Risk of Rain Honor Sniper

Honor's description is actually essentially accurate, just with three caveats;

1: Some enemies have no elite form. They'll spawn normally in an Honor run.

2: Some spawn behaviors circumvent Honor. Ancient Wisps release some Wisps and Greater Wisps when killed, and Honor doesn't upgrade these enemies. Boar Beach has a bunch of enemies when the level is loaded, and Honor doesn't affect them.

3: Blighted is not counted as a form of elite. You actually can't see Blighted enemies with Honor on.

Personally, I'm not very fond of Honor. It sounds like it should be interesting, but the execution is a lot iffier. If it had imposed only the elite special effects (Overloading electrical effects, Leeching healing effects, Frenzied being faster/teleporting/instantly breaking through Guardian's Heart, Volatile having exploding attacks and launching homing missiles, and Blazing having a trail of fire in their wake) and not the stat modifiers and spawn cost modifiers, it could have been neat, but as-is Honor runs are slow because everything has way too much HP and is pretty consistently backed by Leeching healing them to boot, money is slow to come in because elite enemies cost four times as much to spawn (And thus are slow to spawn in) but don't generate anywhere near four times the cash regular enemies spawn, and widespread access to elite bonuses flips things from 'Oh, there's an X in there, I need to adjust my strategy' to 'Oh, how lucky, there's not an X in there, I can do something a little faster that would otherwise be too dangerous'. (Concrete example: Volatile and to a lesser extent Frenzied enemies make Steady Aim dangerous to use to full effect)

The one thing it does that's genuinely pretty interesting is force bosses to spawn as elites. My own experience is bosses almost never spawn as elites unless either Honor is on or you're looping -and even when looping, the game has an annoying habit of doing things like generating 5 Magma Worms instead of generating an elite Magma Worm. I've so far only seen elite Wandering Vagrants, Colossi, and Magma Worms in looping runs, which are the cheapest bosses by far.

This run shows off elite versions of...

-Magma Worms. They only come in Overloading form.

-Colossi. They actually change their spawns based on elite form, in place of having whatever modifiers they should get. There's no Leeching Colossus, for reference, so this run encountered all variations.

-Ancient Wisp. I got Frenzied.

-Toxic Beast. I got Blazing, Overloading, and Frenzied. Curiously Blazing doesn't seem to do anything except change their color. Frenzied doesn't teleport, but it does move faster. Overloading has the expected shock behavior.

-Imp Overlords. I got Blazing, Volatile, Leeching, and I'm pretty sure Frenzied, though given they already teleport it would be hard to tell.

-Scavengers. I got an Overloading for sure.

I was also surprised to discover Archaic Wisps can be elite. I'd been under the impression they were one of the enemies that couldn't be, but you can quite clearly see at one point in the Hive that an Archaic Wisp has the Overloading shock behavior. Apparently they just don't update color.

Anyway, I went with the Sniper for the Honor run because it's actually one of the Artifacts the Sniper is unusually well-suited to. Their limitations don't crop up as readily -damage drop-off on your splash move isn't as big an issue when there's fewer enemies at a time, for example- and Steady Aim's huge damage potential is a lot more widely useful. Pretty much every enemy is tough enough to justify Steady Aim, not just the bosses.

Here, have a failed run with a Bandit.

Elite bosses that show up in this video but not the Sniper video; Blazing and Frenzied Scavengers, Overloading Cremator (Which is weirdly pathetic, firing only 3 shots at a time. More often, yeah, but 3? Really?), and Volatile Toxic Beast. (Though you only see it briefly)

This is not an entertaining run. It takes me fifteen minutes to clear out the first level, and just about that for the second, and then a half hour for the third, followed by me dying in the Magma Barracks because I just could not get space or kill things fast enough. And that was even though the Ancient Valley had done a lot to bolster my offensive potential!

It's educational, but seriously not entertaining unless you find nailbiting tension entertaining.

Glass does a lot to offset the tendency toward boredom Honor leads to.

It also makes it really easy to die with pretty much no warning. I had like... five deaths within five minutes -some within twenty seconds- working on getting this run done.

I also went with a loop, in part because of how much Glass sped things up and in part because I was hoping to show off more elite bosses. I succeeded, too! Got to see a Volatile Ancient Wisp, which instead of adding explosions to its attack doubles how many shots it generates and extends their strike zone in the process.

Comments

Popular Posts