Board 8 > Hades 2 topic

(+) Yeah! (+)

I think it hits every enemy in sprint range and then lasts 13 seconds

I lucked into it with hera's duo zeus boon buffing it, and then getting echo's level doubling blessing the room after.

It's not useful on bosses that much but I am one shotting enemies in the fields and doing tons of damage in tartarus because I also got +160% hitch damage that was boosted to lv 13 by the duo boon as well.

FFDragon posted...

I think it hits every enemy in sprint range and then lasts 13 seconds

the rush's unique property means it deals the damage immediately, and also saddles them with further hitch damage. IE Dash into an enemy, 500 damage, then they take 800+ damage when I dash into a different enemy and hit them for 500 damage, etc.

So once they have hitch they can't get hit again with the initial instance for 13 seconds, but I don't need to since they immediately melt from either the initial rush damage or from any subsequent hitch damage from enemies getting dashed into.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/2/24cf1f50.jpg
62k from rushing. Amazing.

Holy shit I never noticed because the good boy had always been there but Hades is hanging out with BOULDY! And he grew a spruce beard!

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/0/0297108e.jpg

There's a dialogue you can get about it with Hades. One of my favorites.

Sooo about the Arcana fated list prophecy to beat the underworld with every different Arcana. I just tried a no death defiance run (to use the Strength Arcana) and lost to Chronos phase 2 aughhh. I'm assuming you have to actually activate Strength for this prophecy and not just select it?

But maybe you can also have all your death defiances and just lose them all, purposely even if needed, and win with no death defiances left?

Its the only Arcana left on that list and it's an annoying one lol

I'm fairly certain you don't actually need to have zero death defiances / have Strength active when you clear the run, you just need to have Strength selected in your Arcana layout.

Yeah you can have Strength and Death both active. I used Judgment/Circe Keepsake on the run where I got most of the ones I don't typically use, so I had them both at once.

Good deal, thanks! I think I'll do the same thing and do a Judgement run with Strength and Death both active then. Judgement runs are a blast and almost all I do now post-game.

ok nowhere else to drop all this so bear with me while I ramble about 100%ing things.

Hades II 100% challenge update: 137 nights to complete everything other than Spirit Mixer, but that includes the 34 chaos stone runs & 2 cursed surface nights. So 101 nights if all that is discounted but the 34 chaos runs were critical for getting plants grown so yeah.... in any case, took more than my random goal of 100 nights and not nearly done yet.

now as a callback to the original Hades equivalent, in September I decided to go for getting top level in Hades' "Resource Director" which I'd never done before. And i completed it (literally just in time, I think the night before H2 1.0 released), 175 escape attempts after winning starting on 4th night & every consecutive night thereafter, only doing 0 heat runs to mine as much darkness as possible (other than a couple high-heats with the bow just to unlock the statues). Pretty dumb grind but I still love it. So in theory 100%ing Hades would require like, at least 118 more runs on top of those 175 to clear 1 through 20 heat on 5 weapons and 3 through 20 on the 6th, but anyways...

Now doing similar grind in H2 and it's funny the parallels. Every run is fishing for Chaos from the wells and instead of rolling for Darkness%+, it's rolling for GatheringTool%+, lol. Way better to have 10 rolls instead of 4 plus whatever you'd get from keys, though.

Good news is despite the game not letting you recycle a bunch of items for kudos that would REALLY speed things along, Spirit Mixer completion is still way more easily achievable than Resource Director. 95,000 Kudos needed total and I can average around 2k on an unlucky run, much more if I get the good Chaos results. More than halfway through, updated challenge will be seeing if I can get it all done earlier than 175 nights for the Resource Director equivalent, lol.

