This guide describes the Immortal Plague Crit build for Seraph’s hymn. This build is effectively immortal, passively one shots every enemy within a second of them appearing on the screen and lets you farm as many orbs as you want with almost literally zero effort. I have personally played this build up to wave 152 before quitting from boredom.
Contents
Guide to The Immortal Plague Crit Build
Spoiler Warning
This build uses game mechanics to completely break the game. If you are new to the game following it may rob you of a lot of the fun the game can offer as you learn and explore it yourself.
If on the other hand you just want a quick way to farm out tons of orbs and have ungodly amounts of power in game, read on and enjoy it until it gets nerfed. It still works at present for game version v3.3.
About the Build
This builds damage comes from combining the Regrowth upgrade Plague Spreader along with the Precision upgrade Speculator. The former does 1% of a monsters health damage to every monster on the screen every second. Importantly for our purposes this damage can crit. Speculator takes the damage from a crit and gives that a chance to crit again, once you have 100% crit chance this basically happens every time and with enough stacks of Precision this 1% damage ends up doing more than 100% of the monsters total health in damage, one shotting every enemy within a second of it appearing on the screen.
Survivability comes from combining Barrier and the increased invulnerability duration from the Cloak upgrade. With 8 stacks of the former and 13 stacks of the latter whenever you get hit, the Barrier absorbs the hit and you become invulnerable and the Barrier is back up just as the invulnerability fades. It isn’t 100% reliable early on, it seems that damage from touching enemies can sometimes get through it but by the time you get the build finished you will never be touched.
The problem a lot of people face is getting enough points to get the build going. You need to clear quite a lot of waves to get enough skill points and every point you spend on damage just slows you in getting to the final build. They try this build, see they can’t get it running and figure it’s not for them. In this guide I outline a simple strategy for getting the early damage needed to get the whole build working for a minimum of points using the Frozen Tip staff and the Streamer upgrade from Resonance.
Finally, since this build requires a lot of specific skills we will use Appraisal and it’s upgrade Dealer along with Luck and it’s upgrade Blessed to be able to get the specific skills we need.
Pre-Requisites
I recommend you unlock the following prerequisites before going for this build.
The Frozen Tip staff
You can unlock this for 25 orbs. It is core to the early game. While it’s projectiles do quite a bit lower damage than the other staffs (about half as much damage as the Wizard’s Staff you start out with) it has a few advantages. Firstly it pierces enemies and since enemies bunch up quite a bit you can often hit several with each shot. Secondly, and much more importantly for our purposes it has much higher attack speed than any other staff which means once you unlock the Streamer upgrade for Resonance it will be melting waves. It is an absolutely amazing early weapon and with as few as 4 skill ups spend on Resonance stacks can provide more than enough damage to carry you through the first 60 waves until your Plague damage really starts kicking in.
Orbs for Rerolling
At a minimum you need about 50 orbs for skill rerolls. If you don’t have them or you really don’t want to farm 50 orbs unlock the Fedora for 25 and that gives you free rerolls on a run to farm lots of orbs but you won’t be able to appear on the leaderboards. It lets you use the build to farm a bunch of orbs first before going for a leaderboard run later however. If you have more orbs they are certainly helpful as it will let you reroll on the Common/Uncommon skills page as well as the Epic skills page but 50 or so should be enough. I wouldn’t recommend rerolling for early Common/Uncommon skills unless you have several hundred orbs.
The Main Build
The build as outlined here is the safest way to go. It gets you the survivability early on but it is still pretty fast to get going. It takes about 50 minutes to max out the build at which point you should have cleared 70 to 80 waves.
Epic Skills
You will be leveling Epic skills in the following order:
- Appraisal up to 4
When you get four stacks of this it allows you to reroll for free basically giving you complete control over your skill choice from that point forwards. You probably need about 50 orbs at least to be reasonably safe in rolling for this and not running out of rerolls before you get all four. If your total orbs is low I recommend restarting the game a few times. You are guaranteed an Epic skill after you clear the first wave so you can reroll that one effectively for free by restarting each time. If you have enough orbs that it’s not a concern you can save yourself a bit of time at the expense of orbs by rerolling the first one too.
(Optional) Vampiric x1
If you want a little more health regen early on a single 9% life leech upgrade can help here. It isn’t really necessary but if you are finding your health isn’t filling up quickly enough from Regrowth it can shore up the gap.
- Barrier up to 8.
Later on you’ll be taking more stacks of this but a single early stack synergises well with all the Cloak you’ll be stacking.
3, Tome up to 3.
