Brotato - Lucky Build with Sifd's Relic
4Those who remember me sharing a couple Hades videos back in the day won't be too surprised that I've developed a liking for roguelikes. Impatiently awaiting the release of Hades II, I checked out some of them. The platformer and shooter types (I think Cult of the Lamb would count as the latter?) of all kinds were interesting enough, and I actually replayed Dead Cells on the higher difficulties until I be at it despite finding it ridiculously frustrating. The ones I enjoyed the most, however, were the strategic ones, which is to be expected of somebody running this channel. While I was seriously addicted to Vampire Survivors the one day I downloaded it, the novelty quickly wore off. While also a bullet "heaven" type game, Brotato immediately left me speechless with its highly tactical gameplay and seemingly endless range of builds and playstyles to try. Having gotten accustomed to Hades, I didn't mind the repetition of the loops in the slightest.
Looking through my list of Brotato characters I haven't completed a D5 run on my Steam Deck yet, I thought Lucky could be lucky enough to see a successful clear today. You start out with a luck stat higher than what most people end a run with when playing just about any other character, but you gain half the regular amount of experience and attack speed is extremely lacking, so dishing out damage in a conventional way is troublesome unless you seriously work on getting out of the early rut, which I did. Lucky's main strength is dealing a good bit of damage, further amplified by increasing luck, which grows faster than everybody else's, and % damage, and obtaining Cyberballs and Baby Elephants to deal even stronger yet less reliable damage that's rapidly increasing allows you to deal most of your damage when you're not attacking with the slingshots.
On this run, I also had lots of opportunities to increase my attack speed, and I tried to get Regeneration whenever possible as Life Style is ineffective at -60% attack speed with weapons already known for being fairly slow, made much easier by getting a Fairy item really early. What really changed the run tremendously and really secured my victory was getting Sifd's Relic. Normally, this doesn't do much, as you tend to get all the items manually anyway, but what this does to a Lucky run is cause enemies to die the moment they appear on the screen, killing the new waves appearing. Normally, I find choosing Gentle Alien when offered to be rather risky if you overestimate your offensive potential, as no defence or dodge stats can help when the enemies fill the screen, leaving you no room to move around, but here it seemed like the perfect item to kill more enemies for exp and loot. In the end, I changed my negative exp attributes to positive ones, too.
I started recording a couple maps after getting Sifd's Relic after realising how much it changed the playstyle. It's quite a sight to behold.