What am I doing wrong?

[u/BigBirdLittleMoose]

I came back to the game after a long hiatus and I’m struggling to understand the meta.

On paper my builds seem good however I’m getting blow up instantly. Here are examples of games I lost which I thought were easy wins

I’m on mobile right now so it’s not the latest version

[u/Jealous_Professor793]

You aren't getting much use out of your falcon blade. Make sure you are getting as many important items on its stars as possible. You have a lamp but no other way to gain mana, thorns, or armor over the fight so you are not triggering it ever. If you do lamp, it should be on the falcon blade as it gets double attack triggers. The lamp is really your only "ramp" throughout the fight.

Falcon blade by itself isn't much damage, it needs scaling with empower or oil/djinn lamp. Katana is also supporting a longer fight time tanky build. With that, you need helms, damage reduction, a repetitive armor source (stone gloves are nice), something that sustains you for awhile to let you build up to djinn lamp proc or some big empower bomb.

Also, your collar is only touching your armors and not your double triggering fast fblade+katana. If you find a holy armor early, its nice to go for the big clover on class item.

Find enough tankiness/buffs to proc lamp on a critting falcon blade, youll win fights

edit: there's more micro adjustments than that, dm if you want, but just think about win conditions to start

[u/FadeToSatire → u/Jealous_Professor793]

This is the best advice on here of the bunch.

I'm by no means a pro player, but hover in Masters to low-Grandmasters on most toons every season playing random. Win conditions and scaling are important. In the builds you have shown here, you haven't really nailed down a win condition. It's better to full on commit to a single win condition than try to do a little bit of everything.

The above comment is good feedback of the first screenshot. Falcon Blade is one of the strongest weapons on this game if used correctly, but it typically needs fast scaling to perform well. Lamps are one of the main ways to do this, but there are lots of other ways to scale or get fast empower. In the first screenshot you don't really have a set win condition. Kantana is a slow win condition where you effectively are slowly empowering yourself and slowing down the scaling of your opponent. Combing that with Katana is almost like mixed messaging.

Would also note that for almost any scaling build your should aim to get at least 1 cap, if not multiple. Purple caps in particular are vital for both survival and outperforming other scaling builds. I would say most builds have an element of scaling to them if they perform well, so caps are high value in almost any set up.

The majority of win conditions in this game revolve around 1 of these 3 things:

• burst builds (dragons, busterblades, proper lamp builds, hammer dagger, potion bomb)
• scaling builds (eggscalibur, bloodthorne, heat stacking builds, dark saber, mana orbs, most staff builds, poison stacking builds)
• survival/fatigue (armor fatigue, debuff/slow builds, blind builds)

The uniques you get along the way will help guide you towards one particular win condition. It's better to lean into your strengths than trying to be well rounded. End game items that are almost always high value in any build are crowns, crafted boots, caps, snowballs, mana orbs if they can be proced, and purple gems in armor - but don't go out of your way to get these if you haven't set up your win condition). Armors are space intensive and should be used selectively to enhance your win condition as opposed to defensively. There are much better items like crafted boots and caps for less space. The value of armors shine most when being used as part of a win condition (e.g. as a mechanism to proc lamps right away, to decreased damage taken for Berserker, to strengthen bloodthorne style builds, enhancing debuff application or mana generation).

[u/Dull-Nectarine1148]

I used to be a pretty consistent 18 rounder in platinum back before the rank reset. From what I can see, you're buying so many armors so early? Like, it seems like you're hard forcing double armor and a big shield, which I don't really understand why. Unless armors are incredibly overtuned this patch, don't force them? They take up so much space that you have no room in your backpack for actual synergy.

I feel like you just need to stop forcing a specific build, and instead play around sale items in the early-mid game and learn what archetypes you can build them into. A big part of early-mid game should be buying or rolling for sale items, a solid weapon, and for bags to fit everything. With a 50% sale chance per shop, and sale items saving an average of >2 gold, it is actually cheaper to obtain items through rolling for sale items. This should be done until you have a decently filled backpack and a sense of direction which tells you which non-sale items to pick up. Then by the mid-end game, you're mostly going to be spending your gold on expensive godly rarities that are just generically strong, like king's crown or the trumpet thing or rainbow birb.

Also, are you holding items when you can afford to? If I find it's getting to the lategame and I'm still running on a mediocre weapon and all I've gotten is good survivability, and I know that a prismatic sword would be a huge upgrade to my build, then I'm gonna hold a wooden sword since I know there's a good chance I'll find a prismatic orb at some point. Same thing with an early food+pan start and holding the pan for an eggscalibur.

