I once again trip at the finish line and narrowly miss my goal of floor 200 with this unfair Viran build!
Guide to Viran Floor 192 (Silver / Celestial / Magma) Build
By Mihealsick
For defense, you’ll be exploiting the synergies between your built-in Chromalure tag, the Silver set, and gold potions. Chromalure converts your damage received into poison, and Silver cleanses that poison (and other nasty effects) so you can ignore damage and debuffs for the first 2 turns. Your poison damage also only counts as a single instance of damage, so each gold potion you drink can extend the number of turns you don’t care about damage by 1. In fact, Viran’s Chromathorn specialization sometimes allows him to dump his poison stack and get yet another free turn in there.
For offense, you’re looking to leverage the open-ended scaling of the Celestial set with your Cinder damage. Damage converted by Chromalure does still count as damage taken, causing your elemental damage output to scale up and up as enemies deal more and more damage.
But, be careful. There’s a damage cap of 999Q damage, and at some point past that where you’ll start to wrap around and start from 0. I don’t know where that cap is, or why it’s there, or how we were supposed to know about it, but you have to make sure you don’t let your scalers fly out of control! With just a bit of restraint, it shouldn’t be too hard.
For talents, follow your heart! The most effective pre-60 is likely the Chromathorn path pictured here, but Frailty might actually be better past 60 to make sure that enemies are hitting you for lots of damage and scaling up your Celestial power nicely. My own run ended because Saturns weren’t hitting for enough damage to ramp up my scaling in time before I ran out of gold potions, and Frailty almost certainly would have fixed that.
If you do pick the Chromathorn path, it’s probably just as viable to run with Toxicity > +1 Attack > +25% Freezing attack.
Do not pick the Chaos path. It might be tempting since Silver cleanses you of the bad stuff… but you’ll often need more than 2 turns to clear a battle, and some of the random debuffs are absolute run-enders.
Early Game (Floors 10-20)
You’ll need to force Mercenary here for as long as you can and make sure you can collect gold potions. You’ll need at least 4 gold potions if you plan on making it to floor 170, and after that the more you have the better off you’ll be.
Just stick with magic damage for now, but don’t dismantle too aggressively into magic damage. If you need better attacks, focus on Insight and Wisdom. Throw on 3pc demon to tide you over.
Stay precision capped for Jupiters, and just steamroll right through Kotyas: you’re damage immune for the first 2 turns so who cares if they parry you?
- Do not open the opportunism chest. You don’t need it!
- Reach 100% Penetration as soon as you can, and be prepared to scale it to keep up with Iron Golems – By floor 26 you need 154% Penetration, and then about 15 more every floor after that on average.
- Think about your max health – Some Orion’s Chests and Giant’s Rings are nice to sprinkle in to your dismantle rotation, but only if you have room.
Midgame (Floors 21-60)
Once you have a good set together and you’ve dismantled a few Jester’s Bone Masks and Giant Rings, you should be ready to make the switch to a full Cinder strategy.
Between the Flesh and Magma sets, you should be burning through just about everything with a few exceptions at this stage. Once you’ve dismantled a few Thronglers, you should be safe to drop the Flesh set and put on the Celestial set.
Saturns and Iron Golems
You probably won’t be able to burn straight through their Armor Shields, so you’ll need to break through them the old fashioned way. The problem is, you only have 2-3 attacks, so it might take a little patience at this stage. Luckily, you have 6+ gold potions, so you have plenty of time if you need it. Once you swap to Celestial, these get much easier. And remember, if you want to break through Armor Shield just a little faster, dismantle 1x electricity and 1x malice item–each instance of damage pings a shield, so that helps!
Dismantle Rotation
You’ll need to continue keeping up your penetration for Iron Golems. Aside from that, rotate items with high maxhp and maxhp% (like Throngler and Giant’s Ring) as often as you can. Orion’s Core is great because it has hp and penetration on it! Jester’s Bone Masks and Magma Chestplates are good when you go to transition over to the Cinder strat, but don’t go too wild on them–your health is your main source of base magma damage, and the Celestial set is your main source of elemental power. Cycle in some Faith in there like from Ring of Unity, but again don’t go too crazy on it (more on that later).
Freeze attack?
