Strategies

Defense

Effective health is the total raw damage you can take before dying. It's the one number that every defensive stat feeds into.

The formula

Armor and evasion are both worth one extra health bar per 100 points. In essence, they multiply your base health by the point percentage.

With 20 health, 50 armor, and 150 evasion, that's 20 x (1 + (50 / 100)) x (1 + (150 / 100)) = 20 x 1.5 x 2.5 = 75 EHP.

Evasion counts in expectation. A dodge removes a whole hit, so over a fight it averages out to the same total as armor would give you, but any single hit is either fully dealt or fully dodged.

Balance beats min-maxxing

Because the three multiply, spreading points across them beats stacking one. Say you have 200 points of budget across your gear:

• ✦200 armor and 0 evasion on 20 HP: 20 x 3 = 60 EHP.
• ✦100 armor and 100 evasion on 20 HP: 20 x 2 x 2 = 80 EHP.
• ✦100 armor and 100 evasion on 30 HP: 30 x 2 x 2 = 120 EHP.

Overall, each stat gets more valuable the more you have of the others. For example, at 20 health and no armor, one health point is worth five armor points. At 20 health and 160 armor, one health point is worth about eight armor points.

Health versus armor

Two pieces can give the same effective health and still not be interchangeable.

Health wins:

• ✦Anything that ignores armor: burning, freezing, falling.
• ✦Anything priced in raw hearts, such as a cursed altar that takes your hearts.
• ✦Thorns. Thorns returns a share of the damage you actually take, so armor shrinks your reflected damage and health doesn't.

Armor wins:

• ✦Healing. Every heart of food, potion, or lifesteal is worth more if you take smaller hits, because the raw damage it undoes is bigger.
• ✦Sustainability. You are not limited by health caps or anything like it.

Evasion versus armor

Evasion has some unique properties relative to armor.

A successful dodge removes the whole hit, and as such, everything the hit carries: the slowdown from a frost bolt, poison from a tipped arrow, knockback, etc. Unlike with armor, where reduced damage still affects you in other negative ways.

It never touches what you're standing in. Explosions, fire and gas areas, AoE abilities, and burning ticks can't be dodged. A room full of those makes evasion useless, where the same points in armor would still be working.

And arguably the worst, its variance. Take 20 health against a boss that swings three times for 10. With 100 armor, each swing lands for 5, you take 15, you live every time. With 100 evasion, you take 15 on average, but two of the three land half the time, and you're dead. One thing that helps here is focusing on a larger health pool alongside evasion.

Runebinding

Runes possess fairly deep strategies to optimize making the best gear you can.

Guaranteed replacements

Gear can only hold one modifier of each type. An inscribed rune replaces a random existing modifier with its own, and since a duplicate type is not allowed, a rune whose type the item already has replaces that modifier.

If your sword has a "-10% Attack Damage" modifier, an inscribed rune carrying "+20% Attack Damage" replaces exactly that one. Use this to target the modifier you want gone.

Stability

Every rune spends stability, and an item that runs out becomes corrupted and takes no more runes. Read the tooltip's estimate before a rune sequence, or use a stability rune for the exact amount when the item is worth it.

Plan the sequence so the cheap fixes come first and the rune you can't afford to waste comes last, when you don't waste your best runes on fruitless endeavours.

Other techniques

Warding and focus rune combinations, and the order runes are applied in, change what a runebinding sequence can reach. For example, you usually want to use focus first, see what modifier gets focused, and then choose to either ward it, or replace it through an inscribed or chaos rune.

See Runescribe for how inscribed runes are made and how to bias what they carry.

Altars

Blessed altars

A blessed altar sells a buff for essence. Your essence is usually worth more in an essence chest or at a biome gate, so take a blessed offer when the next few minutes decide the run: before a boss, or when you're fighting for your life and trying to extract.

Cursed altars

A cursed altar pays essence for taking a curse. Take one when you need essence fast, most often to open a biome gate. Every minute you spend collecting essence raises the dungeon's difficulty, so a curse that saves you a minute or two pays for itself.

Some curses are easy to live with in any run. Others only work in the right situation, so read the curse before you look at the reward.

Pact altars

A pact altar gives you a buff and a curse together at no essence cost. Weigh the curse against the buff, since the buff is not the price.