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.
Additionally, since the pool skimmer and heavy duty umbrella are both off-hand items, it makes taking the astral shield, bludgeon, statuette, and longbow all unappealing choices.
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 in most cases 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 and got the skills you need, 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.
However, there are a few occasions where you want to keep the water level low, if you need to find non-conditional items for a quest (i.e. the Liver of Steel items and goat cheese). The 100 turn duration for Personal Thundercloud and The Rain In Loathing makes it hard to decrease the water level on demand, so be sure to keep an eye on the turns remaining on those buffs when you're close to having to do those quests.
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
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. Afterwards, you will start encountering the wandering monsters every 35-45 turns.
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 can start with an aquaconda brain if you knew more Rain skills than the other skill groups on your last Heavy Rains run (Needs Spading), but if you didn't, you'll need to learn Thundercloud ASAP in order to get it. Once you have Rain Man, Thunder Clap is the next-best skill for speed, and afterwards you can fill in the other path skills however you see fit.
Thunder Skills
You gain an average of 3 Thunder per combat, or 5 with Thunder Thighs, which makes it the most available resource of the three. Contains mostly survivability skills.
- Thunder Clap (40 dB): Banishes one monster at a time for up to 40 Adventures. Like with every other form of queue manipulation, it's very useful for speeding up runs by removing undesirable monster encounters.
- Thundercloud (20 dB): Increase water depth by 2 for 100 turns. Required for aquaconda brains, making it a top priority skill.
- Thunder Bird (1 dB): Delevels monster by 15%. Good for gremlins and boss fights, especially if you don't have the skills or equipment needed to jack up your stats.
- Thunderheart (20 dB): +100% Max HP for 100 turns. Generally unnecessary, even in late game, but it can help for the last few bosses.
- Thunderstrike (5 dB): Stuns for 3 turns. Best used for The Rain King, since he's not resistant to it and he can't remove your buffs while stunned.
- Thunder Down Underwear (60 dB): Gives you a thunder down underwear until rollover. While it won't save any turns by itself, the huge amount of Damage Absorption, Max HP, and HP regen it gives greatly increases your survivability, making it an excellent quality of life item.
- Thunder Thighs: Increases Thunder generation. Its use is mainly for using more Thunder Claps with less downtime, making it important for optimizing your run.
Rain Skills
Many of the Rain skills can be used for direct turn-saving, but with an average gain of 1 Rain per combat it is more precious than Thunder.
- Rain Man (50 drops): Lets you fight any monster you know, like a Fax Machine, but with multiple uses. By far the best turn-saving skill, so most of your Rain will be used on this.
- Rainy Day (20 drops): Increase water depth by 2 for 100 turns. Required for lightning milk and boosting ML overall, making it a top priority skill.
- Make it Rain (10 drops): +300% Meat Drops for the combat it's used in. Speeds up Nuns greatly.
- Rain Dance (20 drops): +20% item drops for 100 turns. Self-explanatory why it's useful.
- Rainbow (3 drops): Deals 6-7 Prismatic Damage. While it could make early bosses easier, it's generally a waste of Rain.
- Rain Coat (40 drops): Gives you a famous blue raincoat until rollover. Grants +2 resistances and bonus Item Drops and Initiative, making it a nice shirt to have on if you didn't bring an astral shirt. Best used on Moxie classes, and you stop needing Rain Man as much.
- Rain Delay: +3 to all elemental resistance. Can potentially speed up A-boo Peak and is more useful onr low-skill characters.
Lightning Skills
Besides free runaway and Yellow Ray, Thunder is suited for spellcasters. However, you can't gain any extra Lightning until rollover, so it is a resource you can't afford to waste.
- Lightning Strike (20 bolts): Turnless insta-kill (like a free runaway but you get stats, meat and items), saving up to 5 turns a day.
- Clean-Hair Lightning (10 bolts): +100% Max MP for 100 turns. Redundant due to Riding the Lightning and overall a waste of Lightning.
- Ball Lightning (5 bolts): Yellow Ray disintegration with a 99 turn cooldown. While Yellow Rays have diminished effectiveness in Heavy Rains, it remains a useful skill because you can never have enough item drops.
- Sheet Lightning (10 bolts): +100% Spell Damage and damages attacking opponents for 100 turns. A situational skill for when you need a lot of spell damage, depending on your Ball Lightning uses.
- Lightning Bolt (1 bolt): Deals massive damage when cast 3 times in a single combat. Sounds good on paper, but experienced players should be able to one or two-shot monsters anyway, not to mention it uses Lightning. It also doesn't work on bosses due to their damage cap.