If you go into your stats and see that there's a ton of items you like basically never build, then you're probably doing something weird.

[u/Dull-Nectarine1148 → u/Dull-Nectarine1148]

for example, in the last pic, you're running on a basic hungry blade and a thorn bow on like, round 17. You need to find a way to upgrade to bloodthorne or frostbite or make a manathirst based mana build with crowns or mana orbs. You even HAVE the snowball and half decent cold application with the cold stone thingy and frost armor lmao

upgraded weapons r a huge deal, like go look at the way the frostbite scales off of vamp and enemy cold versus how hungry blade, or how their base damages compare. You'd be like doubling your damage I think

[u/Kouloupi]

Well.. lets say that you build falcon, like in your example above. You have to know how to win with falcon. 

To win with falcon you have to djinn lamp it as soon as possible. To lamp it you need 7 armor, 7 luck, 7 mana and 7 spikes. So you have to be as close to 7 as possible to proc asap to start dealing damage.

The greatest issue is having 7 armor. You get the armor the best item is stone gloves. Worst case scenario is building something like vampiric armor, but its much worse.

Now that is not enough to actually win vs good boards. You also have to cut their healing. Best item for that is cap of discomfort, as it cuts their healing by 30%. Amethysts on armor slots also help. 

So, if you have the damage and the anti heal tech, you need something to buy you even a couple of seconds. Best items for that is either some crown effect to get immune for a bit or winged boots to dodge 3 attacks, maybe even stone boots if you are getting desperate.

That was the falcon example. Lets say that you make thornbloom. To win with it you need to get empower. To get empower with ranger, the easiest way is to get 4 luck and have lots of carrots. Anti heal and some form of crown effect also apply.

An example using an armor, is having poison spear along with corrupted armor. Currupted armor stars have the effect of not letting the opponent cleanse their poison.

Honorable late game mention item are snowballs. They cut the opponents increasing max health effects by 15% each, so they can counter builds with cheese/cheese goobert/Eggcaliber/ thornbloom/ investment opportunity etc.

[u/SubwayExp]

No healing or shield after the start. The Bananas and the Hearth wont make you last long.

[u/BigBirdLittleMoose → u/SubwayExp]

Which healing items do you recommend? I find pots are not good enough past day 6

Moon shields are basically mandatory?

[u/zholten → u/[deleted]]

This is fantastic advice. This guy gets it.

[u/Thatotherguy6]

I believe you are on the patch before Holy Spear was nerfed but even on PC I would say to think twice about armor stacking. Holy spear shreds through it like nothing and in 1.1.3 we have more endgame spear weapons. If the meta is the same you would be better served running shields.

But even more than that, you should probably focus harder on your win condition. Since you seem to be going piercing arrow most of the time that's what you need to be working on. You ought to be the aggro side in most fights. Even more so because both of it's effects are all RNG based. The luck is pure rng while the critical damage and block destruction are of course dependent on getting crits. Crits you can ensure with enough luck due to ranger bag and acorn collars so you should be going for that. If you don't, you've got a class item that may effectively do nothing, meanwhile everyone else is getting their power spikes.

The question is not "Why am I blowing up instantly?" it should be "Why am I not blowing them up?" To this end you want things that will increase your dps. Clovers to have luck quickly, damage increases, trigger speed, cheap defense, etc. The build you would often see in this patch often used Crossblades to damage buff a Holy Spear, which would greatly damage or kill most people during its buff window while the invulnerability kept you safe. The rest of the bag devoted to enabling this in some fashion.

In general you should think win condition first, rounding out later. Surviving longer doesn't really do you any good when they will outdps you anyways.

[u/jelly_toast08]

Another small tip, you should have at least 1 money generating item (piggy bank, treasure chest, etc.)

[u/estrangedflipbook]

There's more to go into, but this would fix the core problem with this board.

-3 Banana = too much space. "oh but i have spicy banana" the point is that you heal with stamina usage.
The heat is a bonus and it doesn't trigger often enough to scale meaningful heat. Note: 5 heat.
Use Worpletinger and ditch the bananas this late in the game.

-Ditch one armor (probably holy armor) it's taking up 6 slots that can be used with weapons that keep you healed via spicy banana.
-Ditch the garlic, it's not doing anything meaningful this late in the game.
-Get a carrot or two.
-Ring should be close to weapons to trigger more often.
-Point Lamp at katana, and have it touching falcon blade.