More thoughts on Vampire Survivors

More spoilers for Vampire Survivors. I consider them minor, given the type of game. YMMV.

Milk factory complete. Gallo Tower complete. On to the cathedral.

Gallo Tower has my favorite music by far so far, epic vampire run feel.

Evolving I think makes more sense now. Seems that you only — or mostly? — get evolutions from chests. I think they can only happen when the weapon part is maxed out.

Purple chests. I wondered what they were. They give you a card. You unlock the cards system by picking up a certain relic in stage 4, Gallo Tower. Cards give you unique buffs. You unlock new cards by completing goals for each character, which are generally of the form "reach level X," where X is often 40 and sometimes higher, say 50. The two "monster" characters I've unlocked, the skeleton and the milk factory guy, both have level 50-for-card goals.

I still haven't evolved Whip with the max HP thing! I should do that. I wonder what it is. Nine-tails whip maybe? That could be cool. Or up+down whip.

Also haven't done Peachone + Ebony Wings. Guessing maybe a yin/yang zones effect but it's gotta be slightly cooler than that right? Otherwise it's the same as just having each one separately.

Vampire book is great. King Bible maxed out plus something else.

One metric that seems potentially important for speedruns or for "hardcore" play is realized DPS. Every tick your weapons deal some potential DPS to each enemy they strike, which then gets resolved to "realized DPS" depending on whether there is actually an enemy there, how many, their resistances, and how many your weapon actually hits. In theory every second you're not doing damage is "wasted." In practice this doesn't seem too appreciable for casual play like I am doing.

I can see how this game could get addictive. I say could. Has gotten addictive. So many boxes to check. Crazy slot machine sounds and effects when you get a chest. Even crazier effects when you luck into a triple-item chest.

Chests I think can only give you what you already have.

An interesting thing about weapons is the tradeoffs between how many they hit, and control over where they hit.

1. Whip: Decent control, you know it's always landing left or right or, with projectile increases, both. Great area, hits lots. But the tradeoff for control is that the control you have is limited — you can't aim it up or down. That's a serious limit later in the game when enemies are coming from every direction.
2. Knife is even better control/"where" but each projectile hits only one enemy, so even more useless later in the game.
3. Magic wand is also limited because like the knife it hits only one thing. It's worse control, because it depends on
4. Peachone is interesting because your control over it depends a lot on circumstances! If you have move speed to keep up with it and room to maneuver then it's pretty decent control. If not then it's basically random. It also orbits at a large fixed distance. So generally control is bad. Area is kind of bad because if I watch correctly each projectile fired hits only one target, but it does fire a good number of projectiles once you reach a certain level.
5. Bible is sort of like whip — it orbits you so fixed area and control is good.
6. Cross is mediocre control, but hits lots of things when it is lined up correctly. Like the magic wand it fires at whatever's nearest — and then it boomerangs in the opposite direction which is where most of its AoE comes in. It can get annoying to line those shots up right.
7. ... there are too many weapons I'm not doing them all

Another interesting aspect of the weapon system is projectile speed. It's great for some things, like the Santa Water evolution La Borra, because that means the area damage can track you better. I also suspect that La Borra's area scales on distance traveled, not on time spent moving, because I remember getting La Borra as Pasqualina and marveling at the huge areas vs. what I got as other characters. I think I had some buffs that time (spellbinder? candelabra?) that might have contributed though. If so — then projectile speed is even better for La Borra. It's also great for the King Bible and for its evolution, the vampire book. It is pointless though for garlic, whip, pentagram, and maybe for some other things as well?

Also there's this banishing thing I haven't unlocked yet, I'm guessing that lets you "block-list" a weapon from showing up again?

I think there is some other system as well as evolution for combining or augmenting weapons? I thought I saw something like that in the unlocks screen. If so — dang.

I wonder if the evolution system is supposed to help you transform early game weapons into viable late-game weapons. I notice the garlic, which falls off a bit in usefulness after the early game, becomes much more useful when you evolve it into the HP drain version. King Bible also seems to get much better. I'm not sure about the cross, though, which evolves into Holy Sword that is... basically the same thing but just bigger and with "critical damage"? It doesn't seem that much better than the maxed out cross does on its own...

There is a box for relics on the cathedral stage but no actual list. I bet there's a hidden relic for killing the Final Enemy, whatever that is.

I should try and fight a coffin boss maybe.

I've met the giant enemy crab two or three times now and haven't killed it yet. One time I drowned, I think. I didn't understand the mechanic then. It makes sense to do that on a stage that's mostly vertical like Gallo Tower. Would be a nightmare in the Inlaid Library.