What Sets Are Good / Bad?
- Wood: Not as good as leather or mercenary armor in most ways. The guard ability is okay, but not great. It gives you less gold than the mercenary set.
- Scout: Useful at the start of the game, but becomes risky later. It only lets you dodge once or twice, which isn’t enough when facing many enemies. It also doesn’t give you much energy, so it becomes less useful after the third level.
- Hunter: You need to wear all four pieces of this armor at some point because your damage will decrease without the very high critical hit bonus. Hunter armor is the only way to get this bonus. Before that, it’s mainly used to get 100% precision.
- Golden: I mean, it’s cool early, but usually other sets just outclass it; the 25% revive is as good as wooden 25% reduction, but the pieces mostly suck for their actual stats (the gold amulet is nice) and the sword is outclassed by the two daggers earlier and the silver/ethercrest weapons after it; heart of gold comes way too late and gives little to no benefit.
- Silver: Honestly solid early, good armor & the Sword gives huge damage with full silver gear to carry hard; but it’s also a bit boring past that. On Viran with Royal set it works great but silver alone always feels underwhelming, especially because it’s just 2 turns & the set itself scales poorly past floor 15 in my opinion.
- Monomana: Severely lacks flat mana in the items (to disassemble in my opinion); set effect is cool but just two pieces & bad scaling (just 6 magic attack on a 2p set is crazy low in my opinion, but the best you’ve got until floor 5 ethercrest); just feels weird to have to use this 2p combo on a build that utilizes mana/is a magic attacker.
- Orion: Honestly, I see myself skip this almost every run (except maybe Tyr) :OMEGALUL: It’s honestly a decent set, but the bonuses to health, armor and combat (I hate combat stat for some reason, it’s so weak compared to just stacking physical and/or wisdom for magic), are so spread that it always feels like I’m playing a druid in WoW -> you can do everything, but are good at nothing :xdd: ; it’s honestly a very cool set for the bonuses per item, but the set bonus is meaningless once you scrap like 2 Bloodedge swords.
- Zephyron: I rarely play magic attackers at all (physical just seems so much stronger), but the silence is cool, yet again it requires wearing monomana. Getting Wisdom is okayish I guess, but the set itself buffs magic attack & no set piece scales with piece amount.
- Ethercrest: Honestly very solid at this point of the game, massive armor & in-set scaling, big DPS with the weapon to get like 5k+ freeze attack so early, set bonus is nice but feels mandatory to a degree & needs to be coupled with demonic to be actually useful; also struggling with mana again.
- Arcanum: Cool idea with magic shield and huge damage buff as long as it’s up, but just 1 shield & needing mana (so no chest here again, just boots :xdd: ) is off-putting and way too unreliable.
- Shadow: Items all have pretty good scaling and stats, but the effect is slightly underwhelming with how hard it has become to actually utilize dodge. You often dodge just 2 or maybe 3 times and for that, this set stinks sadly. Was really cool on Fren on a full-dodge setup before the patch though.
- Darkness: Huge potential, big annoyance with double set items blocking other synergies. Casting confusion is crazy, especially with stealing mana (yet, still another monomana angle or it becomes unusable quick), scaling is weak until Rod of doom, which then falls off too.
- Turtle: Pretty pog set effect, making you want to wear all the pieces you can but it firstly doesn’t scale besides the boots & before the gauntlet there were just 3 pieces, making it incredibly weak compared to other sets that give 3-5x the armor at this point. Mostly a set to disassemble or use later, but lack of armor scaling on it makes it weak; also this is basically screaming Tyr, yet Tyr cannot use the new gauntlet.
- Blackthorn: Honestly, this is just a hot mess. Tyr already has a piece and all the other items make little to no sense, some flat armor and wisdom isn’t really cutting it, when I can get more armor and more total damage by wearing ethercrest at this point. No set effect scaling too with more pieces.
- Flesh: Yeah, so Flesh is a weird one. I like it personally, but the reliance of having to heal for vimblow to take effect is odd on turn 1. The pieces are very spread out and you’d obviously want to use that on Elys, but there you also want to wear the body armor (but I’ll get to that later). Recovery not scaling, but health scaling also feels a little off besides that it’s a strong set, but falls off hard later in the game; probably better now after dazzle nerf against perfect slaves.
