N1njaSquirrel

Binding of Isaac: Rebirth

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So much new stuff, yay!  I won't be looking at streams or wikis for some time so I was worried I wouldn't find the new secret mega boss, but it was pretty straightforward.

Finish 'It Lives' in under 30 minutes

and you meet the Hush, and oh dear, now that is a bullet sponge, and it also has lots of cool/horrible attacks!



Afterbirth seems to also have some changes to old stuff : I noticed Book of Belial doesn't give you Devil rooms anymore but it is really nice that the Devil/Angel room after 'It Lives' is now a real Deal room (and not just a passage to next level)!

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The infinite store refilling item is pretty ridiculous (greed mode starts with it, but you can also get it in a regular run).  If you end up with a combo that can endlessly generate money, you can basically buy out all the store items and stock up on a bunch of other things.  

 

 

Oh, and PSA!  Do NOT use the Card Against Humanity in the big room of Greed Mode.  It made the button to start the waves disappear :(   I actually got lucky and refreshed the store several times with the donation box and got a Forget Me Not to show up, but I blew enough money on the refreshes that I was too underpowered to finish the run.

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I was pleased with myself for beating the October 31st Daily Challenge, but only came in 34,947th place out of what seems to be ~120,000 challengers.  I accidentally quit 10/30 (I got a phone call mid-game that stole window focus) and intentionally quit today's challenge with about 600 points for each day.

 

At my best I'm not even in the top 25% of Isaac players.  And I'm rarely at my best!

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The new Challenges certainly live up to their name.  I think there are a few of these I may well never beat.  I can't get past Cellar 2 on Speed.  I thought that the Guardian was a really neat twist, right up until I auto-died walking into a new room and there was nothing I could do about it.  Dampens my enthusiasm for throwing myself back at it to lose that quickly and that randomly.  The one where you take damage if you miss is probably doable, but I'll need to luck into a couple of items early on. 

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The fact that room effects persist between rounds in Greed mode even though it gives you fresh charges for items makes Lilith and her familiar cloning active item pretty interesting. I just had a run with her where I found a nine volt, so by not leaving the main room in between rounds I could get all the way up to a dozen of her starting familiars. I didn't find many others, but I did get a bunch of peepers floating around and a cube of meat that slowly grew into several meatboys, and even those were enough to make everything very confusing.

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if you get blood donation machine you have about 50% chance of completely breaking greed mode and I love it.

 

Also if you have unlimited range tear (like laser for example), don't pick up the new item that lets tears go through wall and come around because that will freeze/crash the game.

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Yo, I walked into Ultra Greed with 93 coins tonight.

 

I, uh, got hit enough for that to go down to 87 coins by the end of the match.

 

I put one coin into the machine and it broke.

 

Why does this game hate me?

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I've made it to Greed twice with 80+ coins, the first time the machine took like almost all of them....the second time it took 1. 

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The fact that room effects persist between rounds in Greed mode even though it gives you fresh charges for items makes Lilith and her familiar cloning active item pretty interesting. I just had a run with her where I found a nine volt, so by not leaving the main room in between rounds I could get all the way up to a dozen of her starting familiars. I didn't find many others, but I did get a bunch of peepers floating around and a cube of meat that slowly grew into several meatboys, and even those were enough to make everything very confusing.

 

I did Lilith on Greed tonight, and holy shit, that's insane.  I didn't realize that one of her starting items actually adds familiars for her (Brimstone, Succubus, Leech, and maybe another one?) as she takes damage.  I got a blood machine, and couldn't figure out why over the course of several minutes I added multiple new followers, so I looked it up.  I must have had 80+ familiars on screen at one time, as I managed to pick up Glitch, Relic, Bag of Bombs, the guy who's chained to you, Meat Boy and the one who leaves Creep.  The Relic and Bag of Bombs also multiplied and had a chance to drop their items each wave.  Box of Friends might be the most ridiculous item in the game now 

 

 

Yo, I walked into Ultra Greed with 93 coins tonight.

 

I, uh, got hit enough for that to go down to 87 coins by the end of the match.

 

I put one coin into the machine and it broke.

 

Why does this game hate me?

 

 

Were you already at 109 on the machine?  It happened to me again tonight in that Lilith run, and so I looked, and turns out that 109 is where it maxes out. 

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I did Lilith on Greed tonight, and holy shit, that's insane.  I didn't realize that one of her starting items actually adds familiars for her (Brimstone, Succubus, Leech, and maybe another one?) as she takes damage.

 

??? I thought it was her space bar item that added copies of your familiars (including certain flies, meat and bandage (the last two lvl up first)) for the room?

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It does, but she also starts with an item that gives her a new permanent demon familiar after taking damage a certain number of times. I actually wasn't aware of this myself, I didn't find any blood donation machines and the combat itself became pretty trivial with the amount of helpers I had.

