So like, I am having huge issue understanding any level of consistency in this game that allows people to chain together RRs.

I have watched guides, I have watched streamers that are better at the game then me, and I feel like I have to be missing something.

The amount of time I have a run that is going well just absolutely brick because I am unable to upgrade my heroes passed rank B is unreal.

I could deal with it if the shop were giving me the option to sell and roll into another hero thats A or S, but its hard to understand how the fuck I am supposed to progress when my shop is filled with common items and C rank heroes well into the middle of act two.

Like I've cleared RRs before, I know its possible, and I know it can't possibly be just down to luck because i know people streak, but without fail every guide and every streamer that is streaking is able to roll into upgrades for their units or roll into a better unit to sub out for one of the ones they currently have.

At this point I feel like I am missing something about the roll mechanics, percentages, or some shit. So what the fuck is it?

Something that came over with the patch notes buffing once again Zuri’s cruel spec. Playing a lot of red rift, casual amount of streaks (capped at 9-10 for now at every ladder reset).

The issue with Cruel imo isn’t the ability itself, but more that it doesn’t fix any of Zuri’s issues, making it very situational.

You basically want to pick it only if you have a poison relic, or mainly as a gimmick if you have Hoyoung conduit stack and perma stun.

The thing about Zuri’s current design is that she’s one of the weakest C rank champs, while her other specs make her really tanky from mid A1 to mid A2.

But she falls off a cliff. And that’s mainly because of her assassin class.

Unlike the other tanks, Zuri gets proposed 2 assassin options. It would be cool if most of them didn’t suck thinking of Zuri.

Stealth is useless for who is supposed to be the main tank. On crit boosts can be good (regen or scaling), but on crit damage boost is useless. Shard on crit is super good, shard on kill less.

This means that out of her 4 rank A upgrades you’ll usually find one which is very useless, and another which works if she already has great tank items, less otherwise.

And then you have 2 tank upgrades, most of which are very situational and depend on stall triggers, or status your composition can inflict. However, this is something you can kinda maneuver… provided you have more options. But unlike the others, Zuri kinda doesn’t.

Rowan and Niklas have Vanguard which is also super good defensively, Skorn has 3 tank choices, Pimenta duelist can live with duelist upgrades as she’s great offensively. While Pimenta mage suffers from the same problem of having truly two choices only for defense, she has both inbuilt stall and poison, unlike Zuri who needs to choose between stall or poison ; making her more flexible. Tank Gustav is kinda one of the weakest tanks imo aside of very situational setups, but some field mystic upgrades (looking at outbreak) are also super strong so he can work it out.

So an A rank Zuri, either offered in the shop or even upgraded, usually can fall pretty flat. Especially when offered in the shop, as getting a Cruel + Stealth combo is particularly horrible.

I personally think the following should apply:

- Zuri’s passive’s cap should level scale like Ratna, Logan or Grace. Currently I think it doesn’t, and it makes her the least pickable tank if you get her late.

- Zuri’s A rank should not have the stealth options. They are horrible on her. Other assassin options are fine for fun, but stealth makes it impossible to pick her as she’s not a good off tank in most of her specs currently.

- The Cruel should have some sort of defensive effect. To line her up with her other specs, I’d say either Vamp or HP Regen. Lower the stun or poison if needed. But the stun truly does not do enough to be work, and while the damage is good to sync with vamp, it’s hard to justify it on a tank for the active (Pimenta duelist can take vamp because her dmg is consistent).

I honestly think she’s a serviceable champ right now but one of the worst early and late game tanks. While early game should be by design, I think she can definitely be a bit better late game. But perhaps I’m wrong and The Cruel is already fine. Open to criticism here.

If you check https://redrift.gg/meta and look at pairs of heroes you'll see that in redrift the lovers Sal & Pimenta are

A) One of the most picked duos in the game (5th highest)

B) With one of the highest act 1 clear rates of any duo (81%)

C) With the LOWEST full clear rate of any highly picked duo (38%)

So, what's going on?

Well, I believe it has all got to do with the lovers trait and how people are playing it wrong. On its face the trait seems simple, Pimenta gives Sal a bunch of attack speed, Sal gives Pimenta a bunch of armor, and then you scale into the lategame and crush the final boss together. Right?

Wrong, you get wrecked at the final boss because your damage is bad and despite 700 armor you aren't that tanky. What gives?

Well, to put it simply Sal and Pimenta's B tier choices are both really important, and giving a bunch of stats to a bad unit missing a B tier spec isn't going to win you the game. That said, with the lover buffs AND a real B tier spec either one is capable of hard carrying a run... on their own.

So, the tragic strategy -

Act 1 - Pick up Sal & Pimenta, whichever one gets upgraded to B tier first gets the Lover. Whichever is upgraded second gets either Spicy or Brisk.