- Lightning Rod (20 bolts): Gives you a lightning rod until rollover. While it gives very large bonuses that benefit a spellcaster greatly, it cost equal to Lightning Strike (so you can't use it to get rid of surplus lightning, unlike Sheet Lightning). Its use is situational, depending on what other Spell Damage sources you have available.
- Riding the Lightning: +100% Max MP. Mainly a quality-of-life skill in some cases. Watch out for storm cows, though.
Skill Acquisition
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 for Turn 1 Rain Man. (Needs spading!)
Either way, the first step you need to take in any Heavy Rains run is to acquire some thunder thighs ASAP, which you can find in a high-level underground zone. The earliest available zone of that kind are the Hobopolis sewers and the Slime Tube, but you will need to be able the large amount of ML from there (at minimum you have to deal with 160 ML from the slimes). If you are unable to handle the monsters or adventure in those zone, then the next earliest available zones is Menagerie Level 3 (faster, but somewhat RNG-prone and not ascension-relevant), followed by The Cyrpt zones. The Dungeons of Doom is also available once the Cyrpt becomes inaccessible.
Once you have learned Thundercloud, zones in Spookyraven Manor, Second Floor and Pandamonium can be used to find aquaconda brains, and are ascension-relevant to boot. However, both zones will take some time to open, so you probably won't be able to get Rain Man until at least the second wandering monster without starting with an aquaconda brain.
By the time you have Rainy Day, there are multiple high-level, ascension-relevant outdoor zones that can be used to acquire lightning milks. You'll likely encounter them during the Mt. McLargeHuge quest and very likely during the Orc Chasm quest.
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.
- piranhadon: can be useful for low-level Mysticality classes, since the large Spell Damage bonus fishbone bracers will allow you to defeat strong monsters much more easily.
- 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.
Quests
Guild Entry Quest
It should be noted that Mysticality classes have to adventure in The Haunted Pantry for their guild entry quest, which is 2 depths higher than the entry level zones for other classes. Therefore, equipping the water wings for babies is recommended.
Due to the high water depth inside The Bat Hole and the fact that sonars-in-a-biscuit and enchanted beans can be washed away, it would be a good idea to equip the heavy duty umbrella here.
Similar to the Bat Hole, lowering the water level can speed up the acquisition of the harem/guard outfit.
The Aquagoblin removes a buff on hit, so if you are relying on buffs to defeat it, you should at least apply several cheap buffs on yourself to reduce the chance that a powerful buff gets removed. Having a stun also helps.
Keep the water level low for this quest since losing one or more items may prevent you from obtaining your steel margarita in that day.
If you do manage to get the items, it should be noted that this is one of the earliest high-level indoor zones you can adventure in.
While the swarm of ghuol whelps do not grow bigger from water depth, it still counts towards the Evility reduction.
The Rain King is significantly tougher than any other final bosses, so plan accordingly:
- Similar to the Aquagoblin, apply as many buffs as possible to reduce the chance of having your stronger buffs removed.
- For non-Mysticality classes, stock up on elemental damage to deal more damage per attack. Drinking a Sockdollager adds a whopping 100 damage per hit, which helps finish off The Rain King much faster.
- A Pastamancer with Bringing Up the Rear and at least 16 + 100% bonus Spell Damage can deal 120 damage per hit with Ravioli Shurikens. Saucerors can deal 80 damage per hit with Saucestorm.
- The Rain King is vulnerable to stuns, and won't remove buffs while stunned. Having multi-round stuns will help turn the fight in your advantage, and the more you have the better. CSA obedience grenades are an excellent choice, as they both stun for a few rounds and delevel the enemy. Thunderstrike is also a good choice for stunning, and should be considered for those without a backpack.
- The Rain King hits progressively harder as the battle goes on (needs spading), and Thunder Bird is an excellent way to reduce his strength.
- If you feel that you don't have enough skills to defeat The Rain King, use a semi-rare on scented massage oils beforehand.
| Ascension Strategy | |
| Rankings: | HC Skills - HC Familiars - HC IotMs |
| General: | Class selection - Familiar usage - Lucky adventures |
| Paths: | BHY - Fist - AoB - BI - ZS - AoJ - BIG! - KOLHS - CA2 - AoSP - SS - HR - Picky - Ed - Random - AoWoL - Source - NA - GN - LtA - L.A.R. - PF - G-Lover - DD |
| Additional Paths: | DG - 2CRS - KoE - PotP - LKS - GG - Y,Robot - QT - WF - GY - JM - FotD |
| IotMs: | Tomes - Faxing - Copying - YR - Garden - Correspondent - Workshed - Tea party - Florist |