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Were you already at 109 on the machine?  It happened to me again tonight in that Lilith run, and so I looked, and turns out that 109 is where it maxes out. 

 

This is a reference to how the rebirth was 'hacked' in 109 hours after release - a particular sore-point for Edmund. Die-hard fans have been going mad over finding where some of the supposed new content is. 109 hours later (earlier this morning for me), some more dlc dropped which has the rest of the content. Well played Edmund.

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This is a reference to how the rebirth was 'hacked' in 109 hours after release - a particular sore-point for Edmund. Die-hard fans have been going mad over finding where some of the supposed new content is. 109 hours later (earlier this morning for me), some more dlc dropped which has the rest of the content. Well played Edmund.

 

Jesus Christ, gamers are the biggest whiny, privileged babies on the fucking planet.  Reddit is going batshit over how Edmund is a lying, disrespectful piece of shit who hates his fans and abuses them.  Guess what fuckos, if you were my fans, I'd fucking hate your asses too. 

 

Apparently the patch also changed the Box of Friends to a 4 room charge, which is way the fuck more reasonable. 

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post-33601-0-03450200-1446651147_thumb.jpg

 

 

 

Edmund's just getting beat the fuck up over this.  Sounds like it was a bug that was actually blocking some of the content/unlocks (and there are known bugs with unlocks, as a bunch of stuff got unlocked when it shouldn't have).  But it also sounds like there are still secrets to find, and they've been quiet about the nature of the bugs to protect the secrets that are left. 

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This is a reference to how the rebirth was 'hacked' in 109 hours after release - a particular sore-point for Edmund. Die-hard fans have been going mad over finding where some of the supposed new content is. 109 hours later (earlier this morning for me), some more dlc dropped which has the rest of the content. Well played Edmund.

 

Haha, the Greed machine now allows donations over 109. 

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Intentional or not, I like the idea of additional content that unlocks over longer periods of time. Probably a nice way to space out "what the hell is this?" moments and keep them refreshing instead of confusing.

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I got to, and beat on the second attempt, the new super boss.  A friend had clued me in on how to get to it, and quite frankly I'm glad they did, as I don't think I would have found it otherwise. 

 

Neat fight, I arguably like it considerably more than any of the other final boss fights. 

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I think I might take another long break from Isaac.  I've really enjoyed the expansion, but simultaneously find myself kind of frustrated with it.  The path to the new boss if very frustrating, and forces a kind of playstyle I don't enjoy.  Previously I've beat every boss with every character, and almost beat every boss with every character on Hard Mode.  I have no interest in having to do that with the new super boss. Just, no, not with what it takes. The Speed challenge is one that requires constant restarts to get a good starting item, as without a high damage starting item, you're not going to make it to the Heart in sub 16 minutes no matter how good you are, and I really hate just sitting there restarting over and over checking the treasure room.  The same with the Lost in Greed mode (fuck doing the Lost with the new super boss).

 

Some of the new item combos are really neat, but I also feel like the frequency that I get interesting item combos is lower now because of the sheer number of items.  I haven't even seen Brimstone a single time (though I have got Godhead 4 times now, so that's weird). 

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Yeah, demands for more speed without quicker damage just don't work.  Plinking away at enemies in Greed Mode that can't possibly die in time for the next round isn't fun.

 

I've completed Greed Mode with all of the old non-Lost characters and fought some new boss with Isaac, though I'm not sure how I got there.  So I think I can still ignore the new challenges and stay away from what's frustrating about Afterbirth.

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I think I have about 18 hours logged on Binding of Isaac (original with Wrath of the Lamb) and I might be just about done with it. It feels really great to play and the music and atmosphere is something I really like getting lost in but the reliance on good luck to have a good run is just getting to be too much for me. I've definitely gotten a lot better and pretty consistently get to world 5 but I have yet to get a good enough mix of items to make it to the final boss. I either get some good damage upgrades with little to no extra health upgrades or I get a bunch of health upgrades with little to no extra damage upgrades. And then just when I get a good build going I find a bunch of pills and when I eat them one lowers my health, one lowers my shot speed, and one lowers my shot distance. I actually think I've had a higher rate of negative effects from pills than positive. I realize if I really stick with it and perfect my skills some more I would eventually get good enough to clear the boss regardless of how lucky I got with my items, but that just seems like too much of a slog. I think this game would be much more enjoyable to play (for me) if they did two things:

  1. Lower the number of pills that drop but remove all negative effects from pills. I fail to see how having some pills with negative effects is at all a desirable thing for this game to have.
  2. Scale the room difficulty based on your build. It is bullshit when you have a great run with a full 5 or 6 hearts going into one of the later areas and then hit a room where you are killed in 10 seconds because you didn't get enough damage upgrades to take the enemies out fast enough.