Last note, and I guess a postgame spoiler so I'll block it off, but constantly doing underworld runs (for maximizing chances of Chaos gates, no wells on surface) highlighted a really bad oversight as far as line recycling goes: If Persephone is with Hades in the Tartarus NPC room which she is like 95% of the time, she literally cycles through only 3 possible lines of dialogue, paraphrasing them:

"We should tidy up this room sometime"
"You must have been an adorable little girl"
"Go show that possibility of Chronos what happens when he blah blah blah"

Literally that's it. I don't think I've ever gotten the same line in back to back runs but I KNOW I've gotten the same line twice in 3 runs. There really should be more than 3 lines there? Let Hades say one of his default lines even if Persephone is standing there with him - I know he has plenty from my 500+ EA runs, which could still be relevant even in the post-game?? I guess they wanted to give her the line since Hades gives a line when you enter Tartarus room V but man, the repetition is really noticeable and there really should be a pool of more than three lines there.

holy shit I feel so stupid that I didn't figure out (character quest spoiler) that Dora is Pandora

Like it was there the whole time and the hints were all there including the obvious

I also realized that one entirely too late and felt like the old cartoons where someone just completely turns into a jackass when they feel dumb. Like it doesn't even feel like they were really trying to hide it at all in retrospect!

Ok, 100% file completed in 164 nights. Which if my math is right, requires 268,339 kudos in total, if you're curious.

....I might do a few more runs to exhaust the dialogue from the post-game "secret" (?) boss fight but definitely near the end of playing this game. Steam says 830 hours. Really need to move on to other games in the backlog, lol.

Anyways one thing I wanted to do since I had so many nights completed in my EA file, was make a list of all the different possible victory screen taglines. Assuming this is documented in a wiki somewhere but honestly the H2 wikis out there are really lacking in a lot of ways so haven't even bothered looking. Andddd unfortunately my EA file doesn't show any victory screen taglines (other than chaos trials) prior to night 435. Eyeballing the weapons of choice there and looks like it's the update where they introduced Hidden Aspects. So yeah, plans to comb through those records are dashed, damn.

So here's what I got, let me know if there's any you remember getting that aren't listed here, I'd be curious what I missed out on.

Agent of Chaos
Dynamic Duos
Family Gatherer
Faster than Darkness
Friends in High Places
Friends in Low Places
Hair's Breadth
Hammer Hoarder
Hand of [God's Name]
Heavy Armor
In Perfect Health
Mega-Infused
Meticulous Planner (this was my challenge "Lunar Ray only" run that took 67 minutes to complete...)
Quick Silver
Silk-Saver
Swimming in Gold
Thick-Skinned
Untouchable

(Edit: just watched a youtube video where somebody got "Pride of Olympus" as the victory line, lol. Looks like he got 3 Legendary boons so I guess that's the requirement? pretty sure I've gotten 2 Legendaries in a run before w/o that)

Other ones that are one-time only:

Titan Slayer
Surface Scourer
Ten Times
Ten Ascents
Fifty Times
*Fifty Ascents
*Hundred Times
*Hundred Ascents

*I "only" completed 40 surface and 81 underworld runs on this new file, and I know about "Hundred Ascents" from a screenshot I took during EA. So I assume there's Fifty Ascents and Hundred Times too. Who knows if there's anything beyond Hundred... damn if only my EA file showed everything!!

The one that bugs me/that I don't understand, is "Untouchable". It's definitely not "doing a run without being hit" because I would've noticed that. So it's either final boss without being hit (and since it was a surface run I couldn't see that happening, unless they give you freebies with Lovers arcana & Snow Queen if you have it which I didn't? or it's because I had Hot Pot & Hasty Retreat but I'm sure I've had two dodge-related boons in a run besides that, and I didn't have Aphro's and didn't have the dodging animal either. Damn! Ok maybe it is new challenge time to try and recreate a run without getting hit in final fight, lol...

ok confirmed "Untouchable" is if you don't get hit for damage (to HP or shielding) in final encounter, so hits covered by Lovers are fine. Seems like "In Perfect Health" gets priority so gotta be no damage + less than 100% HP by end of fight I guess. Well, mystery solved, that's a relief I guess.

...and in an earlier attempt to get the no-hit final boss run (accomplished w/ Lovers arcana) ended up getting "Mistress of Magick" due to a max of 600, thx Medea. Didn't even realize how overboard I went until I saw it, lol.

