Guts/Crit Brawler
7 years ago

So, in my run I'd come up with something considerably different from the accepted Speed Ninja build, and mostly for the sake of the early game, I think it's competitive at least.

The cornerstone is the Guts skill, which adds (20¤level) Atk and Def for a fixed duration whenever direct damage knocks you below 50% health. If you invest in it heavily, you get some absolutely ridiculous margins of gain, at the cost of a much riskier run.

I get the Power Wine from saving the kid on the pirate ship rather than from the arena, since I have enough power through Guts that I'm not losing considerable time waiting til Driazhek. This means no bread, but again, low health is paramount to consistent Guts triggers.

I take a final Vit value of 25, which is the "can reliably not be one-shotted by anything barring Deatharte's axe and blast, which are easily avoidable anyway" point. It's harsh, but with bottomless Healing Water to blow through, it's not bad.

The Critical skill is pretty... well, critical to my speed as well, since it scales just fine with Power Wine gains, the same way Break Armor and basically nothing else would. Weapon skill unfortunately only amplifies the gain from the weapon itself, which is a very minimal increase in the scheme of things.

Another benefit of using claws that I can see is the benefit of its charge attack being full-speed mobile. There are a lot of points where I can wipe enemies out without stopping by grazing past them with it, giving me a pretty good margin of additional EXP without costing much if any time. There are plenty of "roadblock" enemies that can be cast aside quickly with it, as well.

My execution so far is highly inefficient, but I was wondering what other perspectives thought of the route and its potential. I think it can easily compete with Speed Ninja due to how much time you save early game and a seamless way to avoid the arena, but I was wondering what someone else thought of it.

FONR likes this

This is a very solid strat, I had considered giving it a shot from the start as the brawler has always been my favorite class. Raizen is undeniably the best for advanced runs as you can start with lvl. 6 speed, which just saves such a massive amount of time with movement, but I can only reliably get his speed up to about lvl. 2 or 3 in typical normal run, so it doesn't even save a ton of time using him. As said, it certainly makes for a far riskier run, but it's very, very viable. Your run had a lot of whoopsies and you still managed to only be 10 minutes slower than my ninja run, which as it stands now is fairly decently executed. This definitely means this has a lot of promise. I love that you circumvent arena dupes too, it takes so much time.

I am fairly certain that if both were to be optimally executed, your strat would probably be faster in any% normal.

Edited by the author 7 years ago
Vandaeron likes this

Oh, yes. On the Ninja subject, are you aware of the Backstab glitch? That is, if you use the sword charge attack facing away from an enemy and back up into them, it will trigger the Backstab damage bonus. As far as I can tell, this happens because Backstab checks you and the enemy's facing when you attack, and if it's the same (or possibly within one degree of each other,) you get the extra damage.

Anyway, if you like, it might be fine to make categories for different classes (probably as runs for them come up,) so that the game's element of buildcraft and different approaches to the same content can still be prevalent in the speedrun, regardless of what the absolute best speed build is. Then the any% category could just be "one's submission that happens to be their overall fastest"

Edited by the author 7 years ago

I was not aware of this, I am still relearning the game in general as I've come back to run it after probably almost 10 years of not playing it at all, so there is a lot that I do not know about in game. I kind of just remembered the game one day, looked at glitches and established this page and started running. I need to sit down and do some casual grinding. I really appreciate that tidbit, definitely gonna work it into my runs if it checks out, which I trust it will. You seem to know this game very well, I'd be happy to accept you for moderator if you have any interest in that. I've had the idea of making each character their own categories presented to me before and I kind of wasn't super interested in it, but you're the second to bring it to my attention. Perhaps it's honestly a good idea, I can see the merit in it.

IMO, character-specific categories are important only if the interest is present. For the sake of example, if you decided to go for Brawler and got something better than your current run, you could keep the 1:59:xx in a Ninja category, so if someone else came to run Ninja, runs as the character would be comparable side by side.

So far right now, each runner only runs a single character, so there are no runs that would be added to the pool by separating.

Mod would be fine if you want. I've been talking the game up and may be trying to get more people interested, so it's relevant.

Edited by the author 7 years ago

I recently tried leveling a guts/knife build. The whole idea was that the regen skill and healing items would heal me just above mid-health as I took damage enough to fall just below. While I would take dramatically less damage due to the large def and atk boost, this strategy consumed an awful lot of healing items. I found that when I went full dagger and increased the number of SP restore items a bit I cleared faster using less items. Daggers charged attack simply costs so little SP and deals such brutal damage that guts will help, but I wouldn't level the skill past 1 point before daggers would be nearly maxed.

A part of the appeal of guts was that I assumed I could put fewer points into health, but ended up needing more in total to be able to trigger guts consistently and safely in useful situations. I do imagine the brawler can beat the ninja in a speedrun purely on the grounds of damage. My guts brawler was lvl 37 I believe when it started advanced mode and most of the game was very easy, just a bit consumable item dependent.

