Risk of Rain Monsoon Mercenary

I said I'd be starting off on Artifacts next, but that's not quite true; I intend to do all the Artifact runs on Monsoon difficulty -it speeds up the game and makes it more interesting- but I wanted to show off a Monsoon run first to make it easier to grasp what's an Artifact and what's Monsoon at work.

The main thing Monsoon does is accelerate the rate at which the game spawns more and more powerful enemies. On Moonsoon, it's not unusual to have bosses spawning in before you even find the Teleporter, and it's also not unusual to get two bosses spawned immediately after activating the Teleporter. This is actually nice for speeding up the early game, and in fact in general you don't tend to need to grind money on Monsoon difficulty, which is part of why it's going to be my default for the Artifact videos.

This particular run ended up running a bit long, but that was some ill luck in finding the Teleporter and some rough patches toward the start, plus me doing a full loop of the Ancient Valley->Boar Beach->Ancient Valley just to illustrate that you can, in fact, go to Boar Beach after you've activated the Teleporter in Ancient Valley. Most of the time, Monsoon actually goes quicker than the base difficulty.

The other major change Monsoon difficulty incorporates is Blighted/Phantasm enemies. These are basically super-elites; they roll two elite effects to have at once, resulting in such lovely combinations as an enemy that relentlessly teleports on top of you while punishing being near it with electrical discharges, and on top of that they're invisible by default. They reveal themselves when attacking in the form of a shadowy effect, but outside that?...

Interestingly, while Blighted enemies can display their HP meter at the top of the screen just like a boss, unlike a boss this is on top of their regular health meter display. This is important, since Blighted enemies are so hard to track otherwise; you can still see where they are by following their HP meter. I... have no idea if that applies to Blighted bosses. I've yet to have a run go far enough to see a Blighted boss, personally.

Blighted enemies themselves borrow pretty heavily from the mechanics of Providence's final stage, where he summons a shadow version of himself each time you knock him to an HP threshold that triggers his 'almost all damage is reduced to 1' effect. It's the same visuals/pseudo-invisibility effect, specifically; the Providence shadow thankfully doesn't get elite modifiers, and it actually has a fraction of Providence's HP where a Blighted enemy has ridiculous gobs of HP over even elites. The visuals sharing even extends to the quirk that death animations are normal; killing Providence's shadow results in it looking like Providence himself has died, which can be confusing. By a similar token, regular Blighted enemies leave being an elite corpse graphic, not some special Blighted corpse graphic.

Incidentally, Blighted bosses is what I was alluding to as far as 'you won't see this without playing for like 5 hours'. I'll get into that a bit later.

A minor motive in using the Mercenary for the Monsoon illustration run is that he's the only class you actually do have to play on Monsoon if you're trying to 100% the game; the Ancient Scepter is unlocked by beating the game on Monsoon as the Mercenary.

The run itself was a lot more fun than I was expecting, and gave me newfound appreciation for the Glowing Meteorite Use item; I've previously tended to avoid it because it can end up hurting you, but it's shockingly useful and you don't even really need to abuse ropes to minimize the danger. I likely wouldn't have made it past the Ancient Valley without it, or at least I'd likely have ended up playing even more defensively/with even more in the way of waiting around and being boring.