As your elemental power scales up from the Celestial set, it also increases your freeze attack damage. You should sprinkle in some freeze attack into your dismantle rotation, but that damage is going to be way behind Cinder for you anyways. It’s nice to have, but not important.
Endgame (Floors 60+)
The only new enemy is the Perfect Slave, and your strategy for the PS is to just drink Gold Potions until their shields go away. You’ll need at least 4 to get to floor 170, but more is better.
As you approach 60, you need to slow way down on dismantling for damage output. In fact, by the time you hit 80 or so you’re probably going to hit the brakes on dismantling almost anything that increases your damage output.
Why? Because your damage is already scaling to the damage you take! Your job in the endgame is to flirt with the damage cap beyond 999Q but you don’t want to fly too far past it.
What you really want to do is aim for the Max HP Sweet Spot. See, every hit that you take converts its damage to elemental power, but every hit you take can’t exceed your current armor+hp (meaning, just your hp since this build doesn’t care about armor). In the image attached here, each of the Perfect Slave’s hits are exceeding my max health, so they stack my full health bar as poison. 6 hits of that brings us to the 2.59M poison stacks, which means I’m getting 2.59M% elemental power every round per Perfect Slave that’s wailing on me.
Your max hp also determines your base Cinder damage (because of the Magma set). So by increasing your max hp by 100 points, you deal base +25 Cinder damage and it extends the cap of every hit you take to +100% elemental power.
The sweet spot is when low-attack count enemies in the endgame (like Saturns) are still scaling your damage output high enough to keep up…. but high-attack count enemies in the endgame (like Perfect Slaves) aren’t scaling your damage output up so high that it breaks the game.
To find the sweet spot, just play it by ear. After a fight with 6 Perfect Slaves, you should be juuust starting to tickle the 999Q cap by the end of the battle. If you’re not keeping up with Saturns, dismantle a Throngler or Giant’s Ring… just take it slow.
The statline I’d recommend for the latelate game is:
Max HP – Around floor 100 you should be aiming for 350K-400K. Ease that up to around 600K slowly as you make your way towards 200. My final was 574K and it just wasn’t quite enough. The fight that killed me was a Death that was behind a lone Saturn where the enemies in the other two ranks were flunkies and didn’t help scale up my Celestial EP. I was 1-2 gold potions short of outracing Death’s 311Q hp.
Faith – I parked my Faith right around 30K% and left it there. I didn’t want any other variables flapping around.
Base Elemental Power % – An overwhelming amount of your Elemental Power % is coming from the Celestial set, and your base EP% is going to get lost in that after the first round of combat. BUT, more EP% base does mean your first Cinder damage attack is going to deal more damage, which is nice for clearing out flunkies. You also have plenty of room in your dismantle rotation, so you might as well slip some Jester’s Bone Masks in there.
Precision – Feel free to overdo it on these to make sure you stay ahead of Jupiters. I can’t confirm, but I’ve heard they have secret agility that doesn’t show up. You’ll have dismantles to spare, so drop in a Hunter’s Jerkin now and again. I had around 1.5K% Precision by the end of my run.
Aside from the aforementioned Penetration stat to keep up with Iron Golems, that’s it. Nothing else really matters.
Build Recommendation
Take the Frailty talent tree. Chromathorn has limited/situational value, so I agree with this. The only thing I’d say is to get a couple more gold potions than I mentioned above, since Chromalure can sometimes clear your stacks and save you a potion turn.
Do not go over 100% penetration. Dead3y3’s plan for Iron Golems is just to smash straight through them. My little baby mind can’t personally comprehend how you can do enough damage to bash through their armor without doing too much damage in PS fights, but I’m not the one who broke floor 200!
You should care about armor alongside your maxhp and even dismantle fairly heavily into Sparkle. Taking damage to your armor does help scale up your elemental power early as a one-time effect early in the fight without scaling your damage out of control in the end of the fight! This is super smart.
Pick up a Madness potion to help scale up your early damage output faster in fights where you’re not taking as many hits.
Dismantle more aggressively for damage output, and leave Jester’s Bone Masks out of it entirely. I still think I like one Bone Mask dismantle somewhere around floor 15-25 just to kickstart your Cinder engine, but I was using them in the endgame to boost my turn-1 Cinder damage. You can use armor value to get that kickstart, which is much more effective than the Mask.
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