drops, and I was only barely able to get the second highest one (which I normally forego, but good luck beating round 9 with heavy armor), and was actually 1 coin short of the Sphinx hint afterwards.
I made the mistake of accidentally getting the stage 11 hospital before the boss there, but still made it through till the end by the skin of my teeth, through a bit of luck.
Btw, I don't get legendary boots at all anymore, I think the game is much easier with the penultimate (ceramic) ones, buying them on
shield progression is: level 2-40 coins-->level 4-120 coins-->level 8 350 coins.
boots: level 2-80 coins-->level 11 380 coins (I do get ceramic boots as an item drop, sometimes. Maybe just skip the legendary boots?).
armor progression is: level 3-60 coins-->level 4-100 coins-->level 6 540 coins.
Unless I luck out with coins, I buy little else except for energy if I am in desperate need.
Believe or not, even with tatsumakis my 60+ coin skills are bad.
I might buy a new potion on stage 7 if the run is particularly shitty, but often stages 9-10 give a potion if you used up the initial one and you've been for long time enough without one.
My memory right now tells me that a single 60+ coin drop before stage 4 suffices to follow the strategy above, but I really want to scribble it down.
I am sure that I was able to follow that progression a few times that I had NO 60+ coin drops but other coin drops were good, and I did not need to buy energy because I was hit rarely.
EDIT: I just had a third 1-CC on a Saturday morning (ah, the joys of adult age!), and I had:
A. 1 66 coin drop on the first snake of stage 2's dungeon (+66 coins over a "bare" run);
B. 1 missed coin on stage 1 boss' drop (-6 coins, total +60 coins over a "bare" run);
C. 4 missed coins on first iteration of Kraken, stage 4 (-7x4 coins=-28 coins, total +32 coins);
D. One 10 coins drink before the desert part, stage 5 (-10 coins total +22 coins);
E. One full healing treatment on stage 6 (-20 coins, total +2 coins).
I bought the legendary armor with 23 coins to spare, and the rest of the run was like I posted above.
An interesting bit is that I bumped a lot into enemies (strange run, I know), so I also obtained no less that 3 big hearts (1 right after the second knight fight, stage 7; 1 in stage 8, 1 in stage 10).
So, I would say that you can have extremely tight runs in which wiggling around will still net you decent money drops, and buy the minimum equipment on time anyway: no mistakes allowed, though.
I would also say that there is *something* governing heart drops, which seems sensitive to certain aspects of a player's performance (whence the "proto-rank" comment).
Magic is probably the same: I saw next to nothing lightning drops.