Risk of Rain Vanilla CHEF
Nonetheless, it's pretty easy to incidentally unlock CHEF fairly early on once you're able to reliably get to the end of the game. Especially if you're prone to looping to collect more stuff. Especially-especially since all of these are fairly common items, and only one needs to be unlocked. (The Bitter Root requires hitting 650 max HP)
CHEF is a bit unusual in that they have 7 total moves, technically.
... not counting Ancient Scepter moves.
Anyway, their normal state is...
DICELobs a cleaver which travels nearly the entire screen out on a horizontal line, hitting each and every enemy it touches for 100% base damage. Additionally, once it has reached its maximum range it will attempt to travel directly back to CHEF, even through terrain, and it can hit enemies a second time on the way back. No cooldown.
SEAR
SEARShort-range line attack that hits all enemies in a row for 260% base damage and knocks them back. Penetrates terrain in addition to enemies. 3 second cooldown.
GLAZE
GLAZEBriefly increases CHEF's speed, with any enemies CHEF touches in this duration becoming soaked in oil. While GLAZE is active, CHEF cannot stop moving, turn, or take any other action. Oil-soaked enemies animate slower, and if struck with SEAR will take +78% base damage and become stunned if applicable. 4 second cooldown.
SECOND HELPING
SECOND HELPINGChanges DICE into MINCE, SEAR into BLAZE, and GLAZE into MARINATE for the next attack. 8 second cooldown, which is only initiated after an enhanced move is actually used.
SECOND HELPING thus necessitates three additional descriptions...
MINCE
SECOND HELPING thus necessitates three additional descriptions...
MINCELobs 9 cleavers outward in a ring from CHEF, traveling through terrain and hitting enemies a second time on the way back. 100% base damage per cleaver. No cooldown.
BLAZE
BLAZEAs per SEAR, but damage is 420% of base attack and the attack reaches somewhat farther. This includes that it can benefit from GLAZE and MARINATE's damage bonuses. 4 second cooldown.
MARINATE
MARINATEAs per GLAZE, but MARINATE's modification to CHEF's behavior lasts longer and it travels faster. 4 second cooldown.
And since I once again got the Ancient Scepter, it turns SECOND HELPING into...
FULL COURSE MEAL
And since I once again got the Ancient Scepter, it turns SECOND HELPING into...
FULL COURSE MEALAs per SECOND HELPING, except the next two attacks are enhanced. 8 second cooldown, but cooldown does not begin until both enhanced attacks have been fired.
DICE, though it fires in a straight line, has a bit of an odd hitbox that can catch some enemies that are one tile below you, note.
CHEF is a weird class who at first glance looks a bit inflexible or even underpowered, but in actuality has an extremely solid amount of damage output -CHEF is the only class in the entire game whose base attack induces splash damage across such a tremendous area- and looks a lot more complicated than it actually is.
Admittedly, this is in part because SEAR/BLAZE and GLAZE/MARINATE are genuinely not very good. SEAR is not actually worth using over DICE in most circumstances; hitting twice for 100% damage (The wiki indicates that returning cleavers hit slightly harder, but this only enhances my point if true) out to a huge range and hitting everything in that range is, in real terms, much better damage output than SEAR's 260% hit out to a much more limited strike zone. The knockback part is the primary reason to use SEAR, or the stun if combined with GLAZE/MARINATE. MARINATE itself is not a worthwhile use of SECOND HELPING; there is almost no circumstance in which enemies are spread out in such a way that it's a genuine enhancement. Instead, you should use GLAZE and then fire off BLAZE if you're wanting to involve SECOND HELPING in a GLAZE use. 420%+stun against a cluster can potentially be more useful than MINCE.
Of course, MINCE is utterly ridiculous. Against larger enemies and groups of enemies, you simply dive right in and instantly do 900% damage to everything. Then you duck away and do some more damage as the blades come back!
So honestly, SEAR/BLAZE tends to be relegated to knockback and shoot-through-walls duty. DICE and MINCE are usually better in real terms.
CHEF's numbers honestly needed a re-tuning, or its moves to be made very different. 99% of the time, you should be spamming DICE with periodic MINCE bursts, with GLAZE largely relegated to providing a slight improvement in your travel rate and SEAR only really being useful for its terrain-penetrating properties. Bosses in particular are easily burned through insanely fast using MINCE, with the Magma Worm in particular suffering from its multi-segment nature allowing a well-placed MINCE to easily do several thousand percentage of damage in under a second. But even the single-target bosses are generally fairly easy to hit for the full 1800~% damage of a MINCE burst. That's nearly as powerful as a full Steady Aim shot, but with none of the setup involved! And unlike Steady Aim, MINCE doesn't have any damage drop-off for hitting multiple targets, so against blobs of enemies MINCE will easily do far more damage than even a perfect-reload forced-crit Steady Aim. Even though the Sniper has better attack than CHEF!
