I’m super bummed I missed out on 200+ with this run, but I also made some big mistakes along the way and it wouldn’t be hard to use this same build to push farther.
Guide to Sid Floor 195+ (Sparkle Toolbox) Build
By Mihealsick
The cornerstones of this build are:
- An increasingly-high attack count from Sid’s Deserter spec (+1 attack every 8 floors).
- Sparkle, which triggers on each of your attacks to give you an absurd amount of armor.
- Armored Attack (from the Turtle Gauntlet), which makes your attacks deal damage to scale with your current armor.
In the extreme late game, diminishing returns will start to take their toll while enemies continue to scale geometrically, and you’ll need to lean on a more diverse suite of answers.
For talents, the Deserter spec is critical to the build. At the end I was attacking 25 times in a single turn (or 50 with swift set), and each of those attacks stacks a ton of crucial armor from Sparkle.
Don’t be a fool like me and pick the center path (+gold%, +crit chance, +crit chance). Crit chance is absolutely fantastic (and very hard to get) in this game, but Armored Attack effects cannot critically hit! It was useless. The extra attack from the path pictured here is much better than the crit effects (The combat% and physical% are nice early but fall off in the late game).
Floors 1-80
I definitely recommend checking out Chrono’s Jace Floor 166 guide for the basics of the build.
In short:
- Lean on warrior/demonic to carry you most of the way.
- Be smart with your dismantles (see the dismantle guide below).
- Make sure you’re prepared for the spicy enemies that can end your run if you don’t have the right answers (Jupiters, Suns, Saturns, Iron Golems, Deaths, and Perfect Slaves).
Floors 80+
Things start to scale wildly after 120 or so, and as you climb higher and higher you won’t be able to faceroll things anymore. Eventually your damage will start to taper off. It’s important to keep a toolbox of effects in your inventory and swap things around to suit the challenge.
I’d recommend keeping these items. Yes, all of them.
Edit: An armor potion is also helpful, and I missed a very important piece: one pair of Swift set boots!
Jade Set
You can start this off as a dismantle-only option, but after floor 90 or so it became the only set that I kept equipped in every fight.
The idea is every attack applies X stacks of Sparkle, and pops the current stack before it to give you that much armor. That armor is modified by a lot of things, and your next attack scales to your new armor.
Without the Jade set, the stack resets after every attack, so you’ll get +X armor every time for a plain geometric increase to your attack and armor. With the Jade set equipped, the stack just continues to accumulate instead of popping, so you’ll get +X armor on the first attack and +2X armor on the 2nd attack and +20X armor on the 20th attack.
You won’t need that massive scaling until very late in the game, and even then it’s going to struggle to keep up alone.
Just remember–because of the way Sparkle works, once you take damage then you can no longer stack that special armor up. It’s locked out.
Demonic Set
Use this to cruise through the faceroll phase, and then use it more tactically later in the game when you need to multi-attack enemies that you can’t ignore.
Turtle Set
This is a great defensive set. You can’t take damage on the first turn of the fight, so no more dying to Parries from annoying Kotyas, and no damage means that your Sparkle stacking is not interrupted! It also blocks 3 hits per piece with Armor Shield, so you can often buy more turns for stacking when you need it.
Swift Set
Doubles your attack count, which is insane with Sid’s Deserter spec. Since your attack count scaling is pyramidal, attacks 20-40 deal a lot more damage than attacks 1-20.
Legacy Set
I used this set in my run to handle Perfect Slave shields and debuff immunity, but I think you can skip Legacy entirely if you build right from the start!
Gold/Celestial/Cinder/Madness
This brings us to the weirdest part of the kit.
To use this trick, take the following steps:
- Put on 3 pieces of Gold set and 1 piece of Celestial set. (Remember, your third set in the late late game should always be Jade).
- Make sure you’ve dismantled something for Cinder damage. (It doesn’t need to be much).
- Drink a Madness Potion so that you attack only yourself in the next round of combat.
- Make sure you have a gold heart in your buffs area. If you don’t, drink a gold potion!
- Smash that attack button.
- Die.
Because of your penetration, you bypass your own armor and you immediately die… but then a wonderful thing happens. You come back to 25% hp because of the Gold set, and you gain damage immunity for the rest of the round from the Gold set 3pc bonus.
As long as you one-shot yourself (which you should), you do not get locked out of Ephemeral Armor from Sparkle. That means the rest of your bazillion attacks continue to stack your sparkly armor up. When the enemies take their turn, you’re immune to their damage (with very few exceptions).
Not enough sparkle stacks? Just do it again. And again. The only limit is inventory space and potions (which are meaningful limits).
This is your go-to way to handle Perfect Slaves (whose own damage immunity makes it hard for you to stack up your armor).
But wait, there’s more.