If you are including advanced mode guts will quickly becomes nearly useless compared to other skills as your gear is not good enough to mitigate enough damage. The amount of stats you need to invest into health to play safely would be better spent on strength so that everything dies from a charge-up.

Sorry for the long rant. TL;DR, you can get brawlers to easily kill things in a single charged attack if you keep investing in STR and daggers. Guts will as such decrease your speed and increase your item dependency. Guts will sometimes give you absurd numbers while playing, like a regular stab dealing 500+ damage from guts triggering multiple times, but with a regular knife focus you would just spin once to kill anyway.

Edited by the author 7 years ago

I'm sanding the edges off a Dagger build now. There's a few thoughts on your proposal based on what I've found so far.

1.) I'm about 90% certain if you heal above half with regen, you cannot proc Guts again in the same room. Several resources and my anecdotal experience says the Guts reset occurs when you use a healing item to get over 50%, or exit the room, not if you regen above 50%. With that said, I had a HILARIOUS instance of stacking like 6 instances of Guts by healing through a Blast attack the other day :)

2.) In an Any% Normal speedrun you finish the game under level 20. I route to finish at 20, Vandaeron finishes at 18 I think. 37 is way, way more skill points available to dump into Guts and Dagger than we have doing a run, and it makes a difference.

3.) Dagger damage scales geometrically with levels (more hits AND more power per hit), and you really only start to notice the power at 5, 6, 7... which you won't reach in a speedrun. Earlier levels, Guts packs more whallop per point. I'd initially planned to go 4 Dagger, 2 Guts... then I added another Guts because it was so good, and finally swapped to 3 Dagger, 4 Guts when I realized Dagger was paying fewer bills than Guts. Even hilted to the gills with Power Wine STR points, Guts brings noticeably more power.

4.) You talk about stat investment, but in the speedrun you have access to infinite STR thanks to Power Wine duping. In an Advance or Dual mode run you'd also get an Energy Bread and dupe it for access to infinite VIT. Stats aren't meaningful. In Normal, all points go into DEX and VIT to taste. In Dual they'd all go into DEX and you'd use Wine and Bread to buff STR and VIT for "Free"

5.) With the Power Wine dupe, you're killing everything in the game in one Lv2 spin until Tower... then you can kill anything in one Lv3 spin. The trouble in the run comes pre-Boat, where Guts shines since you don't have the points for big Dagger levels.

6.) Something I'd discounted as "Not important" that is starting to hurt my Brawler runs is the fundamental difference between Claw and Dagger: Claw charge attacks move you forward, Dagger charge attacks slow you down. This is a huge problem on the Desert mid-boss, Clione, and generally moving through levels. Also claw has a longer attack range, which matters in a few places. You get faster boss kills when you can just hunker down and DPS, but I don't know if that makes up for it.

tl;dr: Dagger + Guts is viable. I got a 2:10 with it on my 2nd run. I'm not sure it can beat Claw + Guts though.

It looks like the best approach for Brawler is actually a hybrid. Since Vandaeron ran Claw and I ran Knife, we were able to see each weapon had its own strengths and weaknesses. My Knife runs would start slow then gain time on Vandaeron's Claw runs.

Claw is a movement beast. Your charge attack propels you forward faster than walking, and giving it more points doesn't give you more hits so it's a 1pt wonder and falls off hard after Boat. Knife is a boss killer, with geometrically increasing damage with every level, but it's slower than Claw on actually moving through enemies in the dungeons.

I combined the two with this skill order:

¤ Guts I ¤ Claw I ¤ Guts II ¤ Guts III ¤ Knife as many times as skill points allow ¤ If you fall between Knife tiers, dump the remaining points into Critical

Early game, I relied on the ridiculous power buff from Guts (and the ability to get 2 or 3 stacks easily) to power through things. Claw let me dive through enemy packs in Wizari that I had to stop and kill as a Knife user. Once I got the Power Wine at Boat, I already had Knife Lv2 and a decent knife weapon, I switched to using Knife as a boss killer and Claw for moving through levels.

Being capped at Lv1 Claw also meant I didn't waste SP on over-charging when I didn't have to, which was a huge problem for me going pure Knife.

Later in the game, starting at about Coldazhek, Guts becomes less important. It rarely makes the difference between one-charging an enemy and not, so you can stop worrying about it. It's still a beast to stack on bosses though because Lv4 Knife spin hits six times and each hit gets the full benefit of Guts.

The general rule for Claw VS Knife is if you have to kill it, and it won't die in one Claw charge, use Knife; otherwise use Claw.

This approach is, at worst, equal to pure claw and at best can save 3-4 minutes. Unsure because we both had deaths in our runs :/

FONR and Vandaeron like this

Either way, hybrid was definitely conclusive as a theoretical. One can cut 1:50 easily this way.

FONR likes this
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