You want three stacks of this to save skill points maxing out your critical strike chance. You can take a fourth stack to unlock the upgrade which gives you a lot of free upgrades but I tend to find they end up more annoying long term and just get in the way.
Once you have your three points in Tome you are done with Epic skills.
Common / Uncommon Skills
The order for these is less set in stone. If you have a ton of orbs to spend on rerolls or are using the Hat you can reroll these in the exact order I list them. It can burn through many hundreds of orbs to do so however. So unless you have a huge stash of orbs I recommend just treating this more of a priority list until you get your 4th stack of Appraisal and can reroll freely. It is also perfectly fine to take something random that appears useful if none of these appear. You’ll have to go through a few more waves to get to your final build but it won’t make any real difference in the end. If you have a couple of hundred orbs and can afford a reroll or two to get something off of the list that can be helpful but if not don’t worry about it. Save your orbs to reroll for Appraisal.
With that said here is what I recommend levelling and in what order.
- Resonance (+12% attack speed) x8
You need 8 of these to get to Streamer at which point you gain a massive damage increase. Ideally you get the Uncommon version that gives +24% attack speed and counts as two stacks. It’s fine to take the Common version for +12% too.
- Regrowth x5
At five stacks this gives you the Plague Spreader upgrade which will be your main source of damage once you reach your full build. For now however you are just taking them for the health regen. You will take some damage as you go and this should be enough to keep you safe.
- Cloak x13
Thirteen stacks of cloak is one of the two main components in being invulnerable later on.
- Luck x5
You get 5 stacks of Luck to unlock Blessed. This means you can now keep rerolling on your Common/Uncommon page to get Epic upgrades too.
- Barrier upto 8 points
Since you have Blessed at this point you now also use your Common/Uncommon pages to upgrade your Epic skills. So you can now use them to get the 8 points of Barrier you need. You will also notice your damage starting to fall off here as you reach the limits of what Streamer can kill. Bear with it though, your damage is going to start ramping back up soon.
Note that this won’t make you invincible yet. The low flying spikey enemies seem to be able to get through it at times so you still need to be careful and play safe until you get to where you are one shotting everything. If you get unlucky or out of position and trapped inside a big bunch of enemies you can absolutely die at this point so keep moving and play the game as if you were still squishy. You are pretty tanky for sure but the waves will be taking a while to kill still.
- Precision up to 5.
Five points of Precision gets you Speculator and enables you to land Super Critical hits.
- Tome up to 3.
You probably already have these by now, but if not get them before levelling up your critical strike chance. This will be the low point of your damage output. While you have Speculator you don’t yet have the critical chance it needs to really do damage. From here on in however you will notice the enemies start to die faster and faster.
- Eyesight until you have 100% crit chance.
How many points it will take varies a bit depending on how many upgrades you have unlocked at the main menu and whether or not you went for a 4th stack of Tome. So just look at the damage numbers, normal damage appears in red text, critical hits in blue and super criticals in purple. As you play through a wave keep an eye out for red or blue numbers, if you see any get more points of Eyesight. When you see nothing but purple move on.
- Precision up to 18 points.
On the home stretch now. Just need 18 points of Precision and you’re finished. Once you get there you can AFK in the middle of the screen and just click the skill ups after each wave and run around picking up orbs every now and then.
What Next?
Once you finish out the build you have a few options.
Orb Farming
If you want to just farm orbs you can just keep pumping Souls for 50 waves or so. Note that this generates a lot of souls however and once you get several hundred souls on the screen the game can start lagging quite a bit. So if you just want to push as far as possible with minimal interaction it isn’t a good idea to level this up a lot as you end up having to run around picking them up quite a bit.
If you are going to farm orbs about 3 points in swiftness can help you move around faster. More than that starts to get a bit annoying when you want to land on the small ledges.
If you know in advance that you want to farm orbs the Challenger’s Hat can be a good option. It adds twice as many waves and lets you level up faster. It will drastically slow your leaderboard progress though and you can end up needing to choose between sticking at 2 stacks of Tome or taking the 20% chance of being pushed to 4 which can really end up giving you a lot of annoying extra movement abilities which make picking up orbs later difficult.
Leaderboard
If you want a leaderboard position expect a long haul. Even one shotting everything the waves quickly start taking quite a while to get through. You can spend your points on extra survivability instead. 10 points in Resist for 80% damage reduction, 5 stacks of skrink for Gnome and then just pump Max Health to all minimise the risk from the once in a blue moon piece of damage that will get through the shield. Note I have never seen this happen when standing still but occasionally when running around picking up orbs you can take some damage.
Excellent build. I like to add 3 levels of wound early on to increase lethality and crits while the build is still spooling up