CHEF can be fun to play, but I tend to avoid playing it in streaks. It's a bit too repetitive, since when it gets down to it spamming DICE and MINCE is really all you'll be doing most of the time.
CHEF also has the problematic quality of basically auto-scaling to threat level. DICE and MINCE make it so the quantity of enemies isn't terribly important to CHEF, and generally if an enemy has good base HP it's also big enough for MINCE to reliably shred it. There's only a handful of enemy types that can consistently threaten CHEF, such as Mechanical Spiders -which are tough, hard-hitting, ranged, chase you up and down, and are a small enemy so MINCE doesn't... well, mince them- and so unless you fall badly behind the curve or make a really blatant misjudgment, CHEF is difficult for the game to actually challenge. There are other classes that 'break' the game more, but none that is so difficult to threaten.
To be fair to the game, the patch notes indicate that CHEF was added in the very last major patch, and as such didn't get a chance to be re-tuned because the devs had moved on to Risk of Rain 2 already.
On the other hand, it's honestly a bit baffling anyway. The math for comparing DICE to SEAR is straightforward, and if you compare CHEF to other classes the numbers are pretty obviously wonky. I could, for example, compare SEAR and GLAZE to Acrid's Neurotoxin and Caustic Sludge, and find CHEF's moves wanting. Neurotoxin has innate stun infliction with only slightly weaker base damage, and more importantly Caustic Sludge adds continuous damage while slowing enemies down and speeding the player up -this can be directly compared to GLAZE's benefits, only Acrid isn't forced to choose between stunning enemies or getting speed advantage over them, and Caustic Sludge does 90% damage per second (With only 2-second gaps) where a GLAZE adds a mere 78% to a SEAR. Caustic Sludge and Neurotoxin is thus far and away better than SEAR and GLAZE, and SECOND HELPING's improvements don't remotely make up the difference; a GLAZE-backed SEAR is just shy of 500% damage delivered. Neurotoxin only does 220%, but Caustic Sludge will more than double that over the 3 second cooldown Neurotoxin shares with SEAR/BLAZE, and worse yet Epidemic's damage value added is far and away superior to using SECOND HELPING to get a BLAZE hit in... so Acrid's performance with the non-basic moves is pretty much 'CHEF, but actually good'.
Meanwhile, DICE and MINCE are utterly ridiculous. There is no basic move that competes with DICE; the Sniper's Snipe hits only 25% harder, and can only hit a single target while having a worse fire rate. (Even assuming perfect reloads, Snipe hits only a little over twice as hard against a given target. And that's only if I ignore the wiki claiming cleavers hit harder on the way back!) DICE actually fires slightly faster than twice a second. (Note that Snipe with perfect reloads caps out at slightly faster than once a second; DICE hits just about as hard per target in actual DPS terms!) The Miner probably has better performance with Crush if you ignore that Crush isn't a ranged attack, but DICE being ranged is a big part of what makes it so ridiculous.
And MINCE's 1800% total damage is just insane. Even considering that SECOND HELPING has a cooldown of 8 seconds... Steady Aim has a complete cycle of 7 seconds while making you way more vulnerable and denying you the ability to attack for 3 of those seconds. MINCE is fire and forget, letting you make up some of that damage gap over the three seconds Steady Aim disables you. Not even touching on how MINCE doesn't lose damage potential when you increase your attack speed!
It's really too bad CHEF didn't get tuning or something, because it desperately needs it.
DICE, though it fires in a straight line, has a bit of an odd hitbox that can catch some enemies that are one tile below you, note.
CHEF is a weird class who at first glance looks a bit inflexible or even underpowered, but in actuality has an extremely solid amount of damage output -CHEF is the only class in the entire game whose base attack induces splash damage across such a tremendous area- and looks a lot more complicated than it actually is.
Admittedly, this is in part because SEAR/BLAZE and GLAZE/MARINATE are genuinely not very good. SEAR is not actually worth using over DICE in most circumstances; hitting twice for 100% damage (The wiki indicates that returning cleavers hit slightly harder, but this only enhances my point if true) out to a huge range and hitting everything in that range is, in real terms, much better damage output than SEAR's 260% hit out to a much more limited strike zone. The knockback part is the primary reason to use SEAR, or the stun if combined with GLAZE/MARINATE. MARINATE itself is not a worthwhile use of SECOND HELPING; there is almost no circumstance in which enemies are spread out in such a way that it's a genuine enhancement. Instead, you should use GLAZE and then fire off BLAZE if you're wanting to involve SECOND HELPING in a GLAZE use. 420%+stun against a cluster can potentially be more useful than MINCE.
