by Ack Mon Mar 11, 2019 11:00 am
It sounds like we had some similarities in our approach.
I went with the flare pistol for my initial run, though I wasn't that impressed with it. Truth be told, the axe is effective, especially with the range increase that also gives you health on each hit, so on my second I am trying the magnum and loving it. I never play using the magic trident thing, so I can't say one way the other about that.
I haven't tried the slugshot for the base shotgun, but the auto-feed version worked well enough I suppose. The shotgun's problem is that the double-barrel just does what it does better. And the double-barrel can be turned into the flak cannon, which gets two shots before reloading and lights things on fire, removing the need for the flare pistol. I went with dual SMGs too, because self-damage sucks, and with the minigun I removed the spin-up time; it became my general workhorse once I did. The only problem is that it eats ammo, and with that upgrade, there is no reason to go back to the dual SMGs ever.
I initially tried the proximity upgrade for dynamite and found it ok if I was strategic, but it had less general use for me than the dynamite. I'm now trying the frag grenade, and hey, lots of self-damage again, so I may not bother in the future. I also went with the napalm upgrade for the rocket launcher. The speed is good enough, but the blast radius for fire is spectacular and took out a lot if I did a quick volley into a crowded room. As for the crossbow, I also did the ballista and enjoyed tagging things like it was the stake gun in Painkiller.
The flamelance was fantastic. It also eats ammo, but it chunks enemies, so I only used it for the biggest stuff anyway. I did go with the rapid fire version of the laser cannon, but neither it nor the rail version seem to work as well as I want; the gun was just overshadowed.
For spells, the only one I really used was Sammoner to get my ammo back because of how quickly I could go through it on the minigun and flamelance. You have to remember not to spend all of your ammo so you can keep the weapon out for the spell; otherwise you can't bring it up to cast.
I'm about to pop into a meeting, but I also have some thoughts on the best way to level up the warlock. I did the first run on the Casual mode so I could play around with the different weapon designs and abilities, but doing it on the Normal difficulty now with a solid idea of how to approach it has led to success. I've already run through the first two worlds without a problem.