I'm so torn on this one. I really really like playing it but the longer I play the more I feel like there is just a whole bunch of annoying game design bullshit to fight against.

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  • Lower the number of pills that drop but remove all negative effects from pills. I fail to see how having some pills with negative effects is at all a desirable thing for this game to have.

 

This reminds me of shrines in the first Diablo. High-level play invariably involves not touching them because the permanent consequences if they're bad so vastly outweighed any possible benefit to them being good. If the best response to the randomness of a system is just not to bother, I don't know that the system's so good...

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Yeah, demands for more speed without quicker damage just don't work.  Plinking away at enemies in Greed Mode that can't possibly die in time for the next round isn't fun.

 

I've completed Greed Mode with all of the old non-Lost characters and fought some new boss with Isaac, though I'm not sure how I got there.  So I think I can still ignore the new challenges and stay away from what's frustrating about Afterbirth.

 

I actually quite liked all the challenges except for Speed, so I really recommend dipping into them except for it. I haven't beat Brains or Onan's Streak yet, they're hard but at least both are interesting variations on a normal Isaac run. Most of them give you interesting goals/item combos that are manageable or challenging in an interesting way.  GOTTA GO FAST! just isn't that interesting when the original game already wanted you to consistently beat Mom in 20 minutes to take a shot at the Boss Rush.

 

There is still more stuff the devs are going to unlock (likely tied to the Greed machine), and I'm hoping one of those is an alternate path to the new super boss.  Mega Satan has three paths to it now (a card, Dad's Key and the traditional Angel route).  I don't know why they wouldn't have multiple paths to the new one. 

 

Oh, hey, new patch is supposed to come out tonight sometime.  Okay, I might give it a few more runs if there's hope that some of this stuff gets adjusted. 

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This reminds me of shrines in the first Diablo. High-level play invariably involves not touching them because the permanent consequences if they're bad so vastly outweighed any possible benefit to them being good. If the best response to the randomness of a system is just not to bother, I don't know that the system's so good...

 

A few thoughts on pills, as they are quite a bit more complex than just sometimes good/sometimes bad, and don't really map over to the shrines in the same way. 

 

Isaac is full of risk/reward decisions, of which Pills are just one example, and that risk becomes less and less as you identify more pills in a run.  Since negative affects should only hurt you once, that means that over the course of a run you might have 2-4 negative pill encounters, but a dozen or more positive pill uses.  Of course it is possible to end up with a pill pool of almost all negative, but that's fairly rare. 

 

Pills are interesting versus some of the other risk/reward decisions because the reward actually increases in desperate/risky situations.  There's one pill that fully heals you if you are at 1 red heart or less (but normally hurts you) and another pill that gives you a heart container if you are just at 1 container (but normally removes a heart container).   This shifts the statistical chance of a good effect in the favor of the player in those situations.  It also means that if you find those bad pills, but know under the right conditions they can be good pills, they can be incredibly valuable to hold onto.  The heart container one is particularly useful if a Devil Room presents itself and you're only at 2 heart containers, as it's essentially a free item.  The one that becomes a full heal can be used to burn all your health on a blood bank safely knowing that you can heal all the damage.  Thus, pills actually eliminate the risk element of some of the other areas of the game.

 

This creates a strategy where unknown pills should a) always be taken on the first two floors (when a wipe isn't a big deal) to identify them OR B) in mid to late game desperate situations when you're running out of health. 

 

In the original Isaac, pills were the only way to affect the hidden luck stat.  Oddly enough, both negative and positive luck had uses.  In fact, aiming for a negative luck if it is an early pill type found was a valid strategy to increase items drops (because of how luck was used in the drop calculation)

 

Telepills are the only item that can take you to the I AM ERROR room, which is usually a fairly valuable room to end up in.  Saving Telepils until a floor is fully explored and the boss beaten can potentially score a player 1-3 extra items (along with money and pickups).

 

Explosive Diarrhea initially looks bad (as it can hurt you), but can be useful in a pinch if you're out of bombs or want to save bombs and use it to blow up a tinted rock or secret door (being careful of course). 

 

Because different starting characters have different stats, some pills are immediately useful and it's much safer for those characters to start popping pills from the getgo (judas and samson particularly with their low starting health).

 

Getting Balls of Steel in the pill pool (which does not contain every pill type on each run) has saved more runs than I can count. 

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Man, how do you go about internalizing all of this stuff? I've tried to read some Wiki's and there's a few items I've gotten enough times that I've learned how they work but so many of these mechanics and alternate effects of pills are a complete mystery to me.

 

Now I feel like maybe I'm playing this game wrong.

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