Woo got my first clear, think it was Night 17. Weak + Scorch absolutely bodies, and I was around a 19% chance to Dodge and my Lunar Ray Hex was almost fully upgraded

Tried my first Chaos run with Chaos above, got the hidden axe which isn't my favorite but whatever. Leaned into it with a build set to take hits then heal back up using Aphrodite boons. And then in the last biome it randomly gives me white antler. Did not win the run >_>

JeffreyRaze posted...

Tried my first Chaos run with Chaos above, got the hidden axe which isn't my favorite but whatever. Leaned into it with a build set to take hits then heal back up using Aphrodite boons. And then in the last biome it randomly gives me white antler. Did not win the run >_>

Damn, that sucks. There's a few keepsakes that are less than ideal, but that's the only one I can think of that's a straight up run killer. No idea why you'd ever use it. Maybe if you stacked an unreasonable amount of armor? But even then lol

I actually just finished the Greater Chaos Below trial, which was the last thing I needed for the platinum trophy. I got the Aspect of Moros, which is probably my favorite aspect in the game, so it went pretty smoothly! Amazing game overall. Maxed out most of the relationships (wish Icarus showed up in the Crossroads more often, but whatever).

White Antler is fun to use for like, the first area, or when I'm doing a low Fear run.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/d/dc66cb36.jpg

I have been known to see my health bar dropping and the boss bar dropping and just face tank the end of the fight with hopes and prayers

I tried that yesterday with Upgraded Scylla. We were both 1 hit away from death.
I got hit first.

Big sad.

update to post #366: I've googled and as far as I can tell literally nobody has a full list of Hades II clear screen taglines so my list might be the basis of a definitive one out there?

In addition to the ones I posted before, and alluded to Mistress of Magick and Pride of Olympus (and confirmed Fifty Ascents), we also got:

Godless Goddess (acquiring and purging boons is ok for getting this, also hexes are ok. just need no boons at the end)
Who Needs Arcana? (don't know if having the Vow on to give you 0% grasp is sufficient, I actually completed the run with no arcana cards selected, still easy with OP Moros torches)

And the one I learned from googling and am probably going to give up on getting:

100% Gold Free

Truly the toughest and most luck-based to get. You need to complete the game with 0 gold in your possession, multiple problems with this:
-mobs that spawn in the final battle drop gold, even if they're unarmored, so you have to avoid killing anything other than the main boss...?
-if you had the Hermes legendary that lets you lose gold, you still need a multiple of 3 gold otherwise it won't activate; AND not knowing the clear screen priority cue, you may just get the "Hand of Hermes" title since having his legendary is a pre-requisite for it

And I'm kicking myself because I had zero gold going into the surface final boss fight yesterday before I learned about all this but got some gold in there, can't remember if the eggs themselves give it or if i was slow and some egg(s) hatched

I think I actually got 100% Gold Free last week >_> will go finish my current run and take a screenshot later

jealous!! yeah check the record keeper guy and let me know if you had the Hermes legendary when you did that or not... trying to figure out some other ways to lose or at least not make money in this game, lol

After three days out of town, finally got some Hades 2 time. Nothing much of note, just trying to find the Fates and deepen my relationship with people.

I did unlock the hidden aspect of the torches though. It seems interesting considering it's always on. Thoughts on that?

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/6/6cf8e828.jpg

Yeah, I did have the Hermes legendary. I can't imagine any other way to get it beyond a very lucky gold lineup in the end shop, and getting lucky with add drops in the final boss.

Over 100 days and I am still yet to unlock Icarus' affection meter, despite giving him nectar and ambrosia every chance I get...

Raka_Putra posted...

I did unlock the hidden aspect of the torches though. It seems interesting considering it's always on. Thoughts on that?

It's boring and not particularly fun. Seems reasonably powerful though.

