Heavy Rains/Strategy

This page discusses strategies for the Heavy Rains challenge path.

Overall the path plays much like No Path, but with extra skills available, extra wandering monsters, and extra built-in +ML.

Astral Gear/Consumables

Given the path's extra built-in +ML, the astral belt might be overkill. However, it's not as simple as it may seem at first glance. You should definitely not struggle for stats once you hit level 11, but there may be stat bottlenecks at level 6 (especially if you are stuck waiting for a reanimated writing desk to wander by), and level 10.

The inhibition of your familiars by the flood water means the familiar equipment slot becomes nigh useless for non-water-breathing familiars. So, the astral pet sweater is not as useful as it would be in other paths.

That leaves the astral mask as the default choice, at least in Hardcore. More +item is always helpful.

If you are struggling, the astral shirt is an excellent pick. It gives bonus stats from combat without raising difficulty, and the prismatic damage will be welcome against some of the path bosses, if you are using weapon-based attacks rather than spells.

On the consumable side, nothing really changes from No Path. Take the astral energy drinks if you have no path-usable spleen familiars. Take the astral pilsners if you want to maximize turn gen and can delay turn gen until level 11. Take the astral hot dogs if you want to maximize stat gains from consumables, at the cost of turn generation.

Water Management

You will have an extra +10 to +60 ML due to the flood waters, depending on which zone you're in. You have some control over this:

• You can increase the depth by learning and using the Thundercloud and Rainy Day skills. Increasing the depth is the only way to learn the Rain and Lightning skills.
• You can decrease the depth by equipping the heavy duty umbrella (offhand) or the fishbone corset (shirt). If you are playing for speed, you will never have enough fishbones to make the corset in Hardcore, and you wouldn't want to reduce the water anyway. But if you are struggling in softcore, and aren't seeking more skills, the corset might be a reasonable pull.

For speed purposes, you want to increase the water depth as much as you can, as soon as you can. This raises the Monster Level and gives you more stats, and it allows you to pick up more of the path skills. Once you reach level 11, you can stop renewing the water depth increasing effects, allowing the water to recede to its default levels by the time you're ready for the lair.

Increasing the water depth also increases your probability of losing item drops to the water. This means your yellow rays are no longer 100% reliable turn savers, greatly diminishing their importance. Generally you should count on needing to fight more than one of a given monster, even if you can "cap" its drops with +item or yellow rays. This places a greater importance on combat selection mechanics (Transcendent Olfaction or banishing). If you rely heavily on Olfaction, you'll need extra SGEEAs.

Path Skills

Generally speaking, the Rain skills are the most critical to speed, and the #1 path skill by a huge margin is Rain Man. This means every time you use Rain for some other skill, you are comparing the opportunity cost of that Rain against another Rain Man pseudo-fax.

You get the first wandering monster on the 9th to 11th turn (after 8-10 turns spent). You can set a /timer for this as soon as you begin the path, to remind you.

If you don't have Rain Man yet, your first goal in the path is to get it. This means you need the Thundercloud skill, which raises water depth by 2, and you need to unlock a high-difficulty indoor zone.

If you don't have Rain Man or Thundercloud, then your first skill pick should be Thundercloud. Make sure you are in a high-difficulty underground zone after the 8th turn. You can use either the Hobopolis sewer or the Slime Tube. (The extra early stats from regular monsters in those zones will probably be welcome.)

It may not be possible to find a high-difficulty indoor zone after 8 turns in Hardcore (Spookyraven second floor will not be open that early), so you probably can't get Rain Man until at least the second wandering monster, unless you start with an aquaconda brain.

If the theory that you start with an item based on the most common type of skills you had in the previous Heavy Rains run turns out to be correct, this means you should try very hard to ensure that you end each run with more Rain skills than any other category, to ensure that you start with an aquaconda brain. (Needs spading!)

Once you have Rain Man, you can fill in the other path skills however you see fit. The most important skills for speed are:

• Thundercloud and The Rain In Loathing: increase ML, and enable new skill categories
• Thunder Clap: banisher, takes a turn
• Lightning Strike: turnless insta-kill (like a free runaway but you get stats, meat and items)
• Ball Lightning: yellow ray (100 turn cooldown)
• Rain Dance: +20% item drop (costs Rain)
• Make it Rain: +300% meat drop for one turn (costs Rain)
• Thunder Thighs: increase Thunder regeneration speed

Rain Man

This skill is so critical it gets its own section. You start each day with 100 Rain, and it regenerates at approximately 1 drop per combat. So, you can cast Rain Man twice immediately at the start of each day, then again every 50 combats or so, if you don't use Rain for anything else.

Any leftover Rain at the end of a day can be used to spam the Rain Dance or The Rain In Loathing skills, to stockpile turns of the effect for subsequent days.

Since Rain Man works a lot like the fax machine, the standard fax machine strategy applies -- except that you get way more Rain Man casts than you do faxes. Some of the better choices for this path include:

• writing desk: you need to fight 5 of these to open Spookyraven's second floor, bypassing all of the first floor zones. With the Reanimated Reanimator you can wink at the first one, Rain Man a second one, and then wait for the 3 wandering copies.
• mountain man: with Unaccompanied Miner being type69ed, your only speedy choices for acquiring the ore you need in Hardcore are mountain men, clovers, and zapping.
• ninja snowman assassin: you need to fight 3 of these to bypass the middle of Mt. McLargeHuge.
• lobsterfrogman: you need to fight 5 of these to bypass Sonofa Beach
• Quantum Mechanic: this can drop a large box, allowing you to bypass the greater-than sign and the Dungeon of Doom. Remember that the flood water can wash this away. Also remember that if the QM hits you, you can be inflicted with teleportitis.

If you have extra Rain Man casts available, you can also consider some lower-priority targets, depending on what you need:

• screambat: its screams can't be washed away by water, like sonars can.
• gaudy pirate: you have to fight 2 of these... but remember, you also have to unlock the Belowdecks to use the gaudy keys.
• alley catfish: its whiskers (potion) help you prevent items washing away, and it's a fish, whose DNA you may want to extract.
• gremlins, assorted types: be sure to select the correct one. The second one is the tool-bearer.

Pool Skimmer

Whenever you are not actively raising +item with A Light that Never Goes Out (or +meat with Half a Purse at the brigands), you should spend as many combats as possible using the pool skimmer to get random items. The items you get are extremely random, and most will not be useful, but a few lucky finds can help you enormously.