Backpack Brawl – Skull Usage Guide

How to Properly Use a Skull

By Tomotius.

I am making this guide because I see a lot of builds where skulls are used inefficiently, and I want to give a little insight on how to use them best.

(1) What Do Skulls Counter?

• This one is obvious to most of you.
• They counter energy using weapons.

That means daggers, pets, and potions are not impacted by skulls. That leads directly to point 2.

(2) How to Counter Skulls and How to Prevent That

To avoid the issue of not being able to attack your enemy because they have skulls, you can use one of the following options:

• Build daggers with strength as the damage source
• Build pets as damage source
• Build potions as damage source
• Build stamina-generating items to generate energy faster (especially the wrath potion is a good counter since the drain of your energy helps you activate it faster and get the strength bonus from it faster)

Daggers and pets tend to have mostly low damage; therefore, damage-reducing shields are a great option to counter these strategies. Against pets, poison apples, bite traps, and mimics are also options.

Against potion damage, I would recommend always building an antivenom.

Against wrath potion, you can’t really do much more than drain even more energy efficiently. (Look for more on 4).

(3) Ice and Thorn Antisynergy

Energy Drain has a soft antisynergy with Ice and Thorns.

Thorns can’t proc if the enemy does not hit you; therefore, stacking both is not money-efficient.

Ice, on the other hand, is an antisynergy because with more ice, the enemy has less stamina usage, and there is more stamina that you need to drain to make the enemy lose value from their weapons. Therefore, that’s also not money-efficient to stack.

(4) Optimal Energy Drain

The most common mistake I see here is just spamming skulls.

A maxed-out hero has an energy regen of 1.15 Stamina/second; therefore, you don’t need to drain more than that. Normal skulls drain 1 stamina every 3 seconds, and upgraded skulls drain 1 every 3.5 seconds. You should always try to get the proc times to different timings so the enemy does not accidentally get a hit in between your skull procs (if they all proc at the same time, he can regenerate 3.45 stamina in the meantime).

The optimal mix is having 2 skulls and 2 upgraded skulls of your choice. Put one of each of these groups in a fanny pack, the other one NOT.

That’s how you get 4 different timers to proc the skulls on different timings.