Hidden torches has a really long startup time imo and feels slow as hell at the start. I used it on my last run and I almost ran out of time before Surface boss 1 (with Time 2) because I was doing so little damage. Once I got special and rush boons though, it scaled incredibly. Not my favourite aspect, definitely a bit niche, but I enjoyed it when it got going. I think the torches are easily my favourite weapon so take that with a pinch of salt.

I've unlocked hidden axe and hidden coat so far

Tried the coat hidden aspect last night and those are some NUMBERS, holy shit. Lost horribly because I was trying high fear without actually knowing how to play it, but that thing can swing.

Sheep007 posted...

Yeah, I did have the Hermes legendary. I can't imagine any other way to get it beyond a very lucky gold lineup in the end shop, and getting lucky with add drops in the final boss.

yeah I thought if you killed morphed enemies they wouldn't drop gold but looks like they still do, damn.

I finally manged to get the Hermes legendary again but had a bad number, 2 gold. Chronos phase 2 enemies don't drop gold so that'll be good to remember in the future. "Hand of Hermes" clear line comes with the taste of ashes in my mouth...

Only other thing I'm thinking for getting your gold back to a divisible by 3 number within a battle is the Moon Water ability that gives you 15 gold everytime it gets used, but even that's that doesn't help budge a 1 or 2. Maybe if you have a gold+% ability (like from Chaos, Hermes's would only work for +130%), would turn that 15 into a +1 or +2 number that can get you to a divisible by 3 number.

Other than that it's just crossing your fingers and hoping for the 1 in 3 chance I guess...

(also probably going for it on the surface is the way given greater chance of Hermes boons there but I'm working on "hundred times" underworld clearing tagline here, ah...)

Sheep007 posted...

Hidden torches has a really long startup time imo and feels slow as hell at the start. I used it on my last run and I almost ran out of time before Surface boss 1 (with Time 2) because I was doing so little damage. Once I got special and rush boons though, it scaled incredibly. Not my favourite aspect, definitely a bit niche, but I enjoyed it when it got going. I think the torches are easily my favourite weapon so take that with a pinch of salt.

Aah yeah, it does seem like it needs a bit of set-up. Looking forward to trying it myself.

MartinFF7 posted...

Only other thing I'm thinking for getting your gold back to a divisible by 3 number within a battle is the Moon Water ability that gives you 15 gold everytime it gets used, but even that's that doesn't help budge a 1 or 2. Maybe if you have a gold+% ability (like from Chaos, Hermes's would only work for +130%), would turn that 15 into a +1 or +2 number that can get you to a divisible by 3 number.

yessss

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/2/28fa6603.jpg
Took 4 tries of starting w/ Moonbeam (and fate-rerolling if Moon Water wasn't an available hex), getting a Chaos boon that made the math work, and then rerolling hard on 2nd Hermes boon. Totally unnecessary but challenge achieved...

good timing too as that was my 99th underworld win so 1 more for the "Hundred Times" screen and then I should very well be done with Hades II!!! (for now)

I feel like I've exhausted the victory screen tagline scenarios, I tried selling a ton of boons since "Boon Purger" was an H1 tagline but didn't get anything for that. "Fountain Finder" might be one akin to H1 but definitely not going to try chasing that down.

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1145350/view/505090299391902119

I'm legitimately surprised - they're actually updating the ending

Wow, massive patch that seems to have a bunch of good improvements. The true ending stuff seems to be adding more context? Which makes sense. And changes some things to work better. Hope there's a compilation video of all the new scenes at some point, since it seems like there's a good few.

https://i.imgur.com/ayt97DS.gif

lots of good changes in the patch notes there, I know this isn't most noticeable but it jumped out to me:

Controlled Burn (Hestia): increased bonus from Poms of Power

The pom on that was already very generous, like it'd be a +50 for the first pom iirc.... will be interesting to see how much the increase is.

That is exciting.

After thinking about it some more, I think what might help the True Ending goes down smoother is if they show an actual threat from Chronos/Typhon from the other timelines first.

Wowwwwwwwwwww I'm watching the updated ending and it's criminal we didn't get this as the original. To say it's been reworked is underplaying it.

