Vampire Survivors

Some disorganized thoughts on Vampire Survivors.

Garlic. It's great very early game, you get so much XP! It's mediocre later game. It's not bad. Evolved form is much better since you add HP drain.

Magic wand. It's kind of bad. Single-target. You get more projectiles with more levels, but still. It does target the nearest which is nice.

Cross. It's pretty good. Covers a whole line as its area of effect. Odd pattern but works pretty well!

Runetracer. It's like the cross but better. If you evolve it with armor, it explodes — even better.

Pommarola (spelling?). It's nice. It's not fast enough to save you.

Fire wand. It's okay? Random targeting plus high damage is a bad mix.

Knife. It's a bit better than magic wand, you can use it to escape when you're getting surrounded — for a while at least.

Axe. It's kind of bad. Straight up and drops down. Limited angle, doesn't hit many things. I think the area scaling means how much bigger it gets when you get for example a Candelabra. But — not really worth it. Few damage ticks.

Santa water. It's neat! It hits a lot of things when it's upgraded. Evolved form is... eh? I remember it moving really fast when I got it as the runetracer person, which makes sense, she has upgraded projectile speed. That implies it counts as a projectile for speed increases. If you've got projectile speed buffs from the runetracer character or from the bracer, then the evolved form is probably pretty good.

I don't get how evolving works. I would expect it to replace the main item, e.g. santa water replaced by santa water that follows you. I haven't paid attention to see if it works that way. But I know that I played a run recently where I had the two pieces necessary for an evolution, the garlic and the pommarola, and I never got offered the HP drain evolution. Why not?

Area of effect weapons seem much much better than few-target weapons in this game. There are so many enemies all the time.

Luck seems pretty darn good. I bought both shop upgrades. Picking up a few clovers on top of that I got a decent number of three-item chests.

I think chests can only give me things I already have.

I think scaling is purely based on the clock, not on XP, so more XP faster is better.

On that note, the crown is nice, 8% XP per level, but also you have to give up a passive slot for it...

I don't understand either of the wand characters.

The milk factory (?) gets really busy and murderous around level 50. I got to 59 once and almost 60. Didn't reach it.