Thursday 8 January 2015

Binding of Isaac Damage - Correction Included

So I had the wrong formula for The Inner Eye and Mutant Spider tear delay, as I suspected. I've updated the spreadsheet so you can see where they properly rank. Inner Eye is still on the weaker side, Mutant Spider is great.

Nick left a helpful comment explaining a few things - including that Judas' Shadow was on his list and I apparently just plain missed it? - and pointing me to a site with better information about items. This allowed me to add Ipecac, Polyphemus and Dr. Fetus to the list. It gave the numbers for Epic Fetus and Proptosis, but I couldn't meaningfully add them because I don't know how Epic Fetus works with fire rate, and Proptosis simply adds between 30% and 100% depending on range. Basically Proptosis is great and Epic Fetus is completely insane.

Ipecac is the new winner at a 314% damage boost vs. no item at all. Now, Ipecac has some very substantial scaling issues because the damage add it gives does not scale and the fire rate reduction makes all other items scale badly. Imagine you did a run where you picked up the the Pentgram, the Sad Onion, and two damage boosting boss items. Normally this would increase your damage per second by 178%. With Ipecac, the total damage would be 534%, only a 38% increase. Boo hoo!

If you have ever picked up Ipecac this shouldn't be surprise. You fire slowly, but you kill the first floor boss in four or five shots.

The Inner Eye definitely does synergize better than other damage items. It actually works poorly with tear increasing items because there is a flat add in the formula, but it's only a few percent. By contrast, it works great once you start getting a few damage items because while damage items apply through a square root sign, the times three multiplier for the inner eye does not. At +1 damage you are pretty much breaking even between the Inner Eye and another +1 damage item, any more than that and the Inner Eye starts looking very good. Since +1 damage items are good anyway - and because getting to +1 damage over the course of a whole run is pretty reliable - I agree that the Inner Eye is a good pickup.

As for Daddy Longlegs, I certainly defend my pick. It does 40 damage and stomps about every 4 seconds. That's basically doubling your initial damage when you pick it up. It doesn't scale with other items, but it's still going to rival good items in end game. Plus the damage is front-loaded, which is a big plus for normal rooms, and just keeps stomping away regardless of your position in the room, which can be a big asset for some bosses and for certain room configurations. I'd always stick with this.

Yesterday I got some good insight into how good PhD was. I didn't actually get PhD in my run, but my pill rotation included health up and luck up, as well as health down which I identified at one heart, resulting in a health up. Over the course of the run I managed to get health up 4 times which obviously crazy and luck up 6 times which resulted in insanity with my Mom's Perfume, keeping most enemies perpetually feared. PhD is a bit of a gamble because you could still get a lousy pool of pills, but then every item is a gamble because you could always just get lousy items for the rest of the game.

Damage aside, my new favourite item is the Book of Sin. I had been playing a lot with Maggie so it never seemed very appealing to trade in my Yum Heart and a heart container for an activated item. Now that I've had some experience using it, it's dramatically increasing my win rate.

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