Don't want to link to it since there's a spoiler in thumbnail and dont want to throw a spoiler bar on it. I watched it from https://www.youtube.com/@FazFaz

QUICK SUMMARY MASSIVE ENDING SPOILERS Hey this is the spoiler bar if you're still reading watch yourself!! It seems like the "reform Chronos" idea now originates from Mel instead of being something Zagreus independently does (which Melinoe is later really pissed at him for), and now all of Mel, Hades and Persephone also have memories of "alternate possibility/growing up together" timeline rather than just Zag and Chronos. There's also a neat montage sequence of Mel in the House with our beloved houseguests from the first game, and a neat addition to the final boss fight before that true ending gets unlocked.

So either they put this together in the less-than-a-month since 1.0's release (and the reaction to it) or it was already in the works beforehand which is itself an indictment? Will assume it's the former... anyways I'd still need to do a fresh playthrough from the start to catch all the additions in the lead-up and following (or use the incantation i guess)but on first viewing it feels way better.

Yeah I literally just moved over to the patch and used the new incantation and combined with Martin's reaction above I'm already prepared to say there's pretty much zero chance this was just whipped up over last four weeks, especially not given any time for seeing reactions and identifying a need for it.

Feels weird that they had such a long and comfortable (i.e. they clearly polished the shit out the rest of the game) early access period and yet were apparently rushed to release the ending before they were done? Well, I'm glad they ended up doing this rather than leave a relatively minor (though perhaps more major for others) stain on what is otherwise such a masterpiece!

Xiahou_Shake posted...

there's pretty much zero chance this was just whipped up over last four weeks, especially not given any time for seeing reactions and identifying a need for it.

and yet there's all these little things they could have still had in the original ending. Like one small thing, the static painting-like image that pans across when they're first cleaning up the house. original had Chronos sitting in the lounge & Hecate leaning against wall. Now Nyx is standing beside Hecate, Meg & Achilles are instead in the lounge while Chronos is dusting a wall (with Dusa overseeing), and Thanatos carrying a box behind Mel & Zag. Basically adding in the houseguests that were noticeably absent before. I get they wanted to add them in in addition to the other houseguest sequence they added, but there really was no reason they couldn't have had this as that "image" even with the original ending?

I'm also not familiar with any instances of a game having a changed ending after it's released like, the closest thing I could think is the ME3 DLC because people were outraged? No hint of this being a possibility in their 1.0 release message either but I guess it would've been weak to say "we're still working on a better ending which will release in a month", lol.

Anyhow it's all been totally unexpected and welcome, I think.

.....and I started a new game and set my new mark of beating Chronos on 2nd run (got to second half of phase 2 on first run).

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/7/78bfd15a.jpg

The Eris avoidance trick working swimmingly but getting the OP Mirrored Thrasher among other things really did the trick, and I guess I would've died without Life Tax too... don't know if I could even win 3rd run given I can't unlock Torches until at least the 4th, lol

lol what the fuck I just realized I'm on Night 75 and I just now heard Scylla's new ballad song for 1.0. Lost my god damn mind when the intro played, how are there still things like this that haven't triggered until now

I havent beaten the game but Ive seen patch fixes ending and I think Im close - when does it come out for real?

They don't have a release date yet. If you're on steam you can switch to the beta for it

Xiahou_Shake posted...

lol what the fuck I just realized I'm on Night 75 and I just now heard Scylla's new ballad song for 1.0. Lost my god damn mind when the intro played, how are there still things like this that haven't triggered until now

One of the things the patch does is make it more likelier to hear that song play earlier. I think I got it way before night 75, personally, but certain things can block it.

Well I'm certainly thankful for that! Song rocks. Also already noticing after just a couple of runs that other quests are indeed finally progressing after being stuck for ages, hallelujah!

Just unlocked the hidden aspect of the skull and tried it out....

Wow, it felt really good and fun. I think it's my favorite weapon by quite some measure now.

I love the random little things in this game. Like I took the Growth boon from Circe and then ran into Icarus who was flustered as fuck that Mel was now a Amazon muscle mommy.