Of course, MINCE is utterly ridiculous. Against larger enemies and groups of enemies, you simply dive right in and instantly do 900% damage to everything. Then you duck away and do some more damage as the blades come back!
So honestly, SEAR/BLAZE tends to be relegated to knockback and shoot-through-walls duty. DICE and MINCE are usually better in real terms.
CHEF's numbers honestly needed a re-tuning, or its moves to be made very different. 99% of the time, you should be spamming DICE with periodic MINCE bursts, with GLAZE largely relegated to providing a slight improvement in your travel rate and SEAR only really being useful for its terrain-penetrating properties. Bosses in particular are easily burned through insanely fast using MINCE, with the Magma Worm in particular suffering from its multi-segment nature allowing a well-placed MINCE to easily do several thousand percentage of damage in under a second. But even the single-target bosses are generally fairly easy to hit for the full 1800~% damage of a MINCE burst. That's nearly as powerful as a full Steady Aim shot, but with none of the setup involved! And unlike Steady Aim, MINCE doesn't have any damage drop-off for hitting multiple targets, so against blobs of enemies MINCE will easily do far more damage than even a perfect-reload forced-crit Steady Aim. Even though the Sniper has better attack than CHEF!
CHEF can be fun to play, but I tend to avoid playing it in streaks. It's a bit too repetitive, since when it gets down to it spamming DICE and MINCE is really all you'll be doing most of the time.
CHEF also has the problematic quality of basically auto-scaling to threat level. DICE and MINCE make it so the quantity of enemies isn't terribly important to CHEF, and generally if an enemy has good base HP it's also big enough for MINCE to reliably shred it. There's only a handful of enemy types that can consistently threaten CHEF, such as Mechanical Spiders -which are tough, hard-hitting, ranged, chase you up and down, and are a small enemy so MINCE doesn't... well, mince them- and so unless you fall badly behind the curve or make a really blatant misjudgment, CHEF is difficult for the game to actually challenge. There are other classes that 'break' the game more, but none that is so difficult to threaten.
To be fair to the game, the patch notes indicate that CHEF was added in the very last major patch, and as such didn't get a chance to be re-tuned because the devs had moved on to Risk of Rain 2 already.
On the other hand, it's honestly a bit baffling anyway. The math for comparing DICE to SEAR is straightforward, and if you compare CHEF to other classes the numbers are pretty obviously wonky. I could, for example, compare SEAR and GLAZE to Acrid's Neurotoxin and Caustic Sludge, and find CHEF's moves wanting. Neurotoxin has innate stun infliction with only slightly weaker base damage, and more importantly Caustic Sludge adds continuous damage while slowing enemies down and speeding the player up -this can be directly compared to GLAZE's benefits, only Acrid isn't forced to choose between stunning enemies or getting speed advantage over them, and Caustic Sludge does 90% damage per second (With only 2-second gaps) where a GLAZE adds a mere 78% to a SEAR. Caustic Sludge and Neurotoxin is thus far and away better than SEAR and GLAZE, and SECOND HELPING's improvements don't remotely make up the difference; a GLAZE-backed SEAR is just shy of 500% damage delivered. Neurotoxin only does 220%, but Caustic Sludge will more than double that over the 3 second cooldown Neurotoxin shares with SEAR/BLAZE, and worse yet Epidemic's damage value added is far and away superior to using SECOND HELPING to get a BLAZE hit in... so Acrid's performance with the non-basic moves is pretty much 'CHEF, but actually good'.
Meanwhile, DICE and MINCE are utterly ridiculous. There is no basic move that competes with DICE; the Sniper's Snipe hits only 25% harder, and can only hit a single target while having a worse fire rate. (Even assuming perfect reloads, Snipe hits only a little over twice as hard against a given target. And that's only if I ignore the wiki claiming cleavers hit harder on the way back!) DICE actually fires slightly faster than twice a second. (Note that Snipe with perfect reloads caps out at slightly faster than once a second; DICE hits just about as hard per target in actual DPS terms!) The Miner probably has better performance with Crush if you ignore that Crush isn't a ranged attack, but DICE being ranged is a big part of what makes it so ridiculous.
And MINCE's 1800% total damage is just insane. Even considering that SECOND HELPING has a cooldown of 8 seconds... Steady Aim has a complete cycle of 7 seconds while making you way more vulnerable and denying you the ability to attack for 3 of those seconds. MINCE is fire and forget, letting you make up some of that damage gap over the three seconds Steady Aim disables you. Not even touching on how MINCE doesn't lose damage potential when you increase your attack speed!
It's really too bad CHEF didn't get tuning or something, because it desperately needs it.
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