Extreme East Spoiler and Discussion Thread

[shade_of_ox]

To be honest, I usually just prep an extra altar for most of my builds because you're almost guaranteed to get an altar you want, and more variety doesn't ever hurt. In fact, if prepping a god had no downside, I wouldn't mind, since you're already giving up the extra altar... all that the prepping penalties do is make it so you can't reasonably prep GG. On the other hand, that's because my playstyle involves a lot of preexploration, so I can see the god spawning next to you being helpful to conserve blackspace.

With the Heretic, the fourth altar is better than anything else because because the entire point of the character is to trash as many gods as possible.

I don't think a nerf like that for Curious VGT is really necessary. All that would cause is more scumming, but the final build for the Heretic won't actually lose much power. The thing about VGT is that since it has all 9 gods, the Heretic is inherently much stronger than usual. I don't doubt that this is true even if the gods spawned per tower. This nerf would make the middle towers much more difficult, and depending on which gods spawn if you get unlucky you won't be able to clear some towers at all (Curse Bearers before EM or TT, for instance, will lose you a lot of mileage with those two gods). So basically, just make the dungeon more RNG heavy rather than actually being more difficult... I'm not a fan of the idea, myself.

[shade_of_ox]

http://prntscr.com/l60ybn
Cleared Curse of Hellfire!
I played this blind and cleared it first try. It was fairly difficult.
Paladin of GG normally crushes Demonic Library pretty efficiently, but of course here things are different...

I actually wish I'd taken a lower-damage character because Unstable was a pain to deal with. Fortunately I found PISORF which allowed me to largely circumvent complications from that. The One Horn allowed me to level effectively off the goats rather than having to deal with DL's annoying enemy pool (which Profaned Flesh didn't help). Fortunately The Avatar doesn't have Unstable, so I was able to just kill him straight up after wading through all his spawns.

Not the hardest Curious Vicious I've played, but by no means easy. I would rate this around Troll Lab in difficulty, maybe.

[shade_of_ox]

Cleared Eternal Foes.
http://prntscr.com/l61xmc

With a standard Punchomancer this isn't much different from normal Vicious Steel.

[The Avatar]

[shade_of_ox]

I was referring to regular Troll Lab. I'm not tackling Curious EE Vicious until after I finish all the vanilla Vicious first.

Yeah, actually I was sad that the Demonlords didn't give each other DP since that would have made killing them much easier.

If you wanted to make it really brutal, you could make it so knocking off a DP is the same effect as killing it for the purposes of Unstable. Functionally this would make it so that DP's don't just render Unstable completely irrelevant. I don't think it's a good idea to give EVERYTHING DPs when you kill the Demonlords though. Also, why is The Avatar himself just normal? I feel like he should do something special, it IS Curious after all.

Curious Vicious Steel certainly is harder than regular Vicious Steel - it's just that PISORF destroys that dungeon so hard that it doesn't matter. Literally both the bosses have functionally twice the amount of health as usual, and I still finished with many resources to spare. If I weren't using Punchomancer, I think Half Dragon of Binlor would also completely wreck the place.

Also, I'm not sure if this is intentional - knocking off the DPs from the Indomitable using PISORF lowers his damage as normal, but hitting him in melee resets his damage back to 50.

In terms of buffing it, giving the bosses Protective Blessing would be the go-to answer to me - that's how you solved the PISORF issue on Frigid Battlefield. In that case you'd probably just want to start fireballing Indomitable ASAP, kill it for huge bonus EXP, then spend all your resources on BlahBlah.

[The Avatar]

[shade_of_ox]

There's no real reason for me to do the vanilla Vicious Curious first - I just decided to do it first, because I'm much more familiar with those dungeons, so I thought it might be easier to adapt. Besides, I just had Trueblood Bodyguards to go before I move on to the EE Vicious.

On that note, I cleared Trueblood Bodyguards!
http://prntscr.com/l648a6

I took in the Bard so I could just skip the Matron's lair altogether. Tikki Tooki helped me reach level 10. This felt kind of cheap to be honest, I might try this again and actually try to fight my way through the guards.

Not much to say here. The top is the same, the Firstborn has a pretty high stat bar you need to reach to be able to fight him. The bottom looks good, but I didn't do it. If you actually tried to fight your way through everything, you'd need a pretty good caster/hybrid. Maybe Bloodmage could do good work here. I would maybe change the enemy layout of the top a little - some custom enemies like Beholders might spice it up a little.

Moving on to Flooded Foundry, then Lekon's Table.

[The Avatar]

[shade_of_ox]

Ah, I see, with Chaotic that strategy wouldn't work. That makes sense.
Here's my second run:
http://prntscr.com/l64iyd
Still not too difficult of a run. I had a bunch of spellcasting items in the shops I didn't buy, and far from ideal gods (I wanted Mystera or Jehora). 47% Sanguine... I could have pushed it to 55 or so, easily 65 if I hadn't taken Consensus.

I still think this dungeon is missing something. Harder leveling or a harder boss fight would bring it more in line with the other Vicious Curious I've played.

[The Avatar]