Game:

Returnal (2021)

Duration: 7:59

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This is a re-upload, since I found more Dreadbounds to try out.

The personality of the game has changed dramatically since I've started doing weapon farming runs. Before, if I got a great weapon, I just felt lucky because I had more story and rough enemies to get through, and I felt like I was at the mercy of what the story held in store for me. Now, it's just repeated runs to see what weapons I can find.

I saw a video of an Explosive Shards 2 and Expanding Shards 2 high damage Dreadbound (with an Adrenaline Damage Artifact x5) make single shot work of each phase of Ophion. You see videos like that and you think that's just how the game gets for people who got good. But it's still purely the luck of the draw if you manage to get a weapon with the right damage and traits and find that artifact, and you don't get to enjoy the weapon for long before all the enemies are dead and you have to reset again.

I'd guess Expanding Shards is good for damaging multiple things simultaneously in an area, and Exploding Shards is good for the damage done.

I still don't know if I'll restart the game from scratch. The first Biome is so beautiful and still surprises me with areas I don't remember. It's so mysterious.

Chapters:
0:00 Damage 3 Expanding Shards 2 Explosive Shards 1 (74 sec, 60 sec without animations)
1:35 Damage 5 Expanding Shards 2 Explosive Shards 2 (57 sec, 41 sec without animations)
2:51 Damage 10 Expanding Shards 2 Explosive Shards 2 No Fourth Shard (38 sec, 23 sec without animations)
3:55 Damage 8 Expanding Shards 2 Explosive Shards 1 Plus 25 Percent Damage (55 sec, 37 sec without animations)
5:14 Damage 8 Expanding Shards 1 Explosive Shards 2 (73 sec, 58 sec without animations)
6:53 Damage 6 Expanding Shards 2 Explosive Shards 3 (39 sec, 24 sec without animations)

The Damage 6 Expanding 2 Explosive 3 did as well as the Damage 10 Expanding 2 Explosive 2, minus a couple globe misses on my part.

I tried a Dreadbound with just Exploding Shards, and it did horribly - it took me 4 minutes. So Expanding Shards is the important stat for any sort of speed here. I have yet to try Expanding without Exploding. But I did see another video with a max damage stat Dreadbound with only Expanding Shards 3, and it rocked this encounter (the advantage being you're distributing damage across multiple small targets, instead of one big one). So Expanding is great when you want to damage multiple targets in an area, and Exploding is great when you want to do a lot of damage against a single target. Having both is the best of both worlds.

I've accumulated 101 hours, 192 deaths (that's +42 hours, +77 deaths after getting the true ending) by farming weapons and trying one full biome boss run and one full biome room and boss run (not looking for glyphs). I haven't platinumed the game, but I am down to 3 biomes to find all the glyphs in. Farming weapons is starting to be not so fun, and I'm not even close to powering up all of them. And I haven't yet found that precious Dreadbound with Explosive/Expanding 3 at a time when I can farm either of its traits up with torpedo squids. Frankly, for me, other than platinum, farming up weapons is all that's really left to do except try a from scratch run. Trying to find weapons and get their traits up is almost becoming an unhealthy cycle of activity, since it's now becoming a lot less fruitful - there is a lot more resistance against success now because it's starting to become rare to finding a decent weapon with an interesting trait to raise.

I may try a few more times, but Horizon Forbidden West is out soon, so I'll be focusing more on that game. I doubt I'll upload any of it.

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