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Author Topic: [M|ArchAo666|100%|YAAM] Bullet Dance Full Clear  (Read 3695 times)

Icy

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[M|ArchAo666|100%|YAAM] Bullet Dance Full Clear
« on: July 14, 2023, 23:35 »

Bullet Dance doesn't tend to get a lot of love, so I decided to YAAM a 666 game using it. Secret diamond in the rough? Correctly viewed as garbage? Maybe it's just mediocre?

Once fully decked out, Bullet Dance can yield some serious damage as it benefits from both Son of a Bitch and Son of a Gun, giving it a nice damage edge over Minigun. You can also fire in functionally the fastest speed possible, meaning that most enemies don't budge at all while you can take your time drilling them. Hot starts are never a concern because of their natural delay and the damage being outputted, you can clear everything before they can do anything back. Most enemies will die in one or two bursts, and even Cyberdemons only tend to take four.

Ammo is not too much of a concern since most of the shots tend to be ammo-efficient so long as you can make most of your hits. You can also use aimed shots to functionally "turn off" Bullet Dance, and also use single reload to keep one weapon empty. Grammaton Cleric Beretta, Anti-Freak Jackal, and Trigun are all decent options while working towards Nanomanufacture Combat Pistols, ideally finished with Sniper Packs.

And that's about the end of the good.

Bullet Dance is very viable end-game, but getting started is rough. Until you have several levels into Son of a Gun and ideally something better than regular Pistols, you're effectively playing with a slightly better Chaingun. Bullet damage also is one of the worst types as it has none of the benefits that Fire, Plasma, or Acid do, and is commonly resisted by some enemies, in particular Revenants, but also by anything picking up many different armors throughout each level. A few times, I had a Baron wearing a Gothic Armor who mostly shut down all of my damage. Fortunately, it's still trivial to kill everything.

Like other rapid-fires, Bullet Dance has significant disadvantages compared to Shotguns, BFGs, and explosives. To be able to hit enemies, you have to be aiming fairly bang-on to their positions, and they won't always be nicely aligned at a straight angle. After a few hits, you'll often knockback an enemy out of your line of fire and need to re-adjust. Rapid-fire is also awful at clearing groups since you have no area of effect damage and no piercing, meaning enemies clumped in the back have to get cut through to get to. Clearing floors can be extremely slow.

And what might make Bullet Dance terrible indirectly is all the traits it blocks. Eagle Eye blocked means that you can't pump up accuracy, which is a massive problem for a rapid-fire that is intended to be ammo efficient. Granted, most pistol weapons have decent accuracy, but even end-game setups tend to not reach maximum accuracy and hurts the damage potential and also the reliability. With Eagle Eye blocked, Intuition also is blocked, and holy shit was this awful to play without it. Clearing floors with having to hunt down enemies is a huge slog, especially with Archviles sneaking by, Nightmare Demons silently hiding, easily missing monsters that could have been detected, and firing blindly into the void after knocking back enemies out of line of fire. Not being able to beeline for Computer Maps that could be visible also slows down scouting floors significantly, and I also rarely ever used levers which may have been helpful at times.

Furthermore, Hellrunner and Dodgemaster are blocked, which grinds you down to a halt. Firing is ridiculously fast, but any other sort of action often results in enemies quickly shifting around and occasionally getting double attacks in. This also impacts trying to adjust positioning for firing after knockbacking for better angles, so generally I would just stay in place and fire blindly.

The worst floors were Agony Elemental caves, which would take forever because of such poor crowd control. I also think the floors starting with nukes would have been very difficult to fully clear if the difficulty was Ultra-Violence.

The act of needing to dual reload constantly, using aimed shot early on, and juggling ammo to control it effectively also slows down gameplay a lot. Bullet Dance is viable but has horrible quality of life.

I stuck with Inquisitor set, but Phaseshift set can be a decent alternative to compensate for lack of Hellrunner, but this will require 3 Nano Packs to max out the build. I also opted out of putting points into Reloader since I intended to use Nanomanufacture Combat Pistols and made better use of the trait points at the cost of a harder start.

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On this particular game I had horrendously bad luck with Nano Packs, such that I didn't find my first one until floor 198, and then never found a second one, meaning I never properly completed my build. It didn't matter since I still melted everything and usually would be lazy and just fire one Nanomanufacture Combat Pistol so I didn't have to keep reloading. My general strategy was to find an open door and a camping spot, spam Run->Wait, and slowly pick off every enemy.

Throughout this game, I found a total of 10 Onyx Packs:

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I also found a total of 7 BFGs / Nuclear BFGs. Simply using Biggest Fucking Gun would have been far better than Combat Pistols, which doesn't speak highly of Bullet Dance.

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But only the one Nano Pack, which was also super late too:

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Inventory also got interesting for ammo storage throughout the game:

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I stopped the silliness at 8 Miniguns, but I did find 2 more later on. They were basically vanity items and literally never got used anyway. As much ammo as it was, it's still quite a long way off infinity and then instead filling my inventory with actually useful items.

Combat Pistols also came in fairly slow with floors 92, 171, and 218. Interestingly, Grammaton Cleric Beretta also showed up on floor 92:

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And for some other interesting happenings now.

With high reliance on Run->Wait, most items would get picked up by enemies. This one in particular blew up like a pinata:

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I found a Minigun, but it had a guardian:

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What would be a fiery start:

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Easy solution to a maze:

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Cool layout for an island floor:

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On a fresh continuation, I got one of each vault message:

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Amongst the other trolling with Mod Packs, this floor had 4 Power Packs:

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Pretty sweet supply room:

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A little more trolling on the penultimate floor:

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Here's the mortem:

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In conclusion, I give Bullet Dance a solid "At least it's not Entrenchment" out of 10.
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