This Madness potion trick can also be a source of damage that can far outpace your armor % attack. Also, unlike your normal armor % damage that decreases as your armor is attacked down, it ramps UP the more you take damage.
Remember how you have 1 piece of Celestial armor on? That Celestial set bonus takes all damage you receive and converts it into elemental power. That means for every 1 damage you take, you deal 1% more elemental damage. If you take, say, a single round of attacks from a high level Perfect Slave that’s hitting 6 times for 10k damage, that means you’re now dealing an additional 60,000% elemental damage. After it attacks next round, that’s another 60,000% damage on top of it. That means every 1 point of Cinder damage you have is dealing 60k damage, plus 60k damage for each round you took the hits before that.
On floor 195, my armor % attacks were dealing about 100T – 3Q damage (depending on how high it stacked up), and in further rounds of the fight it would tick down slowly from there. My Madness-infused Cinder damage would start around 1Q and triple or quadruple every round.
This isn’t a good tool for immediate-kill high-health enemies (like Saturns), but it’s great to win attrition grinds against enemies with unfathomably huge health pools (Death and Perfect Slave).
Dismantle Guide
As a general note, as you get into the extreme end game, remember that the gear you have equipped counts as less and less of a percentage of your total output. By the time you hit floor 100, you have 8 pieces of gear equipped and 99 pieces of gear that you’ve eaten.
You’ll notice that the initial inventory list has some combinations where you’ll just be missing whole entire pieces of your set. This is because those set pieces would contribute very little in the big picture, and they’re not worth the space in your crowded inventory.
Now, for your dismantles:
Hard Requirements
You’ll need 100% Precision before floor 20. You’ll also need 154% or so Penetration by the time you hit Floor 26 PLUS an average of about 15% more Penetration PER FLOOR beyond that. This means that once Bloodedges show up on 15, you’ll need to eat the equivalent of a Divine one every 6 floors on average. Yes, really. Eat your vegetables or you’ll die to Iron Golems.
Faith
Snack on Believer’s Lockets early, but save room for Ring of Unity later since it’s just that much better. Faith is another layer of multiplier for all damage that applies after all your other math, so keep it in the rotation.
Armored Attack
The only item with this is the Turtle Gauntlets. As long as you’ve dismantled one, you’ll automatically swap over to Armored Attack mid-round once its math surpasses your regular attack. Keep these in the rotation in the late game.
Armor %, Power
In the early game, Cataclysm Mask and the Gold neck can give you tidbits of these with occasional dismantles. Wooden Crowns give you both, so definitely include them in your dismantle rotation.
Cinder Damage
You’ll need a bit of this if you want to lean on Cinder damage. I didn’t personally swap to this until super late, but it’s probably viable earlier on if you have room in your dismantle rotation.
Sparkle
Spam Gloom dismantles as often as you can.
Late-Late Game Enemy Guide
Kotya
If you can’t skip a round, requires Turtle Set or Madness strat. Remember, you’re immune to damage on the first turn with 1+ Turtle piece).
Jupiter
With 100% Precision, you can faceroll these. They have good health scaling, but nothing you can’t keep up with.
Saturn
The only sure answer to these is three rounds of the Madness strategy, meaning you need 3 Madness potions and 2 Gold potions. This buys you enough time that they can’t delete your armor bar with their spell (since they run out of mana). If you’re like me and you don’t find 3 Madness potions, use the Turtle set to hold them off and back it up with the Swift set to double your pace. That said, it’s possible to get checkmated if there’s a third enemy that you must deal with (like that Iron Golem in the top image from this thread).
Iron Golem
Must-kills, but single-targeting them might not net you enough Sparkle since they die very fast. Default to Demonic as an answer. Their armor scaling and armor attack is one of the few things that can break through your defense to one-shot you. You also must have 100% more Penetration than they have Toughness.
Sun
I was a dummy and opened the Opportunism chest because I figured I’d build away from Cinder damage. That 25% damage nerf was super rough. You can be like me, or you can try and get your Cinder (or another placeholder) online before 25.
Death & Perfect Slave
These are easy up until 120+, you just steamroll Death and use either the Madness strat or Legacy 2pc when you see a Perfect Slave. Then they start to get INSANE amounts of health thousands of times beyond the other enemies. The Madness strat always keeps up with them, but for fights where you can’t use it you might need to grind it out and win by attrition.
Other Must-Handles include Eldrid’s Flesh, Pinto, Overseer, Bravura, Blood Ghoul, Venomous Spider, Snow Wraith, and anything that can CC you.
As a special note on Mind Control and Confusion, if you open the Opportunism chest you can’t miss so it blanks these debuffs against targets that have no energy. However, hilariously, since YOU have energy you could end up missing YOURSELF when using the Madness strat. Keep that in mind and remember it can cost you a whole round of Sparkle-stacking!
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