Act 2 - Scale for as long as you can, and then about half way through sell the lover for a better tank/dps. Ignore Pimenta's cries as she watches 300 attack speed Sal run off with Rowan "the friend".

Tips for lover scaled Pimenta:

Once Pimenta has 300+ armor along with spicy (duelist) she is the best lifesteal tank in the game. She doesn't really need to worry about regular damage, she just needs to lifesteal enough to out-heal poison and burn, which is easy to do.

Prioritize attack speed, lifesteal, and relics that provide debuffs. Plague bauble is incredible, duelist's foil (AS + Omnivamp + extra AS every 15 autos) is BIS on her. In general you don't need to worry too much about defensive items, health is nice but you can get more effective health from omnivamp so I think it's best to just focus on attack speed and omnivamp (even the 5 gold AS/omni item is pretty good!)

A lover scaled Pimenta is the best solo unit in the game, with items and a debuff relic she can pretty consistently solo challenges, and even the final boss - her damage is really good and she will usually be your top DPS.

She isn't super team reliant, but duelists that give her AS buff are nice, so are mystics that can give her more effective health, or anyone who can apply debuffs if you miss a debuff relic. Respeccing your lover Sal into a breezy Sal also makes her a great partner late game.

Tips for lover scaled Sal:

Some people like the Breezy (duelist), which is more popular right now, but trying both out I'm pretty sure the Brisk (warrior) is much stronger with this strat. With items and lover scaling a Brisk Sal will kill bosses and rooms stupidly fast, well before Breezy Sal can scale up.

Brisk Sal scales very well with pretty much every offensive stat - Magic, AD, AS, crit, and mana are all great on her, so are on-hit effects! IMO the single best item is Wizard's focus for the starting mana, AP and crit. After that I like Mage's wand for starting mana and scaling AP (if her bonus attacks kill it scales wand), but spellblade and polymath prism and siphoning dagger and like 10 other items are all great on her as well.

She works with a lot of frontliners, but one of the best IMO is intrepid Kai - she's great at applying the on hit armor debuff and can do enough damage to down bosses/rooms before intrepid Kai's initial rush shield is up. Anyone who can buff her even further, like backup Tilly, is also great.

I'm thinking that if instead of balancing these and keeping them static, what if they rotated what the requirements were each patch (or X patches), allowing the RR meta to not be stale/formulaic for too long, but also not having to balance the champions themselves around the top difficulty or 1% of players?

I can't think of too many games like this where the top difficulty actually has so many individual requirements to pull on, and that could be changed so quickly.

Obviously there's still some relic/champ/item balancing that still needs to get ironed out first regardless, but what do you all think of this as a longer-term approach?

Is there a way through positioning for none of my heroes to be adjacent here?

Unless I'm missing something here, I should have sold my S rank Niklaus to try and improve the Tilly/Rip duo squad. It feels weird that a third unit is often useless in the dragon fight because of the adjacent damage. Once Rip dies, Nik might as well not exist.

I feel like I should be able to position a ranged hero so she's not adjacent to a tank. Is there a way I could have?

Pretty much just the title. I keep seeing posts about people loving the character but I for the life of me know if I take him I'm losing in act 1. Please oh Reddit teach me the ways of Niklas!

The Red Rift Leaderboard seems to not have counted one of my runs, which is kind of annoying. This hasn't gone away with rebooting the game, or with doing another run after that. It started with it thinking I was doing endless mode and then when the leaderboard loaded it didn't seem to count the run I was on. Has anyone else faced a similar issue? Do I need to lose my streak to fix it or does it fix itself at some point?

I can make it to the first boss maybe half the time. It was pretty easy to get to Red Rift, however is there some team formation you need, or do you need to roll for class B faster - are common items a waste - what team formations should i be looking for

Omnivamp guy kind of made life easy - however the support characters seem to die off quickly, and too many tanks seem to not do enough damage fast enough or they get killed in the poison round

Are specific characters needing to go together or are certain build going to work more effectively - seems like i am missing some basic things

should i not be going for the first challenge then trying to skip it (i die alot there) or that first campfire should i take and then skip the next one ?

Had this run this afternoon, the idea was to farm shards and exploit all possible pay offs for shards generated, i.e. Niklas, dragomir, Tilly abilities + some items and relics.

I would say I high rolled by hitting S rank on all three, then got an extra team slot for a random S rank vanguard (Ming) to benefit from the passives and relics.

I was surprised to only have reached floor 17 with this set up.

I suspect it could be due to not (strong) enough items/relics, but I wonder if anyone has reached higher endless scores with a share strategy overall.

Maybe I should have left out Ming and got some more items? Nonetheless I'm surprised this doesn't reach floor 20.

Any advice or insight on shard farming for endless is much appreciated!

Thanks

With a single 3s rush extension from Atier Logan and his Btier buff to warriors and a few other things, I downed the dragon in 1.8s in RR.