- Thunder: Yeah, so the damage of the set itself is pog, especially on Riel where you wanna play stuff like that, it even outclasses Magma before you start to stack life, but the set effect is odd (the new one too). Stun is great, but just having a chance feels weird to me, because I’m mostly focusing on 2 defense layers and when one is just random or just 25-40% it’s too unreliable in my opinion, still a pretty nice set tbh, but also relying on merc set and multi attacks + unchained a lot.
- Unchained: Yeah… the gloves suck so much. Set bonus is an absolute banger, but that weapon is just so damn awful, especially adaptive attacks feels so off all the time, because other things just scale much better.
- Demonic: Yeah, no that set is actually bonkers now. I love the 1 and 3 set piece design, it just lacks some scaling on the pieces to remain relevant into floor 30+.
- Poverty: Never using this, not even on Tyr (well, mostly because it needs a helmet slot and gives nothing really), no damage turn 1 is cool, but then turn 2 I’m just dead. Anti-steal is irrelevant on everyone but Tyr.
- Berserker: Fury is super cool and makes a nice playstyle later on when also doing life stacking, just weird/hard to introduce into a build as you usually just alpha strike the enemies until floor 60 instead of letting them hit you a couple of times, also with most items granting armor it feels weird when you have armor because it just negates your set.
- Warrior: Decent set, but too little uptime, basically just a 20% damage reduction that’s on a counter & the set scales badly.
- Cursed: Why would I ever use that? Sure there are some healers but they usually just fall over or your damage is so high it’s irrelevant either way. This set and Malice stat just feel lackluster right now.
- Royal: Bad unless combined with Silver and Viran to turn you into a god, literally. I like the dual scaling, but defense is irrelevant once you’ve ascended to godhood for 10 turns.
- Vampiric: I don’t know, Drain really does nothing, you already have so much life steal anyway. It would also need Monomana set, but both weapon and body are blocked, it scales poorly with itself, clashes with Flesh set too. I’d rather disassemble Bloodedges and Giant’s rings instead of the body armor too.
- Celestial: It always reads so fantastic, but is just a huge disappointment or pain to implement. If Omni crit just weren’t reliant on crit chance it would be so great, but you’ll still need hunter’s, at which point it’s more of a hindrance. Also, its stats are just bad for most builds that would wanna use it, and most builds cannot even access most stats in a good way (like no way I’m getting a meaningful amount of magic blitz on a physical build or lifesteal and health on a magic build); really cool design and idea, but just falls short on every end.
- Jade: Dazzle is just completely out of control. The recent patch made Dazzle basically useless past stage 60, so it’s better now, but this set still is quite OP if you have some additional attacks and unchained set, besides that it feels a little weak now maybe, outside of floor 60+ where it was mainly used (mostly by disassembling), also: no way to scale dazzle without the runes at the start feels a little weird.
- Swift: Pretty straightforward, good set. Could be better at some times, but I feel like it’s in a good, but slightly weak spot (maybe +1 attack per swift piece & double attacks then?)
- Chromalure: Outside of Viran this is bad in my opinion. The items are very very short on actual damage, the bonus just kills you after a while unless you use silver + royal. It just feels bad and I never really use it because it’s so underwhelming.
- Cataclysm: Banger set, but the helmet slot is quite important most of the time and at the end of the day it’s just a 45% more damage; which is good for 1 slot, but bad when you compare it to like 3000% crit damage with hunter and a few items disassembled :xdd: I just use it at black market tbh; especially because I mostly just 1 shot enemies, it helps on super high floors though.
- Magma: Pretty cool set, scales nicely in itself, but why does the set, which scales with life to give cinder damage, not scale in itself with life? Whenever I play Riel and use Thunder set and try to switch to Magma, the damage falloff is crazy. It’s probably better late-game, but around floor 20-30 thunder just outshines it every time for me at least. If that were to scale with like life and armor & give the set life scaling, then it would probably be quite pog). Still expensive as fuck though.
- Legacy: Not so good anymore due to energy changes but pre-patch was basically mandatory to not die of boredom when facing orcs at floor 100+. It’s rather bad than good, because if I can use hunter set and basically hit everything except orcs, then why use the sword or Jace?
The extra gold you get from certain items can be frustrating. I often find myself using Excalibur, not because it’s effective as a weapon, but mainly for the increased gold it provides. I would prefer to use Throngler instead. Additionally, it might be helpful to have more non-set items available. While most item sets are good, having some standalone items that can solve specific problems could be useful.
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