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DRL => Post Mortem => Nightmare! => Topic started by: Asbadagba on April 29, 2026, 12:36

Title: (v0.10.8) [N!|100%|YAAM] standard N!/100% with bullet dance
Post by: Asbadagba on April 29, 2026, 12:36
video:
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

this isn't a badge or a medal or anything, it's just a run for fun
standard N! with 100% kills using by far the worst mastery in the game

so what does bullet dance do? well it lets you fire extra shots out of your pistol for every level you have in triggerhappy

on paper that's already a bad thing, why would you want to be forced to fire extra shots out of your pistol? if you have sog 3+ you can already one shot a lot of the enemies in the game, you're also probably going to be pushing enemies outside of your vision with your first shot, meaning your extra shots come with a 'bonus' accuracy penalty
and if you're doing nightmare, then the extra shots are gonna make lining up corpse stacks trickier...

I guess if you can get yourself a nanomach pistol (or two of them ideally), then you could solve the ammo problem, but the build path doesn't have much room for deviations to whizkid until way later in the game (when you're gonna wanna get sog4 and sog5) and y'know there's no guarantee you'll find a nano mod in the first place, so this is unlikely

another thing is that the extra shots come at a price - your turns become longer the more levels you have in triggerhappy, +50% of a single shot's fire time per triggerhappy to be exact; so you're also wasting time that your enemies can use to sneak up on you while you're dakka dakka'ing it up

and not only that, but there's also a bug currently where the bonus attack speed doesn't even work!
bullet dance is supposed to grant extra shots for only 50% extra firing speed, but right now it's actually for 100% extra firing speed, meaning bullet dance is just an active handicap, you're being forced to take double turns for absolutely no bonus!
It used to work as intended in previous versions, but it wasn't really much better, in fact it was still considered to be the worst mastery in the game and even its younger brother in jhc - bullet storm - is also considered to be the shittiest mastery of that game too

let's look at the traits you need for it:

son of a gun is a must for any pistol build of course,

dualgunner - I'm actually not really a fan of dualgunner,
a single pistol is usually more than enough to beat the game with, but it's not a bad trait by any means

son of a bitch is... odd; it's not very useful in the early game,
though I suppose if you want more late game dps then it's not a bad idea

triggerhappy though? triggerhappy is useless for pistols normally
(unless you get a cleric beretta and only use the full auto mode i guess...?)
and also as mentioned earlier, forcing your pistols to fire more shots is the last thing you want, so any extra levels in triggerhappy are just gonna make things worse!

also bullet dance blocks hellrunner, which is awful for a myriad of reasons, but that would take a bit too long to explain why...

but with all that said, can you beat nightmare with it?
yes!
even with all its problems, it's not bad enough to the point of being completely unusable
(you're shooting yourself in the foot if you try to use it for most of the platinum+ badges though)

I was thinking about doing a conqueror run, but turns it out it also blocks brute, I'd rather not be forced to do longinus diamond on top of this;
not to mention some of the specials are a death wish with bullet dance, so I only ended up doing some of them...

I also forced myself to get bullet dance as early as possible, which is not what you want to be doing normally;
in fact if you are going to get it, then you'd want to get it at the last possible opportunity (like in the jhc badges) because it's just a hindrance if you get it any earlier than that
and if you insist on getting it (somewhat) early, then at least go for sog 3 first so you can get your pistol as strong as possible for the early-mid game

even still, despite having it, the game ended up being about me trying to NOT use it lol
as in like, I didn't get any extra levels in triggerhappy and I tried to not use my second pistol unless I had to, since it's just a waste

I tried to go for only pistol kills too, but I ended up getting like 10 rocket kills
(and a fist kill when an imp got in the way while i was invuln);
but hey the vast majority of my kills were with pistols, that's good enough for me

mortem:
Spoiler (click to show/hide)