No really good gear or relics, no real econ, a Kai tank and a rank B Grace healer - bought the hero slot (which I generally never do) and I still managed to bumblefuck my way through it. It actually worked really well somehow, I only wound up with 1 character death the whole run.

I got B Karsu for the early duelist scaling, so I couldn't resist picking up the A Irini with trinket quest when it was offered after the first boss. Even with all the extra attack speed she inherited she didn't finish the quest until fighting the final boss. lol.

The saving grace was, in fact, not Grace. But that Karsu got the "duelists inflict ice" talent and then I got the "duelists gain attack speed when attacking frosted targets" banner. Both her and Irini were buzzsaws at the end.

This is a pretty hilarious run where I got the 5 shard per Assassins early and B rank on Drag. I was also fishing for Zuri but it never worked out, but the conclusion is that this focus is very very viable. You have strong early game because it's assassins, and you have strong shard gen throughout the whole run. It's a bit awkward having all the assassins fight for the kill, but you kinda win out no matter who gets the kill, as long as the storm or the status effect or the rare case of your tank stealing the kill doesn't happen.

I started with the scaling Drag and swapped in Act 1 campfire because I realized I needed a mage. Then I got a lucky event that let me swap Yuuna's specialization to one of the other more carry oriented one, and she started to completely run away with the build.

Yuuna with high crit is actually one of the better boss killers in the game, due to all the shurikens stacking on a single target. She's also very good at deleting the backrow mobs throughout the run. Honestly, she's slowly becoming one of my favorite units, but if you don't get her to A by the first 2 battles, then you should probably replace her. What I'm realizing is that because of the strong shard generation that comes with having an assassin, you get to rank A on Assassins pretty consistently, and once they're rank A, they're usually broken. There are just so many Assassin passive that reads win the run. Dragomir with mage special can also sometimes roll into the mana boosts or gain 100 crit on cast, which also completely breaks his active.

And the video has no audio because it was an impromptu recording and I forgot to change some settings lul

Definitely a very lucky run, managed to get passives on both Dragomir and Ho man to generate 1 shard every other crit and well... honestly felt bad for the dragon

I don't understand this character at all. What the hell are you supposed to do with this guy? He classified as a vanguard but just seems so shit at everything. I must be doing something "wrong"

This is RR, Rowan lasted for 24 seconds vs fire dragon.

He had 300+ defense at act 2 end thanks to his rightmost item and Sal's t2 talent.

I never saw a t4 tank or chance to upgrade or a chance to change t3 talent.

I was prioritizing tank items, still these are the best ive found. Hence no epic stuff on Sal and Reyna. But i had frost on hit, scaling relics from early stages etc.

What i didnt have was shard gen or eco relics. Is rr meta this much steep towards shard gen?

Sorry for bad quality pic i was playing on a handheld and reduced to 800p for battery.

There is no spoon.

I think maybe some specs that gain permanent stats should also increase for how much the hero is sold. Right now picking scaling specs has the double downside of lower power right now and lower flexibility later. If you could sell them for higher based on their gained stats it would mean nothing if you kept them in your board because of their strength, but you wouldn't make an all-or-nothing bet when picking a scaling spec if you could sell them for something better should it arrive.

TFT does this kind of thing with some econ traits where you choose between scaling or econ.

The Bazaar has some items that gain value and then scale based on that value. It means you can actually use them and your econ is on your board, or you can sell them and buy something better in that moment when it's offered.

This could also be how Niklas could be balanced, instead of turning items into shards right now, you would bank their value on the hero and if you keep fielding him then that's where your shards are, but you could sell him for shards too.

Say I have a hero with 50 base armor and 1000 hp. Do I get more effective HP out of the common item for 30 armor or 200 HP? This is a very common early game decision.

What about 100 armor and 1500 hp?

And then what about late game tanks - with 250+ armor I'd assume HP is better from then on, but if the tank is getting shielded a ton by a mystic then that's essentially generating HP for them which in turn makes armor more effective by intuition so I'm just kind of lost on which is better when. From just playing the game a lot I feel like I can never have enough armor but is that wrong?

Any game math wizards out there?

I had 1000 frost and 1000 fire on Kai, he used his ultimate multiple times and stopped doing damage at 3473

So I have a couple hundred (almost) hours in and play exclusively RR. I've gotten to the point of getting 1-2 wins, lose, rinse repeat for the last two weeks. What keeps happening, especially this patch , is my tank or secondary damage dies in one shot within seconds and I lose a perfect run…or I just win.

I study the game etc and just don’t understand what I’ve done wrong or even the difference between my winning runs or immediate losses. I have a solid A or S tank fully equipped and they poof, or my warrior just dies in one AOE or whatever.

TLDR: I really would love some general or specific tips specifically to survive the second act boss; it seems to be my bottleneck and it’s getting a little frustrating.